I weighed myself because I was curious how much weight Gamma was belaying when she held the rope for me in our climbing class. Quite a bit, it turns out.

We hooked her up to a sandbag a couple times, and ran the rope in a z-pattern a couple times, to assist with my excess weight, as neither of us wanted her to be pulled upwards through a bunch of carabiners if I fell.

I was careful not to fall, but still. You do all that work to help them become awesome, you don’t want to pull them through a bunch of carabiners.

Yesterday I went to a climbing shop and bought a different doo-dad to increase friction on the rope in case of a fall, recommended to me by a climbing friend to help with the weight difference.

Meanwhile, working on decreasing the weight difference as well.

And limpin’ around

Tess, taken 23 12 2014 on aluminum plate, 8 second exposure f3.5. Old Workhorse collodion.

I also did my first glass plate today, a portrait of my wife. It turned out reasonably well. Collodion lifting a little here and there around the edges, not sure why, maybe insufficient cleaning of glass before pouring.

Winter.

But Odin doesn’t wear his hat when he goes to the store. He doesn’t want to make it any harder for the crows to recognize him, and he thinks a hat might do that. It sure freaks out his cats when he wears a hat.

So, no hat.

He buys honey-roasted peanuts and a baloney sandwich in a poppyseed roll. The crows meet him at the bench. Not immediately. He stands there for a minute eating peanuts before the first one, the grey one that reminds him of a duck, Huginn, appears on a telephone wire and swoops down for a piece of baloney sandwich.

Then the second grey one swoops down from the left and fights over another piece of sandwich with Muninn until Odin tosses them a couple more pieces.

For a while, they all hang out, eating silently.

Odin feels particularly unstuck in the multiverse today. All day, he has been slipping easily from one to another.

He is at a movie premiere with his daughter. Standing in the cinema lobby, they crack jokes and watch people, observing the different tribes that show up at movie premieres – the movie actors, the journalists, the photographers, the fans, the weirdos.

They wonder if they should buy popcorn. They agree popcorn should be handed out free at movie premieres. They count uncanny botox foreheads.

Botulinum toxin is the most lethal toxin there is, his daughter says. 100 mg would be enough to kill everyone in the world.

Like Odin himself, Odin’s daughter is a fertile source of useless facts. This makes Odin smile. He has been smiling all evening.

You might want to use 200 mg, though, just to be sure, Odin says.

His daughter has another thing in common with him, too: she attracts nuts. Odin realizes this when a little man appears in their personal space and asks her if she is an actress in the movie they are about to watch.

She laughs and says no.

The lobby is very crowded and noisy now, and the man talks fast, so Odin catches only a portion of what he says, but he hears him say that a local film festival always shows dramas, but never comedies or action films, because dramas are the cheapest. He has something white in the corner of his mouth.

Probably food.

Is that right, Odin says. He moves to stand between the little man and his daughter.

So they show dramas. And documentaries. Documentaries are even cheaper than dramas.

For a while, he tells them about a movie he recently watched. Odin runs through his entire repertoire of things you do to signal a conversation is winding down, but nothing works.

Finally, Odin says, well okay then, grabs his daughter and walks with her to another corner of the lobby.

At one point, Odin gets the autograph of an actress his daughter and he both like.

At another point, they watch the movie. It is okay. It is a comedy, not a drama, and they laugh a lot. Afterwards, the cast come onstage and talk for a while, then Odin and his daughter go home.

Although Odin is unstuck in the multiverse, he is not entirely without control.

On days like this, he can slip almost effortlessly from one universe to another.

He is in his car, realizing it is snowing.

He is riding a train.

He is someone else, in 1972.

He is a man waiting for crows.

He is watching a beautiful woman.

He is playing Arvo Pärt with his daughter – she plays the piano and he plays the cello. Then they give up and he switches to the singing saw and they play it that way, and laugh and laugh.

He is digging post holes with another man, holding a heavy motorized auger between them.

He is back with the crows.

What say the hanged?

Live it up.

What say the slain?

They say live it up, too.

Young woman: Yes, that would be cool.

Man: Think so?

Young woman: Yeah. And you could tattoo a rock on your bicep, so that when you flexed your arm it would look like the tortoise was fucking the rock.

Man: [blink] Totally.

Relief might be the word.

Or gratitude. Thanks for watching out for my kid, universe! And for the dozens of stories you gave her!

As others have said, this is the deal. If you do a good job, they leave. If you do a really good job, they come back. Now and then, at least.

Her sister’s still in the States. She’ll come back too, eventually. I hope.

We have her cat.

Her early-rising cat.

It’s fence-painting season. It’s Gamma’s summer job this year. I keep forgetting to tell her the Tom Sawyer story, but it’s just as well, I can’t imagine any other kids doing as good a job as she does.

Meanwhile, I found myself in a cloud of mosquitos yesterday evening trying to get the pool set up, because my wife wants her pool set up, and also it would be nice if Gamma could jump in when she gets hot out painting the fence.

Definition: the period of time in which a person forgets how the hoses connecting the pool to the filter and pump are connected; equivalent to the time from the end of pool season one year to the beginning of the next pool season the following year.

Imagine me standing there in a tie-dyed T-shirt and old running shorts, slapping mosquitos, staring at the pump, then the pool, then the hose in my hand, trying to grok the nature of this set-up. Eventually I do, of course, I am actually not bad at this sort of stuff, but this is where the fun part begins.

The pool is almost full, just a few more inches to the inlet/outlet holes. I turn on the hose, do stuff around the house, write myself a postit note to turn off the hose before I leave, and go to work. At lunchtime I call Gamma and tell her to turn off the hose and ask her if anything is flooding or leaking.

Flooding no, leaking yes, she says.

When I get home in the evening, I change back into my pool assembly clothes and reality morphs into a version of the cake factory episode of I Love Lucy only instead of cakes moving ever faster down a conveyor belt, I find ever more new leaks. I replace a leaking hose with a new one. I tape up another hose, but I can’t find duct tape and the packing tape I use does not stop the leak and looks decidedly white trashy so I cut more fresh hose but before I can take off the old hose I have to drain the pool below the outlet, so I get a pump  into the pool and water the garden.

All of this is done, by the way, with Beta’s cat walking in a figure eight around and between my feet.

I also tighten every screw on the pump and filter that can be tightened, and that stops a lot of the leaks too. Ditto the screws on the leaking skimmer thing on the pool.

Yes, then the water is down and the new hose goes on and the pool gets filled back up and I’m done.

Kind of wet, and covered in mosquito bites, but done. As happy and relieved as a girl arriving home from a pop music festival.

Shrimp box is glad to have meaning in his life again.

He wonders about the tortoise, and will it have to come inside now that it is getting colder and wetter.

Shrimp box listens to a video on Vimeo while taking a shower. He wanted drone music, but it turns out to be more metallic, and only by a band called Drone. Oh well. It sounds as if the vocalist is hollering ‘take the stairs to the shrimp box’ and Shrimp box decides to change his name to Shrimp box and to write a song with absurd lyrics, since he never understands song lyrics anyway.

The kid is so happy to have access to coffee again. Apparently Hungarian children do not drink it. She talks a lot in the car on the way to town.

‘I was reading old blog posts,’ Shrimp box says. ‘When I came home from America after going to my father’s funeral, you said, Boy am I glad you’re home, I forgot what you looked like. I only remembered that you had white hair, and that you’re nice.’

‘I said that?’ the kid is bemused.

The rain gradually peters out and stops entirely during their drive into town.

The following day, I was going to the kids’ apartment in Vienna after work to pick up Gamma to give her a ride home when I noticed a green grasshopper on the dashboard. It was a different one, I think. It looked smaller.

Hello, green grasshopper, I said.

I hoped it wouldn’t jump into my face while I drove and cause an accident.

I decided I would catch it when I got to the apartment and put it in a plant.

But it was so quiet I forgot it was there. Also I distracted myself thinking about how, in the 1980s, my first decade of adulthood, I thought everyone was crazy who bought the idea that deregulating anything was a good idea and how the past 30 years have proven me right and regulations were put in place for a reason and why not just take mean dogs off their leashes and take off their muzzles and say, go for it, dogs? Time to put a little more trickle in the trickle down.

So my mind was not on grasshoppers when I got where I was going.

Also I was thinking about how blogging is dead, personal blogging like this, I mean, now that everyone is on facebook, only you can’t write the way I write here on facebook, at least I can’t.

I got Gamma and we were driving along and something green flew past and Gamma was all, eek! And I was all, what? And she was all, IT’S ON YOU! and I was all, what? And she was all, green! Green grasshopper! And I was all, oh, right.

It was on my shoulder so I rolled down the window and threw it out (we were at a light) and it flew into some trees.

In the direction of the trees, at least. Up, for example.

Little green grasshopper.

Tired of quoting from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to his teenaged daughter on their commutes into town, the selenologist orders a DVD online. When it comes in the mail, he opens a couple bottles of Radler, which he calls Kinderbier and watches it with her.

He tries to give her some context as she churns through information on her smartphone while watching and talking to him.

“When I was your age, we could do only one thing at a time. We had to get our information from books and our movies in cinemas.”

“Ja, ja.”

Here in Castle Anthrax, we have but one punishment…

“We watched this movie over and over and recited it and watched it until we knew it by heart.”

He looks at the box. “This was made in 1975. Thirty-seven years ago.” He repeats the word thirty-seven several times at different speeds.

“Thirty-seven years ago, the world was a different place. Telephones still had rotary dials, anyone could change a headlight bulb, and I was exactly your age. Okay, roughly. One year older maybe. But without your grace. Anyway we went to movies, mostly. Luis Bunuel, Monty Python, whatever. Different things.”

“Okay.”

None shall pass.

She laughs a few times, this makes him feel better because he didn’t remember the movie being this slow.

“Geeze. Thirty seven years ago, time moved differently. In my memory, the movie doesn’t drag on like this.”

The status update his daughter posted two minutes ago has seven likes and two comments.

Your father smells of elderberries.

“I have to watch Sound of Music someday, too. Being American and Austrian, and living in Austria, I mean.”

“Totally. Like, you’re like a trifecta or something, only without whatever third element would make it a trifecta.”

“Huh?”

“Forget it.”

“Anyway, this movie is engraved on the brains of a generation. I wanted you to see it so you would understand.”

“Okay.”

I’m not dead yet.

“Could I bum one of those off you?” he said.

Eyes watering, I waved the Nicorette inhaler in front of me. “It’s the only one I got,” I finally said. “You’re welcome to it, though, Your Holiness.”

“Please,” he patted me on the knee. “Call me Dalai.” He showed me his inhaler. “I already got one. I just need the little nicotine fluid thingamajig. Ran out of those.”

I gave him one and we sat there for a while, puffing away.

“You can’t inhale too deeply at first,” he said.

“Yeah, I figured that out,” I said. “My kid gave me these for my birthday.”

“Oh, when’s your birthday?” he asked.

I made a generic waving motion at the day around us. “Today,” I said.

“Happy birthday!”

“Thanks.”

“So how old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

I pointed at the sidebar over on the right.

“Wow, you’ve been blogging a long time.”

“I was one of the first,” I said.

“Respect,” said the Dalai Lama.

“By the way,” he said, wiggling his Nicorette inhaler. “You don’t need to tell anyone about this.”

I motioned locking up my mouth and throwing away the key. “Mum’s the word.”

“I mean, I know about you bloggers.”

“Dalai, please,” I said. “Take a chill pill. Quitting making you antsy?”

“Ehn. Looking for a reincarnation.”

“Who is it this time?”

“You wouldn’t know if I told you,” he said.

“True, true,” I said. “So what signs are you looking for?”

“Remembers drowning in a past life. Trips over shoelaces at an ice cream parlor and falls on face without losing ice cream.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s like ninja-level slapstick.”

“Here’s the kicker – it’s a girl. Who gives her father Nicorettes for his birthday.”

“Aight. Okay. I’ll keep a lookout.”

He was looking at me funny, but I ignored him. I wasn’t going to tell him.

Not until he spilled the beans on whose reincarnation he was looking for.