ice

ice is nice

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Immediately after writing about the price of ice and similarly critical matters, I was seated on a plane next to a woman with whom I had a remarkable amount in common. She expressed worry that she would not be able to satisfy her constant need for ice in the UK (or anywhere else in Europe). I reassured her. Ice may not be as popular or as desired in massive quantities by Europeans as it is by Americans, but it is nevertheless widely available.

It’s strange to meet people who haven’t traveled much. It’s easy to forget how unknown so many basic things really are for people who haven’t ventured outside their own countries. With globalization, things don’t tend to be that different, even in very different countries, until you dig under the surface. Spending five or ten days in the UK won’t likely cause major culture shock for an American tourist, even if there are obvious differences, such as driving on the other side of the road. Or in other parts of Europe, there are different languages to account for – but even that isn’t such a barrier to a brief visitor.

It takes time and familiarity to find the real divides, even if superficial ones are plentiful.

 

The cost of ice

ice
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Some moments in life feel frozen – not just me and my inability to take action one way or another. But the moments themselves. Nothing is moving around me – at least not in my vicinity or sphere of influence. Even though I make decisions, make changes, move pieces around the chess board, I’m paralyzed by a sense of being stuck.

A few ill-advised decisions coupled with corporate ineptitude and the most capitalist-greed-driven set of economic conditions of my lifetime (and I’ve seen some blizzards in my day), and I’ve got a whirlwind of new decisions to make. And even though I keep making them and continue to actually skate along, I still feel a bit like I’ve fallen into a frozen lake and can’t find my way out.

I wonder: What does ice cost? Ordering a coffee today, I got the coffee and asked for a separate glass of ice. Normally I get some combination of this to create coffee-flavored ice. But I think I get more coffee and more ice ordering them separately, and I don’t have to pay for the ice. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. At least I hope I can start to thaw some of the other suspended things in my life by thinking about them in a new way as I have done with the cost of ice.

 

 

Seahawks + Dodging Deer = Another Commute

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This morning/middle of the night made for an awful commute. During the first third of the drive, the roads were clear, but every kilometer or so, I encountered big groups of deer playing in the road. I must have seen 100 deer in about 100 kilometers. I also saw a rabbit, which I have never seen around here, and two foxes. This winter, strangely, has been mostly devoid of moose. It occurred to me that my driving amounted to little more than dodging deer, which would not be a bad name for a video game. I got to use the whole road, just as the Seattle-based 1990s comedy sketch show, Almost Live encouraged Ballard drivers to do. You pay taxes on the whole thing – randomly weave all over the road!

On the second third of the road, most of it was covered with ice that had been covered over by snow. So many cars were off the road and so many tow trucks were pulling the cars out. The whole thing made me not only not want to drive but made me think seriously about the merits of living somewhere warmer – Hawai’i once more? Australia (perhaps much too warm)? Uruguay?

Thanks to the middle-of-night driving, I did not get to see my Seattle Seahawks win against the San Francisco 49s in their playoff game. It sounds like the Seahawks did not play at their best in the first half, so I know I would just have been getting angry and sick watching it anyway. By the time I was done driving the first two-thirds of the seemingly interminable three-hour commute and stopped off at a petrol station in Uddevalla, the Seahawks had claimed their place in the Super Bowl (versus the Denver Broncos). All kinds of mentions of it are going around the internet already – but it seems funny that the two places in the entire US to pass laws making recreational marijuana legal are the two places that send their football teams to the Super Bowl.

Music falling on the spooky, dark, winter-wonderland drive

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I arrived home after three+ hours of driving to trudge through ankle-deep snow – snow is everywhere. No big surprise. I cannot complain – winter did not come until late this year.

To get here to this calm, quiet, still cottage in the woods, I drove through some unpleasant conditions. All day in Gothenburg the temperature hovered around 0C while a snowy-sleet fell all day, creating a dubious, slick concoction on the road. It was a harrowing, treacherous drive at various points.

I actually break the trip into thirds. The first third is all motorway, which was largely clear – but it was extremely windy, trafficky and the further north I drove, the thicker the snow that started to fall (and the thicker the layer that already covered the ground).

The second of the three parts of my trip starts to become more winding and rural but is still not the worst part. There were a few blinding snow flurries, and the wind, particularly when crossing large open fields, blew mountains of snow up from the roadway into the line of vision.

By the final leg of the trip, which consists of considerably more rugged roads, winding, hilly and unkept, snow and wind were whirling, mildly blizzard-like, the roads were covered – no lines visible at all. The two vehicles that got behind me expressed their displeasure and impatience with my caution with some angry tailgating. My caution was warranted – in three different spots on the road, large groups of deer were just standing in the road. If I had not been going as slowly as I was, we’d have just plowed right into them.

There was a time, long ago, that driving in these kinds of conditions would have scared the hell out of me. I have let go of the fear and nervousness and embraced a healthy respect for the force of weather and just moved forward. Good advice for most things.

“Yo – here’s another little piece of advice…” Reggie Watts – “Fuck Shit Stack”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2FiYq55oac

Advice: “Sing your life – any fool can think of words that rhyme”

I ask virtually every person I meet to sing for me. Mostly to see what their reaction will be. I like to know what people will do in that kind of unexpected situation. Most people are pretty shy and won’t just break into song. Some need coaxing, such as the shy boy from Karlstad who eventually sang – and once he started could not stop, with lovely patriotic songs about Värmland. Some, like an old ex, would never do it at all. Others burst into enthusiastic singing immediately, such as an Egyptian doctor I once met who sang a long and mournful-sounding song in Arabic; my lovely French friend who regaled me with a most rousing version of one of the worst songs I have ever heard, “Mon fils ma bataille” while waiting on the train platform at Aulnay-sous-Bois after he misguided us and put us on the wrong train to the airport, and then the people who are musicians already – they are always ready to go with a song.

Of late I got to hear the most intentionally whiny, horrible version of Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars”. I can’t stop thinking about it and laughing. It is especially good because the guy singing it to me is Scottish, and he is snide and sneering about it and puts a special emphasis on the word “world” – making it sound like it has a whole lot more syllables in it than it actually does. My god, I love it.

Val Kilmer is Still Alive & Perilous Winter Commutes

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I am not psychic. Evidence of this: Val Kilmer is still alive.

That said, I have some common sense (sometimes). I did not need to be psychic to know that I was going to have to take a longer route to work to ensure a safer route to work.

During the weekend, the weather turned to the typical cold, snowy Swedish winter one expects. Coming off a vacation and not really wanting to go back (I live about three hours by car from where I work and commute in on Monday mornings, leaving on Thursday afternoons), I envisioned the horrible road conditions on the road I normally take (a road I don’t like in ideal conditions). It winds and twists, is hilly, and wild animals, especially gigantic moose, pop out suddenly at every turn. In warm, decent weather, this is dangerous enough. In the middle of the night, at -7C with snow and ice covering the ground, a recipe for disaster. I also did not imagine that anyone cleared that highway – so I drove a good 100 kms out of my way so I could take Norwegian roads. You read that right. I crossed from Sweden into Norway, drove about 150 kms, and crossed back into Sweden to the south. Most of the drive, this way, was motorway that had been cleared and ultimately only tacked one hour onto the overall drive – although one hour is one hour. A train might have been doable but really not the best option this week.

Beyond that, “ice is evil” according to some dude named Doug.

And now, during my vacation, my work network password expired, so I can’t log in. Right now it is not important since I am sitting in the parking lot of the office waiting for it to open. Really need to rethink this nonsense.