Halftime

It has been a busy few months. Not a soul-destroying level of busy, but packed with enough things in my day-to-day to make blog writing a much lower priority. But a nice, leisurely weekend (with a day off I wasn't expecting!) means there's time to write and reflect in between boat rides and World Cup games. Especially when a storm blows through.

I sprung for Leaflet Pro for this blog, so you no longer need an Atmosphere account to follow me, you can sign up via email! I'm not nearly prolific enough to justify it from a "hustle" mindset but it wasn't expensive, I have friends who would use the email signup, and I wanted to support the @leaflet.pub team. I would have linked to the Pro landing page above as well... except there isn't one. Something to add to the queue?

World Tour

We are in the last two weeks of a ridiculous travel schedule. Kicking it off with seven weeks in England bisected by twelve days in Malta and Sicily, we came back to Chicago and immediately jumped on the train for a St. Louis weekend. Wednesday we drove up to Fox Lake, WI; we return Sunday and then fly to Puerto Rico Wednesday night. From there it's a week in Savannah and then finally home for enough time to organize moving to a new apartment before going to DC for a wedding. My wife also tried to squeeze in a weekend in NYC as well, though at some point enough is just enough.

Whew.

England

England was great. I can't remember the last time I'd been in spring/summer; it must've been at least a decade. We had five days in London, staying at a bougie hotel in Russell Square and doing London things: museums, art galleries, Liberty's, Dishoom. From there we caught the train out to Devon, rented a car, and had another week in the West Country. Devon & Cornwall famously fill up in the summer, but it was early enough that there weren't too many people around. Torquay, famously a tourist trap, was a lovely base of operations and thankfully did not live up to its reputation... though there were some amusing sights:

Nothing more 'murican than DELICIOUS CREAM TEAS

From there we were in Cornwall, avoiding vicious seagulls and eating like royalty in Padstow. We stayed at the gorgeous Trewornan Manor, a B&B in a Grade 2 listed property from 1211 that I would recommend to all my friends which just so happens to be a favorite of that all-too-elusive demographic of "Germans who are fans of Doc Martin." We made the pilgrimage to Port Isaac, fully prepared to abandon the excursion to the hordes of fans we heard descend on the place, but it wasn't at all crowded and we were rewarded with the best fish and chips we had on the trip. Tintagel Castle, the supposed birthplace of King Arthur, was also not mobbed by holiday makers foreign or domestic.

As with so many things, a peak life is best lived off-peak. We timed the first leg of our trip perfectly: the weather was good, it wasn't too busy, and everything we wanted to do we were able to do without a headaches. We even had a few unexpected bonuses in the form of inadvertently driving past Stonehenge on our way to Gatwick and a free upgrade to whatever the cushiest status at the airport Sofitel is.

(Pro tip: driving past Stonehenge is plenty. Actually visiting it is only slightly better, you have to stand thirty yards off in a field in Wiltshire. There are plenty of other henges in that part of the world that you can actually walk around and go into, not to mention the White Horse and other... well-endowed... cliff art).

On the other side of our Mediterranean leg, we were based out of East Anglia for the majority of it. Coming back after the first of two European heat waves (it was hotter in England than in Sicily by a significant amount), we had absolutely gorgeous weather. Which we primarily used to sit in my aunt's backyard and watch the runner ducks. From there we took a flat in Cambridge, a few minutes' walk from our close friends' place, and ran the rest of the trip from there. One of the main upsides of being a fully remote worker is the ability to just be somewhere else; as long as you can make your meetings and react if something goes sideways, no one really cares where you physically are. We had done this sort of thing a few years prior using Weybridge (Surrey) as our home base and it works quite well. My company is on Eastern Time, meaning if you're in the UK you need to be online at 2pm. So you get up and do something in the morning, you work until dinner time (which is your coworkers' lunch), and once you've eaten you work until bedtime. It takes a minute to get used to, and isn't quite as good as working those hours from the West Coast, but it facilitates European adventures quite well!

We made sure to take full advantage of the situation. Highlights include:

A trip to Ipswich (meh) to see my cousins, who gave us a private, behind-the-scenes tour of Jimmy's Farm (cool!) along with a lot of information on which enclosure's fences to be suspicious of...

Anglesey Abbey, a manor home near Cambridge which is actually what a Standard Oil heir thought an English manor home should be like. Probably my favorite of the big houses we visited, with an absolutely incredible rose garden.

An afternoon at the Red Feather Club, the former airbase of the US 95th Bomb Group during WWII. The locals bring out all their Americana; it's a total trip to stand around in the middle of a field in Suffolk among a bunch of restored Ford pickups and Brits doing their best American impressions.

A weekend in Derbyshire, which just so happened to coincide with Regency Weekend at Chatsworth. The ladies in our group wore their Regency-esque dresses for our visit, and they were far from the only ones.

On the way back, we had a few days with my family friends in Teddington. We got plenty of steps in traipsing around Kingston, Hampton Court, and Richmond, and slipped out just as it got hot once again.

Malta

Malta was visually spectacular, but I don't think I would recommend it. For one thing, all the people we'd managed to avoid in Cornwall we found in Malta. Without visitors, the Maltese have crammed over half a million people into 80 square miles, most of them in and around Valletta. We were with one of dozens of tour groups, not to mention the three (!!) cruise ships in the harbor. Malta is also a big place for stag parties & hen dos: it's cheap (flights are a quarter of the ones to/from Italy), everyone speaks English fluently, and rules are fairly relaxed around drinking, gambling, and weed. Which is a pity, because Valletta and Mdina are really cool cities, they just cannot handle the sheer volume of people they get. Gozo, one of the nearby islands (and home to Ġgantija, the oldest free-standing structure in the world except maybe for one in Turkey) has a bit more breathing room, but not enough to offset the main island.

I mean just look at this place. It would be great if it weren't for all the people...

Sicily

Our introduction to Sicily started with a sunrise breakfast in Marzamemi, a hamlet1 on the south coast just up the road from the ferry terminal at Portopalo. To get to said sunrise breakfast meant a 2am departure from our hotel in Malta (gross), but we were rewarded with a fantastic granita, a sort of cross between sorbet and gelato, served with brioche and your espresso drink of choice. It was the first of several small villages and rural stops that were the main highlights of the trip. Highlights included an herb farm, an agriturismo with a friendly donkey named Sophia, and lunch literally at someone's house on the slopes of Mt. Etna.

It's been a pretty universal experience for me that the small villages and towns of Europe are more interesting and memorable than the cities. It's not that the cities are bad, per se, it's just when you've traveled enough, the city rhythms tend to feel the same; they have different "bits" as David Mitchell puts it, but at the end of the day you're visiting yet another city. Meanwhile, getting out and hanging out with the locals in a small town is always a little bit different, even if you're only there for lunch. The same was true on Malta: Valletta was overwhelming, but our visit to the tiny town of Mqabba and dinner in (one of) the town's music halls was one of the best parts of our time there.

Unlike Malta, though, we had a great time in the cities of Sicily. We worked our way north along the east coast of the island. We got a day up the side of Mt. Etna, which we also timed perfectly--the mountain erupted just last week. Further day trips took us to Scicli, Modica, and Siracusa, the latter of which was absolutely wonderful (thank goodness there was not a cruise ship in the harbor!). We got a boat tour around Ortigia Island and probably had the best meal we had in Sicily on the waterfront: a whole sea bass and an absolute mountain of mussels.

Speaking of food, one thing that was surprising was the general "that was fine" result of most of our Sicilian meals. We never had a bad meal, and we had some superb ones at the herb garden and agriturismo, but we sort of came to Sicily expecting to have our minds blown by the restaurant scene. What we actually found was the dishes that showcased simple, local ingredients were superb: fresh seafood, citrus salad, olive oil and local bread. But the moment you went to something more complex you would find yourself eating something you could expect to find in any generic Italian restaurant in the US. I don't think our experience reflects poorly on the Sicilian restaurateurs; I think it just goes to show how intrinsic to American food culture the Italian-American communities are that I still feel like the best Italian food2 I've had is here in the US.

The first half of our trip we were based in Ragusa, a cliffside city in southern Sicily. Ragusa Ibla, the lower half of the city, mostly survived the great Sicilian earthquake, and is a gorgeous baroque center mostly missed by the bulk of tourists. I couldn't tell you why, but I wasn't complaining--it was a great place to wander around and explore. The views over the gorge from the hotel were gorgeous, jasmine and citrus were blooming and smelled divine, and the locals were friendly and welcoming. The second half we were in Taormina, which is definitely more tourist-focused (it felt a lot like a ski village) but the balance was better for the most part. The main road would get crowded but it seemed to ebb and flow in a much more natural pattern than in Malta, and it was easy enough to escape to somewhere quiet if you did get overwhelmed. We didn't manage to take the cable car down to the water, but it's really a tiny regret from a wonderful Mediterranean leg.

World Cup

I've been watching the early stages of the World Cup much more actively than I have in the past. We watched the South Africa - Mexico opener in a pub in Cambridge, and several of the group stage matches at my uncle's and friends' houses. Since we've been back, plenty of work has taken place sitting on the couch with the TV on.

I am an England supporter, have been my whole life. Following the English national team is traditionally an exercise in disappointment. On paper they are always legendary, but when they show up they phone it in, too nervous or cocky to bring the same energy they bring to their club teams. So imagine my astonishment when they actually showed up to play against Croatia in their opener. Of course, they immediately brought back some good old-fashioned English insipidness against Ghana (much credit to the Ghanaian defense, which was rock-solid throughout), and have been up and down in their last few games. The Three Lions should beat Mexico but I would not at all be surprised to see it go the other way.

The US look better than I've seen. I could see them making it to the winner of Spain - Portugal; they're playing dynamic soccer and look dangerous on attack. They've felt both sides of the new VAR rules: the second goal vs Australia was allowed because apparently when three people crash the net only the person who actually touches the ball is "in the play"3; and then Balogun got sent off after a bad-but-clearly-unintentional tackle. If it weren't for their heinous kit I might actually be excited to watch them.

Rather than "diluting the tournament," going up to 48 teams has made it exciting as hell. The less-prestigious teams have come with something to prove and the top teams have underestimated them at their own peril. Curaçao took a goal off Germany and held it down against Ecuador. Cabo Verde held Spain and Uruguay to a draw and went toe-to-toe with Argentina for 120 minutes. Scrappy underdogs have nothing to lose and everything to prove, and it just makes everything better when the favorites have to contend with that chaotic energy.

World Building

I have not been doing much blogging, or much writing in general, but I have managed to do a bit of fiction and world-building here and there. A few pieces have come out of it, mostly exercises from The 3 A.M. Writing Epiphany and some wiki-style documentation on a world I've had floating around in my head for over a decade. The pieces themselves I might post here, or at least the ones that compose entire units unto themselves. I don't particularly mind the fact they're bad--when it comes to fiction I am extremely rusty; it's been just under a decade since I finished my screenplay and apart from a couple of NaNoWriMo (RIP) attempts, my creative juices have mostly flown to game dev efforts. I just don't particularly relish dropping fragments into the online sphere--things here should be done, even if they aren't done well. It's a fairly low bar to clear, even if I haven't cleared it all that often.

My most recent efforts were reinvigorated part by a couple of D&D/world-building content creators YouTube decided to recommend to me in March. The first, The Grainbound, is a channel dedicated to world building via systems: economic and physical laws, cultural and political forces driven by incentives as much as beliefs. It can be a little dry at times, but if you're a fan of "History from Below" approaches or more structural/systematic lenses, his discussions are well worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/7whHXsOO9_Y?rel=0

The second one, Mystic Arts, is actually a D&D/TTRPG channel I stumbled across while researching story structure documents. From the DM's point of view, however, world building and writing are the core tasks, so I found it super useful in my own stuff, not just in D&D. It did inspire the assembly of a D&D group as an added bonus; we've been going pretty consistently, though picking things back up while everyone is traveling has been a challenge--it's hard to run an after-work game when you're six hours ahead of everyone else!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hnr6Mr1436M?rel=0

Despite the challenges of travel and work, spending a bit more time with my fiction is something I'd like to pick up a bit more in the second half of the year. The main trick is going to be prioritizing things and setting concrete goals. Writing for me is always a constant tension between feeling like I should be writing for its own sake and lacking any sort of deadline or accountability to drive the engine. Perhaps I will organize something to fill the void that NaNoWriMo's collapse has left. Perhaps there's even a small "progress bar" ATProto project in there as well...

My second-favorite municipality type after "thorp"

Yes, Sicilians generally identify as Sicilian before Italian, but I think my point is only stronger if I think their local restaurants are struggling to compete with Tuscan-American restaurants...

He says, rolling his eyes so hard you can hear them