Peeking into the rock

Reading The Global Pigeon by Colin Jerolmack. It's research for the girls who save the world from fascism through their magical connection to urban birds book. It was recommended to me by none other than Donna Haraway who I met through Katie King at FOGCon. It does not have in it what I intended to be looking for but it has all sorts of other things that I didn't know I needed. That last category is a mark of a felicitous reading choice, I think.


Other than that, I'm trucking along. I find it is better for me to work on a bit of this and that right now because I can't concentrate very well what with the sleep deprivation and the chronic intestinal issues. Oh yes and now I have a very mild neuropathy too, so that takes some of my focus away as I obsess over its progress--if it gets to a certain level we have to stop chemo to prevent its becoming permanent. As it is, my dose has been dropped. This phase of chemo is just to be sure anyways: there's reason to think that in many cases the first round withn the adriamycin/cytoxan is all a person needs. But survival rate is higher and recurrence is lower for people who've had both, so that's where we're going. But yesterday was 6 of 12 doses, so the light is at the end of the tunnel either way. The oncologist says most of her patients make it to dose 9 or 10, but some make it all the way to 12. I would like to get to 12 just to be sure (and also quite honestly so I can feel so very tough, but I don't admit to that often), but I'm fine with following her advice.

We've been repairing the outside of the house and clearing foliage because the painters are coming on Saturday. I probably shouldn't own a house because I'm not houseproud enough to do what needs to be done. Honestly when stuff gets broken or dirty I don't care enough at all. It's weird because I used to take pride in just doing what needs to be done and in mechanical competence. But I'm kind of broken a bit myself, I guess.

While at the library I also picked up a Tobias Buckell book because I keep bouncing off his writing and I want to like his work. And another book called Watermind by M.M. Buckner that was near it on the shelves because it looked interesgting and I've never heard of it or the author. I want to read more genre stuff that's more recent but it's hard at the library because most of the requests for material seem to be coming from the grognards.

Emma told me there's a magnificent petrified forest in Chemnitz and now I want to go there more than ever. My dream itinerary for next spring is: Eastercon, a couple weeks with Frank and Hana in Loughborough, some days in Paris with Andrea, and then on to Chemnitz, Prague, and maybe a bus tour of Poland and if my bro-and-sis-in-law are in Langaland, a few days in Denmark. I imagine it would be summer before I got back home.

I would also like to travel in the States some: to Portland to see my aunt and a friend or two, and maybe the Woodstock Memory Hole if anything is going on there right now: to LA to see my other aunt: to Houston to visit Nancy Zeitler, a friend who's been living there for years & I've never visited her there: to Silver Spring Maryland to visit Katie King, who I visited over a dozen years ago: to Chattanooga to visit Sharon Farber, who I visited 29 years ago: to Philadelphia, just to see it again after 50 years gone from it: to New York, to visit Phil Josselyn, who I've never visited & when he visits me I realize how much I miss him: and to Boston, to visit Mary Porter, who I visited 26 years ago but never in the house she lives in now.

That's a lot.

Today I almost bought tickets, but the verification step didn't work, so tomorrow I am going to talk to the credit union about it. If the same deal holds, I'll be leaving from Oakland on Norwegian on August 11 and leaving from Prague on Norwegian on August 28. No extensive layovers this time. I could have scheduled a day in Amsterdam on the way out, but it would have been on the order of five or six hundred dollars more. So fooey on it.

I don't know how other people choose their tickets. But since time is not of the utter essence for me, I do look for a long daytime layover and take it if I can get it. It's like adding another jaunt in the travel. Also: I decided as of this year that I'm avoiding ridiculously early or late takeoff or landing times. I'm an old lady and I don't want to be taking the bus to and from the airport in Prague at a stupid hour, or asking my stateside friends and family to drive me to and from Oakland at those times. Another thing I look for is I don't want the homeward bound stop to be in the US. I want to go through customs at the last airport, thank you. I do not want to go through customs and also catch another flight. Customs on the European end are trivial. I decided to go cheap and not reserve specific seats or a meal. I'll carry my own food and buy water from the flight attendants. And though I love a window seat, I usually need to go to the bathroom a lot of times, so those preferences cancel out and I can just take what I get.

So the other thing I am working on is a visit to Chemnitz. I'm not longer certain that my last name being Kemnitzer means a definite connection to the city. My grandfather found no traces of our ancestors there. And once you know the name is Slavic (probably Sorbian or some other Western Slavic dialect) rather than German, you discover -- it's not a rare name, for one, and for another, there are dozens of place names that are some variation of Kamenice. So it's possible that my name was never spelled with the Ch, that my ancestors came from any one of these places scattered over Central and Eastern Europe: and even Southern Europe, though there's no reason to think we came from there: the folks who came here were German speaking and told their children they were Germans.

But anyway, when my father visited Chemnitz, he came back with a glowing description, and I've been wanting to see it ever since. I want to see the giant Marx head and the Museum of Industry, tootle around the quaint streets, pick up a children's book written in Sorbian, eat some Saxon food (much of it, according to my research, is precisely what you'd think it is). And Chemnitz is a four-hour drive through the mountains from Prague. I won't be driving, naturally. Apparently the way to get there is to take a train to Dresden and tghen another one from Dresden to Chemnitz. So I could make it a twofer, and see Dresden.  Did I tell you they sell chocolate and marzipan Karl Marx heads in Chemnit? they do.