The Dehans

We are leaving for Switzerland this morning. Up until now my sister and her family have been our generous hosts. We are so grateful to them for letting us stay in their truly beautiful home and being our tour guides. It has also been great to spend time with family that I don't get to see enough of.



Gwyn is pretty good at playing to the camera. She is always popping up in pictures like a technicolor Waldo; a little cute interjection.



It took her about 3/10 of a second to identify and position herself behind this princess cutout.



Aidan never misses a chance for outdoor activity.



A good family photo from the top of Strasbourg Cathedral. I gave Ken a hard time about his tourist-camera look, but he'll probably have the last laugh when I eventually drop mine.

More Germany

I haven't had a lot of time to post the last few days, so I am just putting up a few highlights now. I will fill in the gaps later.

Jaime and I drove to Munich yesterday. It felt just right cranking the BMW up toward 100 and cruising into Bavaria on the autobahn.



We had a meal at a hofbrau in Munich, because we felt that we should an authentic Bavarian meal in Bavaria.





Stuttgart:







We went to the Weissenhof development today, which was planned as a showcase of early modernist architecture. It was organized by Le Corbusier in 1927 and features an apartment block by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and homes by many other internationally-known modernists. It was one of the highlights of the trip for me and I think Jaime, Anne and Aidan sincerely enjoyed it as well. The picture on top is of the Le Corbusier duplex.

Strasbourg

Strasbourg, France translates to "road town" more or less, which it was called because it was for many hundreds of years a stop along a popular trade route. The city was first mentioned in written history in 12 BC.

This time of year it is known, as are many European cities with a scenic space to host one, for its Christmas market. The market consists of a number of temporary structures erected to sell Christmas-themed decorations, edibles, etc.

We drank vin chaud, a hot-spiced wine that was everywhere to be found in big steaming pots and large thermal-insulated containers. We had a very robust french lunch/dinner; Jaime ate a part of a roasted pork leg smothered in Munster cheese. My god, I love french food. It is hard to imagine the mindset of the person who first thought something as rich as a leg of pork needed all that cheese on top, but it was absolutely delicious. The meal certainly fulfilled our desire to have a traditional meal in France.










It was very cold and snowed some of the time. Jaime improvised a face mask that doubled as modesty, then discovered a small door.




Strasbourg Cathedral was the tallest building in the world from 1647 to 1874, when it was trumped by a cathedral in Germany.

A Few More Sindelfingen Images

I liked the color of this building - I would call it chiaroscuro pink.





There are two ponds in Sindelfingen and, based on some fire-department activity we observed yesterday, the local fire department appears to maintain its fire-boat fleet on a 1/1 basis. This was one of the two boats they brought down to the ponds yesterday.

After we watched them using one of the boats and some unusual tools to break through the ice for 15 minutes or so, we determined (and later confirmed through conversations with others gathered) that they were fishing a set of discarded jewelry out of the ice on top of pond. No word yet on why bunches of schmuck had been cast into the lake.

Sindelfingen

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We arrived in Stuttgart under cold blue skies, predictably bleary-eyed but having had a pleasant flight, under the circumstances. We were, until this evening, unaware that the subject of an attempted terrorist attack passed us in the sky soon after it left our port of first arrival, Amsterdam.

Anne and Aidan met us at the airport and drove us to their home in Sindelfingen. Sindelfingen is a small town on the outskirts of Stuttgart, where you can easily walk into the town square and follow meandering streets that display a mix of post-bombardment redevelopment and 16th century half-timbered homes and shops.


Jaime's first schnitzel.












Tomorrow we go to France with Anne, Ken, Aidan and Gwyn, to take further advantage of the weather.

Wedding Photos

Todd, Ameer, Sarah

Jordan, Ryan, Unknown

Ryan and Jaime

Jaime

For reasons too complicated to explain here, Adam and Dahlia just received their wedding photos. Here are some:

I Will Sleep

I Will Sleep by Brother Seamus

A basic jazz track in AABA form, except I expanded each section from the usual 8 bar length to 12 bars. I was inspired to record this after listening to Coleman Hawkins' recording of Body & Soul and Miles Davis' In a Silent Way. The chord changes and modulations are a lot more simple than the former, yet it has more melodic structure than the latter.

I used a borrowed Gibson Les Paul Standard to record this and am now in love with that fat LP sound.

2010 Plans

The stack of my past writings.

Brother Seamus has completed a final mix and mastering of our latest album. The album artwork is in the final stages of design and we are working on finding a print shop that will print our CD sleeves and CDs for a good price.

In 2010 I will shift my focus away from music. I'm not giving it up, in any sense, but there are other things that need my attention and and require some of the time I would otherwise devote to music if I were to continue apace into 2010.

It has been almost five years since I finished a novel and I am nervous that if I wait any longer to write a new one, in earnest, I may forever lose my literary momentum. I still entertain, albeit less and less, ideas of publishing a novel before I abandon this mortal coil.

So, 2010 is my year of the novel. I am about 5-10 pages (I am writing it in Google Docs, so there is no page count) into something new. I have set a goal to finish a novel of at least 67,707 words by the end of next year. "Why 67,707?" you ask. Because of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which is in all respects a nearly perfect modern novel. Even if I don't get anything else right, I will at least have a book of a perfect length. To date, I have 2,258 words toward my goal.

My last novel, which I finished in early 2006, was a little more than 50,000 words, by comparison. That puts it in the company of the Great Gatsby, Slaughterhouse Five and Fahrenheit 451, but only in length (and, quite possibly, in its ability to appear torturous to high school kids).

Expect (I'll leave it to you to determine whether to breathlessly anticipate) more news on this endeavor in the coming months. If I feel up to cutting and pasting, I may even include some excerpts.

Behind Glass

El Mercado

Pioneer

Old Brick

Magic Mouse

I took this just after I finished some Christmas shopping here at Magic Mouse at 1st and Yesler. I could have spent several hundred dollars in the store on myself, not to mention my niece and nephews.

Victory!

So, the good news is, we dominated and won our trivia night last night. The bad news is, thanks to Jess' pop-culture reference, we also used our all-time least-tasteful name for our team.

http://www.geekswhodrink.com/blog/index.php?blog=88

P.S. I am, obviously, not the Ryan identified in the photo at the top of the blog.

Airborne Express

A building is a city block, copied many times overhead.

Sunday Evening

Silent night concrete, cold for isolated cross-town motorists
Going to too-bright living spaces
Where light reflects off the glass
The little stirrings of those getting ready for another day.