“Look! A falling star! Just what I wished for at the wishing fountain! Now I can make another wish!”

The weather has been hot, we’ve been sleeping in the back yard in a tent with a see-thru roof and watching the stars fall. The cats can’t figure it out, they are concerned about us and crawl up onto the tent and look at us until we knock them back off.

Mosquito-wise it’s really good, fewer bites than in the house.

Moon last night was almost full – it’s full tonight. And Mars up over the neighbor’s house, bigger than it has been in what, 2000 years? Back when I was doing belly flops right and left. Cannonballs. You name it.

Today I go to Vienna all by myself and walk around until it dawns on my that I am lost without my wife or a kid. I’ll take a camera to buy a little time – I can take pictures when I start feeling lost. Go to a cemetery and shoot headstones maybe before giving up and going to the English bookstore and browsing. Go into St. Stephen’s Cathedral and absorb stories or just history.

We went to the Music House yesterday, which is quite nice, except the interactive touchscreens were hard to figure out and a waste of time in general – cutting-edge 1999 technology. The percussion things, like rocks covered with anemones and clams and urchins made of hardish rubber, you hit them and they played brief sound samples, so you could get a fun rhythm of burps and squeals going, were wonderful on the other hand.

They had things on the wall, funnels and hemispheres, you stick your head up to them and hear Tokyo subways or a monkey ooking in a space capsule.

Interstellar space is entrancing. I listened to that the longest. Chinese singing sanddunes are a close second, though. Oldest daughter and I mixed a 3 minute CD of alarm clock sound, farting, Lisbon street sounds, the Blue Danube Waltz and us singing, but then decided not to buy it because, you know, €7.20 for a 3 minute CD?