Trains and other means of transportation (pure Hannah post)

It's Christmas time! Sometimes you can't tell though.

While other times, you can!

Because it's Christmas time, Hannah and I got to take a ride with our friends Torsten and Linda on the Nikolauszug! It is an old-fashioned steam-powered train that takes you on a loop around Munich starting from just nearby our house at the Ostbahnhof. Hannah loved it (but Linda didn't):

We saw lots of train-related stuff... Like train tracks!

Hannah loves trains. But she also loves bikes. Especially her own bike.

Her very favourite means of transportation, however, is her Mom.

Oh ya, she also still likes her Thule Running Stroller (even though she hasn't experienced any running propulsion of it in several months).

She also stands now, if you can believe it.

Traveling in shopping carts can also be fun (maybe you can't tell how much fun here though)...

But her favourite thing of all is reading books, preferably in my spot.

The End.

Munich 1/2 Marathon 2016 Race Report

I don't think any of us imagined that it would happen, but here it is: the Munich 1/2 Marathon 2016 Race Report. Also: two blogs in one night. If you were able to get through the previous one (actually, given how "blog posts" show up in general, and since I'm doing this post like literally right after writing the other one, this one will show up "first" (i.e. ahead of the other one from tonight) and so maybe you're actually reading this one first and maybe don't even know about the other one yet), you might have (spoiler alert: maybe read the other one first if what I just described happened to you) noticed some kind of underlying theme of "you never know what might happen" and here's proof: two blogs in one night.

It turns out that everything we thought we knew about training was wrong. Nearly two months ago, on Sunday October 9th, 2016, I ran in the Munich 1/2 Marathon. Poor Sandi and I were once at the pinnacle of our sport. We had crafted a sort of aura of a reputation or personality or whatever as sports-people that were always off running or sports-doing and being in shape and all that stuff. We worked hard to develop such a persona and it felt good and it was nice to have that as a part of my identity. But life happens, man, and you not only have a kid which is already way out there but further your kid is also in some ways German or Bavarian or whatever. I mean, obviously she's Canadian and will speak English but she'll always have been born in Munich in this mansion in the English Garden and actually that's pretty cool in my personal opinion. But all that is totally beside the point and if I were one to edit my posts to try to make them succinct then the total number of words published on this site would in all likelihood be about 90% (at least) less. However, as you no doubt are well aware, I'm often more going for volume -- and really, is there anything wrong with that? Anyways, the real point was that we stopped having time to work out and we got fat.

But I did something very clever. Now, normally I'm a humble man (somewhat embarrassing but required clarification-based side note here: when you go to verify all of the claims that are made in this post, you'll inevitably end up at this URL: http://muenchen.r.mikatiming.de/2016/?content=detail&fpid=search&pid=search&idp=9999991020521D0000147AC2&lang=EN&event=MHM&search%5Bname%5D=Darling&search%5Bnation%5D=%25&search_sort=name&search_event=MHM [and so I might as well just share it with you here to save you the effort] and you'll probably notice that my participant name is "Dr. William Darling" and then you'll say to yourself [out loud] "well that's not very humble at all. In fact, he seems a bit of a smug asshole and I bet he's one of those people who when the pilot announces 'is anyone on this plane a doctor?' that he buzzes the stewardess to let them know he's here and he's ready to help" and I guess that would be fair [prima facie]. However, when you fill these things out in Germany [at least I think it's a German thing] it tells you to choose what your title is and according to my work colleague [who come to think of it might have made the whole thing up to cover up his particular arrogance] told me that you're lying if you don't choose Dr if by definition you have the god damn doctoral degree. Let's just forget the whole thing, shall we?), but in this case I think you'll have to agree that it was clever. I knew that the whole running and cycling and swimming and all that would completely and utterly just totally fall apart and crash with the arrival of our Bavarian baby. I knew it. And so to make sure that we could somehow eventually start to break out of it, I signed Sandi up for a race. You probably remember (at least I think I remember writing about it) that she did the Tegernseelauf in September and she was registered for said race because I registered her.

So, since she did the Tegernsee, it only made sense that I would do a race too. Once you're registered for something, you're kind of bound to make good on participating in said race and when it's some minimum distance long enough, then you're forced to put in a little bit of training if you want any chance of completing it (registering for a 10 K wouldn't do because anyone could do that without training, you're just apt to be slow and be in a lot of pain [cf. this year's Oktoberfestlauf]). Put all this together and you see that I registered for the Munich 1/2 (like I did in 2015 just before Hannah's arrival and as we both [we being me and Sandi] did just after arriving in Munich way back in 2013). But, though the plan worked to get us running a little bit, I still only ended up running starting a few weeks before the race, and not that much, and not that fast.

And here's where we get to the point of discovering that everything we thought we knew about running training being wrong. You see, the conventional wisdom goes that you need to run a lot and you need to run fast to properly prepare for a race (i.e. to do well in it). But here I did my least preparation ever and had the least amount of running (and cycling and swimming) in the year before the race and... I did my best ever. How about that.

Let's hope that same principle applies for Ironman because I sure don't think I'll be able to be doing any training any time soon.........

Hallelujah

Ah Fukuyama. Ah 1992. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. But just when we think things are turning out one way they go the other. Why, just the other day I calculated that for 370 out of 370 days in a row baby Helga had never once taken a single step and I was thus convinced that she would crawl for the rest of her natural life. Imagine my shock, then, when, after literally hundreds of days of enforcing the proof that it would never happen, she shocked everyone and decided to take some steps (while pushing a table for now, but we all know exactly where this is headed). Last night I fêted our American brethren's Thanksgiving sans family due to Helga's latest Krippe-backed illness and I weeped not just for the turkey's loss of life, but for the psychological pain that was inflicted upon him as each day that the farmer fed him he became more and more convinced that he was his friend. No one could have predicted that, on the day where he had been more sure than ever that the farmer was his friend, he would pick that day to behead him and send him to our Thanksgiving table. What a world it sometimes is.

Advent begins this weekend. Our fourth in Germany. I've written of the Christmas Markets here in Munich, most notably in two highly contrasting posts. The first, unsurprisingly (unsurprisingly only in the context of the bad viewpoint being first, i.e. not unsurprisingly at a broader level like I would be saying "obviously such a thing would be met with this reaction"), met them with derision ("contemptuous mockery", if you will), while the more recent described them in a more shining light. It likely all comes down to the fact that you can get used to nearly anything. One could probably even come to like Toronto if you were forced to live there for long enough (though there must be limits to this particular psychological phenomenon).

"William, need easy appies [sic] for a party?". Such was the subject-line of an e-mail I just received. Sometimes the world is very depressing.

Almost anything can become normal. Living in Germany (of all places), for instance. Drinking coffee. Having pain. Talking to a computer. Taking care of a baby. Advertising referring to frozen processed food as "appies". All kinds of things, is what I'm saying. But I guess you already knew that. Unless you're very young. And that's not impossible because even very young people now can read anything they want. It's actually more exceptional for a twelve year old child to not have a smartphone than the other way around. As LC might say, I've seen the future baby, it is murder.

And so I leave you with the immortal (German) words of LC. Stay crazy, friends.

Ich tat mein Bestes, es war nicht viel
ich konnte nicht fuehlen, also versuchte ich zu beruehren
Ich hab die Wahrheit gesagt, bin nicht gekommen, um dir was vorzumachen
Und obwohl
alles schief lief
werde ich vor dem Herrn des Liedes stehen
mit nichts auf meinen Lippen als einem Hallelujah

Anyone still out there?

If my calculations are correct, it's now been nine million, four hundred and twelve thousand, seven hundred and eleven days since the last update to this blog. It makes sense though, because there used to be things to write about (more or less) but for the last bazillion years approximately, not much has happened. Today is little Helga's first birthday which is pretty crazy, but in all those days since she was born I've only slept a total of seven minutes. That could help to partially explain any discrepancies between what's written here and reality. So, since the number of posts this year is down six thousand percent, here is a recap of the main things that have happened around here lately in the off-chance that you feel left out of the loop, as it were. Note that if it's on the list, it happened a minimum 400 times:

1. Helga cried a whole bunch
2. I got balder
3. I slept less than the night before
4. I was stressed at work
5. We spent all of our extra money on some baby product scam
6. Helga got sick
7. I bought a book but then didn't have time to read it
8. It rained
9. There was some situation that took place in German and I pretended to understand but had no clue what was going on in the hopes that it couldn't have been that important to actually understand and then much later on something bad happened that was directly related to me not understanding what happened during that original situation
10. We thought we might have a lead on a new apartment but then it didn't work out
11. We ran out of coffee beans at the worst possible time
12. Kevin broke something of ours
13. Our landlord came up with a new fee, rent increase, tax, or other mechanism by which we lost more money to him
14. I had a nightmare about clowns
15. I got a lower back injury
16. Joelle mentioned that we need to clean the house or run some errand
17. Helga narrowly missed electrocution while chewing on a cable
18. We made plans to go out with the neighbours that eventually fell through
19. My colleagues and I planned a Friday wine-tasting afternoon that was their idea and then they cancelled for some reason at the last minute (remember each of these items has happened multiple times)
20. We took Helga to the doctor

I guess that's about it for the standard stuff. Other one-time things did happen like the Munich Half-Marathon that I'll have to write a "race report" about some time (ya right) and we went to the Schliersee in the Alps for the weekend a few weeks ago which is about when I wrecked my back (ok, so that didn't happen multiple times but the pain from it has presented itself so to speak multiple times -- i.e. every day since then, so that's what I meant by its inclusion on the above list) but besides that it was a nice trip.

What happened in Sweden

Here it is, as it was, when it happened. Sarah, the young and beautiful godly Saint Princess of Love, Hope, and Summertime Dreams that she is, decided to spend a week of her vacation with us (of all people) in the almost vicinity of the Arctic Circle. She would arrive via Reykjavik (as you do) to slightly north of Stockholm at 6 AM or some other most-unholy hour around there. And so, because she is the godly Saint Princess of Child Care, Apples, and Endurance Sports, we thought we shouldn't leave her unattended for too long in a scary Northern European airport and so we scheduled our flight from nearby Munich to arrive as early as Lufthansa allows: 10 AM (for a departure time from Monaco di Baviera [sic] of 8 AM). I will spare you the required mathematics, but that roughly translates to leaving our apartment at 5:15 AM and waking up at 3:15 AM, and when you haven't had any time to prepare for your trip and you have a child and you're pretty much useless as a parent and as a trip-packer, that means you're going-to-bed time is around 3:30 AM. And if you're trying to calculate how much sleep we might have gotten with such a setup, don't bother dusting off your calculator because I've got your back again: it's less than zero.

So, after inverse-last-minute packing (what that means is that we so ran out of time and were in such danger of missing our flight that we actually didn't finish packing and when we returned home safely nearly two weeks later we found half-eaten peaches evolving into emerald mold cities on our kitchen table and three small structure fires that had somehow been burning ever since we left the oven on with toast inside pre-departure, and (worst of all), I didn't have time to setup my automatic watering machine so both (1) all of our plants died; and (2) I missed the window to patent the AWM for this quarter because I wasn't able to perform a proper field test and will now have to wait 2 more years (again)), we were finally out the door racing as fast as we could [question from the audience: what did you eat for breakfast? answer: get him out of here; he obviously hasn't been paying attention] to the local S-bahn station. We arrived, bought tickets (miraculously -- but which brings up a side story of the MVV overcharging us over the course of several weeks [months or years probably] and a vigorous lawsuit will surely follow but all of that is for another post at another time), and after a terrible mishap involving stress and not eating and all that which nearly derailed (ha!) our plans on getting on to the train, we were airport-bound at last.

Who flies first thing in the morning in mid-August on a Thursday? Nobody, right? Wrong! Every man, woman, child, dog, and elephant seemed to be occupying the various lines at Franz Josef Terminal 2 and an already untenable situation looked to be poised to get a whole lot worse. However, our tall, handsome, trustworthy, and knowledgeable (and German) friend Torsten had passed on to us an important secret but one day earlier (side note 3 [or so]: yes, if you've been paying attention and you generally notice things like this, you're probably wondering why/how we saw said friend on the previous day when we could/should have been packing! Well aren't you the observer/back-seat-driver-equivalent! Right, while we should have been packing not only did we meet Torsten the Bavarian (he's not though) for lunch, but we also went running first thing in the morning and then met up with Hannah's good friend Amélie (who's actually a Bavarian -- but with a French name) at the local outdoor swimming pool. I also went to the German equivalent of Costco and bought Hannah a dirndl for some reason.): so (we're talking about the airport check-in secret in case you got lost during that interlude) the secret is that Lufthansa has a special "family check-in" area. We didn't really find it but we found a "group" check-in area while looking for the family check-in area and though we were only 3 the empty group check-in area allowed us to make use of their services most likely because they thought Hannah was just so cute.

Finally, airborne. Hannah cried and cried and cried. I think she was apprehensive about meeting her aunt Sarah again because I'd said so many nice things about her and so she was probably feeling some jealousy (just a guess, remember) but when we finally arrived in Stockholm (well, just north of it remember) and beautiful, fit, super intelligent, classy, strong, young, etc Sarah was there to meet us, Hannah calmed right down and started smiling away at AS [Aunt Sarah in case you're not keeping up]. We took a horrible airport bus to the car rental office some 3 or 4 hundred Swedish miles down the roadway (estimate) and entered the Avis office. Fun little twist of events: the computers were down! This was kind of fun because we had to write up everything with a pencil and those old white-yellow-pink paper pads where what you write on the top copy gets copied to the other two pages and they just had to trust me that I really did make a car rental reservation several weeks back. We got our white VW Polo, unpacked Hannah's car seat which had survived the journey, strapped her into the back, and we were off to Ludvika to Linda's (not Sandi's Mom and not Torsten's daughter but Thony's soon-to-be wife) parents' place where we would spend this first Swedish night. Three or four hours passed and we arrived at an enormous whale of a house overlooking a pristine Swedish lake. Naturally, Thony had given us the wrong address (but we noticed their dog on the front lawn of what seemed to be the way-down-the-street neighbors but was actually the right house) and also wasn't there when we showed up but his brother- and sister-in-law were (Linda's brother and Linda's brother's wife). They warmly welcomed us to the Swedish North, provided us with sun protection and snowsuits and snowshoes and beaver pelts, and brewed a pot of coffee.

At this cottage-like-mansion Hannah discovered her new love: small dogs. She chased around Bobby (Thony and Linda's tiny little dog) and while she did so laughed and screeched and grabbed at that poor dog like nothing you've ever seen before. When Thony and Linda finally showed their faces thousands millions of hours later, we drank more coffee, then a little more (this is Sweden after all), we cleared some snow from the front porch so that Hannah would be able to keep crawling around, and we started to discuss dinner plans. Wow! What a truly enormous nightmare. Here are some highlights: 

"do you want pizza or thai?"
"doesn't matter to us"
"but please, you're the guests, you choose"
"ok, pizza"
"oh, but what about chinese?"
"ok sure -- as we said, anything is fine with us"
"ok -- chinese -- but choose the dishes you want"
[... 20-30 minutes pass ...]
[different person]: "do you guys want thai?"
"umm... sure"
[... 20-30 minutes pass ...]
"ok the pizza is here!"

Those Swedes. After dinner it was time to put Hannah to bed. We lucked out and had the, I guess, "mezzanine" complete with couch, king-sized air mattress, and spot for setting up Hannah's portable bed (aka her tent). We cranked up the mountain-river white-noise and sent Hannah to the dream world. Our whole contingent (wonderful Sarah and Sandi, angelic baby Hannah, and sleep-deprived-monster extraordinaire me) was beat and so we set up camp (literally for Hannah) and went to sleep at the more-or-less acceptable hour of 8 PM. Since we were on the mezzanine which sits directly above the open-concept living room / kitchen, we were then violently awoken two or so hours later when the party started downstairs. About 20 blonde adults drinking and enthusiastically conversing (i.e. yelling) in Swedish down below. There was no use in imagining that you might sleep so I threw on something somewhat appropriate and went downstairs to join the party. We laughed, cried, and reminisced for many an hour and, as per usual these days, finally went to sleep just as Hannah's unconscious mind was starting to get the idea that now would be as great a time as any to begin the protracted waking-up process for another day...

The next morning the house was bustling. First on the agenda was the choice of either (1) a "body-pump" class; (2) an ab/core class; or (3) both of the above, run by Linda at a local sports club (note: this wasn't as out-of-the-ordinary as it might appear because Linda works in a fitness studio [not this one though] and does these classes all the time, I guess; second note: I'd always kind of wondered (especially during the body-pump class that I attended) how Linda was so coordinated and like-a-dancer. Well, we found out at the wedding (the next day) that in fact Linda not only grew up dancing but at one point was the Swedish National Champion in a particular Swedish dance of which I presently forget the name). Sarah the Goddess of not only Endurance Sports and many other things but also of being tough and fit in general naturally chose option (3) and thanks to Baby Hannah Sandi and I had the excuse of only being able to choose (1) or (2) and so I took (1) while Sandi took care of BH and she took (2) while I did the same. After vigorously destroying my leg, arm, shoulder, back, etc. muscles in class (1), showering, preparing all of our stuff (dismantling Hannah's tent, etc.), we then set out for the ~1 hour drive to the weekend wedding venue. It was a similar idea as the infamous Kit-Tim wedding of 2015 where all would live together for a weekend of matrimonial celebrations in the wilderness. Since we have a baby, however, we got to be in the "hotel" instead of one of the public 8-person cabins. I say "hotel" extremely lightly, however, both in a good and a bad way: the good is that the "hotel" room is also at the venue so you're never far from any of the action -- even at night, and the bad is that the "hotel" room is about the size of a standard broom closet. For 3 adults. Plus a baby. I shouldn't complain because I recognize fully how lucky we are that we got to attend a nice wedding in Sweden, we could afford to fly there, etc, etc, etc, but this 4-meter-square room which somehow squeezed in 3 single beds (2 of which were in the "bunk-bed" configuration) and a baby crib (I've been in larger prison cells -- much larger) cost over a hundred euros PER PERSON, PER NIGHT. Ah well. All's well that ends well as they say, and one day when this is all over maybe it will feel like things are well again...

Night one of the Swedish wilderness wedding extravaganza entailed, as you can imagine -- especially if you were lucky enough to have participated in the Tit-Kim wedding and paid attention when above I noticed that there were striking similarities in the two setups -- a BBQ feast. Sausages and beer. Tasty. Since Hannah has made me SO scared of being hung over because she can smell from minimum six nautical miles away when you're tired or not feeling well and craftily without fail chooses those moments to wake up the earliest, I am extremely hesitant and literally fearful of having any more than 2 beers at basically any given night. I wasn't about to let my guard down now and so following two beers and a shit-load (give or take) of sausages and potato salad (where are we? Bavaria?) I snuck off to bed (Sandi quite wisely has the same fear as I do and she had ducked off even before me). Wonderful all-knowing goddess of light, the universe, compassion, wisdom, and everything Sarah came along as well and we all settled in for a very cramped but hopefully long-ish sleep.

Hannah didn't disappoint and woke around 5 AM. But Sandi, who was proving to be quite the Saint/Goddess/Queen/etc as well, scooped up little Baby Hannah and took her for a long walk in the woods. Peaceful Sarah and I mercifully slept another 1.5 hours or so before their return. Another happening of the previous night involved Peter, the father of the Groom. Peter suggested that instead of partaking in the morning wedding Yoga (organized and ran by the bride), we should instead meet at 7:30 AM for a swift run around the lake. I for some reason agreed to this farce and, being a man of my word, (and after first lying in bed hoping that Peter would be a little too hung over to show up but then I heard him outside of our prison cell chatting to another wedding guest and my hopes were dashed) I showed up outside in my running duds (bright orange shoes, bright orange t-shirt, old gym shorts which I thankfully packed as pajamas since I'd somehow forgotten my real running shorts) and we were off to run the perimeter. Now, if you're imagining Peter to be some kind of "Dad figure" à la, let's say, Peter Mansbridge or umm... Philip Banks (from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fame) then you'd be mistaken. Peter is an elite athlete who moonlights as a coach for the Stockholm Road Runners Club. He (probably) holds the nationwide half-marathon record and was most likely at some point an Olympic hurdler and I hear he once killed a bear with his own hands in his attempts at winning Marika's love (though he was eventually successful in winning said love the bear killing turned out to have hurt his chances quite a bit at the time). We were spat out of the resort/campground/whatever like a rocket ship and I was chasing Peter up and down northern Swedish hills as fast as my legs could carry me. When we finally arrived back (and after completing our final km at a sub-4:00/km pace) I promptly showered and lay on my tiny bed to have a small nap (thank you Sarah and Sandi!).

Next on the agenda was the wedding ceremony itself, held at a small church in a nearby town. Fair-skinned, intelligent, talented, young, and modest Sarah took care of Hannah while Sandi and I changed into our Swedish Trachten and drove to said nearby town. We (obviously) sat on the wrong side of the church, but made friends with some lovely Swedes who explained to Sandi that there would be a surprise sing-along for the girls that was a surprise for Thony (remember this was a real church, btw). The ceremony got started and for nearly 30 seconds it looked like it might be a wedding like any other. Then the first song happened. Thony's long-haired rock star friend spent a few minutes making sure his PRS electric guitar and Marshall amplifier were properly setup, and then delved into a near-Ben-Harper-worthy version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah but -- wait for it -- the Swedish translated version! Epic. I didn't yet notice a tear in the priest's eye, but I felt some uneasy energy emanating from the more traditional religiosities in the room (side note: this was the youngest wedding I'd ever been to. Besides both Thony and Linda's parents, there were no "adults" there unless you count us as adults which would be unwise and pretty weird to say the least). Then Thony took the guitar and sang a song to Linda. I don't remember the song but it was some Swedish pop song (main important point to notice: it most definitely wasn't a church song). I guess his song was supposed to be some kind of surprise for Linda, and then she had her own surprise in store when her friend (if I remember correctly) started singing some other Swedish pop song and then at the appropriate moment all of the females in the room (church) were supposed to stand up and join in on the chorus (which was conveniently printed out for them in case they didn't know the song). If you've ever even met Sandi once in your entire life, then you know that this is not the kind of thing that she's wont to participate in. But she at least stood up.

After Thony and Linda were magically whisked away in Linda's Dad's classic two-seater Corvette (with Linda's Dad driving [funny sight indeed]), it was back to the "resort" for the real festivities to begin. We did a quick check to make sure that baby Hannah and wonderful, patient, and (need I mention it again?) selfless Sarah were still safe and alive, and down to the waterfront we went. A Champagne toast was held and we then found our table inside. There were a variety of table configurations with different numbers of people sitting at each. Some had 6, some had 8, some had 10 or more. Ours had 4. Apparently it would have had 6 but one of the couples had to decline at the last minute due to a family emergency (do I believe this story? I suppose I'm inclined to this time). But our counterpart (in terms of couples) were great tablemates. The man was Thony's former boss (but he was still exceptionally young). The next 8 or so hours took place entirely in Swedish. There were THIRTEEN (13) speeches (all in Swedish), there were some slideshows, dancing, your typical wedding sort of brouhaha, and of course Thony's 30 minute long inebriated rambling rant of a speech. You'll recall somewhere above infra that young Hannah has inspired in me a healthy fear of intoxication and its resultant morning-after-effects and thus after nursing my wine as long as I possibly could (and when drunken Thony brought me outside with a bottle of Scotch for a serious 1:1 I actually faked some of my swigs [sorry, Thony]) and then had a single "Lametti" (Rye and Ginger Ale -- long story, law school, copyright professor, now MP representing the riding of LaSalle-Verdun, etc.) and around 2 AM (which is still astonishingly late for us) called it a night (and as full disclosure, yes, we literally snuck out because if we tried saying goodbye to anyone they would surely guilt us into staying longer -- we would see them the next day anyways).

Sunday morning and the sun is shining somewhere. But not in our dorm room (I mean luxury hotel room) because Hannah has woken hours before when that normally might happen. I feel more thankful than ever that I only had that one Lametti, the wine with dinner, and a couple swigs of the Whiskey that made it through my pantomiming (you have to take a couple of real ones or the jig is up pretty quickly), and that we peaced out as early (even though not early) as we did. Unbelievable, that Hannah. Anyways, several pots of strong Swedish brew (coffee, not beer) later we were feeling a little better and we were able to enjoy an agreeable brunch. As I was sipping from my nineteenth cup of coffee I all of a sudden noticed a blurry apparition just coming into view at the penumbra of my vision. Something appeared to be emerging from the fog-dusted lake. The sight grew larger and began coming into focus. I wiped my eyes three, four, even five times before I allowed myself to believe it. It was Thony stumbling out of his matrimonial cabin, without European Hair Product! It was a ghastly site. A male Medusa-like figure that I quickly looked away from for fear of turning into stone or much worse. I threw down my pickled herring, boiled potatoes, and lingonberry sauce, ran to my dorm room, and hid under the covers for what must have been 45 minutes. I finally collected myself, performed my daily affirmations in the tiny roll-out mirror (stored behind the bunkbed), and came out of the room ready to face my darkest fears. But, there was Thony, European Hair Product applied, part so sharp it could cut a diamond. Was it all a dream?

Everyone said their goodbyes and we loaded up the car for our next trip. This would bring us back towards Ludvika where we had rented a small Swedish cottage in the town of Grängesberg on the Södra Hörken Lake. We made a single stop in the town of Ludvika at the local pizzeria and enjoyed Kebab Pizza while we cheered on Reid Coolsaet and Eric Gillis in the Olympic Marathon (of which the latter finished in 10th place!). After our pizza lunch it was 30 more minutes to the cottage and upon arrival our collective breaths were taken away as we gazed in wonder and astonishment at the beauty of the property that lay before us (Sarah wasn't all that impressed though because she experiences a comparable beauty every time she looks in a mirror). Our host Gun (who lives about 200 metres north of our cottage) showed us around; she showed us the rooms, where to find the charcoal for the BBQ and the life jackets for the boat. She showed us all of the nice food that she had bought for us to make our stay all the more pleasant, and she let us know that she'd be right down the path if we ever needed her. First order of business? Sandi had to nap. So, baby Hannah, young clear-eyed effortlessly beautiful, affable, and whip-smart Sarah, and old fat Will got right back into the car and headed to the local grocery co-op.

Grocery stores in Sweden are fairly standard fare when it comes to your median world food dispensary. One thing that does stand out, however, is the pickled herring section (we eventually did have a pickled herring night later in the week and while it probably won't turn into my favourite meal, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared it might). Think of it as you might imagine the cheese aisle in a French grocery store, the pasta aisle in an Italian grocery store, or the gun aisle in an American grocery store. Well there's no point in me saying this now really because we didn't even buy any pickled herring (this time) so let's get back on to what's important... We bought a whole bunch of food that we would need for at least the next 12 hours or so and which cost us about 2 of my monthly salaries because we were in a Scandinavian country. One Swedish-specific food custom that I was eager to participate in is the giant Swedish Gouda cheese block. Every Swedish household contains (inter alia) the following two products in their refrigerator: caviar paste (gross) and a giant block of Swedish Gouda. Both are brought out every breakfast time for the standard Swedish morning meal of open-faced sandwiches with boiled egg, cheese, and caviar paste. The most fun thing about the giant cheese block is that every Swedish household also contains a special cheese slicer expressly designated for the single function of cutting said cheese. We got a big old block from the large selection (rivaled only by the selection of pickled herring, noted infra), and it lived up to all its promise; we had sliced Swedish cheese with the special Swedish cheese slicer (of course our cottage was equipped with three of them) for nearly all of our meals.

Back at home I created fire in the charcoal BBQ. Watching the flames rise high I marvelled at this small miracle of modern technology. Not modern in the sense of SnapChat or Facebook Location Check-In or Google Glass, but the simple ability to strike a common match and create heat for warmth, cooking, and light. After eating some delicious hamburgers and playing a few rounds of cards, we all headed off to bed. Later that night, I fell into a deep sleep and began the most vivid dream...

I'm alone walking through the woods along a narrow path. It's dark, it feels very late in the night, but it is quite warm. I at first sense, and then see, a figure approaching me on the path ahead. I can feel that perhaps I should be frightened but strangely I'm not. The figure comes closer and I can now see that it's Sarah. She asks me if I'm alright and I say that I am. [I have to remark at this point how interesting it is in dreams that in the current instantiation of your life there can be additional contexts such as you know that last week {in the dream} something specific happened but that's only the case in the dream]. She seems to somehow be referring to something that had happened earlier and I remember something bad happening but I can't say exactly what it was. She leads me down another path that leads up a hill to a clearing. She asks me what I think of the after-life. I start to fear that I'm dead. I say that I don't spend much time thinking about it, but when I'm pressed to do so, though I know it's irrational, I find it impossible to imagine myself "not existing". Paradise Lost, Sarah says. "Excuse me?" I ask. Milton, she says. "We know no time when we were not as now"... And then Hannah started crying and I woke up...

The next morning we all had important training runs to complete. Because Sarah is, among many others, the Goddess of Endurance Sports and Commitment to Training, she naturally had a 23 km "jog" (as she calls it) to complete which included 15 intervals and 300 sprints. She's back in around an hour or so and then Sandi and I got to go for a run together. This was really nice because we hadn't actually ran together since months before Hannah was even born. We ran up and down hills, through forests, along the lake, past another lake, etc. Beautiful nature and running country. When we arrived home Hannah was fed and bathed, lunch was ready, the house had been cleaned, and all of my laundry was done. Sarah then surprised us even more by saying "I also called the German government and cleared up that tax issue you were explaining to me last night". What a sister-in-law!

That afternoon, our wedding anniversary, after wonderful, caring, brave, amicable, courteous, exuberant Sarah and I made the drive into Ludvika to buy booze (two quick side stories: (1) Sweden's socialist framework for alcohol purchasing is even more convoluted than Ontario's [if you can believe it]. Grocery stores can sell beer but only up to a maximum of 3.5% alcohol. That means that several breweries [even outside of Sweden] make a special beer specifically for the Swedish market that has exactly this amount so that they can sell it in the grocery store. You cannot buy any other alcohol anywhere else except for in the government-run dispensaries. (2) I'm sure I mentioned a story with this funny mix-up back when we first went to Sweden for IM Kalmar 2012 but this one's fairly humorous and just happened: we asked the check-out lady at the local grocery co-op where the booze store is and she said it's in Ludvika. We asked "is it far?" She said "about 1.5 miles" and sociable sensible self-confident Sarah said "that's not so far" but I knew better and said "she means 15 km" and Sarah said "really?" and I said "ya, they're Swedish miles... 1 mile = 10 km" and the whole time we were still in front of the check-out lady and she said the sweetest words that I've ever heard: "Yes, he is right".), Thony and Family made an afternoon stop over at the cottage. What transpired next would rock the foundations of our very lives for the foreseeable future...

The visit started off innocuously enough. Siggy was playing with Baby Hannah in the living room and Thony and I were drinking a proper (> 3.5 % alc./vol.) beer on the veranda (that's posh for porch). All of a sudden he casually asked "what about doing The Cope next year?". "The Cope?" I asked. "Ya, Ironman Copenhagen..." Up until this point I wasn't even aware that an Ironman Copenhagen existed. Living in France back in 2012 we essentially had no responsibility. We drank a bottle of wine every night and I showed up to work around 10 so I'd have at least an hour at my desk before anyone else started to arrive. The biggest responsibility I had was making sure that I cleaned the used coffee grounds out of our Saeco Syntia every week or so and even that I somehow usually fell behind on by several weeks. But, when we trained for Ironman Kalmar, we still struggled to find the time to fit in the required workouts. We had almost no social life and every weekend (and weeknight after work) was dedicated to running, biking, and swimming. Now, with a real job in a serious no-nonsense country and with a baby who allows one to achieve at best 5 hours of sleep per night (on a really good night that is), there is NO way we would have time to even start think about doing another Ironman. NO. WAY. But then Thony started filling out the registration form. He's bluffing, I thought to myself. But he kept going. A few minutes later his spidered iPhone screen (like all Swedish iPhone screens) legibly read through the broken glass "Congratulations! You have successfully registered for Ironman Copenhagen 2017." Now, just because Thony registered it didn't really mean much beyond the fact that he just spent about the average person's net annual salary on the privilege to be allowed to swim, bike, and run incredulous distances for one single organized day. In fact, Thony tried a similar tactic just one year ago when he thought that registering himself for Ironman Nice would be the push that we needed to register ourselves. That one backfired on him, though, as we stood our ground and had a baby instead (see infra). This time, though, somehow we got caught up in the moment. Within minutes I was flying through the invasive registration questions (ex: "name a time when you've felt inadequate during a sexual encounter"; or "if each person were allowed one murder, who would you kill?"), and somehow arrived at the same "Congratulations!" screen that Thony's iPhone had shown a few minutes previously. Soon Sandi was in on the fun and in a matter of approximately 15 minutes, the World Triathlon Corporation (wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese conglomerate "Wanda Group") had lined its pockets with another nearly two thousand Euros in cash from one tiny little Swedish cottage.

With our registrations official, the following days became a race to get into shape as quickly as possible. We did trail runs, hill runs, interval runs, wind sprints, fartleks, LSDs (Long Slow Distances, not a PED), etc. Then sadly, and all too quickly, it was time for princess Sarah the Great (bearer of all things beautiful and divine) to leave us. However, her flight was to leave Friday morning from Stockholm at 8 AM. Our cottage, remember, was approx. 4 hours from the Stockholm airport. And she should probably arrive two hours early or so. Math? Departure from the cottage: 2 AM. NO WAY! But, this was talented, gentle, bashful, kind-spirited Sarah we were talking about. So, with a few phone calls, WhatsApp messages, and some money changing hands, we arranged the following plan: I would drive to Stockholm with Sarah (yes the one with all the great characteristics) on Thursday and we would stay with Thony's parents (who just so happen to live in Stockholm). More interesting yet, you may recall from way up the page that Peter is a coach for the Stockholm Running Club. And, on Thursday nights, the greatest running club in Scandinavia (yes, this one) has their big interval night. Sarah and I were poised to be the guests of honour...

We departed the cottage around 10 AM to leave some time in the afternoon for a short visit in the city and time enough to get back to Peter and Marika's before heading out for the big night of intervals. La prochaine partie je vais écrire en français parce que l'ambiance de Stockholm se sentait beaucoup plus continentale qu'anglais pour moi, et franchement, ça ne marcherait pas vraiment en anglais (le suédois serait bien sûr mieux mais bon...). Notre premier arrêt était le bureau de Peter qui se trouve dans un (sérieusement) hôtel. Il nous a rencontrés devant le grand bâtiment en portant son pantalon d'un vif rouge. On est monté pour prendre un café et Peter nous a expliqué comment trouver son apart et comment on pourrait atteindre le centre ville par métro (histoire intéressant: on n'avait pas même l'option d'arriver par voiture à cause du visite du vice-président des états-unis Joe Biden; le centre ville était donc complètement fermé aux voitures). A peu près un heure plus tard la belle Sarah et moi sont arrivés au centre ville du capital de la Suède. On avait un grand faim parce qu'à ce point il était déjà presque 15h. J'ai trouvé un beau pub avec une belle terrasse mais ce n'était pas assez bon pour Sarah. J'ai trouvé un autre beau restaurant mais pour Sarah c'était trop chic. On a continué comme ça pour presque trente minutes et enfin elle a décidé qu'on pourrait retourner au premier endroit. Malheureusement, quand nous sommes arrivés, évidement ils ne servaient plus un déjeuner. Alors on a continué de marcher et vers 16h on a mangé des kebabs avec frites et cola. Yummers. Et maintenant on avait un nouveau problème: l'indigestion redoutée de kebab! Avec moins de 2.5h avant "interval time" nous avons eu un grand beaucoup de digestion à compléter... Pour ça, on a fait le tour complet du centre ville de Stockholm: le palais du roi Gustav (mais malheureusement il n'habite pas vraiment là), parlement, les bâtiments du gouvernement, tous les ponts, toutes les routes, et on a même pu boire un espresso.

We arrived back chez Peter/Marika with about 10 minutes to spare before the Great Interval Night would start getting serious. I fired up the TV and was able to find the day's Vuelta a Espana tour. Chris Froome supplied me with enough motivation and drive to fight off the terrible stomach pains I was fighting with due to the previously mentioned Kebab lunch. The group met at around a quarter to 6 PM at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Stadium. The plan? Warm-up; 5 minutes at 4:15/km; 4 minutes at 4:05/km; 3 minutes at 3:55/km; 2 minutes at 3:45/km; and finally 1 minute at the golden pace of 3:30/km (note for some context: these are pretty fast times. If you can keep up with this workout you are a pretty good runner I would say. Note further, however, that when Dennis Kimetto set the current marathon world record in Berlin two years ago with a 2:02:57, he ran an entire 42.2 km at an average pace of 2:55 / km !!! That is RIDICULOUS). Anyways, so we did it, it was hard, it was fun, it was probably the hardest I'd ran in one or maybe even two years, blah blah blah. Here is what the route looked like if you're interested:

After the intervals, we cruised home in Peter's Volvo (note [authenticity not confirmed]: all Swedish families are issued a standard Volvo Station Wagon by the government) and were greeted with a massive spaghetti dinner homemade by Marika. We ate for what felt like hours and then retired to the TV room. We drank some fine Scotch to mark the end of a fine day and watched an entire 1-hour episode of some drama in Swedish even though we (obviously) (we referring to only Sarah and me (again pretty obviously)) didn't understand word one. Then it was off to bed. The funny/ironic/something-or-other thing about this trip is that in a way it could have been a nice get-away from Hannah's early-morning wake-ups. But, even though we were just leaving from Peter and Marika's place in the heart of Stockholm instead of the cottage way out in the boonies, we still had to wake up at 5 AM to make the short trip to the airport. Ah well...

After a pleasant 4-hour drive back to the Swedish Cottage, Sandi, Baby Hannah, and I relaxed and enjoyed our Swedish lifestyle for a couple more days. On our final evening we tried going into Ludvika city centre for a night on the town at the one and only "good" restaurant according to the Internet so as to both (1) finish eating a little earlier so that once we put Baby Hannah to bed we'd have some time to relax on our final night; and (2) not have dishes to do on our final night, but when we arrived, though it was technically open, it was full and the man's suggestion of trying to come back around 9:30 PM (at the time of our visit it was before 6 PM) didn't exactly fit with our possibilities. We looked all over town for another restaurant but the Internet was right: there were no other restaurants. We found a grocery store that was still open, bought some food, headed back home, had dishes, and by the time we had put Hannah to bed it was bed time for us too.

The next morning we said our goodbyes to our Swedish Cottage and our at least second-favourite Scandinavian country and boarded Lufthansa 443 which would whisk us back to reality... THE END

Worst blog ever

No you didn't mess up your counting. It really has been exactly 31 days since the last GWMD blog post. And if we're being honest with ourselves, it wasn't even much of a post. Some rubbish about amateur film making and the Spanish Civil War and probably some Hemingway thrown in just for good measure. Big surprise. The comments veered into some interesting territory touching on Jim Grant's great creation, but beyond that this website could clearly use some spicing up. Let's start with a countdown and an official proclamation.

352 days and counting. On August 20th, 2017, in Merchants' Harbour (better known today as Copenhagen), I, George Pemulis Jr., will complete an Ironman in under eleven hours! Impossible? Almost definitely. But since essentially nobody reads this blog (I know because Google Blogger provides me with detailed statistics of its readership [don't worry, nothing sinister; just things like name, age, address, household income, arrest record, blood type, childhood traumas, recordings of your last dentist visit, other innocuous things...]), I can guarantee pretty much anything I want and even though it most likely won't happen there aren't really any consequences so why not? Anyways, back to the point: Sub-eleven is what it's going to be. That means I'll have to take 90 minutes off of what I did in Kalmar 4 years ago (it will be the same weekend as IM Kalmar and so will take place on the 5 year anniversary of that particular race). No biggy. How will I accomplish such a feat? Stay tuned in the following 352 days to find out...

The Pemulis family recently returned from an extended stay in the Socialist Haven of the Kingdom of Sweden. Baby Helga learned that she really likes small dogs; we learned that Joelle's sister has become an elite athlete who has somehow managed to attain a negative body-fat percentage composition; her and I joined the TSM Running (Stockholm Running Club) official interval training program for one night and Joelle-Sister was unsuccessfully recruited to give up her Canadian passport and compete in the next World Championships for Sweden in all track-and-field events, swimming, cycling, and triathlon; thereafter I (having not been attempted-to-be-recruited) drowned my sorrows in high-priced rare Scotch whiskey with my friend Thony's parents; and Joelle learned that pickled herring comes in a multitude of flavour combinations, containers, and forms of preparation.

The P Family will shortly be receiving visitors. In circa two weeks time the brother of Joelle (let's call him Larry for now), Larry's wife (we'll call her Kara), and their daughter (Magdalena) will arrive in Munich likely expecting to be staying in our apartment. Expect a world of hurt for all involved parties. The PF can't even handle a single child running loose in this apartment, and all of a sudden we'll have two crazed fully-mobile babies, and 4 adults in a single-bedroom dwelling. During said visit, it will however be the happiest time of year here in Bavaria. Obviously I'm talking about Oktoberfest. Though I'm fairly sure they gave up on this blog along with several others somewhere around early to mid 2013, if they do happen to glance an eye at this particular entry, I have some words of advice: start training your beer drinking ability. Beer drinking ability is like any other muscle; you can make it stronger, but you have to practice. Even if Costco doesn't carry cases of Hacker-Pschorr, it will be worth your while to use the extra gas to make it to the corner of Erb and Ira Needles (or your closest liquor dispensary, wherever it may be) and prepare thyself. For Oktoberfest is coming for you, and you never know when she'll attack next. (or something)...

Races: besides the long-term Ironman Copenhagen boondoggle (we can't eat for the next month for example because we used all of our disposable income on registering for that infernal race), there are also some shorter-term races coming up on the calendar. Though things obviously died down for a while with the arrival of Baby Helga, things are now starting to pick up again. It all begins tomorrow with the Craft Women's Run here in the Munich Olympic Park. When Joelle first participated shortly after our arrival in this here city in 2013, it went by the much cooler name "Power Frau" (power woman). That year, out of 900 women, Joelle finished 10th. The next year, in 2014, things weren't quite as exciting as they got a big sponsor (I guess) and changed the name to the Craft Women's Run. But, Joelle vastly improved her placing and out of a similarly-sized field, she halved her placing from 10th down to 5th!!! If she had raced last year (didn't due to pregnancy, I believe) and if you follow the trend-line that ML methods would suggest, she would have placed 2.5th. Since she skipped last year though, we'll have to do some extrapolation from the data and say that she should finish in 1.25th position. Since we're only able to use integers though, our model suggests she'll win the whole thing. The model does not, however, correct for having a baby, missing last year's race, or not running at all for a little over a year. Getting more data tomorrow will be great for the model's future accuracy, however. Following that we have Joelle's big Tegernseelauf half-marathon on the 18th (we better figure out how we're going to get there), and then the weekend after the world-famous (at least GWMD blog-famous) Oktoberfest Run takes place. Look out competitors.

Food for thought before bed: when Erdinger removes the alcohol from their Weißbier to make Erdinger Alkoholfrei, what do they do with the alcohol?

72-hour countdown to glory and/or nothing

Hi, my name is Hakan (grandparents are Turkish). I was born and live in Madrid. In 72 hours I will be a free man for 31 days. Well, not really all that free because I will have different responsibilities than I currently have but they will be responsibilities nonetheless. Something I will not be responsible for, however, is going to work each morning (or afternoon or evening for that matter) (well, at least not my normal work). You see, in Spain there is a certain national film competition. In this particular film competition, when you win the prize for best film you get one month off from your normal job (it's targeted at hobbyist film makers). The government pays you 67% of your normal salary, you don't have to go to (regular) work, but in return you have to spend the month (or at least you're supposed to spend the month) working on turning your short (oh yeah, another thing about this film festival/competition: not only is it aimed at amateur film makers but they're (the films, I mean) meant to be "short" films, but not in the sense of purposely being "short" as in a short story where the format calls for a certain approach but more like "previews"; you make a film that can be no longer than 4 minutes and it's kind of a preview of what you would make if you had more time and budget and all that) film that won the competition (which mine did) into a longer movie, which in this case should be around 30 minutes long (note that while the initial limit of 4 minutes is not really meant to add in additional constraints that would turn the competition into a strictly "short film" competition which would attract short film makers, in the end you have to be pretty good at telling a short story and making people want more which requires some special short film techniques right there so that you will be chosen to make your longer movie but in the end the result is really to get a longer film but still not "feature length"). In addition to your government salary provided by the good King of Spain that aims to partially compensate for you not working (and therefore not getting a regular salary from your regular job that you need to take time off from so that you can devote all your time and energy to making the longer film as good as it can be), you also get a fairly substantial movie-making budget, all of which must be spent on making the movie (rule 23.4, paragraph 6 makes it pretty clear that you can't just use the budget to give yourself a big fat salary and hand in a low-budget movie): a million euros. Scary, right?

So, right now I have 3 days of my regular job left, 860,425 EUR in a special government-controlled account (it would take too much space to explain where the other ~140,000 EUR went but suffice to say that I had nothing to do with it and Felipe VI is no doubt shopping for his next pair of pants), and an empty Word document on my computer with the filename "Script.docx". The organizers of the competition (La Junta Nacional de Cine de España [JNCE]) stress that the government-subsidized time off work and the not-modest film budget are important incentives to further develop homegrown Spanish talent and associated industries in film-making in Spain. To further this aim, they also emphasize that to keep employers happy and for all sorts of other political, social, and other associated reasons that governments have to care about, the winner of said competition should not actually start filming until the one month of non-working subsidized time begins (rule 33.2.5, paragraphs 1-6, further clarified in rule 68.9). What's interesting about this is that filming is so emphasized (i.e., not my emphasis infra). What this says to me is that filming is meant to start immediately upon the start of the subsidized time (and as I've stated is around 72 hours from now). This kind of makes sense because I don't know how much you (the general reader) know about film making (admission: I don't know all that much) but 31 days to shoot, edit, and produce a 30 minute film is one tight deadline. It's probably clear what I'm getting at, but just in case I will spell it out explicitly: I have 3 days to write this script and I currently have zilch.

It will probably help to start with what my winning preview film was all about. In theory, the 30 minute film that I will make in the coming weeks is meant to be the "real" version of the preview that I submitted to the competition. If it wasn't already clear that my day job is as a contract lawyer, this will probably make it so: I've read, analyzed, and documented the correlations, connections, inconsistencies, self-referrals, outside sources, etc. of the competition's 912 pages of rules and regulations (honestly I haven't done much of my real job in quite a while despite the fact that I'm sitting at my desk and watching the 72-hour countdown right now) and I can't find anything that forces one to directly adopt what was "promised" in the preview film. I think it's understood (an unwritten rule, if you will) that that's what one does, but it's not a cold hard rule. If we look back to the framers' intents when drafting the rules and regulations of the film competition (RRFC), I think it's fairly clear that this omission was intentional. First, there are 912 pages of rules and regulations. That alone shows the meticulousness of these people. There are two distinct sections outlining how and when filming is allowed to begin. There is an entire chapter delineating the Spanish-content requirements (no more than 33% of the filming may be done outside of Spain, for instance). There are three appendices (not included in the 912 page RRFC booklet), one of which is a 1200-page dictionary of allowed terms in the script (notable omission: "euzko"). The fact that there isn't at the very least a short clause describing the plot/story requirements and how they connect to the original submission is clear evidence that there were never meant to be such requirements. So, this actually makes things a lot harder for me. Why? Because it opens up the search space incredibly. If I could only expand on the 4 minutes of my original submission then at least I would be constrained in what the 30 minutes should cover. But, alas, I must do my country proud and produce the best 30 minutes of amateur film that I am able to produce (see innate nationalism, supra in main text) and if that requires me to venture outside of what was somehow implicitly promised in my 4-minute submission, then so be it.

So, back to my original submission. I honestly think that one of the prime reasons that I emerged victoriously from the competition is that, unlike every other participant and his brother and his brother's brother, I didn't make a film about our war. One of the films was literally 4 minutes of a man sitting in an armchair reading from the scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls where Pilar describes the execution of a number of fascists in her village. Another somehow squeezes a fantasy of the war into 4 minutes with a beginning (the coup), a middle (Nationalists reaching the Northern coastline), and a fictitious end (the victory by the Republicans). Instead, I (rather cleverly I might admit, but then again the fact that it worked is a troubling conclusion for human nature and the future of the world but in hindsight may actually be something else entirely but I play this out in the following paragraph, supra) played to the undertones of nationalism in Spain (despite the understood hatred that we all have for it and its roll in our unfortunate past) by presenting a 4 minute film on the glorious 2010 World Cup win of La Furia Roja (The Red Fury [the Spanish National Football Team]). The dramatic loss to Switzerland in our first game (which would prove to be our only loss of the tournament) and the media heckling that followed. When no one believed (including the Spaniards) La Furia Roja still prevailed. And so I see my film as displaying two important levels of irony that simmer in modern Spain: (1) the only thing that film critics in Spain love more than imagining a Nationalist defeat in the Spanish Civil War is a nation coming together to embrace the love of our national football team; and (2) while we would never forgive La Furia Roja for losing the first game of the World Cup to the Swiss bankers, and we would never give up the glory that came with the winning of the World Cup, and the glory was only more glorious after having lost the first game of the tournament, we feel ashamed at the loss and would never feel grateful for the added glory, even though the glory is what we ultimately cherish. At least that's what I hope the 4 minutes managed to convey. So if I'm meant to stick with that, how does one extend it to 30 minutes?

To start, it would be nice to understand why my submission was so well received. Of the more than 10,000 (yes, ten followed by three zeroes) entries, there was a single winner and it was my 4 minute film pieced together on my girlfriend's MacBook, filmed principally on an iPhone, and also with a GoPro, and cut heavily with archive footage of the glorious summer of oh-10 and our country's sport heroes. It can't have (only) been the visuals or the editing or the score (that's movie-speak for the music, I think). And that leaves the message. So now I begin questioning myself: did it win at a so-called "shallow" level because of the affinity to the 2010 win where my country became a non-stop party for the months that followed and therefore any connection to that beautiful time (especially pre-20% youth unemployment, etc.) brings us emotionally back to that moment when all else didn't matter and we could all be happy just because of a game? Or, did the jury award my film the prize at a "deep" level, understanding the ironies I was trying to convey and (be still, my beating heart!) see my 4-minute film as art? As a social statement? Which would, of course, make me an artist. If we go down that latter road, this forces me to then ask another basic question: is this all I have to offer? Jokes? Irony? Shallow treatments of a subject that is somehow meant to be deep due to my hinting at its own shallowness? Is it because I'm afraid to deconstruct anything of importance? What's so wrong with dissecting our war? Do I hide behind shallowness and banalities and jokes (&c...) because I fear that I myself have nothing deep to convey? I'm afraid that might be it.

I recently read a Jonathan Franzen essay in the New Yorker (yes, he's big in Spain). In the essay he obviously talked about a bunch of birds but the main topic was a trip he made with his brother to Antarctica. Told by most it would have been a dull article; the daily happenings on the cruise ship full of high-income Americans paddling sea kayaks amongst antarctic icebergs. However, the story is quite dramatic due to an interleaved story about Franzen's uncle form whom he (Franzen) inherited the money required to go on this expensive trip. The uncle had all sorts of interesting (but unfortunate) things happen to him in his life. He left his wife because she had become obsessed with their daughter; his daughter died in a car accident essentially because he had left (OK, not directly because but the obvious unstated argument is that she wouldn't have been driving there if the uncle hadn't left); his wife (obviously) has a full-on mental breakdown; out of duty he comes back to care for her for the rest of his life despite his miserableness. Grim, but makes for a great story.. Or film? This got me thinking about the connection between Spain's loss to Switzerland in the first game of the World Cup 2010 (bear with me here) and Franzen's uncle (who in some ways Franzen was basically honouring by writing the essay). The uncle never would have asked for or wanted for something as terrible as his daughter's death or his wife's descent into madness. Just like Spain never would have wanted to lose any games to anyone. But, that initial loss (which we will never forgive them for, by the way) made their ultimate world champion win all the more meaningful, glorious, and important. What I'm trying to say is, maybe we need bad things to happen for even greater things to follow?

Yikes, I just re-read that last paragraph and what it seems like I'm trying to suggest sounds pretty ugly. I'll just stick with being shallow. The 30 minute video will be the same as the 4-minute submission with an additional 26 minutes of cuts to our players being "injured", crying on the pitch, being carried off the pitch, diving across the pitch in celebration after a goal, and crying in celebration as they carry the beautiful gold trophy above their heads. Hopefully someone will find some irony in there...

Love is a reciprocal torture

Or: My Trip to Munich through the eyes of Pemulis's brother, through the eyes of Pemulis, as he is imagined by the author (part 3)

It's Tuesday lunch time and we're on the Bayerische Oberlandbahn (or, BOB) heading south and slightly east of Munich to the Miesbach district of Bavaria and the Schliersee. From here our plan is to hike over an alpine mountain and end up on the other side at the well-known (from Pemulis blogland) Tegernsee. Any one of these three paths should do the trick:

As you can do doubt guess, however, (and since you know Pemulis and his luck/plans/what-have-you) the route ends up being something more like the following:

So, instead of the ~3 hour hike we expected, we ultimately complete a near-20 km hike over the course of approximately six hours. No matter, however, as Pemulis ultimately convinced me to take part in this 6-hour death march with a promise of delicious cold fresh beer at the end. And not just any beer. The world-famous Tegernseer Helles, brewed (one imagines) from the fresh crystalline waters of the Tegernsee. On broken-down heels and arches, and after several false-starts and teases of potentially arriving at the majestic brewery, finally we turn a corner and -- behold! -- the building rises before us to what must be 100 m if it's a foot. The grounds are composed of the world's largest (or at least the biggest I've ever seen) beer garden, with tables as far as the eye can see. Most importantly, hustling about with a ratio of approximately 1:3 (tables in the denominator) are probably hundreds of dirndled Bavariennes* carrying anywhere from 1 to even 8 (!!) Maßes of delicious, cold, fresh, brewed-on-premises Tegernseer Helles beer. The pain in my feet, shins, and ankles (well, not so much the ankles as I'm 95% convinced there's at least a small fracture that's developed but come on) has subsided and it's clear that the hike from hell was worth it. Our waitress arrives, we order the promised-brew and some sausages (we're still in Bavaria of course), and we wait. The wait is agonizingly long but oh so worth it. The stories are true. In Tegernsee, they brew them right.

* the thing that really gets me about English is how can one properly describe the world about him without the grammatical gender? Sure, if I say "dirndled Bavarians" it's probably fairly clear that the Bavarians clad in traditional dirndl dresses are of the female variety, but isn't it just a little smoother if I can explicitly make that clear with a gendered version of the word? How about Bavarienne, then? For now let's revert to the French: "des jolies bavaroises partout!"

{we continue next time in part 4 as Pemulis and his brother visit the BMW World after a family visit to der Sizilianer for an Italian breakfast, the heroes attend another public-viewing to cheer on the home team in the semi-finals, the whole crew gets back on the train to head to the mountains again, and much more...}