randysmith

So remember how Booking.com told me our hotel reservation in Aberystwyth was confirmed, but when we got there the hotel had never heard of us? The agent I talked to on the phone on the spot said that if I booked one of the alternative hotels they'd email me, Booking.com would cover any extra cost. I booked one of them, it was quite nice, and it cost an extra £105; but a follow-up "sorry about the screw-up" form email from B.c said that they would refund up to £51.90. (Which is a weird number; I have no idea how they came up with it.) So obviously I was not happy about eating the other £53.10!

Well, it took an hour on the phone with them again today, but I emphasized that the first agent had specifically said that if I chose one of their options I would not face any extra expense, and also used the phrase "Booking.com's error" a couple of times, and in the end I did get the full amount refunded! (Well, they issued it as an in-house "cash credit," but I can withdraw it all to a credit card.) Victory is mine!

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3146/

One perk of being born at 0.88c is that your birthday is over two days long.

https://xkcd.com/3146/

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xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3145/

Some lava around the piercing site is normal, but keep an eye out for spreading earthquakes and eruptive activity that might indicate rifting.

https://xkcd.com/3145/

flexagon

I had coffee with

mindways and he noted that DW posts don't always capture the gestalt of my life, which is true -- so let's start with an overview: ( die Gestalt. )

Rightly or wrongly, I realize that I've never tied the quality of my own life very tightly to the (much) larger things going on around me. Where does this attitude come from? I've just always noticed the heterogeneity of things, and noticed that stuff affecting 90% of people leaves 10% of them alone. I remember being really struck, in my 40s, by how many people will respond to "how's work going" with a reply at the company level, about how their company is doing; and that's rational, reasonable. But I never once have answered at that level. It's more nuanced when talking about governments, but: here I am in a good town, in a good state, under a shitty federal government. It's bad, but a good life still seems possible, and open to me specifically (although yes I care about others, and I do get sad over the big stuff).

And events of the week included:

Not one but two circus shows -- Level Up (a local show with every act inspired by a video game), and Passengers by 7 Fingers. I watch these things as an impassioned amateur, always looking for some small floor or acro move that I might replicate, and in this case I saw two. One was a drop-back with one hand, made flashier by holding the second hand behind the back. I think I could do that within one or two practice sessions, and I'm gonna try. The other, going from a backbend, was a little hop over the arms (which bend) into a chest-stand-style rollout. I would want a spot for this, but it sure looks easier than a full hop over straight arms. And also less requiring of flexibility than a fully controlled lower to chest-stand. I'd love to try with a spot.

Reading a lot of Margaret Atwood, as the bug and I chug along through The Blind Assassin. It's definitely an exercise in attention management; I can get sucked into it, but it takes longer than with an easier and faster-paced book, so it rewards longer spans of reading. I do love Atwood's trenchant take on small things, and her sheer precision -- a young woman's lipstick isn't red, it's cerise. The wallpaper has a specific pattern with a name. The narrator as an old woman is far more observant and precise in this way than the same narrator as a younger woman, which delights me and makes me want to get old. I don't want all my reading to be like this, but it's a good reminder that there are different kinds of reading, too.

Covid vaccination! I was afraid I would not be able to get one this year, national policies finally affecting my body in an obvious way. The interplay of CDC, ACIP, state-level and other recommendations are a giant mess but, on the ground, I was able to self-attest to CVS that I qualified for it, and they stuck it in my arm. The next day, yesterday, I got super tired and couldn't really invert, and fell asleep on the couch after doing what I could at open studio.

A good handstand lesson, in which... this will horrify justplainuniverse, I'm sure... I think I managed to jump and push shoulders open at the same time, on purpose, for maybe the first time ever. It felt really strange. But yes, for all these years I've been 1) jumping, 2) losing track of time, space and my identity while motion happens, 3) trying to figure out where I am, and 4) pushing my shoulders open if the situation seems to call for it. Because I couldn't "push earlier" during the lost phase (too lost), and I couldn't push simultaneously. I did it and dang, I hope I can keep doing it. All of this followed from a simple bit of feedback I got from a substitute coach the week before, which oddly sounded negative ("sorry, you just got unlucky in this one way") but was very, very actionable.

A few crossword puzzle personal best times. Construction is paused, and solving benefits from impatience.

I could keep writing for some time. I had another interesting talk with the bug about whether house projects viscerally feel productive or not. And I could babble about my video game, which continues to have both frustrating moments and "ooh" moments and which I don't have to feel guilty about playing. I've started to go through my fancy boots, wearing each pair to decide whether to keep or sell them, and I think I'll put a few other things up for sale too. I have thoughts, continuing thoughts, about AI and climate change and pronatalism (as it rises on the left as well as on the right, how everlastingly glad I am to be sterilized!). And I am worried about the joints and antidepressant levels of several people around me. If any of those sound interesting, comment; I could go into it. But for now, I will put nuts out for the squirrels -- I never see them anymore, but would like to remind them before winter that this is a useful place to know about -- and get a few chores done.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3144/

People looking for the gaps in our understanding where the meaning of consciousness or free will might hide often turn to quantum uncertainty or infinite cosmologies, as if we don't have breathtakingly complex emergent phenomena right there in our freezers.

https://xkcd.com/3144/

the_shoshanna

We booked the aisle and window seats and even though they announced it was a full flight, no one has shown up for the middle! We would have offered them the window so that Geoff could have the aisle, but now we have the whooooooole row, and I'm pretty sure they've now secured the cabin doors! WIN.

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xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3143/

Although now people will realize three-per-em space that all this time I've been using weird medium mathematical space whitespace characters in my hair space hair space hair space speech dot dot dot...

https://xkcd.com/3143/

the_shoshanna

our last real days in Wales

Yesterday was forecast to have much better weather than today, and yesterday and today were our last days in Wales, so yesterday we did our last big hike! We caught a bus to Borth, on the coast about twenty minutes north of here, and spent four hours walking back home along that section of the Wales Coast Path. (We'd considered going south, but the description we found of the path south from Aberystwyth basically said "you immediately start by going steeply upward for a six-hundred-meter rise without a break" and that was it for that option, buh-bye.) It was a lovely day! No rain except for a brief misting just as we started, a strong breeze that kept us cool even on the steep upslopes where we were working hard, and it was always coming off the ocean so we didn't, you know, get blown over the cliff to our deaths. (I did get almost blown off my feet landward once or twice, and I always kept my hiking pole on the cliff side, so that it would always be pushing me toward safety.)

I mean, it's not that dangerous! People hike it constantly, including the trail runners who passed us over a different section a few days ago, and we met another runner on the path yesterday! But I can get a bit freaked out, and I'm always a little nervous about bad footing even when I'm not on a cliff edge, so I (we) take it slow.

We also take it slow because we want to admire the amazing views! Here's Geoff on the trail about half an hour after we started, still kitted up for rain although it had stopped by then:

We had started from the near/right end of the beach that's just over his head, so you can see we'd already climbed a fair bit. The day involved a lot of ups and downs; check this out:

Wales Coast Path between Borth and Aberystwyth

If you open the actual picture rather than this thumbnail and zoom in, you can see the path, just on the outside of the main fence (for pretty much the whole way, we were walking with a fence on our left and a cliff edge on our right). Unusually, there's a fence between the path and the cliff edge for a little way here as well, where the cliff edge has eroded even closer to the path than usual. Then the path descends very steeply to sea level, where there's a track from a field out to the water; there's a little footbridge over a small stream (and also a bunch of rubbish someone dumped there, which was upsetting to see but thankfully was also unique in our experience), and then the path climbs equally steeply up the facing cliff, which you can't see but you can see a bit of it right at the top (bottom left of the picture), where it's contouring around the rise so that the dropoff is briefly on the left (as you walk southward toward the camera) instead of on the right.

Down at the very bottom, by the footbridge, this sign was posted:

an isolated shoreline with a warning sign

saying, in Welsh and English, "CAUTION: There is no lifeguard service on this beach," and all I could think was "No kidding."

We'd read that there can be seals and dolphins in these waters, but we didn't see any: only sheep in the fields, and seagulls, and a kestrel hovering absolutely motionless in the air, almost even with us and far above the shoreline below, close enough that we could watch all the constant tiny motions and adjustments it was making to hover so perfectly motionlessly in one spot. It was like a bird of prey version of a hummingbird!

We had the usual cheerful exchanges with other walkers, and the usual rest stops to drink water and eat trail mix. I bought bags of mixed nuts and mixed dried fruit a few towns ago, and so we mix them together and that's our trail mix; but the mixed dried fruit I found was really meant for baking, not snacking, so it has raisins, sultanas, currants, and also bits of candied lemon and orange peel. It makes the trail mix feel rather posh!

The last bit into Aberystwyth was a hard climb up the hill at the north end of the bay we're on, but worth it for the views (and also the sense of accomplishment). We did see a seal on the beach as we walked along the promenade back to our hotel, but sadly it was dead.

We had a very tasty dinner at a hotel restaurant just up the beach that was recommended by one of the staff here, and then we had a great treat! When we were walking around town the day before, just looking around (and buying me new gear), we'd passed a bar/event venue called the Bank Vault, and the schedule posted outside said that the next night would be performances by members of the Aberystwyth Folk Music Society! Well, we couldn't miss that! So we skipped our usual local beer with dinner (we told the waitress we were going to a bar with live music after dinner, and she immediately said, "Oh, the Bank Vault? That's a great place."

There was no cover charge, but we shared four half-pints of three different beers, and when we ordered the last one we told the guy pulling them "and one for yourself as well," which the waitress at dinner had told us was an appropriate way to tip. (She said they wouldn't expect it but would be pleased, and his reaction bore that out. I saw someone else leaving a few coins on the bar when he picked up his drink.)

a few comments on masking

I forgot to say that, on the bus from Fishguard to Aberystwyth, we saw the first person masking, other than us, that we've seen on this entire trip! Just some guy, our age or a little older, he got on and rode for a few stops and got off again, but I almost did a doubletake.

And we've been eating indoors without masking because we don't have other good options, but we did mask in the Bank Vault, briefly lowering the mask to take a sip of beer and then replacing it before inhaling again. And we've masked in all the shops we've been in, and -- jumping ahead to today -- while we were looking around the National Library. And once again nobody blinked an eye, or did a doubletake, or acted weird about interacting with us, even though we are being, statistically, very weird. I've really appreciated that.

The music last night varied from "that was definitely a song, I'll say that for it" to really, really good. Nearly all the performers were older (or just plain old) men, but there were a couple of younger people and a couple of women in the mix. (Literally two women, in two make/female duos. Those duos had the best songs by far.) The first performer played an accordion, most of the rest had guitars, and here's a picture of a guy with a harmonium:

It was a pretty small space; what the picture shows is almost the whole ground floor. I took the photo with my back against the small bar, and then there was a stairway behind that going up to a second level, from which our waitress had said you could look down on the performance space, but we didn't go up there; we liked our seats at the bar, where we had a great view and also could keep trying local beers! They had fourteen options on tap, and the bartender was happy to let us sample anything before committing to it:

And then around ten pm we staggered home to bed.

Today was forecast to be much worse weather, meaning rain all day, but it turned out to be lovely! It did start out raining, and I made the unpleasant discovery that my new rain pants are slightly too short, and allow water to run off the bottom of the pant leg into the front of my boots. Fortunately, we had bought short rain gaiters for this trip, although we hadn't ever actually used them! But I put mine on and they fixed the problem perfectly, which is of course what they're meant to do. And then it turned into nice weather anyway.

Today we stuck around town; my knee was bothering me a little and we didn't want to try another strenuous hike anyway. We wandered through town some more and then climbed the steep but short hill up to the National Library of Wales! They had a couple of exhibits on; I was particularly interested in the one documenting protests against the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley in 1965 for the sake of Liverpool's water supply, which meant destroying a Welsh village, but I was also curious to see whatever was included in the "treasures" on display. In the end, though, we mostly just wandered around the building, admiring old books on display in beautiful cabinets. The Tryweryn Valley exhibit was smaller (and the story less well documented, for those of us who knew nothing about it) than I'd hoped, and I completely forgot to look for the other ones! And then we wandered home along a new route, just to see some different things, and now are back in the hotel catching up on blogging before dinner.

So mostly today was a winding-down day. Tomorrow we take a train to the outskirts of London, so that we can easily get to Heathrow the next morning!

lehser

Around this time last year, we got back from a bike trip in northern Scotland (amazing, kinda rainy, rather chilly). Coincidentally, my 16-year-old carpool had died at the beginning of the month. And I realized that if I'd been (e-)biking 15-25 miles/day in hilly northern Scotland, I could bike ~8 miles each way to work. And that I can do public transit on days that biking doesn't work for whatever reason.

At that point, I'd had my e-bike for about 8 years, and there were somewhere between 750 and 800 miles on it. Today I hit 1820. I mostly skipped the really rainy days (turns out there's more traffic around here, and I trust it way less) and the really seriously icy days (turns out they don't shovel the paths by the river all that well between Christian Herter Park and the next bridge), and some days when I had stuff going on after work or just didn't feel like it.

It's a fairly minimal accomplishment, but I'm pretty pleased.

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the_shoshanna

We can hear the surf crashing just outside our window!

So, yeah, we got to Aberystwyth with no problem on a scenic three-hour bus ride. I have no idea how drivers manage big vehicles on these roads, and the secret is, sometimes they don't; at one point one lane of the (theoretically) two-lane road (one lane in each direction, that is) (well, two-thirds of a lane in each direction) anyway one lane was closed, and the driver couldn't turn the bus into the other lane, avoiding parked cars and cars waiting to come the other way, until he got out and moved one of the "lane closed" signs a couple of feet back. And there were plenty of times when the roadside hedge was audibly brushing the bus windows as we went by, and a couple of times when we came around a corner to find ourselves abruptly almost nose to nose with an oncoming car, which usually had to back up to let the bus complete the turn. Disconcerting to those of us used to wide North American roads with generous sidewalks or breakdown lanes; utterly unremarkable to the locals.

Aberystwyth is the big city compared to where we've been! According to Wikipedia, the twin towns of Fishguard and Goodwick, that we just came from, have a population of about 5400; Aberystwyth has maybe 18,000 depending on where you look? (And whether you're counting the university students, who won't arrive until just as we leave.) We went from the bus station first to the tourist info, where we picked up some flyers on coastal walks and such; then we staggered into the extremely strong wind coming off the ocean to our hotel, which was half a block from the shore.

Well. What we expected to be our hotel. It turned out to be a "self-check-in" place, meaning unstaffed; you walk in the unlocked door and the front desk has no human, just some folders with people's names on them, and you find yours and in it are your room key, hotel info, etc. You know you're in a low-crime area when! But there was no folder for us.

I poked my head further into the hotel and found a couple of guests in the lounge, who showed me the rather tucked-away button on the desk that might summon a staffer. It did not. So I phoned the number on the hotel's business card, a stack of which were also on the desk, and the guy who answered said a) he had no record of ever receiving our reservation through Booking.com, and b) the hotel was full, no vacancies. He was apologetic about it (while also anxious to assure me that he wasn't holding my money; Booking.com was), but there was flat-out nothing he could do.

I've never had that happen before! (Not that I use B.c that often, I always prefer to book direct, but sometimes either a hotel has completely outsourced its booking to third parties like B.c or B.c just has better rates and cancellation policies.) I had multiple confirmations from B.c, but apparently they were all auto-sent without the hotel's involvement.

So that was stressful! Geoff and I camped out in the hotel's wee lobby for a bit. I had my printout of B.c's confirmation in one hand, their website open on my ipad in my lap, and with my other hand I was phoning B.c customer support. Fortunately I did connect quickly with a human, who put me on hold briefly to call the hotel himself and confirm that they couldn't house me (I presume to ensure that I wasn't just trying to scam an upgrade) and then told me that B.c would cancel that booking and email me some possible alternatives, and I could book one of them and B.c would pick up any extra cost above what the original place would have cost.

He said the email might take 30-45 minutes to arrive, but in fact it took only a few minutes -- which I expected to be the case, since it's all automated; it's not like there was someone hand-curating my options, although the agent's spiel made it sound like there was. I picked the one with the best B.c reviews that was close by and on the shoreline, hastily booked it, and off we went into the wind again!

The new hotel is actually in a slightly better location and has an actually staffed front desk (by incredibly cheerful and friendly young women), and we're on the second floor ("first" to Brits) with a bay window looking directly out at the beach and the waves rolling in. (Today they're rolling. Yesterday they were crashing. Either way it's a lovely sound to fall asleep to.) There's also a small table and two chairs in the bay, to sit in and watch the ocean, but frankly Geoff has dumped his stuff all over them (my stuff is dumped all over the floor on the other side of the bed) and we like to just sit in bed, from which we have almost as good a view. And the bathroom is large, and has plenty of flat space on which to put toiletries etc., and also has a tub. Yay!

The only difficulty now is that I am absolutely morally certain that the agent told me on the phone that if I chose one of the options B.c sent me, they'd pick up the whole price difference; but the email actually says that they'll pick up up to £51 and change. The actual price difference is £105. I'm prepared to fight them on this (the phone call "may have been recorded for training and verification purposes," after all), but if we lose, well, worse things happen at sea.

Once we'd successfully checked in to the new place, we went out to stretch our legs and look around the center of town a bit. And we started by going back to an outdoor-gear store we'd walked past on our way to the tourist info, that was having a going-out-of-business sale!

I'd realized a few days before that the coating that lined my rain pants was disintegrating; they were shedding a fine white grit. And they had eventually soaked through, in that storm we were in. Durable water repellency doesn't endure forever. Also, my everyday backpack is a basic Jansport school bag; it's fine for its intended use, and I like that it's big enough to serve as weekend luggage (I'd say it's thirty liters) while still small enough to fit under an airplane seat, but when I load it up with rain pants, rain jacket, one or two midlayers, one or two water bottles, lunch, emergency first aid supplies, and so on for a serious day's hiking, I really regret its lack of a waist belt. Also I only have a cheap third-party rain cover for it, which you may remember proved totally inadequate against a real rainstorm. (I sure remember.) And, the other day, I noticed a thinning at its bottom where the material was beginning to think about wearing through; not immediately, but that's not something I want to run risks with. And I don't have a rain cover for my big (seventy-liter) hiking pack at all.

So we stopped into the store and I scored heavily discounted replacements for all of the above! Including a thirty-liter daypack with not only a proper waist belt and ventilated back panel but -- what I didn't realize until I got it back to the hotel and was exploring all its pocketses in detail -- its own integrated rain cover! Win.

After that we just wandered around a bit, and spent a good amount of time clambering around the ruins of the coastal castle, which was fun and dramatic and also very windy omg. We eyeballed a bunch of restaurants, but nothing screamed out "eat here" to us.

So we went back and had dinner in the hotel restaurant, because we were not up for researching a place; I had done enough frantic internet juggling for one day.

me at dinner last night: I think I'll have a big glass of wine.

Geoff: You should. You deserve it.

me: I had a very stressful five minutes!

(He did loyally remind me that in fact it was longer than that.)

marthawells

Behold the cover of Platform Decay:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2025/09/16/murderbot-book-platform-decay-martha-wells/86165029007/

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3142/

If you want to see true audacity, do an image search for 'Altoona-style pizza.'

https://xkcd.com/3142/

the_shoshanna

+: Christine brought us to the bus station to catch the bus to Aberystwyth in good time, and the ride went smoothly

-: When we arrived in Aberystwyth, the hotel we had a multiply confirmed reservation at had never heard of us

+: We managed to hastily book what is probably a nicer hotel in just as good a location

???: Booking.com said on the phone that they'd cover the difference in price, but I'll believe it when I see it

+: The new hotel has a full bathtub

-: I have discovered, over the course of this trip, that some of my gear is on its last legs

+: We walked past an outdoor gear store having a going-out-of-business sale, and now I have new ~~toys~~ gear!

flexagon

Knock knock.
( I promise, I like dark humor! Let me see it. )

flexagon

Life continues to overall be fabulous, yet somehow the emotional tone of this last week has been "For the love of all that's healthy, stop setting yourself on fire and then getting the ashes all over me." No, that's not aimed at anyone here. Somehow I had about three days in a row where I wasn't home much at all, and that put me out of sorts, especially since one of those afternoons should have been a 1-hr coffee and it turned into a long, draining conversation about something that not only isn't my problem, it shouldn't even have been my companion's problem. That companion really, really wants to stick a bean up their nose. Different companion is spectacularly pragmatic, but that pragmatism is meeting severely limiting health problems in a way that turns life into an energy-management game, and it's sad to see after knowing them in more energetic conditions. A third person wanted to fling themselves back into the arms of a disappointing ex, for a while there... well, some things have to be lived through and aren't to be helped via advice. It's just harder to let it roll off me, when I care about the people in question.

Okay! Things also happened this week that were expansive and wonderful, and it isn't fair to leave them out: I had the best workout in many weeks, all alone at the gym for a couple of hours on Weds. I went out paddling kayaks on the Charles River, which I hadn't bothered to do in my (ulp) 31 years in this city until

apfelsingail came along and poked me to go with her. We saw a cormorant pretty close up, and lots of familiar places along the Esplanade but from an unfamiliar viewpoint. Had a great time weeding at a library and then having lunch with fellow escapees from Zillian. And to round it out, there was some great acro practicing and finally a class with returned coach, Tiny Person! (*explosion of rainbow hearts*)

Someone on the conservative right got shot dead this week, literally as he'd just started to discuss gun violence with someone from the audience. The person is on the record as saying it's worth it to have some deaths every year so that we can have the Second Amendment... wonder how he feels about that now. "I never thought leopards would eat my face", probably. I'm supposed to be having feelings about "oh dear, not political violence", but like a lot of Americans out there I've become kind of numb. Thinking immediately about the political consequences, rather than about the actual person/people in question. And part of me is like: am I really supposed to care about a stranger whose views I hated, when I'm already feeling stretched thin by caring about a much smaller circle than that? Human limitations... at any rate, this thing feels far away, distant.

I've been playing a lot of Blue Prince when I have time. I'm pretty sure I've figured out one way to roll the credits, but that's a relatively early victory in a deep puzzle-box. Also I haven't even done the thing yet. The bug likes it, and sits with me sometimes -- speaking of which, we had our anniversary date on Saturday! 22 years of being married. I hope he doesn't mind my mentioning this in a paragraph that started with a video game. We're often at our best when being playful together, so it's only a little inappropriate. <3

Lastly -- since this post is happening a bit late -- I had a drink and snack with my old boss, and one of my old coworkers, last night. It was nice to see him, but I don't think we have a lot in common outside of our thoughts about work and management. How strange that there's this entire area of compatibility / incompatibility that used to be so, so important and that now feels far more abstract. A deal breaker maybe, if I learned that someone was a total tyrant at work, but probably not a friendship maker. Transitions, continuing.

the_shoshanna

by which I mean work! Fun work!

Before we left on this trip, we'd booked a sea kayaking tour for today; with only two full days here, the idea was to spend one of them hiking along the tops of the coastal cliffs, and the other admiring them from below. Also we go lake kayaking at home, which we enjoy a lot though it is of course orders of magnitude more gentle than sea kayaking! We booked a similar sea kayaking tour in New Zealand years ago and really loved it.

But it was a lot warmer in New Zealand. And we weren't quite so tired. ~~and we were a lot younger~~ After the day we hiked through sideways hail, we both agreed that we'd just as soon give it a miss. But of course we were well past the company's free cancellation deadline. But fortunately (??) the forecast for today was for heavy rain and high winds. The kayaking company wrote to us a few days ago saying that the outlook was bad, and would we be willing to switch our booking to Saturday (yesterday)? No, we said, so sorry, we can't do that; and crossed our fingers. And indeed, on late Friday evening they cancelled Sunday's trip and said they'd refund us. (I haven't actually checked, but I assume the refund has gone through, or will on Monday.)

So we were off the hook! As I said in an earlier post, we laid in food (and beer) yesterday for tonight's dinner, so we wouldn't have to go out. And Geoff had the brilliant idea of asking Mike and Christine if they'd be willing to show us around the farm a bit today, maybe we could offer unskilled help with whatever they were doing? So we asked, if it wouldn't be intrusive (I mean, it's their home, and Mike's son is visiting), could we participate in their work today? And they were pretty surprised, I think, but said sure!

This morning I made a big breakfast for us with three of the six eggs, two of the four sausages, all the cherry tomatoes that hadn't gone off, three of the five huge mushrooms, and half a red onion that we'd also bought the day before, because for Geoff it's just not an omelet (well, a scramble) without onion. It was delicious.

They said they'd likely be at work in the barn behind the house around ten, and we'd be welcome to come by; but when we started over there a few minutes past the hour, Christine saw us passing their door and nipped out to say they hadn't started yet. So we suggested they just come by whenever they were ready for us, and went back to lounge about a while longer. Finally Mike came by and said he was on his way to the barn to split logs, and if we really wanted to come help, we'd be welcome.

It was ferociously windy and gusting rain, sometimes quite heavily. (Definitely not a kayaking day!) (At least, it was ferociously windy to us, but Mike said that 50kph winds are nothing, around here. Eep.) We put on rain gear, but to my private relief we ended up actually working inside the barn. (Mostly.) Mike was sitting at a powered log-splitter (somewhat like this https://www.homedepot.com/p/YARDMAX-6-5-Ton-15-Amp-Horizontal-Electric-Log-Splitter-YS0650/323678117), with huge tarpaulin bags of cut logs behind him, and it was our job to keep handing him logs to split, keep another bag positioned for him to toss the split ones into, and haul away the bags of split ones when they reached max haulable weight, piling them against a wall of the barn to be moved further (and sorted into shorter ones that would fit in their own home's wood stove and longer ones that would fit in the rental's) sometime later. Geoff also went out into the rain a couple of times to bring in wheelbarrows-full of more logs. Meanwhile Mike's son Aneurin was dealing with their apple harvest; they have I don't know how many apple trees, but I can see through our own window some trees absolutely flush with apples, and the strong wind meant lots of windfalls; so they had to be picked up and brought in and sorted into best quality/not so great quality/use right away, and the first two categories at least had to be put away, each variety separately in its own part of their apple storage cabinet. (Mike called it the apple store, meaning storage of apples; it looked like a tall enclosed cabinet with shelves, and I'd try to find a picture of the kind of thing I mean except that I know you understand that searching for "apple store" will not turn up anything relevant.)

Anyway, it was fun! We borrowed work gloves so our hands were protected, and I was careful of my back, and in about two hours we'd helped him split, at a very very rough guess, maybe fifty cubic feet of wood? We filled seven tarp bags to the limit of the weight that Geoff and I could haul to the side. I know that Mike couldn't have worked so fast alone, and we freed up Aneurin to deal with the apples; Christine was inside their house cooking and also directing Aneurin whenever he had a question about the apples that Mike couldn't answer. Certainly he and Christine seemed genuinely pleased to have us helping; Mike said a couple of times that we should come back, and we'd find the Cwtsh (our rental space) heated by wood we'd helped split!

Once all the wood was split, he invited us into their house for tea! Christine welcomed us in and made impressed sounds when Mike told her we'd filled seven bags of split logs. The kitchen, which was the room we walked right into, is a wonderful space. She said that when they bought the house about twenty-five years ago, she initially didn't like it at all; it had been redone badly and uglily in the seventies (a drop ceiling instead of that gorgeous medieval vault! Terrible colors!), and they tore all that out and restored it to what it had been, except of course with all mod cons. Her oven and hob are tucked into the huge stone arch that was the original fireplace, and the ironwork chain and hook that were originally over the fire, to suspend the cooking pot from, are now hanging decoratively from the rafters. She has floor-to-ceiling shelves on one wall that are largely filled with enameled cast iron pots and pans; I expressed my admiration!

Mike took us further into the house to a small solarium, filled with plants; he successfully grows pineapples there, as well as a cinnamon plant, frangipani, limes and lemons, and more that I can't remember. (Imagine being in a Welsh market and seeing pineapple for sale labeled "locally grown"!) We oohed and aaahed, and then came back out to have tea with the two of them and Aneurin, although Aneurin looked at his phone and excused himself once he'd finished his cup. We chatted about what Geoff and I do for work, and Christine told us about working in professional storytelling and also writing a book of local folktales (https://www.amazon.com/Pembrokeshire-Folk-Tales-United-Kingdom/dp/0752465651 -- there's a copy of it in the Cwtsh but I hadn't realized it was by her!), and also about falling in love with the property despite its hideous 1970s tat when they learned that it has its own spring-fed water supply. We talked briefly about the awfulness of climate change. (I forgot to say that earlier, one of the times she'd come by our place for some reason, I'd said something that made clear I was originally American, "but these days I don't admit it," and she shudderingly concurred, and added that they have a swear jar in the house, and every time That Man's name is mentioned, the offender has to put a pound in.)

They invited us to stay for lunch; but we demurred. I at least didn't want to overstay our welcome even though they pressed us a bit, and I didn't want them to feel pressured to socialize at the expense of getting necessary work done (there's a lot more to do; Mike described a lot of work that's going to be done in and to the barn, in preparation for which a lot of space has to be cleared in it), and I was a little socialized out, to be honest, and wanted to have a chance to relax and also catch up on blogging! Also we really have overbought food -- we still have bags of nuts and dried fruit for hiking that we haven't even opened yet -- and while I'd always rather have too much food than too little (especially on long hikes; imagine if that sideways-hail hike had been even longer and worse, and if we hadn't had plenty of calories available if we'd needed them), we really didn't want to spoil our appetites for dinner, when our wee fridge is bursting with the food we laid in yesterday.

So we said many thank-yous on both sides, and Geoff and I came back to our space. Mike commented that the rain would probably stop in good time for us to have a dry, if windy, evening walk, but we've just been sitting around contentedly on our devices (and Geoff had his usual-when-he-can afternoon nap). Tomorrow Christine will give us a lift down to the bus station, where we'll catch a 10:48 bus to Aberystwyth; the timing apparently works well with an appointment she has, which is great.

It's been a fabulous visit, and I'm sorry it's so short. The location has its inconveniences (and cooking for ourselves? on vacation? what?) but overall this is a great place to stay, the sort of thing AirB&B originally marketed itself as (they are listed on AirB&B, but we booked directly, which I think they much preferred). We've loved both the space and the chance to spend time with them!

Now Geoff is busy figuring out how to work the oven, to heat up our pies and chips, and I'm finally catching up to now here!

the_shoshanna

Geoff is the primary photographer of our trips, just as I'm the primary logisticker. But I have taken a few photos that I thought folks might like to see.

And if you don't, that's what cut tags are for!

This was the view from our first hotel room, in Bishop's Castle:

A view across Bishop's Castle and the hills beyond

This is a pretty representative image of what the easier parts of our hikes have looked like. (On the harder parts I haven't been getting my phone out except to navigate with!)

Some rolling countryside near Kington, Herefordshire

This was the cheese I bought for a picnic lunch in Hay-on-Wye. How could I resist?

This was the path we walked along the River Wye:

and this is what it looked like when we got out into the meadow and had lunch:

A moderately wide, placid river between wooded shores

This was just part of the breakfast spread awaiting us in our Fishguard B&B:

(Yes, a few of the tomatoes had unfortunately gone a bit moldy by the time we got to them. But the others were delicious.)

and this is the ladder up to our sleeping loft!

Success!

Fantastic Four

Officially autumn.

Piercing

Gestalt, reading, vax, circus... what else would you like to know?

Phase Changes

I’m not sure that’s ever worked before!

September so far.

Question Mark

winding down

I would [bike] a thousand miles...

A right triangle is more interesting than a love triangle.

More on the pluses and minuses, and some more pluses

Cover Reveal

-Style Pizza

pluses and minuses

A joke for last Thursday (dark humor)

Troubles around, but not dead center

Unexpected fun!

some pictures

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April 2017

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