WorkPlace Health And Safety for the Win!

As seen on the streets of Providencia today.

Happy Thursday

The shower in our bath is leaking from the taps.  Mr Tabubil went to see how bad the leak was.  
He didn't stop to check which direction the shower head was pointing before he turned the taps on. 
Mr Tabubil is wet.

Yep.

The Estufa

When you live in an earthquake zone, reliably solid stuff  like walls and roofs and windows are somewhat less reliable than they are in places where the earth doesn't rumble and realign itself every other week.
            Walls develop cracks.  Inspectors and building contractors smile and tell you that the cracks are superficial and happening exactly where they're meant to - along slab lines or down the side of a core - places where the building is designed to flex. Because Chileans build really really solid.
            Structural integrity is a very good thing, but in the day-to-day, non-crisis scheme of things -
            There are air gaps everywhere!
            Doors work their way off plumb, and spaces appear between door and frame.  (Our front door has been sticking pretty good since Wednesday last. Opening it takes a shoulder and a shove.)
            Windows rattle out of alignment and lean tipsily in their frames, and narrow wedges of empty space keep the air circulating in and out.
            Every couple of years you call in a man who spends a couple of days pushing on the glass, whispering to it, and tapping gently at pressure points with a rubber mallet, and you're right and tight again for a month or three  But mostly you shrug your shoulders and be glad that no room is sealed too tight for health or happiness. 
            In winter, it takes bit of remembering.  Winter storms whistle straight through your healthy, happy environment- running up and down the curtains, ruffling furniture, knocking over bottles over the kitchen -
            It makes you feel like a protagonist front and center in a really theatrical surround sound experience, but a winter storm that breaches the walls and comes right in the apartment and cozies up next to you on the sofa is cold.
            The first really cold day of autumn nuzzles its way into your bed in the night and burrows deep into the thermal mass of the cracked concrete walls and  the next thing you know you're sleeping under four feather quilts and wearing hot- water-bottles strapped to your waist under your winter coat. (This isn't an exaggeration. I've a friend on the top floor of a building in El Golf who wears a hot water bottle every year from May to September.)
            Freezing isn't actually mandatory. Most of the apartments built in Santiago in the last half century have radiant heating.* 
            Unfortunately, running radiant heat is extremely expensive. Chile has no natural fuel reserves. Hydro exists only in the south where the rivers are.** Coal, oil and natural gas are imported from overseas, and the prices reflect it.
           Most Santiaguinos spend winter wrapped around their estufa. An estufa is a small portable gas heater that sits on a little wire trolley. You trundle it around your apartment from room to room to work up a nice localized fug, and you are very happy that the local geology has blessed you with natural ventilation that lets the fumes out as fast as they build up.
            The average human being is not overly gifted with foresight. In Autumn we watch the leaves fall and we talk about the cold weather that's coming but hardly anybody remembers to fill their kerosene can in advance of the winter.  On the first really wet, windy morning of the year, the whole city rolls out of bed, winces as warm toe meets icy floor, and lets out a collective damn.  
           Because now you have to queue.
           The kerosene that fuels your estufa is purchased at your local service station. There's snow on the mountains, which would be cause for celebration, but you can't see it because of the low grey mist rolling between the trees and the buildings. A slow rain works steadily down your collar, drip by icy drop. The chill creeps up through the soles of your shoes into your feet. The gas station attendants have to fit filling kerosene cans in between serving the cars that are pouring in (because anyone with a car is torn between filling the kerosene and getting up into the mountains to see the snow in person) and it looks like this -
 

* Most of them under the floor as per general spec, but in our first apartment here in Santiago, some unsung architectural genius installed the radiant heating network in the ceiling. The only winter we didn't spend in three layers of sweaters and a woolly hat was the year the people downstairs had a sick baby and ran their own heat all day long. They burned whole gas-fields keeping the temperature up to 70, and we walked around in shirtsleeves and bare feet.

** There's a major political kerfuffle right now over a possible huge high-voltage power line that would run 2000 kilometers from Aysen up to Santiago.
 

Please Join me in a Moment of Silence

- In the memory of my dear, departed Elna 3003. It passed away on Tuesday last at 7:54 in the evening, with three seams left to sew.

Sympathies have flooded in:

Rest in Peace, dear old machine!
You left an uncompleted seam.
Now go to your eternal rest
while I hand-sew the arms and chest.
          -Pamela      
           
Tessa telephoned to sing Mandy -
Ohhh Elna...
How you gave and you gave without failing-
How I neeeed youoohoo 
Ohh Elna…

It was all very moving.  One tasteless wit even offered up a pun - "say it ain't sew."  It was considered, but a firm decision was made: we can't encourage that sort of thing.

So now, pray, bow your heads with me and give a muffled curse in the name of the sewing machine that after all the tender love, care, fresh bobbins, fresh spools, screwdrivers, damp q-tips, machine oil and delicately voiced entreaties in Santiago, could not graciously consent to last just one more damned half hour.

(Epithets are acceptable in lieu of flowers.)

South to Pucon

The week before Christmas, Mr Tabubil and I flew south from Santiago to Pucon.  Pucon is a small town at the head of Lake Villarica, a very long, very deep, and very beautiful lake some 800 km south of Santiago.  We took a late-evening flight from Santiago to Temuco, the nearest large city to Lake Villarica, and rented a car to drive the last hundred-odd kilometers.
            In Temuco, the air was very deep and very fresh, and as we always do after a long spell in the capital, we stood about swallowing it in in long, deep gulps - we could have eaten it, it tasted so cool and crisp and invigorating, and, after all the renovation chaos  of the past few months - needful. 
            It was full night by the time we were on the road, and we drove along the 199 in the dark. It was very dark – a terrible deep dark, compared to Santiago with its all-night haze of sodium-yellow light.  We drove with our headlights on high-beam, feeling terrifically dangerous as we sped along the country highway through the black night.  There were no other cars with us on the road, and it was very black and very lonely and terribly, terrifically, dark.  Periodically, a long-distance bus came roaring out of the night toward us, and its own high beams - brighter than ours - would catch us full in the face.  We'd flinch and pull further into our own side of the road, crowding the verge as it came blazing toward us, its forehead lit up with Castro, Puerto Montt, Valdivia – the names of cities impossibly far away to the south, and at the very bottom of the list, Santiago.  These buses would roar on all through the night, their passengers sleeping behind drawn curtains in their long-haul cushioned seats; they would miss all of this incredible blackness, waking  in seven or eight hours to the sodium-vapor haze of a Santiago dawn. 
            Lake Villarica is very deep and very beautiful and - at Christmas time - very cold.  On its western shore the small resort town of  Pucon, and Pucon sits directly on the feet of the Villarica Volcano.  Volcán Villarica is a  snow covered cinder cone, very much alive and stupendously spectacular as a view.  In the mountains around her are hiking trails across mountain ranges and hanging valleys, swift-moving mountain rivers for white water rafting, slow, lazy rivers for floating and fly-fishing, caves for spelunking, hot springs for soaking, blue lakes for boating, and long lake shores for lying in the sun – 

We had booked a cabaña (holiday cottage) at the Cabañas Azul del Parque - a property of a dozen or so holiday cottages half-way down the lake. We arrived there just on midnight.  The manager  was waiting up for us, dozing in a pine-wood office under a yellow desk-lamp.  He led us down a narrow grassed lane, lighting the way with a torch while we bumped in our car behind him with our lights on dim.
            He unlocked our cottage door and led us straight through the cabin to a terrace facing on to the lake.  We stepped out into silence, and lake sounds and a huge yellow moon. Unnoticed on the road, the moon had risen and it was riding full and heavy above the water.  From our feet a wide white moon-trail stretched out across the lake to meet it.  It was so wide and white that we could have walked clear and confident all the way across to the mountains that stood sharp and silhouette on the other side.
            Mr Tabubil and I looked at each other and we looked up at the moon and all the sharp, heavy things we'd been carrying for last few months slid loose under our skin and fell away into the lake, and were lost in the big water.
            We thanked the man for bringing us here. He smiled, and we thanked him again, and asked how long we could stay -
            He smiled again, and said that we could be here as long as we cared to stay.
We went to sleep in a wide double bed with the water on the other side of the window, and in the morning we called the airport and changed our flights until the very last minute possible before we had to be at work -

And it was a good day.

Almost the last renovation post. Honestly.

A few night ago, Mr Tabubil had a skype call with his sister. I heard her asking “how Tabubilgirl was doing? How’s the blog? I haven’t heard much from her for the last few months-”
            And poor Mr Tabubil got an earful from my direction while he winced and said very carefully into the microphone that "No-o, Tabubilgirl has had to put her life rather on hold for the last six months or so. She's acting pretty cabin-feverish, these days, as well-"
            And then he had to dodge a pillow that had been mysteriously flung out of nowhere right at his head. And another one that was mysteriously aimed right at his computer.
            "You can't hit her." He yelped, his arms wrapped around the monitor. "She's in Washington. How cabin-feverish are you? We’ve reached some sort of delirium state now?"

Hello. I’m back. It’s been a while. I descended into the dark underbelly of the kitchen design industry, and then I clawed my way up and out of the other side, and I no longer come home at night to howl and shred pillows in the privacy of my room.
            Bawling after the fact, in privacy, being less legally compromising than threatening kitchen designers with defenestration as a motivational technique.

The last time I talked about the renovations, we were having an extremely dynamic day.  Among other interesting events, I was on the phone with the head office of a kitchen design company, trying to find out why a delivery of kitchen cabinets wasn’t happening. The call wasn’t going very well.

When the cabinets did finally arrive at the flat – only three weeks after they were completed in the factory, they didn’t actually fit. 
            The dimensions of the cabinets didn’t match the dimensions of the kitchen or the dimensions on the architect’s plans, neither of which corresponded with each other in some rather significant respects. 
            I called the head office to complain, and got a martyred sigh in reply. They’d worked so hard, the Architect said, on those cabinets. They really had. Cutting, gluing, screwing, sanding – her voice got a whole lot crisper and a whole lot harder. Whether or not they actually fitted was now immaterial. They were there. If we wanted new ones we’d have to pay up front for a whole new kitchen. And if we had a problem with that, we could smoke it.
            Eighty decibels of heated opinion later, I had a new set of cabinets on order, with no idea that this was going to be the high water mark of our relationship. In retrospect, I should have dropped the issue and found a new kitchen to go with the cabinets instead.
            Along the way to our finished kitchen, we learned all sorts of things - for example, right about the moment when our building’s residents at the point of defenestrating us, we discovered that our kitchen designers had a whole department of painters and plasterers and general odd-job cleaners and construction specialists on standby – devoted exclusively to the repair of apartments that didn’t actually belong to their clients. In all fairness, they did get the all the apartments on floors two through four of our building completely cleaned up on only two hours notice, but it gave us some serious pause for thought.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo,  our general contractor, was getting curious. And the kitchen countertops had arrived. They were the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong material and only five weeks late, but at this point, that was about par for the course.

“I’ve got a friend who does kitchens.” Rodrigo said one afternoon. I was sitting in the half-painted hallway outside the kitchen with my head in my hands. Inside the kitchen, a pair of young apprentices- their very first week on the job-  were sealing the joins in the stone countertops with a silicone almost exactly opposite on the color wheel, and refusing to call a  supervisor on the basis that any discrepancy in color was due to vision problems. Mine.
            But I was fighting back.  By this point in the game, I had the Head Executive of the kitchen company on speed-dial. 
            “He’s an independent contractor, this friend of mine,” Rodrigo said. “He’s pretty busy at the moment. Has all the work he can handle – and more.” 
He waited politely while I dialed the CEO’s number and yelled at an answering machine for a while.
            “They’re not picking up?” He said.
            “That’s the fifth time I’ve called. I think they’re screening my number. Can I borrow your phone?”
             He handed me his cell phone. I dialed and got the answering machine again, so I yelled at it from his phone for a while. 
             Rodrigo scratched the back of his head reflectively.  “I’ve been asking around,” he said. “Everyone in Santiago who does kitchens is pretty busy right now.  Turns out your kitchen company has been kicked off of half their projects in the last six months. You said you got the recommendation from a friend?”
            “Two friends.” I sighed. “Their kitchens were amazing. They couldn’t say enough about these guys. They were swift, professional, timely, good at what they did -”
            From the kitchen came the sound of stone grinding on stone. We both grimaced.
            “They might have been all right when your friends did their kitchens," Rodrigo said.  "What was that,two years ago? But they’re a different outfit now. Too many clients, too many workshops, a new manager-”
            “Who doesn’t return phone calls?”
             He sighed. 
             I sighed.
             In the kitchen, something heavy fell on the tile floor. Someone swore. I put my head back in my hands. “I’ll get Mr Tabubil to call from his office,” I said. “His office switches up the numbers on outgoing calls. The kitchen company can’t keep up.”

At the end of the day it took some serious legal lawyering to get the apprentices out and the kitchen anywhere near finished.  Outside the kitchen, the general contracting was also going swimmingly, on account of how the same day the apprentices arrived with the countertops, our plumber hooked up the new pipes in the laundry, and sealed and painted the wall up behind him – without stopping to leak-test the new seals. Our downstairs neighbors had a bathtub’s worth of things to say about that.
            So did the elderly lady four floors below, who was complaining of a great big waterfall coming through her kitchen ceiling. It was definitely there. It just vanished when other people came around. Why was the floor dry?  It was dry because the puddles drained away through the floor while we were ringing the doorbell.  The only cure was going to be a brand new kitchen of her own – we had some rather nice designers we could pay to do one for her, didn’t we?

My day was AWESOME. With Bonus Electricians.

Posting is sporadic at the moment.  For my laxity, I apologize, but renovations, once begun, seem to keep on happening, and one day you wake up to find that your electrician has interpreted “I want this light and this other light both on the same circuit and both controlled by this switch right here” as instructions to pull the wiring for the second light out of the ceiling and paint and plaster the ceiling up behind him.

My day today was awesome.  It went sort of like this:
            "Hi Julio, my redoubtable electrician friend!  Where is everyone?"
            "Hello Señora Tabubilgirl! The floor people came, but then they went away again.  They seemed worried about something.  They said they were going to call you.  Enrique the plumber is off sick. The kitchen installation people haven't come at all, but that's okay, because neither did the ceramicist, and we can't do the kitchen installation till the he puts the last corner tiles put in, so that's a good thing.  But don't you worry, Señora Tabubilgirl!  Right now I'm just finishing up the kitchen outlets, but after that, I will do all the tiles myself!  And O Look - here are the floor people now!"
            The floor people were worried.  About two things things. The first of which they wanted to show me right away.  And that ended up in a phone call to our general contractor, which went like this:
            "Rodrigo! Where are you!"
            "In the car!  Going places!  Buying paint for the painters!"
            "There's just a little problem with the bedroom floors and I'd like to see you here as soon as possible!"
            Rodrigo is a good contractor.  He knows a client in a tail-spin when he hears one.  He was on-site in less than ten minutes flat.

            "Hel-lo, Rodrigo!  How are you this fine morning!  Remember how we went to rather a lot of trouble to level the floors and take out the hollows and downward leaning slopes?"
            "Yes?"
            "Right.  So why exactly, after all that leveling is there now a great big upward hump in the middle of the master bedroom floor?"
            "Ah. That's just where the old slab meets the new slab. The floor guys expected a little variation.  Anything up to half a centimeter.  Where are the floor guys, anyway?"
            "Rodrigo, this ruddy great hump is a lot more than half a centimeter!  See?"
            "Oooooh. Oh. Yeah. My word, that IS a big hump. Eight centimeters?  My word. Well, it's not that wide... I reckon we can knock that out, no worries."
            And Julio was duly hauled out of the kitchen and handed a hammer and a chisel.
            Rodrigo looked at me. "Where are those floor people, Tabubilgirl?"
            "Oh, they went away again.  That was the second thing.  They've lost the floor."

We went into the kitchen for a tour of inspection.  And a spit-take.  Rodrigo bellowed.
            "Julio!"
            Julio appeared, chisel in hand.
            "Would you care to explain" Rodrigo said, blinking rapidly, "what you are doing to those electrical outlets next to the sink?"
            "Well, Señora Tabubilgirl wanted two of them. I just finished screwing the cases on so that the installers can come in, just like you asked me to."
            "But why aren't they level?"
            "But they are level!"  Julio was stung.  "You've both made such a fuss about level - I even used the bubble level to make sure that they are perfectly level with the floor!"
            "They’re not level."
            "They are level!  I measured them myself! 
            Rodrigo gathered himself visibly. And let it all out with a rush. "They're side by side-" he hollered, "two centimeters apart, and one of them is three-quarters of a bloody centimeter higher than the other one!"
            Julio looked at him and looked at him and there was absolutely no compromise in his eyes. I could see Rodrigo looking back, and deciding that there were some battles that were just not worth the winning.  Fixing this would involve taking off a lot of tile, and a lot of grout – and considering how lucky we were to have those outlets in the first place* I was inclined to agree with Rodrigo.  Under the circumstances, however, I wasn't entirely sure that I was comfortable with Julio finishing up the tile work before the kitchen installers came.
            "Oh, that's not a problem."  Rodrigo looked happier that there was something to be happier about.  "I've just heard from the ceramicist and he's promised to come in today to finish it all off." 
            Rodrigo’s phone rang.  "Speak of the devil -  Where are you? Downstairs?  Fan-tastic."  He hung up and looked at me.  "Good thing those kitchen installers haven't come in yet.  Where are those boys?  Aren’t they supposed to be here by now?  Speaking of where things are – or aren’t - how'd they lose the floor?"
            I sighed.  "According to the floor people, the floors were delivered here on Friday.  They even have a signature on the delivery slip. Only we didn't get them, and there's no record with the building manager downstairs, so now they're off trying to figure out who actually took delivery."
            Rodrigo’s rather rapt contemplation was interrupted by the arrival of the ceramicist.
            "Don't mind me."  The man said.  "I'm just here to get my stuff.  I've got my boys waiting downstairs in the truck.  We've got another job."
            Rodrigo inhaled alarmingly, and I fled back toward the bedroom and Julio and his chiseling. When I came out again, the ceramicist was looking tightly unhappy, and lowering a tile into a puddle of cement with a rather... teenage look on his face. 
            He did not, however, stick around.  The most we got out of him was the rest of the tiles cut to size. 
            "I will stick them in myself" Rodrigo said, sniffing in a faintly teenager-ish fashion himself. "The tiles can be wiped clean easy enough, and the grout tidied up after the cabinets go in - if we can get the cabinets installed…”
            "I'm calling the kitchen people now."  I assured him, and Rodrigo went off to greet the painters, who were arriving in a cheerful mob, and Gods bless them, settling down to do some actual painting.
            I called our contact at the kitchen store.
            "Oh, hello" She said vaguely. 
            "We were expecting the installers this morning..."
            "Oh.  Right.  You mean they're not there?"
            "Nope."
            "Huh. So do you want them tomorrow then?"


* First we showed Julio the detail design specs and he agreed that they were good.  Then I took a sharpie marker and drew little boxes on the wall where each outlet would go, and he agreed that that was a sensible precaution. Then I wrote “enchufe” (outlet) with my sharpie right next to each of the boxes – and he went and plastered the wall smooth over the top of all of it and had the ceramicist start laying tiles right there.  While he went and rewired the switch for the ceiling lights to run the dishwasher.  I'm not joking.

Construction Happens, and Happens Some More

After all the wishing and planning and designing and ordering and purchasing was complete, the contractor and his maestros (workmen) moved in and things started happening rather precipitously.  In the past three weeks, we have had:  

1) The demolition of pretty much the whole apartment down to the concrete structural walls.  Floors, ceilings, doors, lintels, non structural walls - you name it, we dug it out.
2) Lots and lots of jackhammers. Tiles don't give up easily.
3) One very seasick apprentice who'd been manning a jackhammer in a small concrete space for two and a half days straight.
4) Electricians.  Everywhere. 
5) Ditto plumbers.
6) The original in-floor heating layer was poured funny, and there’s a seven cm slope differential in the living room floor that needs fixing.  Uh oh.
7) Concrete dust, everywhere.
8) Does anyone else smell that smell? 
9) An unexpected trip to the ER with probable ripped tendons all over my foot, and a very unexpected diagnosis of plantar fascitis.
10) Crutches.
11) Physiotherapy.
12) More Plumbers.
13) That smell can't possibly be real, right?
14) It's coming from the bedroom end of the flat?  Oh God, now we have to take up the bedroom floors, too.  You mean all of them?!?!
15) Rush shopping for new bedroom floors - on crutches.  And there's an eight centimeter differential that needs fixing in the master bedroom as well? How jolly.
16) More concrete dust.  Everywhere else.
17) Ceramicists laying tiles.
18) A seriously unhappy resident who calls the police because the ceramicists decided to use the spare key to come in on the weekend and make Very Loud Bashing Noises waaaaay outside of allowable-noise-hours, and going in person to yell at the ceramicists apparently didn't work.
19) Damage control. Much abasing. With chocolates.
20) Food poisoning. All Saturday night and all Sunday.  Did you know you can move really fast on crutches?
21) Ceramicists who, sulking about being bawled out by their general contractor, turn off their phones and refuse to come in to work on Monday. Tuesday they aren’t feeling quite up to par, so they don’t come in that day either. Burp.

Today the electrician is wiring up the bedrooms, and the ceramicists are back on the job, moving steadily through the kitchen and down the hallway. They do lovely work, but the noise really is incredible. I think the neighbor showed considerable restraint. If I'd heard them doing that above my head at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, I'd have skipped the local cops and called in a S.W.A.T. team. With helicopters.

The Joys of Prescription Antihistamines

"Hey !  Mr Tabubil!  Heeeey!  Guess What! I'm going on the internet to look at pictures of kittens!"
            "Did you just type the word 'kittens' into the run command?"
            "How else do you do it?  It worked, too, see?  Look - kittens!  But I don't want these kittens.  They're too small."
            "That's because they're thumbnail pictures in an image search window.  Seriously, how did you get into the internet from there?"
            "I don't want these kittens. They're not big enough to cuddle. Does the internet have any other kittens? Ooooh - PUPPIES!!!"
            "Oh GOODIE.  You just found CuteOverload.  Although I don't know HOW, in your condition-"
            "You're being that pa word. Puh... pota-"
            "Patronizing?"
            "That's it.  Aren't you."
            "You bet I am.  Remember that nice little lie-down we talked about earlier?"
            "Don't be pota...pato... that mean P word any more.  It's not very - ooo!  OOOOHHH!  Look!  LOOK!! LOOK!!!!  It's a doggie and a bitty baby human and the babby has the big old doggie on a leash and the woggie is running and pulling the sweet widdle babby down the stweeeeet!!!!!!!"

Roll up, roll up, Ladies and Gents!  500 pesos to see the wonderful world of prescription antihistamines! Next time I may just choose Door B and take the allergies. Possibly there will be kittens down there as well.

It's the future and we're living in it.

I went to the dentist today.  It's been a while.  It's not that I've been putting it off, exactly, it's just that I live a very busy life and there are many many things to do, and dentists are only one of them. Sometimes, however, your husband gets fed up and makes an appointment for you, and then you're stuck.

"Tabubilgirl!"  My dentist cried.  "Long time no see!  It's been months! You cancelled an appointment for a cough and you never came back. I trust that nasty thing has cleared up by now?"
            "Yeah."
            He bowed me with rather more than the necessary gravity into the chair and clipped a little paper bib around my neck.
            "Are you ready?"
            "Sure."
            "You are sure?  Absolutely sure?  You have your music?  Andrew Lloyd Webber is all ready to go?"
            I burst into tears.
            "I forgot!"  I wailed. "I left my player on the dining table and I didn't notice until I was already on the bus and I had somewhere else go before I came here and I just don't know how I'm going to do this without my happy music!"
            My dentist is a very nice man.  He dabbed at my tears with my little paper bib and waited until I stopped crying.
            "Oh Tabubilgirl." He said.  He shook his head and smiled.  "Do you remember the first time you saw me?  I wrote a note in your file. 'Tiene mucho miedo.' She is very afraid."
            "That's all you wrote?" I sniffed.  "I'd have said a lot more than that."
            He smiled again - he has a very gentle smile - and patted my hand.
            "I am very careful with your fear.  We will only do x-rays today.  And possibly we will do impressions. For a guard against tooth grinding - there must be a lot of stress built up in that little mouth of yours, eh?"
(Presumably, my dentist saves his smirking for when he pulls up his dental mask.)

We settled for x-rays. When the films were done, he let me up to stretch.  He stretched as well, and smiled his lovely smile again.
            "I have the most wonderful new app on my phone, Tabubilgirl! I was playing with it just before you arrived.  I turned on the radio and held up my phone to the speaker and the app listened to the music, and fter only five seconds - five seconds, Tabubilgirl - it told me the name of the song!  And the name of the composer!  Even which orchestra did the recording!"
            "Really?"  I was intrigued. "I have an app like that, but It doesn't know classical from a hole in the ground.  It only does popular music. I do get the lyrics-"
            "Lyrics?"
            "Yeah - they run on the screen in real time, while the song's playing-"
            My dentist clapped his hands. "Come into my office!" He said. "You must show me. Lyrics!  How marvelous!"
            In his office across the hall, soft music floated across the carpet and around his heavy wooden desk.  He pulled his phone from his pocket and held it up against the speaker of a stereo and pressed the screen -
            "There!"
            "Wait-"
             "No time! Beethoven!  The seventh symphony.  Performed by the Vienna Philharmonic.  Can you believe it?  Performed by the Vienna Philharmonic!  It's incredible- it knows! 
            Tabubilgirl, my wife is in California right now, visiting her mother.  Yesterday, while I was driving home, I called her telephone from my car. I said to her 'Are you at home?  Turn on your computer'  and she did and she asked me what the weather was like and I turned my phone around and held it up to the window of the car and I said 'See for yourself!'  It's the future, Tabubilgirl!  And we're living in it!"
            "I remember" I said " the very first telex I ever saw.  You remember telex?  They used it before the fax?"
            He nodded.
            "In the mid-eighties we were living in Papua New Guinea, in a little town in the middle of the jungle. My dad was doing a lot of traveling - he'd be away for weeks sometimes, and this was the eighties - we didn't even have affordable long distance telephone! I remember that one day the secretary in Dad's office called and told us to come down to the office. She wouldn't say why, just told us to come.  When we arrived, she held out a blue sheet of paper.  My dad had written a letter - just a few lines, and sent it through by this brand new machine.
            I remember that my mother snatched that piece of paper right out of the secretary's hand - she held it so hard that she trembled.  I remember that she cried.  It was my dad's own handwriting - his own hand- written that same day in some place so far away it might have been on another world.  My little sister and I crowded around her and we saw her tears and we reached out to touch the paper with something like awe. It was magic.  A new sort of miracle.
            And today, only twenty years later, I can open a video window and watch my sister-in-law's new baby cry and smack her baby lips - in real time, from the other side of planet.  And you can talk to your wife in California from your moving car - in video-"
He nodded again, and smiled, and nodded, and smiled and held up his phone against the stereo -

It's these little things that make the wonder.  Digital music - sound spun out of numbers, for your ears only. X-ray photographs of your insides, on demand, no waiting.
A machine that holds your memories and do the listening for you and read out the lyrics, in real time in case you don't remember or never knew- A weather check from a world away, a baby's smile, brought into your home -

Piazza San Marco in the Damp

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Venice.

Walking towards St Marks Square we saw a lady striding down the street wearing high fashion Italian Gumboots – black polished rubber, with a shiny gunmetal finish and with chains dangling gold charms strung all about the top.
Aqua Alta was coming.
            St Marks square was SLIGHTLY underwater – the water crept across the plaza, bubbling out of storm drains in the paving stones until the café tables and chairs were ankle deep, and walkers were kicking through the water or creeping slowly around the edge of the piazza on narrow catwalks.  The bands on the bandstands kept playing, and tourists sat and drank iced coffee with their shoes safely in their laps.  Along the front of St Mark’s Basilica and the Ducal Palace, the water was shin deep.  We crept along the edge of it on a narrow catwalk built of wooden planks, and watched Venetians in gumboots, stepping carelessly through the waves.

Tourists are truly alien creatures here – we creep across down flooded streets on catwalks, or splash through them playing at being children, kicking the saltwater skyward with every step.  Salt on our skin, not in our blood.
            Aqua Alta is a real problem for Venice – high tides are blown by winds into the long, narrow lagoon and stop previous high tides from exiting.  The waters overlap, and Venice is inundated.  Soil subsistence, channel-carving to allow the passage of large ships inside the lagoon, and the build-up of coastal islands that previously absorbed the water are all contributing to record levels of aqua alta in the new century – in bad weather, seasonal flood tides rise waist deep and make spectacular headlines all over the world.  A massive system of sluice gates is being constructed along the entrance of the lagoon, and dunes along the coast are being rehabilitated, but rising sea levels leave the projected efficacy of these measures somewhat dubious.
            On that afternoon, the water was low – knee deep, rather than waist deep.  Closer to the quay, the ground was higher – and dryer.  We jumped down from the catwalk and waded to dry land, only slightly damp about the toes, and we found a water bus to take us to Murano. 

Segways in Florence.

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now, we're in Florence. 

On our last afternoon in Florence, we rented a pair of segways from a little shop across the street from the Pitti Palace.  A Segway is second in fun only to a barrel full of puppies.  When you know what you’re doing, control is very near telepathic – the subtlest shifts in balance and inclination are transmitted directly to the wheels and that barrel full of puppies starts looking as if it has a very VERY narrow lead.  It’s the next best thing to flying. 
Presuming you’re doing it right.

We weren’t. 

The rental shop gave us exactly thirty seconds of instructions, than aimed us at the door and sent us buzzing gently out into the street. 

In a corner of the palace wall we made a few experimental swoops and curvettes, and then we were off – we had our eye on the Piazza Michelangelo, a hilltop overlooking the city, whose approach is a series of steeply raked switchbacks that would be rather less pleasant in the summer heat on foot than on two wheels –

It wasn’t quite as much fun as I’d expected.  I didn’t appreciate how subtle the steering control really was, and I had some idea that I had to horse the machine around by main force with my upper body, shoving it hard into the curves and throwing myself forward and to slow myself down and to speed myself up – I could hardly manage the weight of it on the turns, and as I leaned into the hills the thing accelerated like a good Italian racing car and it was all I could do to hang on for the ride. 

We took a trial run straight up the face of the Costa dei Magnoli. Despite the heavy handling, it was an absolute JOY to go whirring up the steep stone streets, buzzing past the walkers and climbers puffing along in their drooping sun-hats and hiking boots, smiling magnanimously at them as we came rocketing in and out of view, dipping daringly into the turns without a breath or a hair out of place, and leaving sighs of appreciation and rueful envy in our wake –

Horsing the segway through all of those turns was exhausting.  At the top of the hill, as we turned out of the last switchback and onto the promenade of the piazza, I lost control of the machine and drove head first into a lamp-post.  The segway recoiled and shot off sideways.  I flew off in the other direction.  It was a busy road and I was falling toward a group of elderly ladies –

            “If I land on THEM” I thought, “I’m going to take out at least three hips -”

Throwing myself forward and sideways, I missed the ladies, but landed hard on the pavement on my left hand.  It hurt.  Coming up for air, I took stock - I'd sprained my wrist and dislocated my thumb.

The elderly ladies were impressed.  Descending on me in a mass, they picked me up and carried me into a café and demanded ice – 

            ‘Lots of it!  Your husband will take care of that infernal machine, you sit, cara, sit and rest. Are you bleeding? No? Oh, your poor hand-”

They petted and soothed, darting and fussing and around me like a flock of small birds, till one of them pointed at her watch.  Bird-like, they shrieked and with a profusion of final pats, fled out of the café and onto a waiting bus.

Exeunt Omnes.

I sat in the café with a bag of ice on my wrist, and a bag of ice on my knee, which had begun to swell, and felt rather lost.  And, I suspected, rather foolish. 

Up on my feet again, my thumb put right, the view from the top of the hill was worth quite a lot of the bother.  And on the ride back down the hill, I couldn’t use my hand at all, and I discovered just how subtly and elegantly the segway had been designed.  Control was effortless when I was no longer trying to control it.  I forgot my hand and dipped and soared and FLEW down the hill – a bird myself.

After we had returned the segways, I began the process of lying my head off to Mr Tabubil about just how much my wrist hurt.  I wasn’t going to waste any of my holiday in a doctor’s office – my goodness, no!

Lying to Mr Tabubil became lying to myself.  My wrist refused to improve, but I refused to notice, and it wasn’t until I was back home in Santiago that a friend bullied me into seeing a doctor.  The eight weeks since have involved a parade of X-rays, CAT and MRI scans, threats of surgeries, hand, thumb and wrist immobilizers, and a lesson in just how badly you can bruise bones.

Keeping up with this blog has involved spurts of typing, followed by protracted periods of serious discomfort, during which Mr Tabubil looks righteous, puts his nose in the air and makes vaguely religious pronouncements about the karma of lying one’s head off to a Loving Spouse about a Serious Injury, and wouldn’t it all have been easier if we’d just Come Clean and had it seen to when it First Happened? And have we learned our lesson yet? 

And then he cuddles me, and feeds me chocolate.  So that’s all right. 
And the immobilizer splint came off a week ago. 

It’s almost all better now.

Bicycle Parking

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now we’re in Holland.

 

Train stations in Holland have more bicycle parking that I DREAMED possible – even after half a week in Holland.

Example:  the bicycle parking-facility outside the central train station in Amsterdam is a four storey structure - it holds thousands of bicycles, parked handle to handle, seat to seat, and double-decker and every single one looks identical; the feats of memory that the average Dutch commuter performs on a twice-daily basis are PRODIGIOUS.

“How DO you remember where you left your bike?”

Anneke is vague.  She doesn’t quite meet my eyes.  “Well, you don’t ALWAYS.  Sometimes you spend a very long time – a whole night maybe – trying to remember that.”

I began to look at the bicycle garages with different eyes – noticing the bicycles with outrageous neon saddlebags, or plastic flowers twisted around the seats, and wondering how many of the others there simply WERE there, had been there for days, weeks, months, years –

How many people had given up, and bought another one, and lost that one too, and given up again and bought another one  -

I imagine that annually the city breaks the chains and holds an EXTREMELY lucrative auction -  

SENSIBLE people rent a locker.  Two lockers.  They ride a nice bike from their home to their home station, store it there in their very own numbered closet, ride the train to the town where they work, go to their other numbered locker and take out their beater and ride that one to the office  –

The bicycle-parking facility at the central train station in den Hague is somewhat more modest.  But large enough  - we watched an elderly couple, combing through one level of the bicycle garage, then climbing the ramp to the level above and searching through that.  They decided that they must have been mistaken, and climbed back down the ramp to the lower level and went through it again, bicycle by bicycle – we had to go and catch our train and couldn’t stay and watch.  I imagine that they’re still there.