Proving you really care about someone is an achievement that takes effort everyday. Chocolate and flowers on a single day won’t do.

All that said, I figured it wouldn’t be amiss to let my family know how fabulous they are, a non-commercial sort of way of course :-).

The photo up top is from 9 years ago while we were living in the UK during our first sabbatical; Tom was 7 at the time, and Susan hadn’t yet cut off most of her hair. The strip below is from our second UK sabbatical 7 years later; now he’s taller than her and looking suspiciously like a young man instead of a little boy. Both give a sense of how fun it is to live with these two — there’s no question that I’m a lucky, lucky man.

It was interesting to see how few photos I have of the two of them together outside of the sabbaticals. Those two years are documented in excruciating detail, while our day-to-day here in Morris is much more sparsely recorded. There are moments, like when Tom’s on stage, where I take a billion photos, but I end up with very few photos of the two of them together.

I think this helps illustrate the value of these years we’ve had away from home. There’s something about stepping out of your “normal” life, leaving most of your stuff behind, and making a life (even if for just a year) in a new place. It shaves off a lot of the distractions and, for us at least, meant we spent more and different time together. Some of that is in the form of being tourists together (which is where these photos come from), but it’s also in the form of walking together because we didn’t own a car, and being together because the apartment was too small for us to easily be apart.

(And I realize that having this sort of opportunity just oozes privilege; most people don’t have the flexibility or resources to do this sort of thing once, let alone twice. I’m lucky in many, many ways.)

Happy Valentine’s Day to Sue and Tom!

The cool part is that most of the photos are mine! This set on Flickr shows all the photos they used, although many of them actually look much better in the calendar. Their staff did a really great job of straightening, cropping, and adjusting the lighting on the shots that they used, and it really made the photos look really nice. Thanks to whoever did the excellent work! Christian Lindig informs me (see the comments) that the design work was done by Margot Behr. Thanks for the great work, Margot!

It was really weird when I first looked at the calendar, because I really wasn’t sure how many of the photos were mine. There were two or three that I immediately recognized as mine (like the image at the top), but there were quite a few indoor detail shots that seemed like the kind of thing that I’d take (like the dragon below), but which I didn’t really recognize. There were also several of buildings that could have been mine, but could have been taken by most anyone. Going through, them, though, I was able to determine that all but two were in fact mine. The cropping (and to a lesser degree the cleaning) that the Dagstuhl folks did often threw me as it sharpened the focus in cool ways that I hadn’t seen or thought of.

There are two photos in the calendar that aren’t mine, both taken in specific conditions that I’ve never been there for. One is a really cool panorama with a beautiful fresh coating of snow and the other is the grounds around the chapel in the summer.

photo credit: hradcanska

Today I got an e-mail with the receipt. As an attachment. In “.MDI” format. Whatever the hell that is.

I was pretty sure we were going to find out that this was a M$ format before I’d even bothered looking, as it’s almost always people that have been sucked irretrievably into the M$ vortex that blithely send out files in annoying proprietary formats without considering the possibility that not everyone has sunk loads o’ dosh and a major organ into M$ software. I was right. It turns out that it’s Microsoft Document Imaging format, which apparently scans physical documents and converts them into TIFFs. But instead of then using the open, nigh on universally supported TIFF, they wrap (I’m guessing) that in their own goofy MDI format so people like me can’t open the documents.

Charmed. I’m sure.

Nothing I tried (and I tried quite a lot of things) would open this MDI file up, so I (nicely) wrote back and asked if he could re-send the file in an open format, like plain text or PDF. A model of restraint, I was. Really.

They promptly sent a second message with a new attachment in “.doc”. Good on the promptly. Less winning on the “.doc”, since that’s clearly not an open format. Happily, however, NeoOffice was able to open it up, sparing me a second round of e-mails with this nice person.

And what, after all this fun, did this remarkable M$ Word document contain?

A single, small image.

The image looks like a scan of a small bit of a spreadsheet. A small bit. No names (theirs or ours), dates, or any other standard “invoice” information. Just 10 lines of text, four of which are labels, four of which are actual entries (the rental amount, VAT, etc.), with the rest being sub-totals and totals.

In other words, a ton of machinery to obfuscate a quite small bit of information.

I just hate it when that happens…

The photo above is from a few years ago, but it’s representative of what it’s been like being back. The roads (and sky) are wide and quiet, and peddling my bike down a big empty street seems kind of otherworldly after a year in a much more crowded part of the world:

The other huge difference is the damn mosquitoes. Didn’t really miss them while we were gone, and wasn’t too thrilled to see them again (in vast quantities) upon our return.

Oh, and burritos are much better in Minnesota than in the UK (and much better in Texas than Minnesota). Really. Much better.

We’re back in Morris, Minnesota, sleeping in our own beds for the first time in 10 months!

We arrived late Tuesday after a long, but generally uneventful trip. (Well, uneventful if we ignore a bit of a rush transferring in Chicago that contributed to WeatherGirl leaving her iPods on the plane there. But still, generally uneventful.) Jess Larson was super generous and drove us and our sixty zillions Tons O’ Crap (TM) back to Morris, and for this we are incredibly grateful.

We were thrilled to find that the house was in wonderful shape, and are very grateful to Rebecca and Joe (our renters) for taking such good care of our home while we were away.

All the major utilities have been restored, including Internet and DirecTV, so the family is unlikely to revolt :-). Sub-Evil has been catching up with his friends as much as he can, but many are out of town so it’s a process that will dribble on for a while. Now we plow into the unpacking of suitcases and boxes (both the ones we left behind 10 months ago and the ones we shipped last week) and the restoration of the flotsam of our lives. (We defrosted and cleaned the chest freezer since it was nearly empty, and today I shoveled all the mature compost out of the composter so we could start filling it up again.)

It was a great year abroad, and it’s nice to be home again.

Last night we went on an very nice night-time (started at 9:30pm) guided walking tour of Cordoba. Our two hours of walking through the old part of the city included two bits where an actor appeared in the dress of local figures: first the 20th century painter Julio Romero de Torres, then and the 12th century Jewish philosopher Moshe ben Maimon or Moses Maimonides. "de Torres" appeared in Plaza del Potro, which was many centuries where horses were traded ("potro" = "colt"), and which apparently features in Don Quixote. This history and the name are commemorated by a statue of a colt above a fountain in the plaza, which cast this cool shadow on the wall of the building that houses the Museo de Julio Romero de Torres.

Tomorrow we take the train back up to Madrid, and then fly back to the UK, where we have a week with WeatherGirl’s mum before heading back to the U.S.! We’re happy, tired, excited, and sad all rolled up into one.

Ciao!

Today we went to the justly famous Mezquita de Córdoba, the mosque/cathedral complex here in Cordoba. The mosque is huge and largely intact, a vast forest of columns and red and white arches that really gives on the sense of being in the woods rather than being in a building. As a sense of the size of the thing, after the Christian reconquest they built a quite large cathedral in the middle of the mosque, and you don’t actually see it right away when entering the the mosque. Even Sub-Evil, who’s quite jaded for a 14 year old, decreed that it was one of the most beautiful spaces he’d been in.

I took hundreds of photos in our 2.5 hours there, most of which attempt (usually with limited success) to capture the vast space and repeating columns and arches. As it’s rather dark, however, motion blur and lack of depth of field are chronic problems, and it’s going to take a while to sift through and pick a few that appear to have worked.

Thus I leave you with a little detail shot instead. The mihrab (prayer niche) is a truly remarkable piece of work, with wonderfully rich tile work and calligraphic decoration. In almost any other building it would be a showstopper; the Mezquita, however, is so large that you could almost miss it amongst all the other visual stimuli.

At one point there was this neat patch of light on a bit of the mihrab, so I took it’s picture. (Several, actually, but I’ll only bore you with one.)

Last night the three of us climbed up into the Albaycin, which is the site of the original Moorish town, and the historical location of the old Muslim neighborhood in Granada. There are wonderful “postcard” views of the Alhambra from there, but unfortunately it was overcast and the light was all “blah”. WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy eventually got bored and headed back down the hill, but I stuck around hoping for the sun to creep below the clouds as it was setting. Happily I was rewarded with this wonderful view for the last 10-20 minutes of sunlight. Absolutely splendid.

The big square tower in the foreground and a bit to the left, along with many of the other buildings and towers in the left and center foreground, are part of the Nasrid (Muslim) palaces, and contain some spectacular rooms and spaces. The church spire in the back center is a Christian church built on the site after the Catholic reconquest. The large, square, decidedly non-Muslim building that dominates the right hand side is the palace of Charles V (the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella who captured Granada, eliminating the last Muslim kingdom in Spain), and houses some excellent museums.

And that’s only a quarter to a third of the entire Alhambra complex!

Tomorrow we leave Granada for Cordoba, so more wonderful stuff to see and photograph. Unfortunately the internet at the next hotel looks to be stupidly expensive, so there’s likely to be radio silence for the next week…

Ciao!

Today we spent a wonderful, exhausting day at the Alhambra in Granada, and it’s every bit as cool as the books, etc., made out. Which is good, since that’s a key reason for this entire trip to Spain! I frankly don’t have any idea where to begin. I took over 800 photographs, plus there’s all those from WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy).

It’s like several really cool forts and castles, some spectacular gardens, archeological digs, museums, (Christian) churches, and a complete course in Muslim architecture and culture (complete with some of the finest examples on the planet), all in one (big) place. I’m both physically and mentally exhausted (and exhilarated!).

This shot is from the justly famous "Patio of the Lions" (Patio de los Leones). The lions themselves (part of a fountain in the middle of the space) were missing as they’re undergoing extensive restoration at the moment. Still, the space, the columns, the carving, and the light were enough to take my breath away. And that was after already seeing room after space after room of exquisite work.

I’m going to go sleep now.

Later.

As always, click on the photos to jump to Flickr, where there’s a little more info about them. WeatherGirl is posting lots of useful info on where we’ve been and what we’ve seen, so tracking our combined family stream might be your best bet.