blog.benschumacher.com

So the girl and I are now in Paris. We’ve already travelled quite a bit, and we still have roughly 9 more days of travelling ahead of us. That means we’re about half done with this trip and it’s been great.

So far we’ve been to Brussels, my chum David’s wedding (near Jemeppe—in southern Belguim), Brugge, Amsterdam (with a day-trip to Alkmaar) and now Paris. Any tomorrow we’re flying to Ireland to visit Allison’s (recently engaged) friend in Galway. To this point, we haven’t stayed anywhere longer than 2 nights. That’ll change tomorrow, and I can’t wait. We’ll be in Galway for (get this) 3 nights. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been a fantastic trip, but man, is my body tired. Moving all the time is quite unsettling. You never have the opportunity to really nest. (Did I just use the term “nest?”)

At some point I’ll figure out a way to download some of the photos off the digital camera and post ‘em up, but I’m not convinced that’ll be possible before we’re back in Denver.

Allison is writing an extremely detailed account of our trip to date, so I’ll just link to that when she’s done on this post, but until then, here’s my brief account of the events:

• Brussels
  • Landed in Brussels early Wednesday morning (the 24th)
  • To the hotel—had to call to be let in the door—they weren’t even open yet
  • Napped, wandered around the city some—visited Manneken Pis, the Brussels City Museum, did walking tour of city’s comic murals
  • Next day: went to Flautist concert, wandered around city, drinks at Cafe Delirium (which carries 2500 beers, but only guarantees the availability 2004 of those at any one time)
  • Next day: packed up and took train to Namur
• Wedding (Namur/Jemeppe)
  • Met up with David’s folks and sister at train station, rode with them to very small town (one tavern—Cafe de E’glise, across the street from the Church), chatted with Holly for quite a while, napped for a bit, got up and chatted with Pearces and then went with Pearces to the Cafe de E’glise for some beers
  • Next day: woke up late, walked around town a bit and then got ready for marathon wedding celebration. Ceremony started around 2PM, followed by cocktails at 4PM, dinner at 6PM and finally partying at 9PM to around 1AM—long day
  • Next day: woke up late (again), packed up and headed back to Namur, took train to Brugge
• Brugge (Bruges)
  • Arrived in afternoon, headed to our B&B to drop off stuff and then headed back to the Market (Markt) Square and went up stairs of the tower in the center of town—around 366 (?) steps on a winding and narrow staircase, took canal tour, had some drinks on terrace near canal, fantastic dinner and slept
  • Next day: woke up and headed back into main area of town, slowly wandered around, visited canals, some place that I can’t recall the name of but where nuns went to live a contemplative life without a formal tie to the church, wandered more (it’s a beautiful village/town/city) and pondered the possiblity of buying a place to open a B&B of our own
  • Next day: woke up and headed back to the train station to go to Amsterdam

Alright… so I still have Amsterdam and Paris to cover, but I’m running our of internet time. Maybe you should just read Allison’s account of the trip to date. Her writing will be much better than mine (no doubt) and will have quite a bit more detail. Until next time…

Update: Allison has posted another update.

As my girlfriend will no doubt attest to, I have a terrible memory. It’s really awful. It’s so bad that I think she believes that I intentionally try to forget things. I don’t, just FYI.

What can I do about this? I have no idea, but I might give this a try. Why not? It can’t possibly cause me to be worse off, and it could make it better. That’s my theory anyway. Wish me luck.

So I’ve replaced Rublog with some home grown blogging software based on Ruby on Rails, and I’m pretty excited about it. It’s mostly Rails based, but I didn’t want to go through the trouble (which probably wouldn’t be that much trouble… really) of converting my old Rublog content from its currently CVS -based storage to being backended by a database, so I created a Rails model that can read files from a CVS store and gives me an object with an interface that is mostly compatible with the model I use for the SQL -based storage. Fun stuff that.

Now what’s really cool is that Rails is even going to allow me to maintain the validity of my old permalinks. To acheive this, I had to add some custom (and somewhole thing takes a little bit of routing magic in Rails, and a couple lines of code in my controller. And one thing I am fairly proud of is that I turned the directory structure from my Rublog CVS repository into tags for categorizing entries (see navigation bar on the right). Swell, eh?

Downsides? Currently no support for comments, but I’m working on that.

So I went to the Pixies show tonight with Allison, which was a blast. I really think that for most of the show, the Pixies totally phoned it in, but I'm still glad I went.

I guess for my money (which uh... was $0 tonight, cause Allison bought the tickets) I'd like the performers to care about the crowd. The Pixies came out and just hammered through their set. I can recall only one instance during the show when they weren't playing straight through, and Kim Deal said, "Thank you for coming to the show tonight."

It was still a blast though. I mean... the Pixies. I have never seen 'em live before, and I'm guessing I'll never have the chance again. All the hits. They started strong, nailing "Where Is My Mind?" in the second spot. And they powered through "Debaser," "Here Comes Your Man," "Monkey Gone To Heaven" and so many others. And they picked up one of my favorites, "Gigantic" in the encore. All in all a sweet set. No doubt about it.

The point? I guess the point is that Frank Black (or Black Francis), Kim Deal and Joey Santiago all get to cash big fat checks, and I get to spend two hours listening to some great live music. I suppose that works out well for all parties invovled.

Jon and I have decided to take DeanSpeakup.com offline. It has died with the Dean campaign. While I am a little sad how the campaign ended, I'm still energized about the prospect of removing Bush from office.

Either way. The URL is now redirecting traffic to our new project, The Daily Soapbox. We'll be launching soon, so keep your eyes peeled.