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We're back! Again...

I said I might write something about our time in Houston, but I am not going to include any great detail.  Our return flight arrived Sunday morning at a few minutes past 07:00.  Our homecoming pattern varied little from our typical experience...P and C asleep in our bed before 10:00, me getting the house in order, doing some laundry, and going on a grocery run before lying down to fall asleep on the couch myself at a bit before noon.  Then we all slept until 17:00, with me moving from the couch to the bed around 15:00.  

I still feel like a greenhorn, but after ten years of living here I am getting to be a pretty experienced east/west traveller.  I won't re-describe a situation that I have described many times.  Suffice it to say that sleeping all day after a nine hour overnight west-to-east flight with a seven hour time change is the absolute dumbest thing one can do.  Yet we persist.  

After a brief consultation The P and I agreed to engage in a normal Sunday afternoon/evening routine.  Monday was a school day after all.  And that's an intentional feature of our travel plans.  If The C can arrive Sunday morning, and then attend school Monday, exhausted and badly jetlagged, our child's jetlag problem is quickly solved.  That might sound harsh, but with lots of free time and no impetus to conform to a time zone-appropriate sleep/wake schedule, such a jetlag can easily languish for the better part of a week.  See The P and I, for example.  

So we listened to some music.  The C worked on a new lego set we brought back with us.  I put on a record for The P.  It was one from her high school days which she had unearthed at her parents' house some years ago, but which had been sitting in the staging area at my mom's house, among the group of things earmarked to be transferred from North America to Europe, but which have not quite made it to the head of the line.  We always travel to Texas with an empty suitcase and return with an overfull one, usually having to make painful decisions in the last moments before departure.  

The record turned out to be a dud.  I thought it was alright, about what I expected, certainly not my style...  The title track was good.  The C, however, was quite disappointed, especially after several years of anticipation.  After hearing both sides she announced that I could go ahead and get rid of the record.  Some things just don't hold up to fond memories.  

I put dinner on the table at 18:30, and retired to the couch to read.  The  C was delighted to have "Amsterdam milk" and "Amsterdam bread" again after our two week absence.  That is a recurring experience.  At age ten, The C is mature enough to be resigned to the fact that Dutch milk tastes differently than Texas milk, and that a two euro loaf of Dutch bread, even one  baked at an in-house discount grocery store bakery, is pretty much universally superior to all but the most artisanal of breads being baked in Houston, TX.  On that last point The P completely agrees.  As for the milk thing, cows fed on Dutch grass produce milk which tastes different than that of cows fed on Texas grass.  But as a four year old, five year old, six year old visitor to Houston?  The C was having none of it.  I'm glad that part is over, though we still have to endure light sulking and the occasional half-hearted complaint.  

Everybody did their best to stick to the plan.  At 20:00 I was lying on the couch, The P was lying in bed, and The C was playing upstairs.  I had little trouble falling asleep, but I woke up at 23:30 and did no more than doze for the next couple of hours.  At 01:30, Monday, I went ahead and got up, and was up the rest of the night/morning.  That pitiful showing basically provided me with the best night's sleep in the family.  Throughout the rest of the night, and approaching dawn, The C came down several times to go to the bathroom, and The P walked up the stairs several times to check on The C, and to exhort the child to go to bed.  The P finally drifted off to sleep around 06:00.  The C never slept, just played upstairs wth the lights on all night.  

And that's not completely unprecedented.  The C has never slept on planes, even as an infant, even on these nine and ten hour back and forth flights we take.  So twenty four hours awake in transit has never been out of the ordinary for our kid.  It's also never not been both annoying to me and distressing to The P.  But I don't think The C has ever not slept at least a very little bit on our first night back.  Around 06:00 The C came downstairs, ready to start the day, excited to get back to school.  And it was going to be a long one.  

I was tempted to keep The C home.  When school began at 08:30 my ten year old had been awake since 17:00 the previous afternoon, was seven hours jetlagged, and had quite a long day ahead.  I suggested that we ride to school, with The C on my bike.  Then I would go in the classroom, explain the situation to the teacher, make sure he was cool with having The C in class, and then let him know he could give me a call if the child started to fade.  The C agreed to the plan, but didn't want to go on my bike.  I explained that it wasn't just the ride to school we were committing to here, but the forty minute ride to Sloten for gymnastics practice after school, assuming The C made it through the school day.  Unsympathetic taskmaster though I am, even I thought that was a lot.  But far be it from me to try to keep a child off a bicycle.  

The idea that a sixty year old Dutch primary school teacher would have any reservations whatsoever about having an unrested and jetlagged child in class proved to be nonsensical.  I should have predicted that.  I couldn't go straight back to bed when I got home from dropping The C off, but I did after waking The P up at 10:00 to start her day.  It was a tag team sort of affair.  I was standing outside the school building at a bit before 15:00.  The C's class came walking past, on the way back from gym, like they do on Monday afternoons at the end of the school day.  All public school buildings in Amsterdam are owned by the municipality, and space is hard to come by in the city, so schools share facilities.  The C goes to gym on Mondays in a gym connected to another primary school two blocks away.  As they walked past, to go inside and gather their bags, The C's teacher came over to me and assured me that The C had done well that day.  

Very good.  So we pedaled to Sloten for gymnastics practice.  I was home a bit before 16:00.  The P was struggling through her succession of late day back to back work calls, and getting grouchier each time she came out for a bathroom break or to make a cup of tea.  I prepared dinner, and then read/dozed on the couch until it was time to go pick up The C.  

That was the meat of this week's jetlag experience.  I picked The C up from gymnasticas at 19:30.  We were home at 20:00.  By the time The C had eaten dinner, argued with The P at the dinner table, showered, lingered in the bathroom, argued with The P again, and lingered in the bathroom some more, and then finally gone upstairs to bed, it was 21:45.  The C had been awake for more than twenty eight hours.  Lights out is typically at 20:30, but that's hard to do on a gymnastics night.  Monday night The C slept long and well.  I slept from 22:00 until 03:30 my second night in-country, and haven't gotten up any later than 05:00 any day this week.  But that's a story of far less interest and import, and one with which I will not burden you.  

And those consequences weren't really too severe, being the debt of a rather pleasant two weeks in Texas. It was our first ever family visit in the spring, our routine to date only including summer and winter visits.  The weather was much milder than I expected.  We arrived 21 April, and didn't see temperatures in the nineties (F°) until our last full day there, 6 May.  That was welcome and unexpected.  We got to huddle out on my mother's front porch one evening and watch a brief but violent thunderstorm, with thunder rattling the windows for hours after the front had blown through the city and travelled out into the gulf.  Tex-mex food is still the best, though I was disappointed to learn one weekday at noon that the Chuy's on upper Westheimer is now permanently closed.  I don't travel with even my dumphone when we visit Houston these days, and the closure ended up resulting in my first missed connection in a decade of return trips.  That's always a concern and source of mild anxiety, and of conversation.  What if there's a wreck?  What if there's extreme traffic?  What if there is some other sort of emergency?  My social life in Houston is a throwback to my youth in the eighties.  You make plans and you show up when and where you agreed.  Luckily every single person I am close-to in the world has at least one thing in common, reliability.  I don't have time for flakey people, the chronically tardy, or those who can't commit.    

I took a Greyhound bus up to Austin on our second day there.  The bus was cleaner than I expected, there were far fewer crackheads on the bus than I expected, and it reached its destination precisely on time, despite multiple lengthy traffic delays during the three hour trip.  And despite me having no sort of communication device, a friend was waiting at the bus station to pick me up, because I only roll with reliable people.  I saw Widespread Panic perform in Austin Saturday night.  I was my first time to see them in a decade, as well as my first time to see a bunch of old familiar faces in just as long.  A good time was had by all.  I lucked-into an amazing setlist, including a Driving Song>Little Wing>Driving Song encore.  I'm strongly tempted to describe our chemical intake recipe for the show, but I try to be subtle about that in this space.  I rode back to Houston with friends on Sunday.  We talked about Phish almost the entire time, a luxury and pleasure to which I have no access in Europe.  

I showed up on very short notice at the new home of friends and was treated to the best meal prepared by someone other than myself that I've had in years.  More drinks and drugs and laughter and good times.  Then they put me to bed in a child's bedroom, in an upstairs corner room of an old two story wood frame house, ceiling fan humming, with the windows open and a cool gulf breeze blowing in through the screens from the southeast.  I slept soundly, still taking in the sound of an occasional car passing in the night, and a train whistle now and then.  That's the Houston I remember.  I made plans to return the following Sunday, when their kids would be home, wthThe P and The C.

I am always treated with kindness and generosity during our visits home, but the hospitality on display in Texas this visit was epic.  

I don't know if this will be typical for spring visits moving forward, or if it was just dumb luck, but I had the opportunity to see two other musical performances while we were there.  Mid-week our first week there I saw Ween perform at an outdoor amphitheater with the Houston skyline in the background.  Once again I was surrounded by a dozen awesome people, some of whom I had not seen in a few years.  Once again I just walked into the venue.  Once again I had various consumables thrust at me from every direction all night long.  My middle aged people in Texas are living the good life, and their generosity knows no bounds.  

Our first week there ended with The P and I going out for the evening to see Leo Kottke perform at Heights Theater.  It was still a new-ish venue when I relocated to Amsterdam, so I was pleased to get to visit it for the first time.  It is lovely and intimate, with a capacity of perhaps two hundred fifty for a seated show such as we attended.  We went at The P's suggestion.  I came home with a used Leo Kottke album a couple of years ago, and The P just fell in love with the music.  I didn't hide the fact that the only reason I have any idea who Kottke is is because of his collaborations with Mike Gordon, but I don't emphasize the fact either.  The show was great.  Kottke's stage presence is amazing.  He banters a lot, and is quite funny.  The album that we have is all instrumental acoustic guitar, so The P was surprised that he sang about half of the songs in the set.  We behaved responsibly and were back to my mom's early.  

Week two didn't feature any live music, just family, friends, and food.  The C managed to finagle at least one beef fajita taco nearly every day.  We were present to celebrate my mother's eighty fourth birthday, the first time I had been there for ten years.  We took her to a Mexican restaurant and surprised her by having them put the sombrero on her and having the whole restaurant sing.  My mother was delighted.  So was The C.  Every Texan knows what happens if you go to a Tex-Mex restaurant on your birthday.  The little European we are raising had never seen such a spectacle.  My mom had two margaritas at lunch and took a nap when we got back home.  

Saturday afternoon we were up, up, and away.  

During our time in Houston I decided to take a break from Duolingo.  I let a streak of more than 600 days go, and over a couple of weeks relinquished my place in the diamond league, and then the obsidian league.  I wasn't enjoying it, and had not been for a long time.  I was interested only in the gamification of the service, and had adjusted my daily usage to maximize experience points, at the expense of actual learning.  First it was hard work, then it was a game, and then, ultimately, it had become a chore, devoid of purpose or pleasure.  And doing my exercises on the road, at the level required to keep my place, has been an even greater chore, and that's been the case for some years now.  I thought, "This is dumb..."  And after like one day of anxiety and regret I didn't really think about it again.   

But I didn't intend to quit forever, just take some time off to enjoy our vacation.  When I fired up the Duolingo Monday morning I found myself demoted to the pearl league, which would not be a bad place to be for a casual user, and with no streak whatsoever.  And with suddenly no pressure from inside or outside, I just started doing exercises, the sort of exercises I have not done in quite some time, simple repetitive drills in French, Spanish, and Dutch, for not very many experience points.  At the end of the week I'm thinking I might even get back into proceeding with the French and Spanish courses, which I abandoned probably a couple of years ago now because the grammar was becoming challenging, and the time/xp equation just didn't work for my xp and league goals.  

Revelatory would probably be considered by most normies to be overstating the experience.  But as a long time Duolingo superuser, it feels like a big deal.  In this case gamification compelled me to use a free online service beyond the point where I was receiving any value from the service.  What was supposed to be both fun and valuable became an albatross around my neck.  A hard reset quickly changed both my perception and my perspective.  I don't know if there are parallels to be drawn for all people based on that experience, but for people like myself, those who both find tranquility in routine, and are prone to compulsive behavior, I believe there certainly are.  

I might even attempt hard resets on a couple of the other patterns in my life.  Wish me luck!  

Peace!