Not Amsterdam. Not Düsseldorf. It's Ochtrup.

OK, back to the recent travel recap! To review: the time is August 16 - about a month ago - and the place is Ochtrup, Germany. It isn't a place the lady and I would normally visit but we have friends who live there. That's not to say it isn't worth visiting: the area is authentically pastoral and rich in distinct agricultural character (i.e., hay hotels, which I will discuss later).

Downtown Ochtrup.

A flyer for the Schützenfest. I'm told it is a critical element of the local social (read: drinking) calendar.

Through a mirror, darkly, but only because it was a bit overcast.

Ochtrup isn't far from the border with the Netherlands, so it's also not far from the border city of Enschede. This city is famous for a fireworks warehouse explosion nearly 15 years ago but we primarily went there for the large outdoor market and the curious sensation of seeing all the road signs switch over from German to Dutch with little notice. It doesn't help that stop signs in the Netherlands stay STOP on them.

The market at Enschede. I'm not sure what those twisty metal structures are but the birds sure like them.

The lady finds her Backfisch. This market had more fresh fish than you could shake a squid at.

Here's some of that fish!

It's not all seafood. There are also buttons.

Also present: fries, the potato kind. They're just called patat, giving the impression you will be sold an entire potato.

Not shown: that evening, which I spent drinking with some delightful old ladies. They do enjoy their schnapps and bolle (the latter is primarily sparkling wine with fruit in it, much like sangria).

The next morning was time for a visit to the Ferienhof Laurenz. It's a working farm with a restaurant, accommodations (including the aforementioned hay hotel, which is essentially a hay loft one can legally sleep in), gift shop, and friendly animals. After an excellent brunch, we visited all those attractions, but mostly the animals. Farm tourism is a force of nature in Germany to an extent that's difficult to describe, but if you've ever visited Lancaster, PA then imagine that area's tourism strategy without its dependence upon religious minorities but with a greater emphasis on an ambiguous rural way of life.*

The brunch room. It's ready for Pinterest. Observe the many eggs.

This cow is artificial.

Do not assume the cow is alive.

It's authentic! We would have purchased gourds but they're easier to get at home and difficult to get through Customs.

It's the Hay Hotel! It sleeps 40.

Hello there, goat. If you look closely, you can observe my reflection in the goat's eye.

It wasn't the right time of day for the Biergarten.

We stopped at the Dreiländersee after brunch. It's a popular lake, especially with camping tourists, though it's quite small - if it was any larger, it would be in the Netherlands (or Saxony, at least).

You can't quite See it yet.

Aha, there it is. The Dreiländersee, that is.

Next time: it rains quite a bit and we take a train back to the lowlands.

Bonus photo: Dutch home goods.

*I think this may be referred to as Hofleben in more than a few places, at least in the context of a Bauernhof (a farmstead). Hofleben looks like it can also mean "court life". Either way, your current lifestyle is likely not one of Hofleben.

It's been interesting to see the new features getting added to Google Now since I traded in Apple for Android more than a year ago. Some of the features, like traffic and weather updates, are genuinely useful. Others are less useful to me but are innocuous: my phone tracks any stock ticker I search for, even when I search for an acronym which is coincidentally listed on the NASDAQ. A few issues irritate me enough for a complaint-heavy blog entry:

1. Flight updates. I'm still getting updates about flights I took weeks ago. On other occasions, notifications have contained incorrect flight times or have referred to the previous day's flight. These updates are misleading and distracting.
2. Automatic directions. Ostensibly, this feature exists to grab directions to places where you want to go. In practice, it provides me with directions to every restaurant and attraction I've googled in the past day. Even worse, if I drive out of the state, Google Now starts suggesting trips to every now-local place I've visited in the last year. Some of those directions may be useful but they're difficult to extract from the list of false positives and routes I already know well. To make matters worse, Now tries to assign names to locations but usually can't guess if they're gas stations or office complexes (usually, they are neither). A street address would be just fine!
3. Limited customization. The Google "cards" aesthetic is one that trades in minimalism. It works best when images are bold and lists are short. This is hard to accomplish when Now becomes a list of New Content Available. The problem could be easily solved with a single setting to control how many different items a card can hold, but the whole system is Apple-like in its planned simplicity. 

That being said, I like the overall Now concept, even if it's still reminding me about events in Amsterdam I couldn't see without a rather expensive plane ticket.

Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of beauty,
Namely, it isn't as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night every
time you neglected to do your duty;
You didn't get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;
You didn't slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,
Let's all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round of unwritten letters is on me.

- a snippet of Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man by Ogden Nash

Slay the beasts

Here's a nice thing to try the next time you're feeling overwhelmed, just like the feeling I've had a touch of lately, as with most Septembers:

1. Grab a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle of it.
2. List 8 to 10 of the projects requiring your attention on the right side of the page. List them in the order they come to mind. No job is too small! If it's a pressing concern, it belongs on the page, whether it'll take an hour or a solid week to get done. If you can't think of that many tasks, write what you're planning to have for dinner instead.
3. Pick out three of those tasks as the Most Pressing. These aren't the most important or immediate tasks - you're not making an Eisenhower Matrix here - but they're the biggest stressors. Circle them, star them, number them, or highlight them in neon and gold. These tasks are in your sights now.
4. Pick out a time to work on these tasks. Here's the fun part: you should choose a time when you wouldn't normally work on such a thing, but the total elapsed working time can be as short as you'd like. You have three tasks to focus on, so you can even break them up into This Evening, Tomorrow Morning, and Tomorrow Evening. Write that time on the left side of the paper next to each of the three tasks. Then, when that time arrives, get to work! Even a five-minute interval is fine if you use it to organize and record your thoughts about a project.
5. Repeat as necessary!

The goal here is not to use this activity as a task manager. Rather, it's intended to provide reminders about the work we're focusing on, how we feel about it, and how eminently feasible it is. It's far too easy for even the smallest projects to grow into mythical beasts when left to roam through the recesses of our minds. Remaining aware of the work keeps it in perspective.

I've never really found a single time-management strategy which balanced the immediacy of day-to-day responsibilities with the Sisyphean toil of long-term projects. That balance is especially difficult to manage in academic environments. Between unruly faculty schedules, unpredictable experiments, and students who really ought to ask for extra help, even minor projects can rapidly evolve into Minotaurs. The existing time-management philosophies usually go just half-way. Structured Procrastination is one example: it seeks a similar stress-management objective to what I've mentioned above but exists in the minefield between "don't sweat the small stuff" and "my ambivalence has alienated everyone around me". Professional philosophers may find this method ideal. I find it difficult to implement.

Though, to be fair, everything's procrastination when there's something else you should be doing. Perhaps the key is just to trust that you'll get that Something Else done in time, and that you should be doing what you're doing now.

The music for today is Wintersleep - Astronaut because it has been stuck in my head all morning.

This song has always caused me to picture a heated, ideologically-questionable barroom debate, perhaps between opponents who are only preachers and astronauts in appearance and demeanor.

Not Amsterdam. It's Düsseldorf.

The lady and I got into Essen with flexible plans. They looked much like this:

• Visit friends
• Visit Düsseldorf
• Find sushi
• Visit Ochtrup* 

The first step was in progress by Friday so we started in on the second. That's the easy part - it's just a short train ride from Essen. The third may seem surprising if you're unaware of Düsseldorf's large Japanese population and selection of all-you-can-eat sushi places. They're high-quality and quite inexpensive. They're also quite popular as our first choice was far too busy to ever have a table ready. Luckily, there was a great alternative not far away (the rain had finally caught up with us, so we didn't feel like searching for long). It's an atmospheric, classically German city, especially if you don't mind Nordrhein-Westphalia serving as the representative of the whole country.

In Essen, waiting for the right train.

In Düsseldorf. You can tell because they sell gazpacho in bottles (don't believe me about that - it's a novel thing to do in most places).

There's that rain again.

"What's Beef Burgers". There isn't a question mark so I don't think it's interrogative.

This building may be competing with Philadelphia's Comcast Center for the title of Most Sinister-Looking Tower.

We made it to the Rhein and had some Spaghetti-Eis (not shown, but it looks like this).

The trees by the river had managed to survive all the recent volatile weather.

The Oberkasseler Brücke. It's technically the oldest bridge in the city if you ignore how it was rebuilt in the 1970's.

Looking out at the river to see where it's going today.

Back to Essen and to this wonderful place. 

Next time: To Ochtrup.

*What's an Ochtrup, you ask? It's a small town. It's right here. They make ceramic whistles there called "nightingales". They don't look like birds but they sound like them (the ceramics, not the people of Ochtrup).

Amsterdam - Day Three. Also a bit of Essen.

One wall at the de Hoek is papered with exotic foreign currencies.

We began at the Koffehuis de Hoek and pancakes. Pancakes with raisins, apple, and bacon, to be specific. It's quite cozy and supposedly very Dutch in a difficult-to-define way.

The proprietor is also named Harry. He's had the place for 50 years, at least according to these photos.

Not shown: boat captains who may or may not have been drunk, an entire tour group, and the nearby Heineken Experience.

We followed this Authentic Experience with the requisite Amsterdam canal tour. I'm usually skeptical of guided tours as they can seem hackneyed. This tour was enjoyable, especially as it's the only way to see a number of local fixtures (oddly-angled buildings, concrete houseboats, and the inner workings of the lock system) without renting a boat or illegally swimming around in the canals.

My Heineken Experience is usually disappointment and regret about ordering a Heineken.

Theft-proofing, I presume.

An exemplary façade.

Out on the IJ. The wavy building is the EYE Film Institute. It's called that because IJ and Eye are phonetically similar. The nearby tower was once owned by Royal Dutch Shell but is now being redeveloped into offices and entertainment space.

The top of the NEMO science museum, looming.

The Montelbaanstoren. The prerecorded tour stated that the tower's bells don't ring on an exact schedule.

Have I mentioned how nice the Amsterdam city logo is? Here it is on the side of a tram platform. It's ubiquitous yet simple and recognizable.

We went shopping for some lunch - Marks and Spencer sandwiches - and made our way up to the train station.*

An ICE to Germany.

The atmospheric platform in Essen.

The eventual destination: Essen, or more specifically some friends' apartment. They're great people.

The next day: rain and the fight for sushi.


*We had left our luggage in station lockers, a precious commodity. Don't count on their availability should you plan a visit.

A recent piece on Medium compared e-mail to cockroaches in an effort to explain its longevity:

Email is a way to bypass the crowded room for something more intimate. When everything else is parading naked through the living room of your mind, email is politely waiting outside for a personal invitation. This is both good and bad when you’re trying to connect with the person on the other side of the door. They open it, or they don’t.

I'm not going to muse about how accurate this comparison might be, but I am going to use it as justification for one of my most prominent pet peeves: email without humanity. If email is truly best when it's a personal message, the worst offense a sender can commit is to fail to identify themselves. Here's an example: I recently got an email from my local recycling organization containing only the following text.

Good Afternoon

Which apt do you live in @ [my street address, spelled incorrectly]

I had requested some additional recycling bins, so this wasn't totally unexpected. The greeting is nice, but still, where's all the context? I can only suspect this message was written by a real, living human because the email address had the usual first initial plus last name format.

Even worse, some senders work under the pretense of a single organizational identity. This means they sign their emails with phrases like "Office Assistant" rather than any useful identifier. In short, they dehumanize themselves.

Email may offer convenient intimacy (at least, far more than whatever modern social networking provides) but this implied intimacy highlights situations where it's completely disregarded. Yes, I'm complaining about a decades-old form of communication. Yes, I'm venting. Even so, there's a lesson to be learned here: any medium of communication can lose its unique benefits without the right context.

Amsterdam - Day two, part two

There's that museum again.

The Rijksmuseum contains all manner of Dutch treasures, collections of artifacts which just happened to show up in the Netherlands, and an interpretive series titled Art Is Therapy. The last of these took the form of Post-it-styled notes stuck near some of the exhibits. Rather than just offering more information about the piece, each note asked probing questions about the feelings the piece may evoke or the relationship between art and a balanced life. This is a seethingly negative review from The Guardian. Invert that opinion and you have mine.*

This is where they keep the Rembrants, the Vermeers, and the like. That's the Night Watch at the end of the hall.

Pieces by the Golden Age Dutch painters often make me think of the group scenes used to promote TV shows with ensemble casts. Compare:

The cast of Law and Order: SVU.

The Meagre Company by Frans Hals and Pieter Codde, finished 1636.

Neither of those assemblages is Rembrandt's Night Watch, seen below.

It's difficult to get close.

Most museum patrons were busily attempting to photograph the whole thing. It's a challenge.

It's easy to understand the painting's popularity. It's rich in personality and fancy dress. It evokes an age and an aesthetic while leaving most contextual details (namely, whether this citizens' militia ever really had to post like that during their nightly patrols**) to the imagination.

The remainder of the Rijksmuseum contains items like 17th century dollhouses and exotic firearms.

Above the atrium of the Rijksmuseum.

The entranceway of the Rijksmuseum.

We followed the museum visit with a traditional Dutch dinner at The Pantry. It was quite respectable for its location in the middle of a tourist district (that is, just a block or so from both a McDonald's and a Hard Rock Cafe). In this context, "traditional Dutch" means meatballs and mashed potatoes, also known as stamppot. It goes nicely with a tasty Tripel.

Searching for dinner. Many choice's were available so we weighed our option's. 

Finally: a visit to the BeerTemple! D. was here on a previous Amsterdam visit and enjoyed its extensive variety of beer offerings, especially as she prefers sour Belgian styles over the ales commonly found in the US. On this visit, the Temple featured a multitude of the palest ales. That isn't D.'s cup of tea so she had an UWE cider instead. I had a Mikkeller Peter, Pale and Mary and a Brewdog Clown King. The former is a calm pale ale but the latter is a bare-fisted punch in the nose (in a good way, I think).

Not shown - several empty cases of Weyerbacher Blithering Idiot.

The lady considers the cider.

A bonus church panorama courtesy of Google. Their photo-stitching algorithms do not account for passing streetcars.

Next time: breakfast, boats, and trains.

*I'd like to think there's room for banality in an institution based around placing objects on pedestals, often literally.
**Let's imagine that they did spend the bulk of each night in dramatic poses but found it embarrassing to be painted while doing anything other than standing or banqueting.

The music for today is
El Ten Eleven - Tiger Tiger

Amsterdam - Day two, part one

Amsterdam supposedly contains more specialty museums than any other city on the planet. It's a believable claim, if only because the city has a long history of global trade. It's a natural place for strange collections to accumulate and there's no shortage of room to display it all. Specialty museums in Amsterdam include:

• The Museum of Bags and Purses
• The Funeral Museum
• The Cheese Museum
• The Cat Cabinet

Of these, we only visited the last. I'll get to that one later. 

Amsterdam is certainly more famous for its art museums, including the modern collection of the Stedelijk Museum and the definitively Dutch Rijksmuseum.

The Stedelijk is smooth and white, like a seafaring Apple store.

The Opera House peeks over a nearby wall. There's a supermarket under all that (the black structure, not the Opera House, at least as far as I can tell).

I don't generally take many photographs in museums as it leaves me feeling a bit silly. It's like recording the sound of someone eating soup.* This stairwell at the Stedelijk contains a neon installation by Dan Flavin.

We took a museum break to picnic in the Vondelpark. That's an artificial swan.

Picnic fixin's.

The cheese is from goats. The berry is from straw.

The lady D. enjoying the park.

The Museumplein, the Rijksmuseum, and a kid in a bike lane. Get away from there, kid!

Next time: Dutch Masters. No, really, you'll see them.

*Or maybe dancing about architecture. 

Amsterdam - Day one

The wife* and I arrived in Amsterdam on the second Tuesday of this month. Why Amsterdam? It may be the easiest city to visit across all of Western Europe. We didn't know that when we were first making travel plans, but we did know we had friends in nearby areas of Germany and could visit them easily in the same trip.**

We stayed at the Qbic. It's almost unbelievably convenient, sitting right at the end of an 8 minute ride from the airport. The rooms aren't easy to take photos of.

Perhaps we could have opened the curtains.

It's a bit like staying in a compact RV parked in a new neighborhood brunch place you've been willing to visit for a week or two but you've just been too intimidated by the colored neon and eclectic decor. That's a good thing here - it's a fun place to stay!

Plane delays left us with limited time for museum visits so we explored the local neighborhood. South Amsterdam (Zuid) is bucolic and distant from the noisy attractions of the central city neighborhoods. We found some parks to explore instead.

These stone lions guard the Beatrixpark.

The lions aren't very vigilant.

Yarn-bombed canals. They aren't all like that yet.

Not far away from the last photo, two stately balconies overlook the canal.

Having successfully explored the South, we found noodles at Wagamama.***

The next day and the next post: Masters of the Dutch Arts!

*She doesn't really like being referred to as "the wife." I just asked her and she expressed a preference for the phrase "my lady." I'll refer to her as D instead.

**Many of the times when I would mention traveling to Amsterdam to colleagues and acquaintances, they'd ask me if I was going there for the marijuana. I wasn't and we didn't. The popular connection between Amsterdam and weed is a unique one, though it will be interesting to see how that changes as more areas legalize consuming the stuff.

***There are US locations of this noodle-centric establishment but they are all in Massachusetts.

I am back from Europe and will be discussing my trip over the next week or so! This will include photos, my opinions on how Dutch sounds to the naïve American ear, and possibly a few thoughts about the Robocop remake.

In lieu of any of that, here is the music for today (Loscil - Dub for Cascadia).

I am in Europe (specifically Amsterdam, at the moment) for the time being. Photos will be posted either soon or upon my return to the States.

The Rosetta probe mission is an exciting one. It was launched in 2004 with the intention to orbit and land on a comet (specifically, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko). In the meantime, it's passed by Mars and a few of the stranger asteroids we've studied, grabbing some great photos in the process. It's orbiting the comet now. Take a look at the new photos. For reference, the comet is only about two and a half miles long.

See also: the entire trip.

This is the music for today. August in Virginia makes one feel like an escaping cave ghost.