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My screen agent’s gorgeous young Weimaraner bitch, Ch. Dakotaridge Carousel’s Ola Lola!, is competing today at the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York. I’m so excited!

Miss Lola is a sweet and happy dog, and apparently loves the showring: last year she took a first-level Award of Merit for her breed at Westminster, a surprising achievement for so young a dog. (But then her family, as shown on her breeder’s homepage, seems to be good at picking up the ribbons.)

The Weimaraner judging is at 10:45 NY time. I wish I could watch the action, but unfortunately no one seems to be doing streaming video.

Oh well…at least I can check the Westminster results page and keep track of things that way. But meanwhile I’m finding it hard to type with my fingers crossed…

…And an update: Lola won “Best of Opposite Sex”, which is nearly-as-good-though-not-quite-so as “Best of Breed.” Yayyy!

Oh, I forgot to mention this — I was e-mailed about it some weeks back, but it got buried under work.

The two terms which appear nowhere else together on the Web but in “Out of Ambit”, to judge by Google’s index:

“Samhain” and “heliopause.”

This is a blog about Buying Stuff. Especially women’s clothes. If you’re not into that kind of thing, Look Away Now. (Doubtless we will return to our relentlessly Professional/Scientific mode later. … Am I wildly excited about the bedrock outcropping on Mars? Of course I am. Are you nuts??? But we’ll get to that later.)

[girly mode] It has to be said that Brugge is simply one of the great shopping cities. How it got that way in the modern era (for it certainly was one in the 1400’s, though it lapsed later), I wouldn’t venture to guess. Others probably have better data. But here you can go from The Tintin Shop to (right next door) the Airsoles Shop (vital for those of us disappointed with Ecco this season) to the holders of the Belgian Crown Warrant for Chocolate. (In their very window they have the waffle iron by which they will make, for you, fresh mini waffles stuffed with praline. Oh, My, Goddess: Drag Me Away Now! …But not before I can send a box of them to my mother-in-law.)

Anyway, right now the town is full of signs in shop windows, and the signs say “-50%! -60%! -70% op!” “Op” meaning “Off”, in English, as you might guess. Everyone is dumping their winter goods for the “Niew Collectie”, which I shouldn’t have to translate too hard for any English-speaking [girly] shopper. (Are there still boys here? OK, they have boys’ clothes here too.)

As usual, the locals have stripped the place mostly bare before I got here. Alas. …Nonetheless, there are a few choice possibilities…which nevertheless put me off.

The leather car-coat (I use the term to suggest its length rather than anything else) that I picked up in Munich a few years ago is now showing its age. The leather was never that thick to begin with. Now it’s got a couple of tears in unhappy spots, especially over where the strap for my purse goes. So, time for a new coat.

The goals: Get something Classic. Something that won’t show its age within seconds if not days. (Like the much-beloved Jaeger wool/cashmere coat of some years back, which turned out to have unremovable shoulderpads. Argh.) And none of these “unreconstructed”, stitched-together skins that were all the rage here last winter, either (and are being cleared out right now with the usual blinding speed). I want something that will last another three-four-five years. Ideally, another leather coat, maybe shearling-lined: or a wool/cashmere one: either way, in a belted “bathrobe” wrap. If there are buttons they should be high so as to protect any scarves underneath from the elements. (I collect Hermés astronomicals, and various others to keep my poor weak throat warm.) The coat needs to be sort of boot-length or so. That’s about it.

Anyway, I wandered the town far and wide. Nada. There were a few shops that had something that would have worked had I been a guy, and six foot six. (Not today.)

And after much searching, I stumbled across a branch of Max Mara.

Okay. The coats were nice. They just about fit the bill. Cashmere/wool, black, simple, the right length, the right style. Lovely.

But I balked. Because the coats were nearly identical to ones I had seen (unbadged or store-badged) in the Globus and Jelmoli department stores in Zurich. (These would be about equal in general style and quality to Bloomingdales or Nordstroms in the US.) But these coats cost (converting currencies here from SFr to Euro) about five hundred Euro more.

For the name “Max Mara.”

This really annoys me. The style of the Mara coats is no different from the Globus and Jelmoli ones. (I mean, how much can you alter a bathrobe’s style, short of edging it with platinum or diamonds?) The weight and warmth of the weave was the same. The hand of the material was the same. And Max Mara wants me to pay FIVE HUNDRED EURO more for their tag in the back?

Sorry. I’m off for Zurich next week, and I’ll get the new coat there. I would sooner choke myself than buy one of these Max Mara things. Where do they get off??

Feh.

We now return you to your previously scheduled blog.

(Max Mara, gonif!!)

[/girly mode]

…They make my brains hurt, some of them.

“…For instance, after science standards were changed in Kansas, a physics teacher was not allowed to teach the big-bang theory. A chemistry teacher could not teach the periodic table. …”

The Periodic Table??

AAAAAARRRRRGH!!

How can a God so smart design people so…so… !!!!!!

Oh, Dmitriy Ivanovich, we hardly knew ye!

(sigh) I now return to my previously scheduled European idyll. With The Greatest Difficulty.

(My only consolation is that after the people with these wee, dim, parochial ideas are all gone… our good lady Scientia will still be there. Snickering.)

Or, more properly, “Brugge.” This is a Vlaamse-speaking area: while you can speak French here, it’s probably politer to default to Flemish. (English is always accepted, almost gratefully, as an alternative. A word, also, to the wise: this would probably not be an area where German is terribly popular as a linguistic alternative. Having previously spent some days in Switzerland on an earlier trip, I picked up a menu and out of habit, said, “Bitte…” Things went on in German for about a minute and a half until “mein Deutsch”, such as it is (“sehr kaum”!) failed me. I fell back into English, and the manageress of the restaurant breathed a big sigh and said, “Oh, thank you…” and continued the discussion in English which was better than that of some native English-speakers I know. …It is worth remembering, in circumstances like this, the monument at the North Gate of the city; it commemorates, most affectionately, the Canadians who liberated Brugge in 1945.

…This is another of those “timewarp” cities. In Basel, in the middle of the night, you can suspect yourself of having fallen into the 14th or 15th century: here you can do it in broad daylight.

Brugge was one of the richest cities in this part of the world, in the 1400’s and 1500’s, due to its adroit management of its end of the wool trade with England. (The city imported rough fleeces and exported them as finished cloth, or sometimes — more unusually — as spun thread.) The great families of Brugge became wealthy enough to do things like (in one family’s case) build their own “corporate box” into the great cathedral of the city — high up above and to the left of the high altar, so they could (through a bay window) attend Mass in their bathrobes — and they had enough spare florins flying around to commission that hot young Italian artist, Michaelangelo, to do a Madonna and Child for the cathedral: the first Michaelangelo north of the Alps.

The boom lasted a long while, but eventually came a bust, affected as much by their harbor at Zeebrugge silting up as by anything else. The city fell on hard times and became such a backwater that neither side bothered to bomb it during the war. The place was poor for a long while, and only began to recover during the 70’s.

But then Brugge found that History had dealt it the same kind of weird backhanded favor it did when it made Ireland too poor to put chemical fertilizers on its fields and pastures (for which reason its grass-fed beef is now famous all over Europe, and its organic produce is becoming that way). Brugge had been ignored… and hence all the great old buildings of its medieval inner city had been perfectly preserved. The city began renovating itself and (in a very smart move) putting all its utilities underground. Phone, electric, cable, fiber, everything went under the paving stones. Satellite dishes are not permitted to be visible on the outsides of buildings: everybody in town has affordable thousand-channel cable and broadband, and if you want something more exotic, as long as you can hide the hardware from the tourists, you’re fine. As a result, you can walk through the Markt and all the streets around it and see nothing that reminds you of this century…except the things inside the shop windows. A big problem, there, for this is one of the great shopping towns of northern Europe.

Fortunately I have other things to do while I’m here. My base is one of a number of beautiful “holiday apartments” rented by a smart and energetic couple whose own house, a 14th/16th century building two minutes’ walk away from the Great Market, is next door. The apartment is spacious, has a fully equipped kitchen, and everything else a working writer could need, including WiFi. It does *not* have four cats, endless mailmen, delivery guys, and constantly ringing phones. Which is why I’m here, and will be until the 30th, kicking various wizards around.

I’ll post pictures later. Right now: to work…

We’re running down the Rhine valley under a blurry grey sky that tells me it’s going to be snowing soon.

It was snowing in Köln this morning, if the weather reports are to be believed. It looked like it wanted to do it in Basel, but perhaps the city’s heat footprint prevented it.

This train is an ICE3, newest and sleekest of the German “InterCityExpress” fleet. Their noses are getting more and more pointed with every version: if they keep it up, pretty soon they’re going to look like the newest model of the Shinkansen. Everything aboard them is polished stainless steel and beautiful modern birch paneling, with seats in a neutral blue: here and there you get gray-speckled white granite (in the bistro car and the toilets, which are spotless, and merit a picture of their own — sorry, the quality of the picture won’t be great when it gets pasted in — but these facilities still cause me some wonder when I remember the pestholes that some other trains’ toilets can become: specifically, in the US and Ireland, two of the three countries on Earth which honestly believe that the public rails should function without subsidies).

A cranky moment there…never mind. This is a train on which every seat has a plug / power point, so shortly I can go back and give Ryoh-ohki a recharge (and the phone too): they’ll both be well topped-up by the time we hit Cologne.

The train which paused opposite us just now in the station at Karlsruhe went by in “kissing cousins” mode: four engine sets — one at each end and two more in the middle, nose to nose, for when the train splits. Unfortunately I’m in the “back half” of our train, which is hooked up the same way, so I don’t get the dramatic 200-kph view out over the pilot’s shoulder (they do call them “pilots”, on these trains: possibly with some slight justification, since not so long ago, anything that went at this speed would have to be flying…).

Onward to Köln…

Well, not a whole day.

P. and I went into Dublin yesterday evening to see Return of the King, then afterwards ran into an old fannish acquaintance and had a late dinner with him: then went back to the hotel and Fell Over Big Time. It’s astonishing the effect seeing such a long and (to the two of us, anyway) emotionally loaded movie can have on your energy levels. It’s going to take days to internalize this one, if not weeks.

Anyway, around noontime we went up to the airport, had lunch, and then parted company, I heading for LX 401 to Zürich, Peter heading home to feed the cats and get on with his own work. Two hours later I was in Züri: I did the sane thing and sent my luggage ahead of me to Basel (Swiss Railways makes this easy: and they’re probably the only rail system on the planet I would really trust with my luggage…) and then paused for some dinner.

This is one of the few places in the world where you can genuinely imagine yourself saying to a friend, “I’m dying for a good meal…let’s go to the train station.” Zürich Hauptbahnhof (or “main station”) has eleven restaurants of various kinds, ranging from “Au Premier” upstairs (Michelin-rosetted, I think, though I could be confusing it with the former station buffet at Eaux-Vives in Geneva) to various cafes scattered about the lower levels (there’s a terrific shopping center under the station, not to mention the gym and tanning center and the two supermarkets…).

My favorite of the main-level restaurants is Brasserie Federal. Once upon a time, a shade more than a hundred fifty years ago, when the Hauptbahnhof first opened, it was the first-class waiting room — and hence has noble classical proportions, beautiful sculpted plasterwork, and a spectacular stained-glass skylight. Nowadays it also features a hundred Swiss beers (twenty or so on draft, the rest bottled) and a great deal of what the Swiss would consider “comfort food”: a lot of rösti, the local version of meat loaf, sausages naturally (the veal and pork bratwurst are terrific), and much other stuff which can be generally classified as “stick-to-your-ribs”. So I had some calves’ liver (which I love) with onions, and rösti, and a few dezi of rosé, and then got the heck out of Dodge and headed for Basel.

The early-ish meal was a good idea, since by the time I hit the hotel (11ish) everything restaurant-like in the neighborhood had closed down. So nothing to do but go upstairs to my room, go wireless (the hotel is a Swisscom hotspot), and take care of business before falling over. There’s a morning appointment in town, and then I can head north to Köln. The final destination…

More about that later. I’ll paste a picture or two of Brasserie Federal in here in the morning…or you might look at this page, as this gent’s pictures are probably far better than mine are going to be. (These will be from a marvelous device which I’m still attempting to get to terms with — Peter’s Christmas gift to me, a Nokia 6600. I’m trying to do with it what the kids in E. Nesbit’s “Psammead” series would describe as “taming it by kindness”, but this may be impossible at the moment. More of this later as well.)

Eric Berne, founder of transactional analysis and generally interesting person (and a serious user of the Stith Thompson Motif Index and expert on fairy tales, but that’s another story entirely…) coined the term “reachback” and defined it (I paraphrase here) as the ability an upcoming trip has to upset or disarrange the conduct of your everyday life before you actually leave; and also as the period during which that upset/disarrangement lasts.

It’s an easy thing to miss, or to gloss over, until you have your attention drawn to it as a phenomenon in its own right. (I may talk a little about its companion phenomenon, “afterburn”, when I get home…if I have the energy.) But it’s worst when you try to cram too much preparation for a trip into too small a space. Fortunately this trip hasn’t been one where that happens.

This week has been about getting Ryoh-Ohki II (the Sharp Actius, successor to the Sharp Mebius “Ryoh-Ohki”) into shape to go abroad for a couple of weeks. This means duplicating all the e-mail and other “daily changed” files in Calanda, my big desk machine*: making sure all PDA and organizer entries are duplicated in both machines: making sure that the laptop can talk to the mobile phone as usual: making sure that the digital recorder is talking properly to the dictation/transcription software: making sure that everyone who needs to know where I am knows how to find me if they need me; making sure that the laptop has all the applications installed that need to be there to carry on daily maintenance on various aspects of the websites; etc, etc, etc…

Reachback: this is it. (sigh) …Work? This week? I don’t think so. …And then there’s the laundry.

Argh…

*Calanda is the name of a mountain north of Chur, in Switzerland; the peak is reputed to be haunted, and there are supposed to be caves underneath it in which local heroes lie sleeping, waiting to awaken in the time of their canton’s greatest need, as in the ever-popular archetype. (However, whatever caves there may be under Calanda are much more likely occupied by the Swiss Army.) …It’s also the name of a very nice beer brewed by a Swiss brewer in the area…though the Haldengut brewery seems to have been eaten by Heineken. (mutter)

It’s always strange when I go away to work.

One of the things I find hard to deal with (in the abstract) is the idea that the presence of another person in the house can confound your work sometimes. Even when it’s someone you love desperately. And then you discover that it’s not just The Person You Love, but also the mailman, the delivery people, the phone, the fax… Everything seems to conspire against you, and you remember (with guilty longing) how peaceful the work process was before you got married…

Yeah, well. There’s more to it than longing: sometimes you have to do something. So starting Saturday, I’m taking myself away for ten days to an apartment in Belgium to finish work on Wizards at War.

I’ll post here from various spots “on the road”, inbound and outbound, and a couple of times from the place itself (with pictures, because it’s choice).

More than this, deponent saith not. At least for the moment.

…for the Bloggie nominees. Like blogs? Go nominate something.

“President Bush next week will announce a plan to send humans back to the moon early in the next decade as part of a sweeping, new NASA agenda that could lead to a manned mission to Mars, sources said last night. ”

This is the one and only thing this presidency has done that makes me genuinely hopeful about anything. …Not that I’d care ot go live on Mars, mind you: at least not in its present state. But the Moon…that’d be another story.

…A little belatedly. Even through the holiday period, work has had to continue on some projects, and everything else has been getting a little behind, particularly blogging.

But this goes out to wish everybody who bothers to read this a most excellent New Year, full of good things.