let's go shopping maybe then we'll go to a cafe ...

I thought it might be super original and cool if, because I'm going to write about going to London, that I would call this blog post "Well I just touched down in London town". I didn't in the end because when I searched for that line to see what song it was from (heard it on the radio at some point I guess), it turns out that almost every single other person in the world has used that tactic (naming their blog post or blog after that song lyric) and it wasn't original at all anymore and also I listened to the song and didn't really love it but since I still wanted to go with the idea I just took another line from the same song and it sort of in a way fit what will be the theme and so that concludes my explanation of the title.

As another prelude, I would like to point out that what follows is a true story where I have not even really embellished (or at least don't plan to as I'm writing this prelude before having written the core content of the post). No names of people, places, or companies have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty. And I'm totally serious on that.

Wednesday morning I rose early to make it to Franz Josef Strauss for my 7am takeoff to London. Had some meetings at the London office, don't ya know, and impressed them with my brilliance (ok so maybe there is a little bit of truth-stretching). Nothing too memorable to report. About 4:30 I was Kings Cross-bound for the next train to Cambridge. Thursday and Friday encompassed a training course in the Microsoft-backed functional programming language F# (pronounced like the music note) and "Data Science with F#". Good course but spent a good deal of time with a BBC live video Olympic feed window open. Thursday night after the course my colleague and I set off to find a pub that would show the Canada-Norway hockey game. It took a little longer than it should have but eventually we found the (seemingly single) pub in Cambridge that would show the game and settled in to a British meal with some ice hockey on the telly. Our table neighbour just so happened to be a fellow Canuck who had moved to Cambridge less than a week prior to this occasion and we reminisced about the frozen wastelands of the New Country as we enjoyed the disaster of "only" beating Norway by a handful of goals.

Friday after the course I was train-bound again to race back to London... to catch the next hockey game in my hotel. This one (as you know) we won a little more convincingly and after the hockey and some speed skating (if I remember correctly), I was off to meet up with my Estonian friend -- a User Experience expert -- from my halcyon days at the University of Leeds where we had a Valentine's Evening dinner date. You can't make this stuff up.

Saturday was mine to experience London Fashion Week as my flight was not scheduled to depart until 8pm. I found what the Internet coffee snobs consider to be London's finest and was thoroughly impressed. I enjoyed "fast-food" sushi near Hyde Park with one of the most multi-cultural crowds I've ever been immersed in. I tried strolling through Hyde Park but the 60+km/h wind gusts made that difficult. I browsed in some book shops and laid down a few quid here and there. Sorry this story is pretty boring but hold tight and we're getting to the good stuff soon.

Around 4pm I met up again with my friend for a snack and a drink before my Heathrow Express train to the airport and to then head back to the continent. I was a little nervous and experienced some moments of panic as I nearly missed the already "cutting things a little close" train but my rushing paid off and I was off to freedom with plenty of time to spare. Being the clever young chap that I am, I had only carry-on bags with me and sub-consciously patted myself on the back as I sauntered to the check-in machine, passport in hand. I scanned said document, input my booking reference, and was off to the rac..... what's this? "We could not process your booking. Please bring this card to the flight management desk." Weird...

I arrived to the "Flight Management Desk" which is a corner of London Heathrow that never quite made it out of the third world. Chaos reigns. There are no queues, no instructions, and panic is everywhere around you and all about. At this point I naïvely believed that this silly little misunderstanding would be quickly sorted out and I'd be on my way back to the land where 1L beers are a breakfast food. I do admit, however, that I was feeling a little bit of the butterflies as at this moment it was just past 7pm and my flight was scheduled to depart at 8.

I finally shove my way up to the counter and hand over my piece of paper. By this point I've half-figured out that this is where flight plans go to die and from conversations that I've heard around me it seems that British Airways -- that's B-R-I-T-I-S-H -space- A-I-R-W-A-Y-S -- has a keen knack for overbooking flights. The lady tells me that my flight has been overbooked and that I should go for a walk and come back to the counter in 20 minutes. I oblige, take in my BA-imposed light exercise, and return to the airport mad house corner. Every now and then you hear shouts: "Passenger Smith? Ryan Smith to Moscow? Smith to Moscow?"; "Who had Beirut? Anyone? Beirut"; "Janice!?!?!? Do you have Nice down there?"; etc. I wait another 10 minutes and by this time it would be a miracle if I made my flight. I'm jostling to get to the front when down the way I hear the tiniest whisper that -- though my mind just may be playing tricks -- sounds something like my name.

I head down the way and ask a desk-lady if she called my name. And I swear this part happened exactly as told:

Me: "I think I might have heard my name being called down here"
Her: "What's your name?"
Me: "Darling"
Her: "Seriously, what's your name?"
Me: "Seriously, it's Darling"
Her: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA...

Not very polite, especially for a Brit! Anyways, she says that she definitely didn't call that name, but a kid a couple of counters over says "I heard your name!; it was either him or her" and points down the way a little more. I go over, force my way to the front and ask if they called my name. She says "yes, sorry you didn't make it on the flight; it's overbooked". D'oh!

So this isn't really the end of the world. The first thing she says is: "do you need a hotel?" and I answer "I don't know, do I?". The answer is yes because the next flight is the next morning at 7am. So, I, along with two other women who didn't make it on to the Munich flight, get hotel vouchers, dinner vouchers, transportation vouchers, breakfast vouchers, and first-class already-checked-in boarding passes for tomorrow morning's flight. We then get ushered to another desk where it's the man who deals with compensation. Since we were supposed to arrive in Munich at 11:15 PM but instead we'll arrive the following day at 9:15 AM we are held back by 10 hours and by their calculations that comes to a cash card with a value of 250 euros. Fair enough, I guess, but I would have preferred a free flight anywhere BA travels.

Me and my new hangers-on finish up with Mr. Compensation Guy and head down to where the shuttle bus will take us to the lovely Premier Inn on Bath Road. We get to the hotel shuttle bus area and if you thought that the Flight Management Desk area was a jungle, this bus area was the Amazon. When the pandemonium greets us I jokingly (but so, so unfortunately, foreshadow-ingly) say "now watch the hotel will be overbooked"...

The bus finally comes and we, along with several other people going to several hotels all scattered around Heathrow presumably because the evil airline corporations play statistics fast and loose with our lives, hop on to a promised warm bed and warm meal at the other end. Our Premier Inn finally arrives and us 3 new buddies along with about 10-15 other people disembark. As we do so, a man that I recognize from the earlier gong show at Flight Management says to the driver "the hotel is full". I kind of hope and kind of try to convince myself (though I know it's futile) that he's joking. It's clear that he's not for a number of reasons but mostly the fact that this does not look like a man who jokes. But it seems that everyone wants to not believe it so much that we, I guess, pretend to not hear it and go to the check-in desk. The first people to step up to the desk start conversing with the hotel people and sure enough, the hotel is full. A huge family of 20 barges in front of us and a raging argument breaks out between them and the hotel staff who really can't be blamed for any of this but angry, tired, stressed people need to have someone to yell at and so right now it's them. Phone calls go back and forth between BA and the hotel, and they find another hotel for us. Amazingly, the bus driver has stuck around (even though I'm sure it wasn't in his job description) and he is happy to drive us all to the next hotel.

We arrive just after 10pm and, of course, although there are rooms for all of us, the kitchen is closed because it's after 10pm. However, the staff really (sort of) come through on this one and they put together a buffet of just pathetically awful food so that we have something. On the one hand, it's nice that they did that because I'm sure they weren't required to in any way. On the other hand, if they didn't, that same rude family that pushed their way in front of us would have bitten their heads off I'm sure if they hadn't done anything so I guess they just chose the option that looked better at the time.

I finally got to bed just after 11 and just after placing a wake-up call for 4am since the shuttle buses only come every hour that early in the morning and the later one would be too late to make the 7am flight. Things go fine, I make it home, and I think: I'm just going to get this over with and withdraw all the cash from my BA "compensation". Both fortunately and unfortunately, things work out like this: I go to the bank machine, follow the instructions they gave me, and: "transaction not authorized; contact your card issuer". SON OF A BITCH! So the reason I say fortunately and unfortunately is because this was great for the story but it would have just been awful to have this thing drag on and have to call BA and try to figure out what the F was going on. However, then I remembered that BA is British, after all, and the guy I think was just estimating when he made the conversion from pounds to euros, and either he rounded up a little too high or maybe this bank is just giving me a poor conversion rate. So, I head back to the machine, try 240... same thing. Then I try 230... Cha-Ching! So, a little less than what they told me, but in the end I'd probably do it all again for 230 smackeroos... Maybe...

How The Tannoys Eventually Achieved World Peace

Mr. Tannoy is quite pleased with himself that his little loud-speaker company -- started on the side in his college dorm room thirty years ago -- not only became his full time job years back but has now taken the lead in the ruthless hi-fi speaker market segment that in turn has made him and his wife, by extension, fabulously wealthy and in general able to satisfy any whim and/or desire that might find its way into their collective minds. The idea of kids came and went as Mrs. Tannoy was never so hot on the idea as she imagined that it would only bring back grim memories of her less than jubilant childhood when she was essentially forced, along with her younger sister, to care for her abandoned-by-husband, unfortunately disabled, and severely pain-killer-addicted mother who was a sorry case even before the abandonment and the disablement and the addiction which all happened not in that order but were all tightly coupled in a short window of time which led directly to the unfortunate childhood that now psychologically prevented her from having children of her own. This initially presented no problem of any kind to Mr. Tannoy as he was, and always had been as far back as can remember, interested primarily in three, and only three, areas: (1) building kick-ass speakers; (2) building kick-ass speakers; and (3) building kick-ass speakers. The problem is that now that his speakers are so good and so kick-ass, he has little to strive for anymore. And so he kind of wants to have some kids.

Tannoys

In the early 90's when he single-handedly invented reverse-deep-attenuating-split-frequency-light-induced-anti-modulation, the incredible increase in loud-speaker quality was so pronounced that the sheer sound was so infinitely better than any competitor for a number of years that no self-respecting audiophile could be caught dead without at least a pair of Tannoys somewhere around the house. When the competition finally had some semblance of an answer somewhere around '96, Mr. Tannoy was already well on to the next-next thing in speaker technology. When one afternoon in the Fall of 95 he stumbled in his basement lab across a little idea known as triple-attenuated-reverbial-double-split-coaxial-fibre-based-tone-boosting, it took him less than six months to turn the speaker world upside down for another time and literally obliterate any hint of competition in the high-end segment for another five years. Thanks to industrial espionage, the corrupt US patent system, and probably the Russians (though he's not 100% convinced on the latter), the competing speaker makers finally chanced upon a technology that by no means equaled but at least finally gave consumers a choice if they wanted a different aesthetic (but why would you?) the amazing kick-ass sound quality available in a Tannoy.

And so, as he had done on two previous occasions, Mr. Tannoy would again come to re-invent the world of high fidelity audio when in 2001 he invented not a new breakthrough in sound quality, but something never imagined before in home or industrial electronics: an enclosure and speaker system that was invisible and that weighed nothing. The Tannoy Phantoms* were like nothing ever seen before not only in the home-audio market, or the electronics industry, or really any other industry in recorded human history: everyone had to have a pair of Tannoy Phantoms as it solved so many problems. No cables, no space loss, no having to sacrifice the fullest sound possible because the room can't quite handle floor-to-ceilings (a speaker term), no downside at all. Well, to be fair, at first the purists weren't at all convinced. Somehow Mr. Tannoy had achieved a speaker set that was essentially invisible and took up no space at all -- of any kind -- but that still produced the best sound-reproduction product that money could buy, but a stereo system just didn't look like a proper stereo system without a beautiful pair of wood-encased Tannoys framing it. What finally convinced them (the purists, that is) was the inclusion (thought up by employee #2 at Tannoy, Mrs. Tannoy) was a Tannoy name-plate, essentially, that you put beside your stereo system to make sure that all of your guests knew exactly what kind of speakers you were sporting (it was a little strange that it took this for them to be swayed because even the least-refined trash-pop-listening-pre-teen raised on iPods and cheap earbuds could tell after a single note when Tannoys were in play because they're just such a damned good product and listening experience).

Tannoy Phantoms in front of a grey wall

And so Mr. Tannoy is pleased, but he is bored. The loud-speaker market is literally locked-up tight and most of the competition has full-on given up. While minisculaly pleasing, but ultimately somewhat depressing, Mr. Tannoy's former idols Castle Speakers have even recently thrown in the towel, laid off all of their audio engineers, and turned their UK-based factory into an indoor paint ball arena for loathsome 13-year-old boys getting rage out at birthday parties. His speakers are invisible, they take up no space, and most importantly of all to him -- what has driven his passion for loud-speakers for all of these years -- is that they sound perfect. Literally, in every sense of the word: perfect. It would be a contradiction of the laws of physics for a speaker to sound any Planck-limit-defined delta, iota, smidgen, or any of those teeny-tinily-imagined amounts better. So what more can he do, and what more is there in life?

Each day, Mr. Tannoy wakes up in his 50 million pound (weight and currency) mansion on the shore of Grasmere Lake in the Lake District of North-West England. He walks downstairs, his sensor-aware "smart"-house knows he's awake, fires up the stereo, and begins -- through the magic of pervasive-surveillance and machine learning -- to play exactly the best possible choice of music for him at that very moment to achieve a maximally-optimal state of musically-incuded happiness. The musical reproduction is A-one, of course. He sits at his kitchen table and eats his favourite breakfast: disgustingly-prepared bacon the way British people like it, along with equally disgusting brown sauce the way British people like it (though of course it's not disgusting to him because he's British if you haven't figured that out yet. Hint: his name is Mr. Tannoy). As he is enjoying his bacon and brown sauce sandwich, Mrs. Tannoy joins him. He thinks about how bored he is and how much fun it would be to either push loud-speaker quality a little further (physically impossible as we've just discussed) or maybe to raise some kids.

Just then, Mrs. Tannoy, after taking a "bite" of her morning Appletini, announces that she got over all that stuff about her childhood when she was listening to this amazing version of Cat's in the Cradle reproduced immaculately by a pair of Tannoy Phantoms in the backyard during her morning swim and so she wanted to have kids. They go upstairs, the house AI comes up with the perfectly machine-learned mood music for optimally creating a baby, and nine months later out pops little Nigel (remember, they're British). Then they live happily ever after and Nigel wants to become a sound engineer just like his famous Dad but there's really nothing left to do in sound engineering so he instead takes on the problem of over-population and disease and he cures both but then he gets bored since both those things are solved so him and his wife Kate (like most British girls born post-2010 or so she's named Kate) have kids to help them not be so bored and that kid grows up to solve the whole non-world-peace problem and then everyone's truly happy because he also came up with something that makes it impossible to ever be bored and that's called a Bicycle. It turns out it already existed but people forgot about them around the start of the 21st century because everyone became so enthralled with listening to their invisible speakers that sounded oh-so-good that they forgot that bikes existed and so no one rode them anymore and that's probably why people got so bored in the first place but if they hadn't then all this other stuff wouldn't have happened and the world would have ended because of over-population and disease and we wouldn't have bikes anyways.

* Having amassed a veritable fortune from his speaker empire and not being able to imagine a name other than the Tannoy Phantoms, when the Rolls Royce Motor Company came threatening to sue Mr. Tannoy and the rest of his 2-person conglomerate for the (as they argued) infringing use of the name "Phantom", Mr. Tannoy could do nothing but hire the highest-priced lawyers he could find and echo former President George W. Bush when he was quoted by numerous news sources as not only referring to Rolls Royce and its executives as "terrorists", but urging them and their lawyers to "bring it on". Mr. Tannoy expended many millions of pounds but eventually won the right (out of court) to go ahead with the Phantom brand name.

Ben Harper

Last summer we went to the Nice Jazz Festival both so that we had a good excuse to go to the South as per usual but more importantly to catch the best live act this side of the Atlantic: Ben Harper & Charlie Musselwhite. We saw some live music in Grenoble but not a lot; it's kind of a small place and there wasn't much to choose from (but The Cranberries did do a show at the Stade des Alpes in November 2012). Anyways, after attending said Nice Jazz Festival, it was reinforced upon us that Ben is certainly an act that's worth re-visiting. So, tabs were kept on what might be next in this aspiring artist's touring repertoire. All of a sudden, as I was surfing through www.benharper.com/tour, I noticed the name of a small city that I once called home: Grenoble! For some crazy reason, this cat is playing one of his only 4 shows in France (the other 3 are all in Paris) on this summer's European tour in that teeny tiny place where we no longer live. Craziness! So, this seemed like as good an excuse as any to arrange a trip to the old homestead, say hello to old friends and colleagues, eat a baguette or two, sneak in a Vercors mountain-summitting bike ride, and, of course, experience the thrill of another edition of one of contemporary music's hottest live acts. But then, woe is me, (as Job might say), when all seemed to be falling into place, Mr. Harper went and let all of his Grenoble show tickets sell out before we could get our grubby little fingers on a single pair of them! Total suckage. But, if you'll remember a few lines up, it is a European tour, and though we'd love to fit in all that biking and colleague-visiting, all was not lost yet. It seemed that Ben, his tour manager, and whomever else may have been involved in the decision making related to such a large-scale touring event, felt like they really wanted to see Italy this time around. Granted we've never called anywhere in Italy a home, but we have enough connections and memories there that a trip due-south of here into the promised land could involve more than simply a concert attendance. We perused the proposed Italian docket, and hit upon the perfect parameters: show in Florence, mid-May, landing on a Saturday. Can't ask for much more, right? I made the appropriate network set-ups and soon the new plan was all but assured and all that was left -- essentially -- was to mark it down in the old iCal for posterity, reminding-purposes, and next year's Christmas Card. We would stay with friends in Florence, attend the concert with them following an aperitivi at one of Florence's hipper locations, and cap off the night with a visit to the infamous night-time swimming pool as we once did in a time far removed from today (2007)

I wonder if it's still there?

Everyone was on board, the flights made sense, we could taste the Campari. But just then, something that I wouldn't have expected happened: those tickets were sold out too. Man! People must really like this guy! But we were not licked yet. When some people are knocked down in life, they stay down. If they do get up, it's only much later, and their spirit has been broken. They are weak and easily breakable now, like an Ikea wine glass. Not us, though. This experience only made us stronger and further fuelled the burning desire that we held to attend another Ben Harper concert. Come Hell or high water, we would spend an average weekly salary to push Live Nation's executives that much further into the one percent. So what did we have left? Rome? Sold out. Milan? Turin? Sold out, sold out. Geneva, Lucerne, Brussels? Sold out, sold out, sold out! But wait, what's this? Padua? THE Padua? The setting for Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew? One and the same. Could we make it there? Was there a train? Did it matter? Would I continue to ask myself questions that I would in turn answer immediately afterwards? And most importantly, were there really tickets still available? Yes, Yes, Probably, Unfortunately, and YES!

So, come Friday May 9th (if indeed we can find the right train tickets), we will set off on an epic journey from the Ostbahnhof, through the Bavarian and Italian Alps, stopping briefly in the town made famous by Romeo and Juliet (though I guess it was probably famous before then [Verona, of course]), and then slightly changing direction to continue east and little bit northwards, we will find our way to Padua (Padova), to the Gran Teatro Geox, to An Acoustic Evening with Ben Harper, and to our salvation. Amen.

Canadian Christmas Vacation 2

Pemulis has seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Speed 2, Batman & Robin, The Lost World, the Matrix sequels (if they actually existed but we're supposed to pretend that they don't), and though he's never seen Sex & the City or Sex & the City 2, he's sure that they're both terrible and that they found a way to make #2 even worse. Therefore, he knows that sequels are difficult. You should know that too.

Pemulis wakes fully rested after another luxurious 9-hour sleep in his brand new bed. If he felt any itchiness or noticed any strange rash on his side it couldn't be from bed bugs or mites that traveled through the mattress of his bed in his furnished apartment because he has his very own bed, thank you very much, and the mattress is brand new and affords him with luxurious 9-hour sleeps, and thankfully, there is no itchiness and there are no strange rashes so there is no zona, no powerful anti-viral drugs, and there are no pain killers. There's no time to swim so the no-zona thing doesn't affect that, there's no more ping pong tables around, and there are even less baguettes.

A comfortable plane ride with no screaming babies ends in record time and lands without delay between a plane-delaying decade-defining ice storm and an airport-shuttering century-defining polar vortex-induced deep freeze (cf. Le Grand Froid, but for real). Pemulis and Joelle are chauffeured home to a grandiose feast served with wine and the finest organic produce. They are warmly welcomed by the family dog Bow. Someone or something is missing, Pemulis feels, but he can't put his finger on who or what that might be. At first he thinks it might be one of the evil cats but later sees them both scurry by in a most non-evil way. He chalks the feeling up to jet lag.

Speaking of jet lag, Pemulis and Joelle simply retire at an appropriate hour and wake somewhat earlier than average to greet the glorious sunshine and circadian dysrhythmia seems to hold little sway upon their lives. Waking up early, Pemulis sits with Bow and reads about the trials and tribulations in Emma's and Matthew's lives. To hammer home the point that people never seem to learn, the protagonists again visit the high-school Christmas-time get-together but lo and behold, it actually turns out to be a lot of fun. Even LaMont makes an appearance along with Jay-R and good times are experienced by all involved.

Christmas Eve is in London and all the family is there. Presents, Rum & Egg Nog, Christmas Dinner, Bernie Nichols Wine (or was it Mark Messier?), and the World Juniors only two days away. Christmas is at CIA HQ and again all the family is there, Pemulis thinks, but things still feel somewhat awry. Who knows, there's a lot of good food and a lot of booze again so that must be it.

Pemulis makes his second annual bus trip to Toronto but sadly this time there are no young entrepreneur/philosophers to distract and enchant him to help the time go by. LaMont and Pemulis plan again for food in the hipster style but the "Singapore street fare" is a 3 hour wait (just about right to keep up the hipness factor) but that's just a little heavy on the waiting side for this night so kind-of-hip Phó it is.

Pemulis and Joelle remain in remarkable health with help from the Chartreuse monks age-old vitality elixir. It's Avril's 60th birthday and the paparazzi are out in force at Edward's on the Seine. Sporting the newest fashions from Milan and Paris, the family dines on gourmet food and fine wines while surrounded by an adoring public. There is little time for autographs but Facebook lights up that night with posts by Pemulis's fans commemorating the event.

Time goes by and all of a sudden they have a couch and Pemulis has a functioning green Brompton folding bicycle, and soon will have a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon turntable, a Rotel RA-11 amplifier, and Tannoy Mercury V1 speakers. And a bookcase. And then he'll have to move them all to some other city...

Click Bait: Three Simple Tricks that will help us get more clicks

The WMDGrenoble blog has been stuck in the high 2000's of page views for a while now and we're just not going to make it over that 3000 page view milestone if we don't start employing some tricks-of-the-trade. To begin, we will be employing some simple click-bait headline tactics. Following in the innovative footsteps of businessinsider.com, our titles will now be more along the lines of "EXCLUSIVE: Apple Has Destroyed 490,000 American Jobs" (http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-has-destroyed-american-jobs-2012-5) and cetera...

But I guess we also need some content here so here are some pictures from Christmas time. (Tell your friends! -- and click twice!)

The Darling Christmas Tree with a bunch of loot

Christmas Day at the Schmitters

Aero "Wiener" Schmitter

Happy 60th at Michael's on the Thames

Scarves

Back in Munich and drinking beer as we're supposed to...

The Tell Tale Wolf

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood.

Ba-bum. Ba-bum. BA-BUM. BA-BUM.¹ Pemulis's heart beat so hard that he felt as if his chest would explode, collapse, and turn to a most distasteful blood-and-gut strewn rubble at any moment. But he could scarcely afford to stop now. Each and every searing, nauseating breath and aching, piercing step made his now-suffocating throat singe with pain and his oxygen-deprived muscles scream in abhorrent agony. Yet still he pushed forth. It was autumn. Dusk. Enough light that when he looked up the sky still shone a navy blue, but when he looked forward and down to navigate his escape through the leaf-covered woods he could barely make out rocks, roots, crevasses, mushrooms, rats, snakes, dead branches, and other impediments and potentially lethal hazards that lay in his way. He could not afford to glance back so he put all of his power and all of his concentration into running running running as fast as his weary spent legs possibly could move him. Minutes ago fight-or-flight had set in. But it was short lived; there is no fighting a pack of scorned vengeful burning demonic wolves.

Pemulis all of a sudden remarked an agrestic cottage-like dwelling ahead and a brief and strangely smug smile came to his face. He now imagined that -- just maybe -- it was possible that he might be OK. He could hear the burning wolves² gaining on him, however, and as he rounded a corner towards beautiful safety suddenly his ankle was caught under a branch and he began to fly feverishly forward. His hands managed to break his fall but the momentum was too much and as his forehead smashed suddenly and swiftly against a rock-hard ground, the first wolf pounced. The smell of burnt flesh and cooked blood was nauseating. As the next wolf arrived, seemingly dead from its zombie-like eyes yet still ready to snap his neck in a fiery attack, he awoke with a lunging start, covered in sweat, heart beating at near 200 beats per minute. It was the nineteenth night in a row that Pemulis had dreamt the same dream.

Grenoble had begun to feel like a home for Pemulis and Joelle. After a relaxing summer on the Côte d'Azure, Pemulis had returned to work, refreshed and excited for his new position. A promotion -- including a healthy bonus -- had been offered to him in the Spring and following very little reflection -- very little was needed -- P&J made the decision to stay in the Grenoble area and start a family. With the bonus, and with thoughts of requiring more space, they purchased an old seventeenth-century farm house east of Grenoble not far from Meylan. The house itself was in fair condition following an un-charming yet decent and complete renovation some time in the last half century. Some work would be required but it was in a livable state and repairs could be made when money and time became available. There was no hurry.

The highlight for Joelle was a 2-acre yard that extended from the back porch, gently down a soft hill, to the river Isère. Very little effort would be required to turn a sizable portion of the property into a large fruit and vegetable garden. They would be happy here, she thought. On the first night after they received the keys, Pemulis came home from work early with a bottle of Champagne Marquis de Sade that he'd been saving at work. POP! As they sat down to enjoy the wine produced from some of the finest grapes in all of their adopted-country, a lone wolf could be heard howling in the distance. "Amazing," Joelle stated. "I knew that wolves had been reintroduced to the Vercors recently, but I'm shocked that you can hear them all the way out here; we really are back in the nature. We're going to love it here." A shiver tursed down Pemulis's spine.

Following another painfully restless night, Pemulis -- in a zombie-like state -- downed 2 Syntia (TM)-produced espressos and set off for work. The farmhouse was less than 2 km from the Chateau de Maupertuis that housed the ZQ(Pi) Research Centre, and Pemulis had been unhurriedly making his way to work each morning by foot. Joelle's plans for the day were to begin turning a large portion of the yard into a garden. She rinsed some dishes, found a big old straw hat to protect herself from the sun, grabbed a shovel, and set to work.

When Joelle hit the first bone, she did not think much of it. Strange, she thought, ... , what is this? The bone itself was around a foot long and could have formed the upper part of an animal's leg. She tossed the bone aside and returned to her task. After two hours of work, the outline of a garden began to emerge. Shortly before Joelle planned to take her first break of the day, her shovel struck yet another bone; this time, an even larger one. She picked up the bone and inspected it. Again it seemed that it could have been part of a fairly large animal's leg. Strangely, the bone smelled strongly of smoke and seared flesh. As she inspected it more carefully, it appeared that the bone itself was charred; the lower side was entirely covered in a crusted black soot.

When Pemulis arrived home later that day, he found Joelle shaking, sitting in a crumpled ball on the floor, in a corner of the kitchen. She'd gone mad; "wolves!", she cried! "Burning wolves back for revenge!!!". Yikes, thought Pemulis, she's clearly had a little too much to drink. And she's burned something in the oven. Smoke started to fill the room. "Joelle," he began, "what the hell's going on? You can't forget about a roast in the oven and drink yourself into a..." Just then, a pack of angry wolves burst through the front door that he had carelessly left ajar. The wolves were on fire, just as in his dreams. The wolves attacked, and quickly, Pemulis and Joelle were no more.

It was a sunny day in Grenoble just five weeks after the attack. Aurélie Bouchard received a call at the agence immobilière where she worked from a young couple. They were interested in moving out of the city to start a family. An old farm house, perhaps...

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1 Un coeur qui bat (si ce n'était pas évident).^↩
2 Oui, ils étaient vraiment en feu.^↩

EHC Red Bull München

You might have noticed: unfortunately I don't have time to / don't remember how to write. Here are some pictures though...