The musicians among you will confirm this: forget notes and all that crap – the secret to playing a musical instrument is moving like the musicians do! Yes! I just figured that out yesterday.

Beta was at the music school Sunday practicing on the concert harp they have there (I have a key to get in on the weekend, that is so cool, wandering around an empty school like that, except of course the music school wasn’t entirely empty even on a Sunday, the hard-core musicians were there practicing) and since I bugged her sitting around listening to her, she sent me into another room to play my flute. And I sat there, going through some slow airs, and tried something new: moving the way I’ve seen flute players move – you know, sort of doing that kelp-like back-and-forth thing with your upper body, in time to the music, and wagging the flute around a little – and I sounded much better.

Fascinating! I got home and tried the same thing with the cello – and it worked! Doing that eye-closing thing, and the little swoops with the shoulders etc – no more strangled warthogs! All the time I’ve wasted sitting there stiff as a board. It’s great!

Beta and I went shopping and bought, among other things, a coconut. We were all looking forward to drinking a little coconut milk.

After lunch, I drained the coconut milk into a glass. Little Gamma got first sip because she is the smallest.

She took a sip, and went “Ptooey! Bleah!” spitting the mouthful back into the glass.

And the rest of us sat there, downcast, watching her spit spread throughout the rest of the coconut milk; a translucent blob of used and rejected coconut milk, bits of masticated food, and saliva.

Then a bell rang and an angel was born.

Alpha: [Sips tea] “Aren’t you overdue for a visit to the urologist, honey?”
Miguel: [sigh] “I suppose so.”
Beta (12 year-old daughter): [Sips tea] “What’s a urologist?”
Miguel: “He’s the man I pay to stick his finger up my ass.”
Alpha & Beta: [spit tea back into cups]

No one reads this at meal time, do they?

You know those holidays families go on, and they bond and return home after the week or whatever away loving each other and on good terms and so much closer than before, and not ready to murder each other?

How is that done?

Beta is 12. She does not like to be photographed. In fact, she really, really, hates it.

This past week was the semester vacation in several Austrian provinces, including the one we inhabit, so we did what everyone else does and went skiing. Only we were smart, and embarked on a Sunday (not Saturday) and returned on a Friday (not Saturday or Sunday) thereby missing all the traffic, which according to radio reports (no TV, remember?) was impressive.

Austria is an interesting place to go skiing. Only 8 million people live in this country, yet it dominates the world, ski-competition-medal-wise. They take skiing very seriously here, so excuse me if I don’t crack any jokes in this post. I can’t stress this point enough – they are fucking ski ninjas here. I may as well have gone on a vine-swinging vacation with lemurs. (I am assuming here that lemurs, being monkeys, are big vine-swingers who, like, send their young to vine-swinging classes at a relatively young age).

Our daughter Gamma turns out to have a mind of her own, as my regular readers already know, and so the Austrians in my family were concerned whether she would cooperate and attend a ski school for three days. To their relief, she did and can now stand on skis and, even, slide down a slight incline on them for a considerable distance. The emphasis was on fun this time; next year she will attend for five days instead of three, and learn all the slalom and ski-jump stuff I suppose. Here’s one picture of her ski class, here’s another. In each of these, she is the orange dot towards the center.

She would not be Gamma, however, if she had not altered the curriculum somewhat, and spent most of her ski afternoons (they had two hours before lunch, then two more after lunch) sitting down in a pile of ski teachers’ coats, wrapped up snugly in more coats, watching everyone else.

Anyway.

They eat bacon raw here, did you know that? They have a type of bacon, extremely lean, cured somehow, smoked I guess, that is great on mountainous vacations. Hiking or skiing, nothing better than thin slices or chopped bits of raw bacon. They call it Speck in German. Which sounds okay in German, not like a mass-murderer the way it does in English. While Bacon sounds like an artist in German, I suppose.

Anyway. The ski trip was great. The apartment was a little small, but we weren’t inside that much except at night, when Gamma had a fairly serious allergic reaction to all the dust mites and kept us all up coughing, which was okay, though, because the fold-out couch bed was hard to sleep on anyway. (imageHere’s the bog.) I’m also blaming it for – you guessed it – my back going out again. I’m sure it was the bed and not sitting on the ski lift in the freezing cold and rain, because I only did that once or twice on my way up to the lodge to drink beer and eat Speck. And once to listen to a story-teller and a bagpipes player.

Bagpipes were a common folk instrument in central Europe until about 1850. I don’t know whether that has anything to do with all the revolutions here in 1848, or with industrialization, or what.

So everyone was skiing. Gamma was skiing with the other little kids. Beta was skiing with her mom and a friend and my father-in-law. Beta is fearless and skis well. Whew. Skiing, skiing, skiing. Sounds like lots of fun. Great sport, skiing. I may ski next year, actually I’m looking forward to it, if I can find a bionic knee by then. Because it gives you an excellent excuse to sit around in the lodge in your skiboots (I learned this trip that people look at you funny if you walk through the lodge in non-ski boots) and drink Weizenbier.

Weizenbier is a tasty brew, but only in a ski lodge in the snow. I find it a little oppressive anywhere else. Often you drink it with a bit of lemon, which is normally done when the beer might be a little spoiled – common in hot climates, like with Mexican beers – and Weizenbier does sometimes have a bit of a stink to it. Maybe there is more yeast or something. Anyway, only takes one or two of those for a decent buzz.

What else did we do? We walked a kilometer through the dark to eat at an inn, only to discover it was closed. Actually, we could tell after walking about halfway, but we refused to believe our eyes. I got a little rewriting done on that novel I was talking about. I was chatting with the English manager of the apartment complex we stayed in and he mentioned his Austrian wife has leukemia, so I spent a little time being thankful that we are all fairly healthy.

There was a TV in the apartment, so we watched a little TV in the evenings. Oh yeah, this reminds me. Actually, maybe I should save this for a post of its own. Nah. They showed a lot of German stations, and I have to say that German TV is, on the whole, the worst I’ve ever witnessed. Austrian TV is – since the market is so tiny – low budget and has few own shows. German TV manages to be far worse with much higher budgets. They have a real thing for crappy hospital soaps/dramas and detective/police shows. And they are just so bad. For all I know, French or Dutch TV is no better, but, man.

Then we packed up and drove home. My wife packed, god bless her. She had been on a business trip to Munich and joined us later, and we drove home in two cars. Everything went well, and I didn’t get lost until the very end. Actually, I didn’t get lost at all, just missed a turn, which my children were quick to point out to me. The house is still standing, the cleaning lady came twice daily (!!) to feed the cats (who had begun to go a bit feral nevertheless and had to be persuaded to let us back into our house), and we only had a small flood in the cellar while we were gone.