Alpha thinks I’m configuring her new e-mail account, but that went faster than I thought so I’m blogging. Today is a holiday here, see, and she would put me to work doing something else if she knew I had finished the other task.

We went to see Anne and her guys on the weekend. We enjoyed it thoroughly, and not only because my wife’s parents have moved in with us while they wait for my MIL’s cyborg knee installation to take. Once this knee heals, she’ll get the other one replaced, after which she might be able to run at speeds up to 60 mpH.

But until then, she’ll spend a few weeks on the sofa telling us how to do things. So we take walks, and make telephone calls trying to find a plumber to fix the leaky pipe, and go to the Czech Republic to visit nice people, and the stuff you do in situations like that.

Nine weeks of blogging gold in sight.

We went to see Anne, who just for the record had the most incredible blue eyes I’ve seen since 1976 (seen then in a woman’s head at the airport in Washington D.C.) and plus she is a spookily good palm reader.

The Czech Republic is as beautiful as Austria, and this time of year, with the lush spring growth, both are quite smashing. The Czechs seem to have more whorehouses, at least they have bigger signs than in Austria, but they appear to be clustered near the borders.

Czech fields are bigger. Maybe their farms are in general larger than Austrian ones. So this makes the landscape look a little different.

Brno is hillier than Vienna, and easy to get lost in because the street signs are not only in Czech, they’re also somehow hidden. So as we looked for Anne’s address, me driving and Alpha reading the directions to me, there was a lot of conversation like, “Turn right, no left, at the street starting with a Z. Does this street start with a Z?”

Also they have different currency so I was reduced to infantile tourism, where you don’t know anything and just go where people take you and pay what they tell you to pay. Alpha, on the other hand, learned Czech after about 30 minutes.

What can I say about the trip? We took a walk through the town, along streets and trails in the woods, making fun of participants in an orienteering competition running around with their maps and compasses. Around this time we discovered we were lost in the woods. Then we found a pub and everything was okay again. Not only okay: I discovered an idea I’m going to steal from the pub and become a very, very rich man with. But more on that at a later date.

I can’t give a good account of the trip here, because I’m still so hungover, a strange gin hangover where you don’t feel so bad physically, you just question the meaning of existence. At the same time, it was one of those visits where the kids get along, and your wife likes your friend and her husband, and you like her husband and you’re relieved everything turns out so well. You rifle through the books on their bookshelves and they all look interesting as do the CDs on the rack. The furniture is tasteful in a comfortable, agreeable way and they cook well and their son draws cool maps and takes knightly good care of Gamma.
The Murphy bed was cool. I slept well, although I suppose I would have slept well inside an industrial clothes dryer that night. The food was good. The neighborhood was charming. If only existence had a meaning.