Travelblogue

My first real vacation in almost two years is coming up at the end of March. I'll be flying into Dublin on Sunday, March 22nd and staying until the following Sunday.

In the past two years I've had a couple of trips up to northern Wisconsin, and a short road trip to Detroit. But this will be the first Lindbergh trip since the summer of 2007. (That is, me traveling solo across the Atlantic, that is; nothing to do with kidnapped babies or fascist sympathies.)

I wouldn't be going unless I had found a very cheap ticket, which I did. Given the state of the economy right now, I've been hesitant to spend any money, but I should be able to keep costs down on this one. And I desperately need it.

I hope to head back to Galway for a couple of days, to see what's left of the Roisin Dubh after I stumbled upon a major overhaul a few years ago. It was transforming itself into a night bar, emphasizing live music, and probably won't be the place for good conversation and good craic like it used to be.

After that I suppose I'll head south to Dingle, which was originally on the schedule to visit a couple of years ago, but got nixed in place of a brief jaunt to Scotland to see Colin. Good pubs and good live music is to be expected.

And then Dublin, and the point of it all, really. While I greatly enjoy traveling on my own, riding on trains and listening to music and writing never-published-or-posted musings on travel, I really keep going back to Ireland to see some very good people. Apparently instead of the usual wanderings from pub to pub, we are also going to have a very special screening of a very special film.

Linus also says I should bring over a DVD of one of my plays, which reminds me: I need to track down a possible copy of Heroes and Villains before the end of March.

I've been thinking about all of the traveling I've done over the past eight years: all of the things I've done, the places I've been to, people I've met. I think I may dip back into all of those journals and scribbles I've never done anything with, and see what I can put together. I'll try a few things out on the blog, here, and see where it goes.

Not Quite a Nobody Anymore

Neil Gaiman, my favorite author, inspiration, and model for a good read-aloud voice, just won the Newbery Medal for his sort-of for kids novel, The Graveyard Book.

I am incredibly happy for him. Good timing, too, since I'm reading the book aloud to my kids, and was sweating it a bit, afraid I'd get a call one day from an irate parent, wondering why on earth I was reading a book to my kids that deals with a boy being raised by dead ghosts in a graveyard.

Now I can say to them, "But it won the Newbery, see? It's got the big silver seal on it and everything!"

I went a bit over my usual read-aloud time in class today, to make sure they heard all of Chapter Five in its entirety, since it's my favorite chapter of the book. I don't know how much they're into it, but I love reading it to them.

Congratulations, Neil. It couldn't have happened to a better writer.

The President is Just Like Me

My Uncle Hamish pointed this out to me this evening:

Barack Obama holds a pen just like I do.

I'm a lefty, and have this horrible habit of curving my hand awkwardly when I write. I know a lot of lefties do it, but I receive a lot of teasing for it from my extended family.

I wasn't even aware that President Obama was left-handed. Cool. One more thing we have in common.

We're awkward lefties, and we have daddy-abandonment issues. He's my hero.

Notes on the Inauguration

The President is at the Commander-in-Chief's Ball right now, talking to troops in Kabul. They're almost all Cubs fans, mostly from Chicago, but one's from Naperville and another is from Aurora, the two towns I claim to call home these days (I kind of live in both.) Represent.

I'm watching all of this for the first time, really, after a long day at school and at rehearsal. Switching back and forth between the live coverage of the Inaugural balls and the ceremony from earlier today. This is an event that HD televisions were invented for, and the images of the Capitol building and all those people are just stunning.

George H.W. Bush sadly looks frail. Vice President Cheney looks old and defeated in his wheelchair, a Mr. Potter for our times. Former President Bush looks smug and defiant as always.

President Obama looks serious and ready to go.

...


Biggest Disappointment, aside from not being there? the absolutely shoddy way my school and my school district handled the viewing of the Inauguration. Some schools watched it on tv, some couldn't, and were forced to stream it off the internet, which overloaded our bandwidth capability. There were reports of parents picking up their kids early so they could watch it properly at home.

I spent the morning running around the school, from computer to computer, updating Flash players, trying different sites, frantically trying to make it work (with the help of our Learning Center Director), but all we could get was a spotty still image punctuated by the occasional three seconds of movement on the screen. That was our backdrop while we listened to it on an AM radio station.

I had worked so, so hard to get my kids interested in the process, and to care about it, and I was embarrassed by the limp presentation we had for them today.

Best Part of the Day? Aside from sharing it with my students, I can't tell you what it means to receive blog comments, Facebook congrats, Gmail IMs, and texts from friends in Dublin, family in Indianapolis. and Annie in Wales and Cori in Angkor Wat. This is truly a worldwide event, and those small communications from loved ones far way means more than I can properly express. We are all in this together.

Thank you, everyone, for touching base with me, knowing how much this day meant to me, and I know how much it means to you. Donal, we'll raise a glass of fine whisky to this new world very soon, and it will be a good thing.

O! The Joy!

We overloaded the internet connection in our district, apparently, and this building doesn't have cable TV (even though it's supposed to, and so I and the rest of the students had to listen to the Inauguration on the radio.

And it was still awesome.

Country Gentleman

For a long time now, I've wondered whether or not I should write anything about President Bush's final days in office.

I'm not going to do that. Everything that has to be said about him has already been said, by myself or by others out there in the world. I had my time to be angry at him, and what he's done to the world. And just because we have a new president coming in, it doesn't mean that my anger at the last eight years has lessened in any way. It's going to take a long time to repair the severe damage done by this administration, if it's even possible any more.

After the 2004 election I mostly stopped writing about politics, stopped the rants, and just put my head down to get through it.

And while I had hoped to be in D.C. right now to say this aloud, to shout it on the National Mall, instead I'll just post it here:

Goodbye, you incompetent failure. Go back to Texas, and don't ever come back.

Work, and the Other Thing

This Saturday morning I had plans to get up early, pack up the car, and drive to Washington D.C. in order to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Those plans are now out the window.

There is work, you see. Too much of it. I won't bore you with the minute details of report cards and 2nd quarter assessments and why I'm behind on getting them done on time, but let's just say I'm behind on them. And then there's the theatre thing, which hasn't allowed me any time to get caught up, since I've had rehearsals and performances and new rounds of auditions almost every night lately.

We had a day off today, due to the weather being Incredibly Deadly, and I thought I could get caught up and maybe still have the opportunity to slip away from work for a few days. But then I slowly realized that a day off today (and quite possibly tomorrow) now means pushing all those final tests of the quarter into next week. I wouldn't feel right having them administered by a sub teacher, and there's no way I could get everything done by the time report cards go out next Friday. And so that pretty much did it.

And while there's too much work to be done right now, there also isn't enough of the other thing. Money's tight right now. Teaching may be recession-proof, but theatre isn't, and I'm not getting enough of the secondary income right now. And I need every travel dollar I need, since I have a more important trip coming up in March.

And so practicality has to win out right now, and the proper education of my students.

I really looked forward to going out there and "reporting" it to everyone on the ole blog here, but I'm afraid I won't be able to do that. So, sorry, folks. We'll always have Grant Park.

Lucky Day

The weather report says that tomorrow's high will be 13°, the low -13° . Sounds like a perfect day to cancel school.

(That's -25° and -11°, respectively, in Celsius, for my overseas friends.)

It's 3° right now, (-16° C). Winds are 12 mph and rising. Today when we loaded the kids up on the buses I looked out across the road into an open field, the sun partially obscured by the blowing snow, and it looked like one of Annie's pictures from Iceland.

This is the coldest weather we've had in a decade, the TV tells me. Surprisingly, I don't mind it at all. I like it when the weather gets rough. Wakes us up a bit.

It's going to be 45° in Dublin, though, and I'd rather be there. Two more months...