May 28, 2008

• In my own personal hell.
• Woohoo!! Smt, you go, baby! I am sooooo jealous. Anybody says anything about yer darlin's, you just tell 'em to suck it up. You paid their fare, they deserve just as much respect as any other passenger, and kids are human, too. I can't remember how old your oldest is, but this thread has great advice for traveling with toddlers, and if you can keep toddlers happy, you can please most any age. Of course, all a teen needs is tunes, but even a young child can be distracted with music and stories, as long as they tolerate the earphones. My neighbor's kiddling is only 18 months, and she likes headphones. Mine wouldn't wear hats or ANYTHING on their heads until they were 6-7. Go figger. Do you have bulkhead seats? That's best, because you can even put down a couple airline blankets and let them be on the floor a bit. Airlines are so pissy nowadays, but everyone is still allowed a carry-on purse and such, and you can get each chillen a small backpack full of entertaining items. Even if the kid can't carry it themselves, just let people know you are helping the kid out, but it's THEIR bag. That way you can carry your stuff, too. Stay hydrated. The biggest thing is to have the kids swallowing on take off! Landing, too, but at least that's at the end. If they can keep their ears from plugging during the start of the flight, that will make the next 25 hours much less miserable. Back in the day when my two youngest were three and a year and a half, I bought them milkshakes on board. Sucking at the straw and swallowing seemed to make all the difference. Have fun!
• My husband and I were going to go to Ireland next week, but we had to cancel the trip. He's playing with his band in Barcelona at the Primavera Festival this weekend and I was going to meet up with him. Siiiiiigh. I'll get to Ireland someday! I just took vacation days and stayed here in Seattle; also drove up to Vancouver for a day. It was pretty, but it wasn't Ireland!
• Oh, forgot to mention. TODAY IS THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL. Officially ended for me at 11:15. WHOOT! One more paycheck. damn! Well, I have a month to decide whether I'm going to get a real job or go back to working as a para-ed. I love it. Love the kids. Pay sucks. "The public education system in America is one of the most important foundations of our democracy. After all, it is where children from all over America learn to be responsible citizens, and learn to have the skills necessary to take advantage of our fantastic opportunistic society."—Bush, Santa Clara, Calif., May 1, 2002 Sounds good on paper. But is our children learning? Wadda they need an edumacation for to carry a gun? I can't afford a vacation. Will be pondering the job situation, riding my horse, and doing stuff around the house. As long as the sun shines, it will all be good.
• i'll be right here, off the coast of Oakland, CA, waiting for anyone who wants to stop by. :)
• Albuquerque is like a vacation every day! Or that's what I'm telling myself as it's unlikely I'll be heading anywhere anytime soon. Lots of mountains and hiking and ruins and such to explore though, and my father-in-law has a getaway cabin up in the Sangre De Cristos that we'll be visiting, so I'm pretty content squandering my summer days on boring old home.
• SMT, I'm 100% sure you're not one of those parents who let their kids run wild on long flights. I don't think you have it in you! I'm going to California at the end of June, EEQ, but it's at the other end of the state in Costa Mesa. And I don't think I'll actually be able to leave the conference, anyway.
• I just got out of rehab a month ago, stuck in South Florida until at least October
• Eatin' cheese, wearin' a fez, baby.
• Next month, I do a road trip to Montreal for a few days, to see this guy a couple of times. End of July, after an absence of many, many years, I'm going camping here. With any luck, I'll have sufficiently recovered to allow use of my driving foot and hiking leg.
• South Florida... Doesn't sound like you're thrilled to be stuck there, Debaser.
• Not a fan of sun, hot weather, or the beach... I definitely miss NYC, still... I guess it was worth it.... :)
• I spent a month (and way too much money) in Australia last December/January, a trip I'd highly recommend to any North Americano monkeys. So I'll be staying pretty close to home this summer. Fortunately, there's plenty to do here on Vancouver Island without having to travel far. Bon voyage, SMT & family!
• Woohoo smt! Hope all goes well with it. After I finish this dingdang French Immersion course, we'll be going to Alberta for a brief stint, then near Montreal for a family visit. Yay! And then back to la mer ici - yay yay!
• We're heading all the hell the way up to upstate New York (Rochester) in mid-July, sans Fatso, to watch one of the best people we've ever known get hitched to someone we're pretty sure is worthy of him. It'll be a reunion of a dearly loved group of friends who're scattered around the country now, so lots of drinking and laughing and giving of shit, and no dirty diapers. Also, next week we're driving to Memphis for a few hours to see Eddie Izzard. That won't suck either.
• hbs...sounds like a meetup possibility to me...
• Well allrighty then. We'll have wedding stuff most of the time but surely we can figure something out. Care to be a bald guy named Chuck's plus-one?
• I'm trying figure out how to get to Mendocino in September to celebrate the 60th birthday of my great and good friend of 40 years. He introduced me and my family to the place back when it was the hippie chill-out place par excellence, and it is so beautiful. (Though there don't seem to be any hippies left there.)
• SMT, I don't suppose you'd be able to take a short ferry/flight over to Singapore, wouldya? I will buy your family dinner if you do ;) Due to some, ahem, splurging the last couple of months, I won't be doing any travelling till August, when I'm going to UK for the Discworld Convention.
• i am on my idyllic island off the coast of Oakland with absolutely no plans to go anywhere.
• oh, i said that already. crap.
• Good luck SMT! Today, we're going to Dublin for a short visit with M aged 3 and E aged 15 months. This is the fourth time we've traveled internationally with both of them, so although I expect to spend the afternoon somewhere around the fifth circle, I doubt we'll descend to the ninth. Total travel time is likely to be about 7 hours. In three weeks we'll go to Massachusetts to spend some time with mrs roryk's family. This will be more challenging as travel time will probably total 11 hours. Plus there's the joy of jetlag in small children. They get reoriented to the new timezone and guess what? We bring them back to Europe! Ha..! Later in the summer, we'll spend a few weekends travelling inside France. We did a very quick visit to Bordeaux recently, and I'd love to go back there in August or September. Such a beautiful place, and they make this yummy drink.
• We're planning to explore the northern reaches of NZ this year. I've been to Auckland for long weekends and to Wellington for a day, but aside from that I haven't seen the North Island at all, and neither of us have been to the beautiful and warm Bay of Islands. So we're hoping to go there in October for a holiday with the kids and some good friends from Auckland. I'll let you know what it's like. We've flown from Christchurch to Philadelphia with a 2 year old (and if you checked the archives from January 2005 you'd probably find panicked posts from me about it), and it wasn't a big issue. Our flights coincided with sleep times, we kept Kid#1 well hydrated (so our major problem was that we didn't change him often enough and he drank so much water his nappies were soaked). We did unfortunately have one flight that coincided with a molar cutting through and he screamed for the first fifteen minutes from takeoff with the combined tooth/ear pain -- finally collapsed into a 4-hour sleep. Lots of books, an iPod, more books, colouring in, walks through the plane, snacks, more books. We were also able to bring his car seat which we could strap him into, though, and that helped with the Dreaded Fidgets. We may have had the laptop and a movie for him, too, although I don't remember. Have also flown with a four year old and almost-two year old, last year. Only a one-hour flight but we had no trouble with taking off or landing (we took pump water bottles which they could suck water from, and lollipops), and they mostly watched the clouds and played spot-the-mountain. I've even taken Kid#1, aged 2.5, on a ten-seater white-knuckle flight to Blenheim, which he adored (so did I). That one did a number on his ears, though, and he pretty much screamed throughout descent. The other passengers were very kind about it. In summary: there are no guarantees, but be as prepared as you can. The times a kid has lost it due to descent, he's refused to take anything to help (like a bottle or even a lollipop) because he was too distressed.
• Last long-haul flight with my elder kid. We get on the plane but an aisle is separating two seats from one other. Mrs roryk takes one seat with the smaller child; I take a seat beside bigger child. As we approach take off, he decides he'd really really really like to be sitting beside his mom. Cue ten minutes of screaming blue murder, followed by vomiting in daddy's lap, followed promptly by falling asleep... Take a change of clothes in your carry-on luggage if you can.
• Not quite 'summer fun', but in October I have to ditch my Annual Trip to Paris TM to go back to the motherland for a cousin's black-tie candlelight wedding in this castle in a swamp (perhaps best known for being the prison of this guy). Meh. Nice, but it's not Paris, is it?
• When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up!
• Fun summer planned. Paris, one week, July. For a conference, which means sans wife, but still. I'll have one actual day in which to look at stuff before flying home, the remainder will be in a dark room watching PowerPoint presentations. (All I know about Paris I learned from Hemingway and art history. So tell me - is one day in Paris enough to become a disaffected ex-pat raging alcoholic and get syphilis?) When I get back, we're planning our 10-year anniversary trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior. The plan is to see if we end up with a little tadpole. So yeah, it ought to be eventful.
• I'm getting hitched this summer. We're actually having two ceremonies (both small)...one with friends in a party/camping atmosphere and one more intimate with family. Honeymoon likely won't happen until fall...I'm hoping to cash in air miles for a freebie trip...either Grand Canyon or California Coast (SF to Big Sur).
• ...the remainder will be in a dark room watching PowerPoint presentations. Seems to me they won't know if you're not there.
• Sounds to me like a dark room in Paris is the IDEAL place to catch syphilis.
• One day? One hour!
• I'll tell you where you are. You're all right here in my computer, where you're supposed to be. Now entertain me, dammit.
• Hey congrats to you rocket! And bon voyages to all travelling monkeys. I was going to go to Whitehorse this week but had some last minute schedule hitches. Might try to get out to Newfoundland in the summer. But then i say that every year.... So maybe I'll just stay here in Ottawa and help make it more boring for the inhabitants.
• Congrats r88!!
• Having been sans computer/internet for over two weeks now, I can hardly look at my monitor at work without getting dizzy and nauseous. Sorry to have missed you Alnedra! Normally, we do a stop in Singapore, but this time we stayed over in Kuala Lumpur. Next time! And I'm proud to say that both of our little ones did EXCELLENT on the long haul flights. Not a single scream or cry (well, the young one did scream when our plane felt like it was going to crash last night - - another story). Additionally, they did not roam around the plane, unlike the 15 month old who's mum completely ignored him - - the flight attendants had fun baby sitting him (at one point he got his head stuck under another passenger's seat, the mother just sat there and did nothing while another passenger had to get up and help the kid out). *succumbs to jet lag*