An (almost) White Christmas

The snow hit Raleigh just late enough to miss a White Christmas. But it was still a beautiful way to keep the Christmas spirit alive after all the presents had been opened. I estimate that we got about 8 inches, which, I realize, is small beans compared to other parts of the country.

Lisbon

I'm a little late about adding Lisbon to the list, but I ended my travels here. It's good to finally be home (and to be home for the holidays), but I really did enjoy my trip to Europe even though it could be a bit tiring at times.

Lisbon was the last city to visit and it was my favorite. People have called it the "San Francisco of Europe" which, I was told, was a bit pretentious of Americans. "Why don't they call it the Lisbon of America?" one Portguese friend asked me. Good point, except that we're the global super-power, not Europe. And we're cooler. And everyone wants to be like us. (Don't believe me? Just listen to the music...it's Katy Perry all day, every day).

Anyway, Lisbon is hilly and has a mini Golden Gate Bridge and is laid-back and beautiful and by the water. It's better than San Francisco. I loved the tile work on all the buildings. It's an easy city to walk around and if you haven't had their wine and pasteries, you haven't lived.

And yes, this last picture is an outdoor urinal on the side of a building. Did I mention Lisbon was my favorite city?

Munich

Up until today, Europe has been fairly warm with temperatures in the high 50s/low 60s. To me, this means a light jacket (unless I'm wearing a sweater). To the rest of Europe, this means heavy coats, hats and gloves. I've been a little confused by the attire.

But Munich was COLD. It truly warranted heavy coat, hats, gloves...and fur-lined boots. Of course, it wouldn't be the spirit of Christmas without a little chill in the air.

I was last in Munich about nine years ago, when I went backpacking after college. So it was fun to see some of the sights that I saw then. I did a lot of walking and toured the Residenz (the king's palace). I ate roasted chestnuts from street vendors (it was my first chestnut experience). I went to mass at St. Michael's Cathedral (one of the benefits of being Catholic is that you don't actually have to understand the language to still participate since it's all the same ritual...always). I listened to street muscisians perform classical and holiday music. And I ate some really great food.

Again, I always underrate Germany. Both Frankfurt and Munich have turned out to be such cute towns...even in the cold.






PS...take a gander at the outdoor muscians. Note the baby grand piano that's performing with them. How in the world did they get a baby grand piano outside?

Frankfurt

Everytime I come to Germany, I'm surprised by how much I love it. I had some time to walk around Frankfurt and watch the Christmas markets go up. Unfortunately, I'm just missing them here in Frankfurt (they don't open until next week), but I can see how magical it's going to be once the Christmas season is in full swing.

On Saturday morning, I walked around the outdoor markets, sipped on a cappacino and had a jelly donut (and, just because it looked and smelled delicious, some sort of pork sandwich with onions...yum!).

I love the quinessential German feel of the city, mixed with the modern shopping. This is what you think of when you think of Germany. It's quite a lovely city.

This is my version of "Ich bin ein Berliner." Eat your heart out, JFK!

Barcelona

I had always heard that Barcelona was a magical city. After visiting it, I have to agree. Think Alice in Wonderland down-the-rabbit-hole, a little girl playing make-believe, and charming Europe, all rolled into one.

The one architectural masterpiece that best embodies Barcelona has got to be Sagrada Familia. I was expecting just another cathedral (after all, this is Europe), but this was unlike anything I hadd ever seen - experienced, really - before. It was gorgeous. And not in the Notre Dame kind of gorgeous. But in a Candy Land sweetness kind of gorgeous. You literally feel like you're standing in a magical forest and there's a good possibility that you may be greeted by a sacred tree nymph.

Gaudi was ahead of his time. His use of color, texture, movement, nature - it was unbelievable. Very contemporary yet still tasteful. Of course, the cathedral is still unfinished (it's not slated to be completed for another 25 years or so). So I can't wait to come back and see it in all its glory.

A few pictures are included here, but they don't do it justice (pictures never do).

During our research sessions yesterday, our Spanish moderator asked one of the respondents (in Spanish, of course, but translated here):

Moderator: You're not from Spain, are you?
Respondent: No. But I've lived here for 13 years. I didn't think my accent was that noticeable.
Moderator: Your accent is perfect. But you look like a foreigner.

I was struck by two things: 1) that the moderator could tell someone they looked like a foreigner without fear of litigation and 2) that he could even tell he was a foreigner. It made me realize what a melting pot we are. Aside from our obesity and penchant for wearing athletic shoes, there really is nothing that makes us uniquely American. We don't have facial characteristics that give us away. But other countries are so much more homogenous that you can "tell" if something doesn't belong.

I guess that makes us mutts. And maybe a little bit boring. I'm OK with that...as long as I can still be visited by a magical tree fairy.

Galavanting through Europe

I'm off to Europe for the next three weeks (save for a quick visit to St. Louis for Thanksgiving). I'm visiting six countries and seven cities, many of which I've never been to before. This trip is for work, but I'm hoping to get a little down time to enjoy the sights.

The cities planned on my trip are Barcelona, Rome, Frankfurt, Munich, Paris, London and Lisbon. I'll send updates on my exploits and hopefully have lots of great pictures to share!

Europe, here I come!

Wake Forest in the news

I was watching some TV in a hotel room today and heard a Toyota commercial that cited Wake Forest. I couldn't find the same commercial online, but I did find the commercial below. Looks like Toyota and Wake Forest Medical Center have teamed up with using technology to study the imapct of crashes on the human body (courtesy of the game of football).

Kind of cool to hear your alma mater mentioned randomly in a commercial. Looks like Wake is moving up in the world!

The wonder of Craigslist

I had, of course, heard of Craigslist before. But we had never used it. Tonight, I understood just how wonderful it is.

After eight years, our Kenmore vacuum cleaner crapped out. It really started about a year ago, when something went wrong with the plug; we attempted to fix it, and we sort of did, until we plugged it in the other weekend and it blew a fuse. We think it had something to do with our fix-it job.

It's a great vacuum cleaner and we figured any handyman would be able to make it almost-new again. The problem is, we're not handy. But we felt really bad just dumping in the landfill. So we decided to try our hand at Craigslist to give it away free to a good home.

Within 24 hours, we had several bites. And, as of 8:00pm tonight, our Kenmore has a brand-new home to someone who seemed to know exactly how to fix it. We felt good that we were able to help someone out, prevent something from going to waste, and find an easy way to make room in our house. Craigslist just might be one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century.

I have a feeling this could become addictive...

What I learned in France

Scott and I spent a week in glorious France, starting our trip in Paris, driving through Provence and finishing along the Riviera. It was a wonderful week and it was fun to see other areas of France besides just Paris.

This is what I learned while I was there:

French women don't eat. This is actually a hypothesis I've had for some time and I test it out each time I visit France. So far, I haven't found one instance that refutes this statement and I chalk it up to caffeine and cigarettes. Both of these are appetite suppressants and both of these are the only things close to eating I've seen French women do. This, I believe, is their secret. I've seen plenty of women in France eat; they just aren't French.

55% of Philip Morris sales must come from France. Everyone in France smokes and they all smoke Marlboros. We saw a few 14 year olds smoking, too. This supports my argument above.

You can spot an American a mile away. It doesn't matter how they are dressed, you just know they are American. I can't figure it out...someone can look French on the outside -wearing the right clothes and shoes - and even be speaking French. But you just know they are American (confirmed when they switch to English). I don't know if it's in the way we talk or in the way we walk, but Americans are easy to spot.

France has a roadway hierarchy: Mopeds, people, cars. With mopeds being on top. They can squeeze between traffic, cut you off, run over a person. It doesn't matter. They are the supreme being.

France is beautiful in the fall. The weather was gorgeous. The vineyards were blazing. The wine was tasty. I can't imagine a better time to visit an already beautiful country.

A walk back in time

A few weekends ago, Scott and I went up to visit our good friends Elizabeth and Chris. It was just a wonderful visit, getting to see them and watching how big Chase has grown. And they unwittingly unleashed a monster - after a fun-and-curse-filled night of making pasta from scratch, I have now gone out and bought a pasta maker. (The one I purchased, however, uses electrical power to crank the pasta out...all that hand-cranking was the cause of the cursing).

This was the first time I was back in DC with Elizabeth since 1998. That sounds so weird to say...that the last time I hung out in Georgetown with Elizabeth was last century. Anyway, I did a little rummaging and scrounged up a few pictures from that last visit, back when we were just wee college freshmen. We've come a long way, baby!

Thanks to the Bevacquas for a very fun weekend! We hope to see you back in DC before the next century!

If I had a million dollars

I'd be rich.

And I probably wouldn't give it to animal shelters. With Katherine Heigl's announcement this week that she's giving $1 million to LA-area animal shelters, I was wondering what that same million dollars might do for LA-area homeless shelters.

Don't get me wrong. I love animals. And I think we should do everything we can as a society to treat them with respect and prevent an overpopulation. But I also think the least fortunate of us humans may be a bit higher up on the food chain than animals. And while it's noble that Heigl is helping out our animals, it would be great to see that same amount of money go to helping out those in our species. Heigl says in People:

"How can we change the results for these animals?" she said. "[Shelters are not only] euthanizing sick, old dogs. It's gotten brutal, you know. It's inhuman, really."

It is inhuman. It's also inhuman how we treat our humans. Maybe if we did treat our humans better, then our animals would follow.

A good commercial

I enjoy a good commercial. Especially one that speaks directly to its target audience and knows the insight about that audience to touch them on an emotional level.

The new commercial for the Nissan LEAF is the perfect example. Someone needs to buy that creative director a drink. He just earned himself at least one sale (of course, once the Honda dies).

Has Facebook made us lazy?

It's been awhile since my last post and I realized that, over the years of having this blog, my posts have become less and less frequent. Maybe this is because I have less to talk about, but that seems hard to believe. Instead, I've found myself posting little snippets on Facebook, using that as a way to express myself. And I wonder: has Facebook made us lazy?

Rather than write out our thoughts and feelings, we post quick sentences to the world. We scan the quick sentences that our friends - or acquaintances - post, getting a little taste of everyone's life, rather than the full meal. On one hand, we can multi-task, learning a little about everyone's life. But on the other hand, we lose the depth of focusing on people and truly expressing our own feelings.

I watched an episode of The Colbert Report (that show and The New Yorker are pretty much the extent of my news sources) and he had a guest that asked: Is the internet making us dumber? While the internet allows us to search for all kinds of things, we end up only scratching the surface of knowledge about any particular topic. The internet lets us avoid the digging and reading and learning that goes into gaining knowledge, so we end up learning a little about a lot. With that and multi-tasking, we rarely have the chance to focus and think deeply.

At work, I've been trying to concentrate more - by stopping the multi-tasking and focusing on one thing at a time, spending time to just think about a topic. And it works. Even taking an additional 10 minutes to mull something over results in better ideas and approaches.

I wonder if that's the same with Facebook. We don't get a chance to stop and focus and think more deeply. We read a quick post and move on to the next. And because it's so much easier to do that than to write out our feelings, we lose the art of thought.

So I'm going to try ("try" being the operative word) to be more diligent in my postings. Even if it's just for me. Even if it's just to take a few minutes to really think about something and put pen, er, keyboard to paper.

It's about time...

It's been almost two months since I last posted. But it definitely doesn't seem that long! The summer has, unfortunately, flown by and I can't believe that kids are getting ready to head back to school in the next few days (this weekend is North Carolina's tax-free weekend in preparation for the new school year).

And I realized, sadly, that this also means that it has been almost two months since the oil leak in the Gulf (the word "leak" doesn't really do it justice, does it?). It amazes me that it can take some of the brightest minds in the industry over two months to fix a problem, but at least it appears to be fixed.

As my last post suggested, there definitely has been blood. The BP CEO has been ousted (to a certain degree, at least), thousands of people on the Gulf have been affected, lawsuits are pending, the wildlife has been damaged. I just hope that we don't get over-stimulated and over-saturated with the BP news to the point where we just don't care any more. Time is a great healer.

But we need some wounds to still smart so we remember how we got hurt in the first place.

There Will be Blood

I can't help but think of the greed and obsession that Upton Sinclair writes about in "Oil!" as I watch another day go by without any solution to the oil catastrophe in the Gulf. It's almost too much - my stomach hurts and I lose my appetite every time I see another headline about the BP spill - almost enough to make me callous to the whole situation.

But we can't be callous. Not when we're losing thousands of wildlife a day. Not when countless people are volunteering to try to clean up someone else's mess. Not when this catastrophe threatens to become bigger than it already is.

I already boycott Citgo because Chavez is a thug. Now you can add BP to the list of places I won't fill up at.

But herein lies the problem. While the bigger solution is to vote against legislation that calls for offshore drilling, that really implies an independence from oil. So...what do we do? Wind power would be optimal, but as we've seen with the controversy on Cape Cod, it brings its own set of problems. And solar power would be great, but it's costly and may not provide the magnitude of energy we need. It's no secret that we get the biggest bang out of oil...it's the most efficient of all the energy resources we have. But we've got to find another way.

Maybe this, then, is what makes my stomach hurt: that while this disaster makes us re-examine our choices and options, it may not ultimately make an impact on our behavior in the long run.

And that's scary, especially since we know history repeats itself.

Because of a Mouse

I heard this on NPR this morning and thought it was touching. And it's a good reminder about how to think about our fellow humans (remember, humans are animals, too).

You can click here for the NPR link, but here is the short of it:

The chemist, Joseph Priestly (who discovered Oxygen) wanted to discover how it was that we breathed. So he conducted experiments on mice. In particular, he would put mice in a tank, remove all oxygen from the tank and watch what happened to the mouse (it would die). He did these experiments over and over again. Keep in mind that this is 1773.

One night, Joseph packed up to leave his lab and he placed a mouse in a cage on his desk. This was to be the mouse he was going to experiment on the next day. After he left, his lab assistant, Anna, was cleaning up and had this moment with the mouse – she looked at it, it looked at her – and she had this epiphany. So she penned this poem, from the point of view of the mouse, and stuck it between the bars of the cage:

For here forlorn and sad I sit
Within the wiry grate,
And tremble at the
approaching morn
Which brings impending fate…

The well-taught
philosophic mind
To all compassion gives,
Casts round the world an equal eye
And feels for all that lives.

We don’t know the fate of that little field mouse, but it’s the first written record of animal rights.

But no matter what the fate of the mouse, the story a great reminder to “cast an equal eye and feel for all that lives” within this world – for all animals (including humans).

Prayers to God

We've started our annual Spring Cleaning (it's amazing how much stuff you can accumulate in one year) and I came across my catechism books from when I taught Faith Formation to sixth-graders last year. As part of our weekly activity, we had index cards where the children could write their prayer requests. They were anonymous and it was a way to get the kids to think about God at least once a week.

So I came across these prayer requests as I was doing our spring cleaning. And I was amused and touched by some of the requests and thought I'd share some of them below. It's a good way to think about our own lives and repentance as we continue Lent:

Dear God, help me be nice to others so I can make more friends.

Help me do better at school. Mostly at science.

God, help the people heal from diseases.

God, bless those in danger and feed the hamster.

Dear Lord, I hope I get more A's on my midterms and report card.

I pray that my grandma gets out of the hospital.

Dear God, keep my bestest best friend (for life) in your care.

For Doug. Please be with him in heaven.

I pray that my little brother lives a pretty easy life with diabetes.

I pray that I find the right guy in life.

That world peace will happen sooner.

Dear God, thank you for what you've given us. We hope for more accomplishments in life.

Amen.

The argument for Market Research

I sometimes get asked: What, exactly, is market research? From now on, I think I'll just use this as an example of why a business would want to do market research on a new idea:

From The Economist:

International hotel chain Holiday Inn is offering a trial human bed-warming service at three hotels in Britain this month.

If requested, a willing staff-member at two of the chain's London hotels and one in the northern English city of Manchester will dress in an all-in-one fleece sleeper suit before slipping between the sheets.

The bed-warmer is equipped with a thermometer to measure the bed's required temperature of 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit).

Holiday Inn said the warmer would be fully dressed and leave the bed before the guest occupied it. They could not confirm if the warmer would shower first, but said hair would be covered.

Holiday Inn are promoting the service with the help of sleep-expert Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Center, who said the idea could help people sleep.

Now, I do my fair share of sleeping in hotel beds and I spend much of my time trying NOT to think of the different people who have slept in my bed and what they may have been doing in that bed before I checked in. So to know that there was definitely another person in your bed moments before you entered the room is a little disgusting...and creepy.

Return to Simplicity

I've noticed a trend in the grocery stores lately: processed foods becoming less, well, processed. Or, at least, the perception of being less processed.

It started with Hagen-Daas, with their new "Five" ice cream. The ice cream only has five ingredients, giving a feeling of being pure and more natural. I bought into the hype and it is pretty good ice cream (although Breyers also has about five natural ingredients and is quite a bit less expensive. And can you really get any better than Breyers Vanilla? No, no you can't.)

And then today I see that Pillsbury is jumping on the bandwagon, with their premium ready-to-bake cookies. They also have about five ingredients, but beware - the five main ingredients are bolded in the ingredients section and each are followed by several ingredients in parentheses. Which brings their total ingredients up to about twelve. But they tout all natural ingredients, no high-fructose corn syrup and all natural flavors.

I've seen this same trend in Starbucks and, to a certain degree, at McDonalds. There seems to be a move away from all those ingredients you can't name and to something more natural.

I guess this is good- people know that all those added ingredients can't be good and aren't found in natural foods. People want to eat healthier. People want to get back to basics - not only with their finances but with their food, too.

Of course, nothing can beat the real thing you make in your kitchen. No preservatives, no MSG, no corn syrup. All ingredients found in nature.