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a hell of a night, waking and sleeping

shalmestere and I came home from two weeks in Europe with colds. We didn't pick them up on the plane: we both woke with scratchy throats last Tuesday morning, the day we were supposed to fly home. Anyway, after various misadventures we got on a plane Wednesday morning, we wore masks on the plane to somewhat-reduce the chance of infecting anybody else, and got home Wednesday afternoon, still with scratchy throats but nothing worse. (I had an intermittent, unproductive cough, as I have been since a bout of COVID in July, but that's become "the new normal".)

shalmestere spent most of Wednesday afternoon and much of Thursday and Friday in bed -- partly jet-lag, partly having a familiar, comfortable bed for the first time in two weeks, and partly cold symptoms, which always hit her hard. I still had only a scratchy throat, so I went about the usual post-vacation chores: triaging two weeks of accumulated mail, re-stocking the refrigerator, picking overripe raspberries off the vines in the back yard, paying bills, etc.

Somewhere in the two weeks' worth of work e-mail was an automated complaint from ${EMPLOYER} that I had been physically in the office less than two days a week in Q3, "well below" the three-day-a-week standard they'd issued last year, and they were informing my manager and my grand-manager. Nevertheless, I worked from home Thursday and Friday because I figured I was probably contagious, being only two or three days out from first symptoms.

Saturday I went to a "No Kings" march and rally, on my own because

shalmestere was still too sick. Marching and standing outside in the sun for hours are tiring at the best of times, but I had picked the march/rally two miles away rather than the one in Manhattan, so I got home quickly, drank a lot of water, and collapsed. That evening I noticed that I was getting physically tired more quickly than usual, and coughing and sneezing more often than normal, and having some general all-over body aches. (And

shalmestere was still alternating between the bed and the living room couch, getting tired out by the slightest exertion.)

Sunday it hit. Walking the dogs around the block tired me out. Re-heating lunch or dinner tired me out. General body aches, nasal congestion, headaches, frequent coughing-and-sneezing spasms, all that. Sunday night both of us woke up every few hours to cough, blow our noses, pee, and drink, usually not at the same time.

I officially called in sick to work Monday, thinking I might get some programming work done in between naps and reheated meals, but not at all confident of that, and not wanting to further exacerbate the hybrid-work-policy issue by working-from-home too much. Again, general body aches, nasal congestion, headaches, getting tired quickly, frequent uncontrollable coughing-and-sneezing. Monday night was the same as Sunday night: we both woke up every few hours to cough, blow our noses, pee, and drink. And I feel about as good this morning as yesterday morning.

To add to the angst, between the 4:30 and 6:30 wake-ups last night, I had a nightmare.

I was walking down the street in a fancy, rich neighborhood and saw a small black boy and a white woman walking together. I asked the boy "And where is your house?", and he proudly stopped in front of one of the grander houses and replied "Right here!" There was a small slab of rock in the front yard, under which were a couple of plants he'd been taking care of, and I helped him plant another one. And I walked on, preparing a standard-issue lecture in my mind about racial prejudice.

But the next block was our own block, and our house wasn't there. I recognized all the houses on the street, but there wasn't even a gap between our neighbor on the left and our neighbor on the right. It seemed that other houses were missing too, although I wasn't sure which ones, because again there was no gap where they should have been. This was now seriously scary.

Conveniently, Pennsic was a short walk away, so I went there, to check on our encampment, and our pavilion wasn't where it should be. I saw Cariadoc in the marketplace and asked him about the phenomenon: he was aware of it, and had identified several people we both knew who seemed to have vanished not only from the site but from the memories of other people we knew. He said he was "going into town" and asked whether there was anything he could pick up for me, and I replied "Well, all our food is in our pavilion, which is missing."

Before I could elaborate on that, I thought I saw (in another market stall in the distance)

shalmestere, in modern clothes, so I ran to catch up with her. But it wasn't her, and I realized there was a substantial chance that she too had vanished completely.

I saw Thor (from the Marvel movies -- I guess we're in the middle of "the snap") standing and talking to his girlfriend on a cellphone. She too was worried about all the missing people and houses, and was calling him "Chris", so I guess this is an out-of-universe girlfriend. But at least they could find one another.

AWS outage

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

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politics

Political protest

shalmestere and I both have colds, but as usual it's hitting her harder than me, so she opted out of going to yesterday's "No Kings" protest; I had only a scratchy throat, so I decided to go stag. I've done two or three protest marches in Manhattan, and they always involve standing in one place for at least two hours before you can start shuffling slowly along the march route. You can talk to the people near you, but if there are speeches, you won't hear any of them or see the speakers. And by the time it's over, your back is sore, your legs are sore, you're dehydrated, and you're physically a wreck for the rest of the day if not the next day. So with all this in mind, I decided to go to the one two miles away in a small park in Forest Hills rather than the one on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

I ran into the first other protesters on the platform of the train station near my house (where I would normally commute to work); we touched antennae briefly, compared signs, all got on the train for one stop, then walked the two blocks to the park where things were scheduled to happen. On the walk, one of the other protesters I was talking to asked whether I had ever worked at Google, and I replied "yes, I still do." He had worked at Google NYC for fifteen years or so, retiring a week before COVID shut everything down, and for some reason recognized me from there. So we chatted a bit about the union, how working at Google has changed, etc.

Got to the park, where there were what looked like about 500 people ranging from age ~5 to 90-something, and somebody leading chants through a bullhorn. After a few minutes of that, there were a couple of brief speeches, including one by the Lieutenant Governor, Antonio Delgado. He's a good speaker; I told him he should consider going into politics. The lady with the bullhorn reminded us that this is a non-violent protest: if we encounter any counter-protesters, we will de-escalate and not take the bait.

And then the rally turned into a march, a bit over a mile from the park to Queens Borough Hall. The police had closed off the local lanes of Queens Boulevard eastbound, and marchers filled that two-lane street for five blocks (which I think means more like 1000-2000 people). As we marched, a number of drivers on the inner lanes honked and waved in support, while other spectators on the sidewalk held up signs of their own and cheered us on.

On the front steps of Queens Borough Hall they had set up microphones and loudspeakers, so I could actually hear what the various speakers and musical groups had to say, of which the consistent call-and-response was "Queens says / No Kings!". Heard from our Congresswoman, our State Assembly member, the State Assembly member from the next district to the west, a retired doctor talking about a friend of hers who used to practice here but moved to Canada because her husband was threatened with deportation, a pastor who pointed out that Donald Trump actually comes from Queens but still doesn't get it, etc. Several speakers quoted the Republican talking-point that this is a "Hate America rally", saying "no we don't, we're here because we love America and don't want to see its experiment with democracy ended." A voice-and-guitar duo took the stage and said "we're gonna take a vote. Would you like a song based on 'We Shall Overcome', or one based on the 'Hunger Games' theme?" Two thirty-somethings standing near me said "What's 'We Shall Overcome'?", and I said "Classic of the civil rights struggle, fifties and sixties." "We Shall Overcome" won the vote, and those of us old enough to know it got to sing along. After another politician or two, a different musical group took the stage: the "Revolution Resistance Choir", which I gather counts about sixty women-and-NB members, but only about eight of them were at the rally. Anyway, they did a couple of protest songs too, some of which I knew ("Woke up this morning with my mind / Set on freedom"), and the rest of which were sufficiently repetitive and formulaic that one could pick up at least the chorus and sing along. The group is quite good.

I chatted with a guy in an inflatable chicken suit, and saw a couple of inflatable frogs and Tyrannosauri. Most people were not costumed, just waving signs and American flags and sporting appropriate T-shirts. There were plenty of police, as well as volunteer marshals, lining the march route and separating the protesters from car traffic and any potential counter-protesters -- of which I didn't see or hear any at all. Things wound down, and I was home in fifteen minutes.

The NYPD, after the fact, reports at least 100,000 protesters in various locations in the five boroughs, and no arrests. Which is obviously evidence that the NYPD is incapable of maintaining peace on the streets, and desperately needs the help of the National Guard if not the regular Army.

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travel

A long strange trip home

Tuesday morning we awoke in our hotel room in Brussels. We took a 10-minute walk to Wittamer's, one of the classic old chocolateries of Belgium, then back to the hotel, packed everything up, checked out, and walked the 15 minutes or so to the main train station. Caught a train to the Amsterdam airport: it was somewhat delayed by a national strike in Belgium, then by a slower train ahead of it on the same tracks, then by an infestation of swans on the tracks. (Would I make that up?) But we still got there at 13:30, in plenty of time for our 17:05 plane to JFK.

As of 16:30, they hadn't started boarding yet, and takeoff was tentatively pushed back to 17:25. Mechanics were looking into "a technical issue" with the plane, with no confident estimate of when they'd be finished. As of 17:45, takeoff was tentatively pushed back to 19:00. As of 18:30, the flight was cancelled altogether, we would be automatically rebooked onto a later flight, we would get an e-mail with details, and if we wanted a hotel voucher to spend the night, we should go to transfer desk T4. We heard about all of this by individual airline employees walking around and telling small groups of people, because the microphone they would have used to announce it more broadly wasn't working. So by the time we got the word about transfer desk T4, there had already been a mass exodus in the direction of transfer desk T4, and we found ourselves at the end of about a hundred-yard-long line inside the terminal.

It occurred to me that the rush for hotel vouchers might well be accompanied by a rush for hotel rooms, so while standing in the line, I pulled out my phone and looked for nearby hotels. Found one, the "Citizen M", a 5-minute walk away from the terminal we were in. This sounded good because we had no idea what time our rebooked flight would be, so I made a reservation there. And since KLM was allegedly paying for it, I requested breakfast with our room (for an extra 19 € each).

I checked my mail a few times for word of a rebooking, then tried text-chatting with customer service to rebook interactively. The bot informed me that my flight had been canceled (news flash!) and pointed me to the exact same web page I had used to chat with it, but also offered the option of talking to a human. So I waited for that.

After an hour and a bit, and before getting a response from the chat, I reached the front of the line for hotel vouchers. There was a ring of about eight self-service kiosks, which the employees recommended you start with, resorting to another line for human customer service only if the self-service kiosk couldn't cope with your request. So I did that: the kiosk recognized that our flight had been cancelled, and offered us food-and-drink vouchers and a hotel voucher. For the hotel voucher, there were two choices: make the reservation for me, or I'll make it myself. Since I had already reserved a room, I picked the latter, and was given two food-and-drink vouchers and a "generic voucher" that isn't actually good for anything itself; you're supposed to show it to the human customer-service agents after standing in another line. But in the process of doing all this, the kiosk also informed us that we had been rebooked for a 7:15 flight to London Heathrow and a connection at an unspecified time from there to JFK. So much for breakfast.

We stood in another line for twenty minutes or so before getting to the human customer-service agents, who took our "generic voucher" in exchange for a voucher at the Park Plaza hotel. I pointed out that I had already made a reservation at Citizen M, which the agent acknowledged was much closer -- "basically the only hotel in walking distance of here". The prepaid vouchers were apparently available only for the Park Plaza, but the agent assured me that we could get reimbursed for the cost of a night's lodging at another hotel, and gave me instead a card with URL's to request such reimbursement in various languages. And she also printed off our boarding passes for the flights to Heathrow and thence to JFK, telling us we should be at the terminal 90 minutes before boarding, i.e. 5:45. We thanked her and walked into the night looking for the hotel.

Which wasn't difficult: Google Maps gave reasonable walking directions, and we weren't far from the front door of the terminal before we could see a big letter-M logo glowing in the distance. Checked in and went to our room. Which was trippy and ultramodern: the first thing you see when you open the door is a shower stall on the "open plan", followed by a toilet, also on the "open plan", and once you've walked between them, you get to the bed. In fact, both shower stall and toilet have frosted-glass walls that close around them on a circular track, so they're not entirely "open". Next to the bed is an iPad that controls everything in the rooom: the television, the curtains, the blinds, the lights, the soundscape, the night-light (which has separate controls for brightness and color)...

It was now about 9 PM and we hadn't eaten much since noon, so I looked up the menu on the iPad and discovered there was no room service. So

shalmestere and I agreed on some dim sum as a late-night snack, and I went back to the ground floor bar to order it. While waiting, I pulled out my phone and realized that a human had responded to my customer-service chat. I summarized the situation, and the agent said "Good news! You've been rebooked on the 8:00 AM flight from Brussels to Amsterdam, and the 10:00 AM flight from Amsterdam to JFK." This was the exact same pair of flights I'd been rebooked onto twice before, and it was decidedly not appropriate now given that we were in Amsterdam, not Brussels. I pointed this out, and asked whether we could have just the 10:00 flight from Amsterdam to JFK, without the Brussels-AMS leg (which sounded more pleasant than a 7:15 flight changing in London). The agent misunderstood me and said the 10:00 PM flight was cancelled too (I didn't think there even was a 10:00 PM flight!); when I clarified that I meant 10:00 AM the next day, the agent said that flight was also canceled or unavailable or something. So we agreed to stick to the 7:15-to-London plan. And finally the food arrived, I took it up to the room, we ate and fell into bed.

Wednesday morning I woke to my alarm at 4:30 AM. Turned on the night-light in orange-yellow to suggest sunrise, took a shower, and woke

shalmestere to do the same. We got downstairs by 5:30, checked out (accepting the offer of a couple of pains au chocolat to-go, since we had paid for breakfast after all), walked back to the terminal, and went through security and passport-control again. The 7:15 flight to London boarded without mishap, although it didn't actually get off the ground until 8:00. Landed in London only ten minutes late, with about 45 minutes before our connection to New York would start boarding. Unfortunately, the connection to New York was on a different airline and from a different terminal, so we had to stand in line to catch a bus from one terminal to another. Fortunately, the bus stayed on the "inside-security-and-passport-control" side of the border, so we didn't have to do security and passport control again in the new terminal. Unfortunately, the boarding passes we had used for the flight to London were apparently insufficient to get us onto the NYC leg, so we had to stand in another line, with dozens of other people, to talk to one of the two Virgin Atlantic customer-service agents on duty at 9 AM. Eventually the agent issued us two new boarding passes, and we started running to find our gate, hoping it wouldn't be closed by the time we got there. And it wasn't, although the plane was mostly boarded.

Fairly uneventful flight from Heathrow to JFK. Retrieved bags, didn't even have to show passports to anyone (just get our digital photos taken), caught a cab home, and collapsed in bed, 32 hours after boarding the train from Brussels to Amsterdam.

Entry tags:

travel

Ghent

Took a train to Ghent, of which we had fond memories from our previous trip to Belgium (15 years ago?). Google Maps showed something called the "Gravenstein Castle", which we didn't remember seeing on the previous trip, and which looked promising from the photos on the Web. So that was our first stop (after lunch at a sandwich shop with awesome frites).

Gravenstein Castle, under various names, was the seat of the Counts of Flanders for almost a thousand years. It started as a 9th-century wooden fort, then became a stone motte-and-bailey castle in the 12th century, was expanded into something more luxurious in the 14th and 15th centuries, was sold and repurposed as a textile factory in the 18th-19th centuries, then was sold to the City of Ghent to be "restored to its medieval glory". Which of course doesn't identify any particular point in time to restore it to, but they aimed for 14th-15th-century. So a lot of the current castle is a c1900 reconstruction, but a decent job for the time.

Anyway, we walked from there towards St. Bavo's Cathedral, the home of the city's top tourist attraction, the Ghent Altarpiece by the van Eycks. We didn't have reserved tickets, but things looked fairly un-crowded, so I went to ask whether we could get in any time soon. And it turned out that the Altarpiece isn't actually there at the moment: it's being restored, and has been temporarily replaced with high-resolution photos of it. So since we saw the real thing on our previous trip, we skipped that. Instead, we went up the nearby Belfort and got the panoramic view of the city.

Back to Brussels, got take-out Thai food to eat in the room, and started packing for our trip home tomorrow.

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Brussels and Leuven and Mechelen

As planned, took a morning train from Tournai to Brussels. As soon as we got out of the station,

shalmestere spotted a poster with medieval drolleries advertising a museum exhibit. She took a photo of it, but we were more immediately concerned with finding our hotel. Which we did without much trouble; it involved walking past some homeless people and the like, but it was a straight shot from the station.

Then looked at the photo again, looked up the museum (KBR -- the Royal Library of Belgium) online, concluded it was an exhibition of medieval manuscripts around the theme of music, and decided this was What We Should Do Today. Walked back to the station and just a bit past it to the exhibition. Which was indeed awesome. The KBR's permanent collection includes 279 medieval manuscripts from the Dukes of Burgundy, and many of them were on display. Some of the musical connections were a stretch — "this is a really cool manuscript, and if you look at the drolleries in the inner margin of the recto page, one of them is an animal playing a harp" — but an excellent collection.

Back to the room. I took a bag of dirty socks and shirts to a nearby laundromat and, while waiting for the wash cycle, hunted for nearby grocery stores. Didn’t find much, but got some yogurt for breakfast-in-the-room. And we both have enough clean clothes to get through the end of the vacation, even if our flight is delayed.

Saturday we had reserved tickets to the M museum in Leuven, to make double-sure we didn’t miss the Leuven Chansonnier exhibit. So we took a train to Leuven (a 20-30 minute ride) and walked to the museum.

We needn’t have worried: the museum wasn’t crowded. M Museum is all about juxtaposing old and new: every room seemed to have Renaissance art alongside 20th or 21st century art on the same theme, or commenting on the Renaissance works. The first floor was given over to permanent collections (an impressive collection of Renaissance stuff, and I have no idea how impressive the modern collection was), while part of the second was “The Pursuit of Knowledge”, an exhibition about the 600-year history of KU Leuven that includes the Chansonnier.

I was uncertain how the museum would go about presenting the Leuven Chansonnier, which is after all a single object the size of a largish wallet. The installation, entitled "Forty-Nine", set up a darkened room, with speakers on all sides and The Book partly open in a lit display case in the center, and played a recording of piece 49 from the Chansonnier (one of its 12 unica, pieces not known from any other source). On the front wall, five spots of light became the five performers on the recording — two singers, two lutes, and a vielle — with various digital manipulations done on their images. Effective.

Anyway, we saw a bunch of other stuff from the University’s collections -- fossils, 19th-century lab equipment, etc. -- before leaving and heading for the train back to Brussels. Got take-out Thai food and ate it in the room.

Sunday: Mechelen. Fill this in.

BTW, I've started uploading pictures and adding them to previous entries, starting October 1. Go back and take a look, if you wish.