Mark L. Van Name's Blog, page 34

A short, slow, and easy day in Florence

Though it pains me to admit it, I so desperately needed sleep that I slept from about 1:30 a.m. local time to nearly three in the afternoon.  I did not awaken feeling fully healed, but I was definitely a great deal better for the rest.

I decided to devote the rest of the short day to re-introducing myself to some of my favorite parts of Florence.  I wandered my way over to the Loggia Della Signoria, which features some lovely old statues

Click an image to see a larger version.
and a great view onto the square at the front of the Palazzo Vecchio.


I wandered from there down the courtyard between the halves of the Uffizi, along the Arno, and back into the city on the street oppositve the Ponte Vecchio.  I eventually wound my way to the Duomo, because, well, the Duomo.


While eating a bruschetta snack at a little place well behind the Duomo, I ended up in conversation with a woman from NC who was on a very long trip.  She elected to join the expedition to Grom, where I very much enjoyed a medio cup with salted caramel and orange.  Wow, is Grom's gelato good!

After rest, email, and writing, dinner was at a local place, The Cat and the Fox, that has always treated me well.


In addition to a just-right set of beverages,


I enjoyed an okay Caesar salad and a very tasty bowl of spaghetti carbonara.


Some reading and then a lot of sleep are ahead.

A gentle and good first day in Florence.

Firenze, I return

I'm here after 28 hours of travel and frankly happy to be staying anywhere for a while.  I am especially pleased, though, to be in Florence, because I love it here.

Though I'm exhausted, I went walking for a bit just to see familiar sites, check out the changes, and pick up some water.  I also shot a quick pic of the lovely Basilica Santa Croce.


The square in front of the church is usually thronged with people, but today it was, as you can see, cordoned off, I am assuming for construction.

Time to crash and infuse my body with a metric ton of sleep.

The trip so far, the journey ahead

As I write this entry, it's about four-thirty in the morning back home and nine-thirty a.m. here in London's Heathrow airport.  I am well along in my travels, but still far from my destination.

The trip began with a ride to the airport and a flight to JFK.  I flew on Delta, where I have no privileges, but I was lucky enough to score an extra-leg-room seat, so I was reasonably comfortable.

In JFK, I walked for what seemed like a mile or more, first to reach baggage claim, then to catch the train to another terminal, and finally to check into my American Airlines flight to Heathrow.

I spent several hours in the flagship Admirals Club there, which not only offered for free all of my typical travel beverages of choice, it also provided a lovely little workspace.

Click an image to see a larger version.
Power to charge multiple devices, a good desk, and room for beverages; it's hard to ask for more.

I was in business class for the flight to Heathrow, so I was quite comfortable the entire way.  The only problem is that the trip lasts only five and a half hours, which after eating and watching a short movie leaves very little time for what passes for sleep on a plane.  Still, I managed to grab about 90 minutes of low-quality sleep.

I'm spending some hours here in the arrivals lounge because the car I hired to take me to Gatwick won't arrive until nearly eleven.  This is also a fine place to pass time, though, with comfortable chairs for working and reading, plus a sort of build-it-yourself British breakfast.  I kept my version simple by avoiding the tomato and mushroom bits.


If you click the image to expand it, you'll be able to seen the spoonful of beans in the upper right of the plate; I felt they were necessary to fulfill the plate's potential.

From here, I'll spend an hour or so in the car going to Gatwick, check in and check baggage, and ultimately fly to Florence.  With Brexit I'm not sure how security will work there, but I will find out.

By the time I hit my hotel, it'll be around nine in the evening Florence time.  I am quite looking forward to a real bed.

The most surreal presidential press conference ever

Read the transcript here.  Trump is ranting at the media in ways that make extraordinarily clear how big and self-centered a bubble he lives in.  I cannot recall a weirder presidential press conference.

It is hard at times to remember that this strange White House reality TV show is in fact our reality.

I'm heading out tomorrow for three weeks in Europe.  I think I will do my best to avoid American news during that time and instead focus on art, food, culture, and doing my best to stay positive.

These days, staying positive in America is quite the challenge.

I know the movie is more than a year away

but this first look at Avengers:  Infinity War makes me excited to see it.



Of course, I am a sucker for superhero movies, particularly the Marvel Universe films of the past almost ten years.

John Wick: Chapter 2

is a faster, louder, more flamboyant, more violent version of its predecessor.  Some of those descriptions may be hard to believe, but they are all true.  This one turns up the volume in almost every area.

Some of that increase is quite successful.  The film provides a great deal more world-building than the first movie, and most of that material is both interesting and entertaining, even humorous at times.  Many of the action sequences work very well.

Some of those sequences, though, like some of the other bigger, bolder bits run on a bit too long and use somewhat repetitive fight choreography.  Where the first movie was a very tight 1:41, this one runs 2:02, and though I had a good time watching it all, the movie could have used a tighter edit.

All that said, if you enjoyed the first John Wick, and I very much did, you're going to like this one.  Some in our group enjoyed it more than the first, though most of us found it the weaker sibling.

This one begins right after the previous film and ends with a scene that will undoubtedly move straight into the sequel.  I'm not at all sure how the sequel can work, given where this one ends, but I'll be in the theater to find out.

If you liked John Wick or are just in the mood for big, dumb action, check out John Wick:  Chapter 2.

Qspresso serves the best Cubano in the Triangle

I'd read about Qspresso in a few places, including Greg Cox's review in the N&O, but I'd yet to try it.  I fixed that the other day with a visit to the food truck.  I'm happy to report that for my taste, Qspresso serves the best Cubano sandwich in the Triangle area.

This is no small thing.  I'm a huge fan of Cubanos, and many of the local variations are frankly poor imitations of the real deal.  Just the bread, which must be lard-based to have the perfect flavor, is very hard to find.  The Qspresso folks originally imported theirs but now have a local baker making a strong variation of the bread.  It's not quite as robust as it should be, but it's the best Cubano bread I've had in this area.

Our small group also sampled multiple other dishes, and all were tasty, but the Cubano is the star.

Having said that, I must also say that Qspresso's Cubano has not yet reached perfection.  The one I tasted needed a bit more ham and a more even distribution of that meat, so that every bite contained all the right flavors.  It also should have contained more pickle slices.

That said, for now it is my go-to Cubano.  If you love this sandwich or would just like to try a good version, catch Qspresso, and enjoy!

Thoughts on my mother, five years after her death

Yesterday marked the five-year anniversary of my mother's death.  I don't do anything to celebrate the day, but I inevitably note it, of course.  She was the only person who was a parent to me, and I miss her very much.

Over the years since she died, I've come to have more and more respect for what she managed to do.  Through a string of bad men--those prior to Ed and Lloyd, both of whom were (and in Lloyd's case still is) good men--and in the face of all sorts of incredible life difficulties, she never wavered from her commitment to her three children.  She did the job life gave her.  She worked her butt off to put food on our table and pay for the roof over our heads.  I never once heard her gripe about how hard it was to be a single mom.  (I'm sure she must have talked about it to friends, but not to us.)

She made a ton of mistakes, but she never stopped taking care of us.

She also imbued me with beliefs that I cherish to this day.  She taught me that in this country if you were smart and worked hard, you could make something of yourself, build for yourself and those you love a bright future.  I've since come to believe that this dream does not apply equally to all of our citizens, and that angers me more than I can say, but belief in it helped me survive a lot of hard times.
She also convinced me that she always believed in me, and that helped me believe in myself in times when I had trouble doing so.

She taught me the value of loyalty and of protecting those who were with you.  I hold to those values to this day.

She showed me earlier than most kids the joys of reading and of listening to music and looking at paintings, though we didn't have much in the way of the latter.

Most of all, she taught me by her example that you do the job life gives you, that you never abandon those you care about and who depend on you, that no matter what weight threatens to push you into the very dirt beneath you, you push aside that weight, get up, and get on with it.  She was a small woman, never a full five feet tall in all the time I can remember her, but when life pushed too hard I got glimpses of the absolute fucking steel that infused her bones and her soul, because she never gave up, never stopped doing her job, never stopped fighting.

Once, after a chemo crash during the treatment of her third cancer, on the phone with me, she came close.  She begged me to tell her it was okay for her to give up, that it was okay for her to die.  She pleaded with a hoarse, tear-filled voice for me to tell her she could die.  She said she could no longer take the horrible pain, that nothing the doctors were giving her was helping, and she wanted to die.  She wanted me to tell her it was okay for her to stop fighting and to die.  I was flat on my back and on painkillers, having hurt my back.  I never so much wanted to give up--and to tell her it was okay to give up.

I didn't.  Against her entreaties, I asked her to give me twenty-four hours, to fight for one day more.  I told her that I was absolutely positive--a complete lie--that in that day the pain would subside and she would feel better.  I told her she had beaten everything else life had smacked her with, and she wasn't going to stop now.  I told her she could do twenty-four more hours of anything, that she was just that strong, and that she had to do it.

"Just twenty-four hours," she said, her voice a whisper.

"Yes," I said, making my voice stronger than my belief in what I was doing.

"Okay," she said.  "Okay."

She kept fighting, and the pain indeed subsided.  On the day she died, about five years later, the doctors declared her free and clear of the cancer.

I hope every day to be as strong as my mother and worthy of her legacy.

I love you, Mom.

About that flight delay

Yesterday, I mentioned an odd delay in my trip from O'Hare to Raleigh yesterday late afternoon.  Here's what happened.

We boarded and pulled away from the gate on time.  We were slated to arrive at RDU eight minutes early.  I had been lucky enough to receive an upgrade to First Class, where I was enjoying a pre-flight cup of Coke Zero.  Everything was looking good.

When we were well away from the gate and starting to turn toward the runway, the flight attendant started throwing paper napkins on the floor, at which point I could see water coming onto the floor in her space.  She got on the phone with the pilot and kept putting down napkins--but the water spread.  She pulled out a trash container, one of the large carts that stow under the counters in the attendant space, and it was full of water.

The pilot announced that we had a small flood in the front cabin and took us back to the gate.

A maintenance team boarded the plane and set to work.  I could hear them talking.  After a while, they figured out that the coffee maker was leaking water.  They quickly fixed the problem, cleaned the area, and left.

I figured we were good to go.

No such luck.

The pilot told us over the intercom that the end light on our left wing was broken.  They had known about this problem before, but on our original schedule we were due to land in Raleigh in daylight, so the broken light was not an issue.  Due to the flood delay, we were now due to land in Raleigh in darkness, so they had to fix the light--a process that was going to take somewhere between twenty minutes and so long we'd have to change planes.

I began rooting for the former option.

About twenty-five minutes later, the pilot announced a successful repair, and we finally took off.

Until yesterday, I'd never had a plane delay due to flooding, but now I can cross that one off my to-do list.

I'm home

Odd flight delay story to follow.

Crashing (me, not the plane) looms.