How are you today?

[yashima]

This post is traveling backwards in time a little but that’s how my thoughts are… it fits as I also feel a little upside down most of the time. It’s getting better though, especially with today’s stuff done.

Today, the penultimate Handwerker was here to finish up the silicone “seams” in the bathroom. Now we have to deal with the electrician and wait for all the remaining invoices. (This does not mean the house is “finished”, just the current phase)

Right this moment a bunch of stronger-and-less-impaired-from-the-move-than-us guys are here to carry the remaining Sperrmüll (bulk waste?) to the curb where the city will come for pick up tomorrow.

We’re both–as noted above–in dire need of some physiotherapy. My back is hurting everywhere and our vacation on Sicily was not what we needed at all due to lack of time for figuring out what we needed and also for planning it. I came back from vacation with my back hurting worse than ever. I made a doctor’s appointment while still there.

Our flight back was the fastest ever. Scheduled for 2h45m it took us 90 minutes to get from Palermo to Frankfurt due to an “is there a doctor on board” emergency (there was a doctor, the crew was very professional and I believe the poor woman and her heart are as fine as can be when you have a mid-air emergency). We were prioritized for landing and then the plane went down faster than I realized. The kid 2 rows behind me did and screamed the whole way down. Had I realized, I might have done the same.

Sicily is awesome and now that I have been there I know how I would organize a good trip there.

• Rule #1: do not go when the season is over and
• Rule #2: do not stay in one spot for 2 weeks. The biggest island in the Mediterranean is big. Duh.
• Rule #3: get to know the food before hand. I knew less about Sicilian food than I thought I did. (I now have a cookbook…)
• Rule #4: Google Maps is not the ideal navigation system for a place like Sicily that is 90% awful backroads that lead into nowhere in the middle of possibly burning forests… (we had some forest fires while there, the autostrada closed right behind us one night due to fire). There is a single autostrada circular around the island that is 90% construction site…

We got to visit 2 vulcanos: Etna–from afar–and Stromboli to walk on the island and watch the eruptions at night. Incredibe and impressive even when you are quite far–a safe distance–away. Fire spewing out of a mountain even at a distance creates pure primal awe–as evinced by everyone on the boat going “woooaaah” at the same moment.

The feedback from the album I sent to friends and family is one of “that must hve been a great vacation” when it was one of the least good ones we ever had. Photos are little liars, aren’t they? I’ve made a somewhat smaller selection for here. The places we visited were Capo D’Orlando (where we stayed), Céfalú, Messina, Taormina, Stromboli and a bunch of small towns and villages. Palermo was a 2 hour drive away, too far really…

So traveling is still always good but in this case it did not bring me the relaxation and enjoyment I had hoped for.

In any case, work welcomed me back with some unnecessary hickups that are very slow in clearing up. While we were gone the heating system started breaking down even more than before but it is now actually fixed (not just duct-taped) and it should last until we replace the whole thing.

Overall things are looking up and I feel like sometime this month we’ll arrive here for real and have something akin to what used to be our “normal” before we began the moving project. So yay for that–it’s not a loud yay yet… but we’re getting there

PS: my mobile took better pics at night than my camera. That firecolumn is something around 200m high…

[dscheidt]

@yashima

Our flight back was the fastest ever. Scheduled for 2h45m it took us 90 minutes to get from Palermo to Frankfurt due to an “is there a doctor on board” emergency (there was a doctor, the crew was very professional and I believe the poor woman and her heart are as fine as can be when you have a mid-air emergency). We were prioritized for landing and then the plane went down faster than I realized. The kid 2 rows behind me did and screamed the whole way down. Had I realized, I might have done the same.

a few years ago, I was on a flight to california that made an unscheduled stop in Denver, because of a medical emergency. the pilot most have been a fighter pilot, because he came in really fast, and didn’t put the flaps up until just before touchdown, and rocketed down the whole length of the runway (which are really long at Denver, because mile high city. (12,000 and 16000 feet, looked it up), not using the thrust reversers until the last second. We were on the ground a total of 10 minutes, the takeoff was similarly full thrust, and the turn back to the right course was the steepest banking I’ve ever been in a commercial airplane. We arrived only 15 minutes late.

[RogerBW]

@yashima

Google Maps is not the ideal navigation system for a place like Sicily

I recommend basically anything that runs on OpenStreetMap data, where they (we, I have a few contributions) care about things other than major roads—especially if you’re doing anything on foot or by bicycle. On Android I use OSMAnd, which if you get it from F-Droid is entirely free; I think elsewhere they may charge for map downloads.

I mean, it won’t update you for road closures, but nothing does that reliably anyway.

[yashima]

Road closures are on some Italian website (https://automap.it) I apparently cannot find while not there… you just know the number of the Sicilian one (20) and search for it.

I have managed to rip out most google services from my phone and replaced them with other stuff. Just recently finally getting rid of GooglePhotos. Maps really is one of the last to go. I am working on it. Just maybe not while on vacation

[Whistle_Pig]

We’ve been house hunting this week, which is a bit of a mission. We thought we’d found a place, so we asked some friends what they thought of the area. Comments included:

• “Dodgy as f**k”
• “You see armed police around there a lot”
• “The local crime family used to come into my betting shop”
• “The problem with living right next to a shitty area is that the shitty people don’t have to come far to steal your stuff”

Back to the drawing board!

[RogerBW]

If the local crime family actually lives there, their neighbours are sometimes very happy because nobody wants to cause trouble on the boss’s patch.

I moved into a place in east London and found it very pleasant. Five years in, the old man a few houses down died, and had the full horse-drawn funeral. A month later, there started to be dog-mess on the pavement, arguing youth in the street, and so on.

[Whistle_Pig]

I don’t think it’s that level of crime family - more the throwing chairs around in the bookies and uploading videos of stabbings to tiktok variety.

[COMaestro]

With an assembly of parts costing $150 and about an hour of work, we once again have a fully functional dishwasher!

[dscheidt]

I’m glad to hear it.

I hate working on dishwashers. My previous dishwasher broke down four or five times before I replaced it in a fit of rage the next time it broke. Then I discovered it had been installed by muppets, and had to spend an entire weekend doing electrical work and modifying the cabinets to install the replacement. (The wires to power it were just floating in space, and not in conduit as local code requires. The rough opening was 3/8” too small, the old machine could be wiggled in, the replacement couldn’t. And the drain hose routings required modification. ). Let’s just say I was unpleased when it displayed an error code just over a year after install. I actually called a repair guy. Several, even, but couldn’t get any one who could come in less than two weeks, so I had to do it myself. This one is at least serviceable with out taking it out.

[Marx]

My eldest kitten, Donut (16) is in for surgery today.

The vet is cautiously optimistic. I’m worried sick. Fingers crossed.

She has a wound on her cheek that refuses to heal. She’s in pain but she has a brain the size of a walnut so she doesn’t know why.

I just hope she doesn’t suffer, no matter what.

[Whistle_Pig]

Bags of luck and plenty of her favourite treats to your cat

[Griffster77]

In our previous house, the dishwasher had been installed by someone the investigators euphemistically called ‘an amateur…’ - it leaked so badly, we had to get the kitchen ripped out, 3 months of work to try and dry everything, we had to move out another house etc. Thank god for insurance…

[COMaestro]

Hey, I’m an amateur! Hopefully a better class of one, though.

[Griffster77]

I think he wanted to say something considerably stronger…

[Acacia]

My 3 year old gets Monza. I’m over the moon. We played once and she asked again, again, again, again. We went from 3 dice to 5. There’s still some material hand holding but she’s answering all the yes/no and which space questions and moving her piece! So much fun.

The 6 year old still struggles. We got her report card this week for Kindergarten - benchmark was a score of 23 and she scored something like 86. So it’s not a raw horsepower issue, but visuospatial and “avatar” type abstractions are just tough for her. We were playing candyland this weekend (oh my gosh it’s interminable) and she had frequent trouble determining which way the path went (which isn’t her fault, the thing goes every which way and the “helpful” arrows on the board are just plopped into dead space so they are sometimes pointing the right way, sometimes the wrong way, depending on where you are) and, while she could jump to the right color, it wasn’t always the next space of that color, just a nearby space of that color.

Her limited ability to interact with the world, I think, has led her to create a very internalized view of the world. We explained that the playing piece was like a bookmark, keeping her place in the game. She would still pick it up between turns, and usually put it back on start when it was her turn again. Just this “this thing outside of me represents my place in the game” is something we all take for granted but it’s learned, not instinct.

Her ability to interact with the world, now, is miles ahead of where it used to be. But it’s fighting against a pre-existing world-structure now, rather than being built in a vacuum as it is for our baby.

The hard part is that she can do it all. I try to break it down to steps like I do with the 3 year old. “Your piece starts here. The path is going this way. Move until you find two orange spaces.” She can easily do that with prompting, and she does for a turn or five, but then some lack of confidence kicks and she starts intentionally tanking things.

Parenting is such a puzzle. And it’s so much easier to push things five steps back in a moment than coax them one step forward over an hour.

[pillbox]

@Acacia

she had frequent trouble determining which way the path went

If you have the version we do, this is completely normal. Even for distracted adults—I can tell you by first- and/or second-hand experience.

[Acacia]

We get the same thing two rainbows into Unicorn Glitterluck. She can do that one when it is just her and me - if anyone else is present she withdraws.

But yeah, you’re right on Candyland. The Mrs and I were trading looks over the board like “now how do we end this,” probably with feelings similar to every recent US president regarding various engagements in the middle east.

[pillbox]

@Acacia

“now how do we end this,”

You palm the Ice Cream Cone card before the game starts and place it on top of the deck when it’s the kid’s first turn (if playing with only one child)

[pillbox]

A game that’s slightly more palatable than Candyland, but has similar vibes, is Count Your Chickens! | Board Game | BoardGameGeek. Added benefit is that it focuses more on numbers and counting than it does on color recognition. My kids never needed practice with colors but counting accurately is still something that we’re working on.

I wouldn’t break the bank trying to find a copy but it’s definitely worth $10-$15 or so if you find it on discount somewhere.

[Acacia]

@pillbox

You palm the Ice Cream Cone card before the game starts

This is the way.

We definitely removed all the pink cards on the reshuffle. Reshuffle? That’s when we realized it was calibrated for infinite loops.

Re: Peaceable kingdom, I’ve been slowly replacing with Haba. Glitterluck killed Count Your Chickens and Monza is intended to kill Hoot Owl Hoot. Snug as a Bug in a Rug has been an acceptable alternative to My First Orchard, though.

But yeah, we’re blessed with good counters. The main challenge of Count Your Chickens was the aforementioned “count from start” each turn, and the fight over “Daddy Chicken.” And the inevitable meta that developed, of “40 chick pickup” (though 60 Glittercrystal pickup has also proven popular).