ENOTSERIOUS

Kristen and Joe Vescovo

My firstborn was married a few days ago, and I'm only now catching my breath.

Bottom line: things went off without a hitch. My daughter was beautiful, and my new son (!) was handsome. The hall was gorgeous and the food was pretty darned good. The band was competent, and the photographers were a class act. Nothing but good things to say about the hired guns here.

But the kids' friends were the real heroes. They did the table settings, trellis, bridesmaids' dresses, the cake, and other stuff - a real community effort that was notable for the love that went into this production.

I had it easy; all I did was pay some bills, walk Kristen down the aisle, drink some Scotch, and dance my arse off. (Hey, you didn't know I dance? Never gave me any Scotch, did you?)

Bernice was walked down the aisle on the arm of Kristen's pal Charles - a Marine in full dress uniform, wearing his sword. I stood under the stairs while the bridesmaids (including my other daughter) came down and walked the walk. Finally Kristen emerged and floated down the stair.

I rounded the base and awaited her. She came to me and I opened up my hands, leaned over and whispered "It's showtime!". She smiled and took my proffered arm and we headed for the crowd. She was nervous and started to walk a bit too fast, and I held her back a bit. "Slow down, take it easy" I said, smiling a big smile for the relatives. "Take your time. Let's give 'em their money's worth." She made a face at me - no telling what the relatives thought of that.

Walked her to the dais, shook Joe's hand - it seemed appropriate - and put her arm in his. Then I walked back to Joe's parents, shook Louis' hand, and touched Debbie's shoulder. Sat down next to my wife and hauled out my cell phone, punching the Gran button and enabled the speakerphone. Please God, don't let Gran's dogs bark during the ceremony.

Father Bruce (Joe's family is Catholic) is a nice guy, and did a good job officiating. Not overlong, certainly not a Mass, and Gran got to hear most of the deal. Only heard some noise come out of the speaker a couple of times; either the dogs barking or Gran sniffling, I'm not sure which.

They finish, we applaud, we recess, we take pictures. Yadda yadda yadda. Then we party.

It's a pretty good cover band (The Plaintiffs), not too loud, taking their time winding up. 150 people or so in the room, and shortly there is a line at the buffet and the bar. A couple of Kristen's pals get good n' loaded, probably the same ones that were dancing with me.

Hell, even Bernice danced with me. That never happens.

The kids closed the place, staying 'til the bitter end. Bernie and I, Allison, Kristen and Joe finally left at about 1:30am, after everyone else had split and the hall had been cleaned of all our stuff. We took Allison back to Rhodes, while the kids went... well, I'm not sure exactly.

K&J flew out of Memphis on Monday morning, bound for Jamaica. It's raining there, but I don't somehow think they'll notice all that much.

Troupers

We had a purely astonishing show last Sunday when WRP's Junior Theatre presented Oklahoma.

About a quarter of the way into the matinee, when Ado Annie was singing her solo ("I'm just a girl who cain't say no") there was a sudden BOOM and subsequent power failure. A handful of emergency fluorescents came up in the house, three floodlights lit the stage, and the sound system died. Our young lady hesitated for a second, recovered her smile, and continued her song a capella. She stayed on key, gave her best performance, and when she finished the house gave her an ovation. I was at the stage manager's position consulting with the crew over the radio, and the cast crowded around. "What do we do now?" "Roll on" I replied, twirling my wrist and gesturing toward the stage. "And project!"

Our crew quickly established that the power failure wasn't a simple matter of circuit breakers needing to be reset -- the problem affected at least the entire campus. During the scene change to the smokehouse, our producer announced to the audience that the power problem was bigger than we were, and that we would do the very best we could.

And the show went on. Every number got an ovation from the audience, and the kids sang without hesitation. The audience clapped along when we did "The Farmer and the Cowman" and when the dancing interlude came up one of the cast yelled "C'mon everybody... let's dance!" Hootin' and hollerin' filled the musical void.

There is a "Dream Ballet", where Laurie dreams on stage, surrounded by dancers. Without music -- how do you manage? Laurie counted softly "1...2...3...4" just loud enough for the dancers to be able to keep time. Another "o" from the audience.

The final scene rolled in, with a wedding, a fight, and the cast singing Oklahoma. They poured more energy into this than I'd seen throughout tech week. The kids took their bows, to enthusiastic applause, and the cowboys shot their cap pistols into the air. I started to close the curtain, then quickly changed my mind. It didn't seem right to separate the audience from the cast at that point.

These kids pulled it off, despite technical catastrophe. The last 15 minutes I stood at the SL wing, tears running down my cheeks. I was full of pride for these young people, who make it all worthwhile.

RIP: Fax Machine

For years at the office we had a plain ol' fax machine: you drop a page in the hopper, you key a phone number, your document gets sent. Life was easy.

NOW we have a monstrous scanner/copier/collator/printer/emailer with a touch screen and PC keyboard and a complex embedded Windows application; I'm required to log in using my active directory ID and navigate a half-dozen screens. I'm prompted to select resolution, orientation, magnification, and add the destination fax machine to an address book. Then I'm invited to configure a cover page, and receive permission to scan the single piece of paper I want to send. After tapping the "send" icon (ARE YOU SURE? Y/N) the fully customized fax image migrates to a send queue, and I'm obligated to logoff from the damned contrivance (ARE YOU SURE? Y/N). Some timeless interval later the fax gets sent or not, but I don't know which.

Technology run amuck. The IT k1dd13z make me nuts.

Emptying the nest

Here I am, on an AirTran flight somewhere between Orlando and Atlanta, enroute to Memphis. It's a laid back crowd, sleepy and uncomplaining. I sip my tiny glass of ginger ale and contemplate the week ahead of me.

Allison, my youngest, moves into her college dorm tomorrow. She and her mother await me in Memphis, having left home several days ago in our minivan. Said van was chock full o' clothing and linens and lamps and appliances and housewares - I have no earthly idea where she'll put it all.

Not my problem! My job is to get her moved in, take lots of photos, and then to get myself and Bernie the hell out of Dodge. I know that having the P's around will cramp her burgeoning social life, so I'm anxious to oblige. I remember all too well my first night alone as a freshman, where having your mommy present was embarrassing.

(For me, that was either last week or 37 years ago, depending on whether you trust your calendar. Christ, time does move on.)

Have to have a serious conversation with her big sis and her intended while I'm there, too. We've already given our blessing - as if we'd refuse? But there are some concerns we'd like to express. Namely: Are you out of your freaking MINDS?

Just kidding.

Sorta.

So anyway, it will likely be an interesting weekend. Manic, but interesting.

Engine throttles cut back, ears-a-poppin', descending into Hartsfield.

The Great $300 (!) Keyboard Experiment

Back when I did my first gig as a "technical director" last year (for The Sound of Music, not that it's pertinent) I worked like a slave. I was at the warehouse every weekend and many evenings, hauling around heavy set pieces, which activity eventually took its toll on my aged bones.

My left wrist in particular took a beating. I'm not sure what I did to it, but it was quite tender for a few months after that show, and I saw a physician. "Don't know what it is", he told me. "Probably a tendonitis. Wrap it in a splint for a week and take two Aleves twice a day. Let me know if it doesn't improve." I followed his advice, and it seemed to get better... but after two weeks, not one. I decided not to return to have it x-rayed, but to baby it as necessaray.

Since them, the wrist discomfort has come and gone. If I baby it for awhile, the nagging pain goes away. If I start to use it with any regularity (and especially if I'm horsing stuff around) then it becomes a nuisance. I'm always conscious of the wrist when I'm typing, which is, unfortunately, all the time.

So I've wondered off-and-on over the last year: would one of those so-called ergonomic keyboards do me any good? Melynda has run through a fair number of keyboards, and she even tried a Twiddler for a couple of weeks. None of them did anything for her, until she settled on a Microsoft Natural keyboard. She swears by it, as does another pal of mine, but I never was able to warm up to it for some reason. The couple of times I've tried to use one it was just too weird.

So what do I do? I go ultra weird, of course. I am the proud owner of a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, which is a truly odd little device. The keys are arranged in two bowl-shaped depressions at either side of the keyboard. Keys are arranged in pretty much QWERTY sequence, though they are sitting in neat little columns and not arranged diagonally as they are on a normal keyboard.

The Kinesis keyboard also makes better use of your thumbs. You use your thumbs for space, enter, backspace and delete, and eight other common keys. The theory is to make your fingers travel less, and make your thumbs do something useful.

Though I'd been eyeballing this keyboard on the 'net for almost a year, I'd never seen one up close and personal, as there is no dealer in my neck of the woods. But a series of articles posted by Bill Clementson prodded me into ordering the keyboard. Bill has fought the RSI demons and claims to have won; he has nothing but good things to say about the Kinesis keyboard. Emboldened by his success, I plunked down $300 and ordered one.

It's been a week now, and I don't know if I have a keeper or not. I am more fatigued using this keyboard than I am using the standard unit; this may be because I'm learning to type all over again. Special characters are coming to me, but I have to look at the keyboard all too often yet. Emacs keyboard chords aren't the big pain that I thought they would be, but I find that I'm having to learn to use the ctrl and shift keys all over.

It's been total immersion: the keyboard commutes with me to work and back every day. My speed's not up to snuff yet, not by a long shot, but I can get stuff done. And I had to go into the office last weekend and pull someone's address out of my work computer - using the old QWERTY keyboard. Boy, that felt weird, and I was missing keys for the first minute or two.

I'll give it another few weeks. It's on a 60-day acceptance period, and if I don't like it I'll just send it back. So far it's an uneasy truce... usable, but kind of a pain. Until using the keyboard becomes less stressful, my wrist is going to keep bugging me, too. I'd really like to see some improvement soon.

That Old Devil, Time

Drove out to Tim & Cathy Kelley's place last night for Tim's retirement party. Didn't see a whole lot of faces that I could recognize; most had come to work at the school board after I left -- 18 years ago!

Larry Ann and Anne Griner came though, and so I spent a couple of hours yacking with them and with the Kelleys. Tim was playing music from the 60s and 70s, and when House of the Rising Sun came up, I suddenly felt comfortable.

I guess the underlying (but unspoken) theme of these retirement things is... surprise. We are surprised that our kids are becoming - have become - grown, we are surprised that we have grandchildren, we are surprised at facing mornings without a job to go to. We are surprised by the names of people we knew who have gone to their reward, by the growth of the metro area, by each others' gray hair and wrinkles and overweight.

We are surprised by That Old Devil, Time.

We remember our lives together as youngsters, which days don't seem so long ago. We remember drinking and driving, pranks and pratfalls, friends and enemies, softball, card games, concerts, political affiliations. We remember what each of us was driving, what pets we had, our first heady and uncertain steps into parenthood.

You do the math, and tote the years up, and you'd think we should feel decrepit. None of us do, not by a very long shot - yet we know that decrepitude is coming. We are tied to a railroad track, awaiting the 5:15, and it's already afternoon. The train schedule was unimportant to us early this morning, but it is much more on our minds now.

How did we come to this? I don't FEEL old!

How many middle-age-crazies do you get? Can I still bike the Blue Ridge? Quit and write that novel? Or should I just stay where I am, comfortable in the cozy little niche that I've cut out of life?

Do I do something uncomfortable and stupid while I still can? Or do I stay the course, saving up acorns for my decrepitude?

Such things occur to me after one of these retirement soirees. There will be other such gatherings in the near future -- Annie will retire next year, Cathy the year after that.

Maybe me, too. I can early-retire at 55.

Then what?

"I want to marry your daughter."

Funny how you know that something's coming, all the signs are there, your eyes are wide open and you think you're prepared... yet when fate calls you're surprised as hell.

Flash back to last Thursday evening; I was sitting in front of my desk at home, playing with some Lisp code, when Bernice walked in with a thoughtful look, carrying the phone. "Joe wants to talk to you", she said carefully, placing the instrument into my hands. She lingered for half a moment as if to eavesdrop or give advice, and instead turned away to give us space. She knows what this is about.

Now Joe and I don't talk much -- we're acquainted, but we're not pals. The last time he called the house he had to introduce himself to me. So this call, where he specifically asked for me, is out of the ordinary. Whatever he's got on his mind must be important, right?

We'd missed an opportunity for some man talk when I was last in Memphis, back in May; Joe had to work late and we had to leave town early. Bernie has mentioned several times since that Joe really wanted that time together with me. I've been afraid to know why, and afraid that I already knew why.

So now Joe has rung us up and asked to talk to me. Game on. I accepted the phone from my wife and stepped out in the front yard, so's to have a semi-private conversation. As I passed through my front door the clammy heat and humidity of an early summer evening in Florida enshrouded me. "Hey, Joe. What's good?"

We made a little small talk about the weather, about Joe's year as a D3 dental school student, and some long-distance driving he had been doing lately. The conversation fizzled after that, and there was an awkward silence. "Well..." he said, pausing to gather himself. "I guess I should tell you why I'm calling." Here it comes. "I hate to do this over the phone, and I really wanted to talk to you when y'all were up here, but..." He cleared his throat, and declared: "I want to marry your daughter."

I expected it, I saw it coming a mile away, but I was still dumbstruck when he said the words. I think I said something lame in response, along the lines of "So do I, but I'm taken!" There was another awkward silence, during which I had the time to gather my wits about me. Okay Dave, this is a serious occasion. Get hold of yourself. Don't be funny. Don't make this harder for Joe than it has to be.

I told Joe that he had my blessing. "You're smart, you treat my daughter well, and my family likes you. You ran the gauntlet at Christmastime and endured life in a fishbowl with good humor. I'll be pleased to welcome you into the family. Congratulations."

Joe disclaimed that nothing was official yet. "I've got a ring", he said, "Had it for a while. Got it with me now, and I'm going over to her place." Alright, so congratulations might not be in order just yet. "We'll keep the news embargoed then. But keep us posted!" "I will."

I was wishing I'd had time to have that man talk with him in Memphis, and mentioned that we will have to make some beer time when we bring Allison up in August. He brightened, and assured me that he would see to it that we accomplished this. "I'm not a cheap date", I warned. "I don't drink that wussy Budweiser stuff. Are there any locals you think highly of? Any stouts?" The conversation immediately sidelined to beer -- something we both like to think we know something about, and common ground as well. So we talked about beer for a few minutes, and a pub or two in Memphis that he and his pals like.

We eventually hung up, and I walked sedately back into the house, a sheen of sweat on my forehead. I held the phone up to Bernice, not saying a word, and she took it from me -- afraid to ask. "He asked permission to marry our daughter", I said simply. "That's what I thought." "It's not official yet. She hasn't been asked. Nobody should know, not even Allison. It's their news to tell, not ours." "Okay." I turned away, extracted a beer from the fridge, and retired to my downstairs office. I contemplated having a married daughter, permanently moved out of the house and out of town. I contemplated having a son, something I never remotely considered before - until this very moment.

Presently I pulled another beer out of the fridge.

Allison's no dummy; she figured it out, of course. She came downstairs a while later and asked Bernice "Who was that on the phone?" "Joe." "What did he want?" "He wanted to talk to your father." "What about?" "I don't know, but Daddy's on his second beer." She nodded her understanding, and went back to her room.

Baby steps

I spent a great deal of time last weekend, sitting in front of my computer at home and slogging through some Lisp code. I had multiple windows up on the screen: the Common Lisp Hyperspec, Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp, the SBCL online manual, the SLIME manual, and an emacs instance. I pinballed back and forth, trying to learn and use the tools at my disposal, hoping to emerge with something useful to show for it all.

A useful toy application? At work I get bombarded by spam all the time, and I employ both SpamAssassin and Bogofilter against it. But I'd also like to filter my inbox against a few RBLs that I like. Unfortunately, I have no control over the MTA at use in the office, so if I want to employ an RBL I have to do it by looking at Received: headers in mail that has already been processed by the MTA. So my assignment was to parse Received: headers from stdin, and run those IP addresses through a list of RBLs.

Some 9 or 10 hours later, I have 29 lines of code to show for it. TWENTY-NINE. That's one LOC for every 20 minutes I've spent so far.

That's humbling, that's what it is.

Yet every 20 minutes I grow stronger. My fingers learn new emacs key bindings. I inspect stacks of broken code, generated by misused macros, and puzzle out how I got there. The differences between eql, equal and equalp get hammered home.

My toy does some piddly file I/O, some condition handling, some string and vector manipulation. I even memoized a function -- ooh look, a closure!

29 lines. They take up less than a screenload, and they don't do anything very sophisticated. Yet I'm as proud of them as I've been of any programming effort I've undertaken in a very long time.

Miscellaneous crap

I really do mean to put my travelogue up here, but it turns out that it's a big PITA to do. I haven't taken much of an inventory of our photos yet, and I've got about four hours of videotape to run through, and I just haven't been able to bear to do any of that work yet.

So here's what I have been up to, for those who care.

I spent the last week cleaning the pool. It was getting to the call-in-the-EPA stage, a green quagmire that you could spot from geosynchronous orbit. The robot vacuum died a few months ago (an overly complex and prone-to-breakage piece of shit manufactured by Hayward) and so I sort of let the pool fester. So last weekend I bought a manual vacuum, and a double arseload of chemicals and went to work. Been backwashing the filter cartridge four or five times a day, morning, noon and night, vacuuming, adding noxious chemicals, and other stuff. Finally today the pool is no longer green, but the water is cloudy. Bozhemoi, this happy homeowner stuff is the pits.

I've resigned my position as board member for the community theatre that I'm always yacking about. Business has been way bad for us, and we've decided to suspend mainstage productions for this year while we worry about our future. In the meantime our Junior Theatre folks are going great guns, so at least something is going right.

While I'm officially off the board as of the end of June, the sad truth is that I'll still be pretty active in the group. I told them that I wanted to concentrate on some apolitical things, maybe work on the website or something. I have in the back of my mind doing some dynamic web service stuff, administrative crap that they're currently using a single central computer for (using Win-XP-Home and Access). The website is running Gentoo Linux and Apache2, and I've added in PostgreSQL and a couple different Lisps. If I do any applications, it's almost certainly going to be in Lisp.

Lisp? WTF? Well, y'see, Paul Graham is a smooth talker, and his exhortations to consider Lisp have been seductive. Hackers and Painters was an entertaining read, and On Lisp is probably the best treatise on Common Lisp macros that you can find anywhere. I've been working through Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp and am currently trying to wrap my mind around CL condition handling. Due partly to Jerry's nudge, and partly because it seems to be universally recommended, emacs has become my standard editor. SLIME has received my first tentative advances relatively well, and I'm beginning to think that I might - just might - soon have enough knowledge that I can do something useful in Lisp. (I've written lots of hello-worlds and compute-factorials and towers-of-hanoi, but that's not what I mean.)

Beer of the moment: Mojo IPA, Boulder Beer Company.

Music of the moment: The Carl Stalling Project (music from Warner Bros. cartoons). Before that we heard Kovcheg (Russian men's choir), the Jeff Beck Group, Westminster Choir College, some piano pieces by Marjorie Fierstadt I found on the intarweb someplace, and Jonathan Coulton's Thing a Week.

Port of call: Oslo

After a day at sea aboard the cruise ship, we find ourselves moving inbound to Oslo. I awoke at 5:00 a.m. and discovered to my surprise that dawn was already upon us. Bear in mind that the sun set at about 11:00 last night, and you start to get an appreciation for these short northern summer nights.

On the way into port I can see that we're traveling through a passage similar in many ways to the "inside passage" we took on our Alaska cruise two years ago. Not as mountainous, but green -- very green indeed -- and rocky. During the course of the next 10 days I will not see a coastline that isn't rocky, and will gain a new understanding for why people consider the Florida and Caribbean beaches attractive. Why, they're sandy! (I grew up with this stuff, so it's just sand to me.)

I shower quickly and go out in search of the elixir of life. Suitably fortified I venture out on the pool deck with my cameras. The weather is overcast, maybe about 50F, and with a windbreaker it's just comfortable enough to stand outside. Bing Crosby croons from the outdoor sound system and the landscape slides noiselessly by. A lone jogger bounces past, making the first of a dozen laps of the deck. I snap a couple of photos of the coastline and am surprised when the SD card announces that it has filled up. Dang. I trundle downstairs to offload the photos to the Apple whilst my family gets ready to greet the rosy-fingered dawn.

We score a window seat in the dining room, and we enjoy our breakfast while the rocky Norwegian coast slides by. The water is glassy and a handful of small craft operates around us. We pass a number of islands, many of which have little houses on them, but no way on-or-off without using watercraft. Your sailboat is the only way to get to the nearest Safeway, or its Norwegian equivalent.

Within an hour we eat, the ship docks, and we're cleared to disembark. The ship's handling is remarkable; at no time during the cruise were we ever aware of docking or leaving. The cruise tech has become very, very smooth, and you might as well be in a hotel for all the movement you ever feel.

The family clamors off and we walkabout Oslo. The first thing we spy is a 250-year-old fortress that sits right next to the ship, across the street. Everybody else who gets off the ship starts trudging the few blocks into downtown, but we spy a stair that leads up the steep hill to an opening in the citadel and just have to check it out. Bernice is a little dubious, looking skeptically at the steep stair, but she follows us up, not wanting to be left behind. As I mentioned above, everything is a luxuriant green and the weather is crispy cool. The overcast is beginning to yield to the sun, and birds are making happy noises. It is a great time to be here.

There are uniformed lads in ceremonial military garb, who patrol the fortress in threes, marching slowly in stiff-legged goose step. I drop my video camera down to my side as they pass, deliberately not taking a picture. (When we visited Granada years ago I began to take a photo of police officers in a similar citadel -- and they complained quite forcefully. So I don't take pictures of uniformed people anymore when I'm in a strange country.)

Kristen, my firstborn and our resident visiting biologist, points out that the crows have white bellies.

We circle the fortress and come down on the side next to downtown. Things are really dead just now; Sunday morning is a quiet time in Oslo. Nothing is open, there's no traffic on the streets, the only people on foot are folks like us who have just gotten off the cruise ship. This will change in an hour or two, but for now it looks like the tourists have completely taken over the city.

The streets are lined with brick that looks like it might be granite? Trolley tracks stretch down the avenue, but we've yet to see what uses these tracks.

A little park square, with a stone lion keeping eternal watch. Kristen poses for a photo next to him, while a couple of bums sleep nearby on the park benches. A lady out walking her pooch curbs her dog within two feet of one of the benches. A lone trolley finally approaches and lumbers by, a great beast whose motors make a loud whiney complaining noise.

Bernice has a map that she got from somewhere, and is consulting it, declaring that she wants to see some cathedral or other. We set off in the direction she wants to go, and stop at an intersection. There is no traffic, but the light is against us and we don't know what the local laws say about that... so we sit tight. A local passer-by notices us and encourages us to go ahead, just be sure to watch for traffic. "And also watch for pickpockets", he adds, "though perhaps not this early!" We smile our thanks and hop across the street.

We cruise by Bernice's cathedral, which was nice enough but small by midtown London standards. It is Sunday, remember, and well dressed worshippers were beginning to congregate out front, and so we decide not to take a photo. (You're not missing much; it wasn't all that interesting.) However we did take a picture of some nearby ducks. We LIKE ducks.

Most stores and signs are foreign to me but there is some English posted here and there. We've seen a Burger King, a McDonald's and a 7-11. This last store is a small shop, with wood paneling inside and rock music piped into the street. There are slot machines just inside the door. Now that's weird.

A pair of stone cherubs seemingly standing in mid-air support an overhang on a building corner. I observe that you can see right up the butt cracks of those cherubs, and Allison slides me a disgusted look and says nothing. Man, I love jerking her chain.

A bell tolls somewhere. It's 9:15.

The sun is coming out in force now, and I'm beginning to warm up in my corduroy shirt and windbreaker. We turn left, steadily up a long incline until we come to a big hill. The street up the hill is lined in lilacs, and leads to the royal palace. We take the palace, circle around the grounds, and come back down the hill on the other side, landing squarely in embassy territory. There are some really nice digs up here, and I want to walk farther into this neighborhood. But Bernice is becoming antsy because we have wandered off her tourist map and she is out of sight of the port, and she has some other mission that she wants to accomplish. So we head back in the general direction of the ship, and eventually find the waterfront and the Jewel of the Seas. Now she's happy; since I sort of got lost in London she doesn't trust my sense of direction all that much.

We decide that after three hours of hoofing it around it'll be good to get back on board for a pee break and maybe a bite to eat. The lunch break turns into a lazy nap break, and while one or the other of us sleeps the others steal off the ship to hunt souvenirs.

Too early it's time to leave. Captain Scheisskopf wants all his passengers back on board by no later than 1/2 hour before sailing. He's quite adamant about this, and emphasizes that if you miss the boat... you're screwed. (A couple of guys found this out the hard way in Tallinn, but that's a story for another blog entry.) The girls find their way down to the cinema to take in a chick flick, and Bernie and I sit on the pool deck as the ship drifts away from port. A lounge lizard is playing Elvis tunes, the sun is still shining bright (and will be doing so long into the evening), and I've tried to ruin my dinner with a handful of oatmeal-raisin cookies I found somewhere. All's right with the world. Tomorrow: Copenhagen!