Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

This is the first time in a long time that I’ve been up past 2 a.m. My former job was a long hike from home, so I’d wake up at 5:45 every day and got used to going to bed at 10 p.m. After a while, it became a habit. Now I’m in D.C. while my friend’s asleep, and got into an AIM chat with my nocturnal friend Josh. The hours flew, as they always do with Josh, and here it is almost 4 a.m.

Random Pleasant Link Discovery Department: wanna visit the New York Times but don’t want them to track your viewing habits? Then generate a random ID for their site. Combine it with Privoxy and you will, as far as I can tell, defeat all the countermeasures they could ever use against this sort of tool. Privacy for all.

Really. It’s time for bed. I mean it.

I spent most of today wandering around D.C., popping into the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court along the way. I was underwhelmed: I was expecting that I could just go into the LOC’s main reading room with some random book and bask in the glow of Thomas Jefferson. Sadly not. There’s velvet rope in front of everything, and I think most of the books are strictly confined to hermetically-sealed vaults protected by rabid howler monkeys. Because I don’t think I saw a single book during my protracted wanderings around the library.

Getting a library card from the Library of Congress is also a hellish process. First, an old lady who looks exactly like a librarian takes your driver’s license, fills in two lines on a form, and sends you on to a computer lab. There, you type the same information that the old lady filled in, plus some other stuff, and they give you a six-digit code. You wait in line with that code, and give it to the nice attendant when he takes your photo. All of this so that you can not borrow books; the LOC’s stacks are all closed. Exsqueeze me? Popcorn?

I expected less from the Supreme Court, but still I think I imagined Scalia and O’Connor debating intensely in the halls over issues of legal interpretation. The Court wasn’t in session, so I took a photo of the empty chambers. All the items downstairs — like the exhibit on John Marshall — closed two minutes after I arrived. Even the café down the street closed at 4 p.m., which is a damn shame considering that it was freezing outside today; it actually snowed. I just wanted to go somewhere warm and hear a legal argument or, barring that, have some coffee. Is that too much to ask?

When I came back outside, I saw an incredibly attractive woman and snapped a photo of her. I walked behind her for a block or so, then realized that this was veering into the category of Creepy, so I walked back across the Mall to meet my friend Adam at the Smithsonian Metro stop.

Lesson from today: make better plans about how you’re going to aimlessly wander. Don’t plan it too hard, because then it’s not aimless. But have a faint idea in mind.

Lesson about D.C. generally: the historical exhibits, if they’re not outright lies, carefully dodge subtlety. The Marshall exhibit, for instance, doesn’t bother to mention Jefferson’s deep hatred of the man, and Jefferson’s general distrust of an unelected judiciary with life terms. Maybe they just did it to save space, but the overall effect is that they teach a single, monotone arc of American history, rising progressively through stages of enlightenment. There’s no room for conflict along the way, because the Founding Fathers were far too busy coining poignant witticisms. Subtlety doesn’t sell well, I guess.

Next stop: Pittsburgh. I’ll arrive there Tuesday night around 10:30. Good friends await.

I’m reporting to you live from my friend Adam’s computer in Alexandria, Virginia. It’s a very slow machine, which is why I’m so happy that I can sign into laniels.org using a text-based ssh client and do everything I need quickly. Ain’t old technology grand?

I had a great time this weekend with my friends Chris, Alisa, Rebecca and Brian in Philly: some drinking, some Eddie Izzard, some cooking, and some chilling. Very wonderful, overall.

As much as I wish I were, I’m not so good at making up fatuous justifications for speaking with strangers. (“Holy shit, you respire? So do I!”) But when the very cute woman sitting next to me on the train (“Ingrid,” as it turns out) fell asleep, I had to think of some reason to talk with her. When she woke up, I asked her whether she’d like me to wake her when we got to a particular stop. She thanked me but declined, but I met my goal: we ended up talking until the end of the ride (both of us were going to D.C.), and she waited when I got off the train so that we could keep talking. She’s dating some dude who is in Florence, Italy until May, so feh on that. But we had a nice chat. It’s like job interviews: the more of these you do, the easier it is to do them later.

I’ve also concluded that people on trains — at least east-coast trains — are just much more attractive, on average, than airplane passengers. I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s because train passengers tend to be poor college students, hence closer to my desired aesthetic. No idea. In any case, I think plane passengers tend to be overweight. I have no data to back this up, nor any reason to explain it, but it just seems to work out that way. And I’ve seen a lot of gorgeous women on trains this weekend. It kinda makes me sad that I’ll be flying from Pittsburgh on.

I’ll report more about D.C. tomorrow. Adam’s at work all day, so I’ll be wandering around town alone. With enough coffee, maybe my writing will sound like Truman Capote’s.

A few notes from the first 24 hours or so of this trip (between Boston and Philly via Amtrak):

1. Stamford, Connecticut is filled with people who either look inhuman — literally; I mean they look like caricatures — or inhumanly beautiful. This, at least, is what I conclude from their train station. I don’t know what’s happening in Stamford. I’m not sure I want to know.
2. There was a lavender-colored, lacy pair of women’s underthings laying on the tracks at some station in Connecticut, I think. I quickly looked around for a laundromat, which would explain how the underthings ended up there. No laundromats in sight. (And besides: if you were going to a laundromat, why would you go to a train station?) I think someone maybe had a more exciting train ride than I did.
3. A very energetic woman named Alicia sat down next to me and started chatting me up at the station in Providence, Rhode Island. She must have folded and refolded her newspaper 200 times between Providence and New Haven, and spoke at approximately twice my pace. She’s a really interesting woman, it seems, with all kinds of crazy stories about the restaurant industry (she’s the head chef at some restaurant in New Haven). She gave me her Hotmail address and — for reasons I can’t really discern — her password.
4. The woman in front of me kept having annoying cell-phone calls, and kept getting disconnected when her cell lost its signal. Every time she’d start talking, I’d pray for her to get cut off. It would happen every time. Either God is great, or Sprint sucks.
5. Suze Orman will melt your spine! Suze Orman is practically godlike! Suze Orman, if she believes you are a traitor to her cause, will make your life a living hell!

   More to the point, they really shouldn’t have put Suze Orman’s face on the cover of her book. And they definitely shouldn’t have scaled that face up to Gargantuan Dimensions and plastered it on posters all throughout New Jersey.

I’m about to take off on a big trip from here to Philly to D.C. to Pittsburgh to Chicago to San Francisco, then back to Burlington, Vermont and then to Boston. Three weeks or so in total, visiting more or less all my friends in the United States. I’m very excited. I’ll try to blog - and hopefully post photos — as the trip progresses.

Michael Moore is awesome. When he won the Best Documentary Oscar (for Bowling For Columbine), I leaned in toward the screen, expecting him to say something about the war. He didn’t disappoint. He brought all of the other documentary nominees up with him, then delived a little speech; to paraphrase, it said, “We’re documentarists, so we like non-fiction. We live in fictitious times, under a fictitious president fighting a war for fictitious reasons.” The audience responded with cheers and catcalls, but it was Moore’s moment.

Our first obligation in life is to live in accordance with our own principles. Michael Moore is living proof that it can be done. We may disagree with him. We may disagree with his presentation. But we cannot disagree that he is living life on his own terms, persistently bowing to no one. For that, he has nothing but my respect.

Pedro Almodóvar won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Talk To Her. Nice; it may be my favorite movie from the last year. Y Tu Mamá También was one of my top few, and was nominated for the same Oscar. I was sorry both couldn’t win.

And just to make me sad, Almodóvar had to kiss Leonor Watling — who played Alicia in Talk To Her and broke my heart for two hours — on his way to the stage. For just a moment, I thought I saw her blowing me a kiss, but it turns out she just had to sneeze.

Steve Martin closed the ceremony with the words, “I’d like to thank Stephen Spielberg, because it can’t hurt.” Gotta love Steve Martin. I don’t think he’s the best choice for an Oscar host, since his comedy depends so much on eloquent build-up. But he did a great job nonetheless.

The Oscars were actually interesting this year, because I kept expecting someone to get pissed off and storm out. After a series of obliquely or outwardly political speeches, Dustin Hoffman came out and said something like, “Oddly, we’re here to celebrate the artist” — meaning the politicization angered him. The next speaker was Barbra Streisand, who retorted with something like, “art cannot be separated from the world around it.” Little jabs, back and forth, all night. It’s wonderful that the ostensibly apolitical Oscars finally admitted that they exist in a world of blood and death, where movies needn’t always spout the “patriotic” line. I say bravo.

Now it’s time to go to bed, perchance to wake up and sit in on some law classes.

P.S.: Halle Berry is amazingly hot. Adrien Brody gave her a very long, bent-over-backwards kiss that seemed to anger Miss Berry, but they walked offstage arm-in-arm. I wonder whether the Academy stage-managed that departure to assure the world that all was well amongst the glitterati. In any case, lucky Mr. Brody.

So I definitely spent the latter half of today firing semiautomatic weapons at paper targets with Osama bin Laden on them. And I have come to a few conclusions:

1. It has been a long time since I’ve been as scared as I was while handling a semiautomatic pistol for the first time.
2. Guns and cars should never become banal. We should never forget that we’re handling an object that can kill others in an instant. We should remember in particular that a handgun’s only purpose is to put holes in another human being (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut).
3. Bearing the first two points in mind, using a gun is a really fun — hence deeply scary — affair. I want to go back and do it again, now that I have my wits and sweat under control.

We wore incredibly sound-suppressive earpieces, yet still the sound of a gun inside the shooting range was enough to make me jump — especially when the dude a few rows down from me fired his .44 Magnum. The term “hand cannon” is incredibly appropriate; it really did sound like a cannon going off. I cannot imagine the sort of damage that thing would do to a human being.

At first I was only comfortable with the .38 Special 6-shooter; somehow it makes more sense, and is less scary than the Beretta semiautomatic. I got the feeling with the Beretta that if I sneezed, I would blow a hole through the opposite wall — or myself. When using the Beretta, it was impossible not to imagine my own head exploding. I have similar feelings when driving a car: when another car approaches, I start to sweat while imagining a head-on collision.

Now I feel like a good, well-rounded liberal. To quote my friend Mike, with whom Paul, Seth and I went to the shooting range today, “How can I enjoy this? I voted for Nader!” (Just to be clear, Mike was mocking me, not stating his own voting record.) Now that I’ve gone, I’ll probably go again.

And for the record, I’m very much in favor of the Second Amendment: when your government starts to repress its people, it is your right to revolt - peacefully if possible, violently if necessary. I have long supported the right to keep and bear arms as the last defense against tyranny. Thank god Ashcroft is a gun nut.

Another shout out to some products: I really love Penguin Classics books, particularly with their new redesign. I’m reading the newly redesigned Herzog by Saul Bellow right now, and I find it just a pleasure to hold and to read. If you think about it, it’s a nontrivial task to make people want to hold your book for 400 pages, much less read it. The more I read, the more subtle I find the attributes that go into a well-designed book. Until I read Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, I didn’t even think about setting up the ratio of the book’s width to its height, but that makes a huge difference. Oddly, Bringhurst’s book isn’t the best example of that ratio being done correctly; Herzog and others in the Penguin family may be. By contrast, I can’t even pick up a Bantam paperback: the font is crap, and often seems to bleed on the poor-quality paper that they’ve chosen. And while Bantam paperbacks may fit nicely in your pocket, they’re not at all a pleasure to read.

James Grimmelmann wrote a really interesting — and, in my experience, totally true — piece about book fetishism a few years ago. Certain publishers — particularly Springer, Vintage, and Penguin — make you want to hold their books and have them on your shelves. James and I seem to agree on our choices in publishers. Fetishists unite.

This weekend has thus far proved awesome, and I expect it will continue to be through tomorrow. I left home around 2:00 yesterday afternoon, finding it beautiful outside and disheartening that I was inside. I took a nice long walk down to Davis Square, bought some ice cream (which I realize just now was the first ice-cream cone of the summer — rock!), and read a book in the park. Then I picked up the T and headed to the train station to meet some people in Salem for my friend Britta’s birthday.

I missed the 5:15 train, however, hence ended up getting to dinner 40 minutes late — and only then because my friend Paul happened to be driving by and noticed me walking along the road. As it turns out, I was perhaps a mile past where I wanted to be; had Paul not shown up, I probably would have been even later.

We got some dinner, had a good time talking (with the elephant in the room being my former employer’s recent layoffs), then headed to Marblehead to watch a former coworker perform some good covers in a cool little bar. After that, I headed to my friend Seth’s place in New Hampshire and spent the night after chatting with him until the weeish hours. (I think the actual wee hours start around 3 a.m., and I’ve lost the ability to enjoy those. I get sleepy. So Seth and I stayed up talking until the semi-wee, or quasi-wee, or “partly wee” hours.)

I had an awesome time with Seth today, bumming around Newburyport and Portsmouth. I already knew Portsmouth was cute, and now I’ve confirmed that Newburyport is as well. And they both have a rich history, about which I know very little. In general, I find that New England has a very well-hidden history that I’d like to explore.

Around 3:00, I rolled back into Boston and relaxed. And here I am, making some fettucine alfredo and planning to blow some shit up with my friends Seth, Paul, and Mike tomorrow. It should be cool.

Our friend Britta won’t be joining us: she says she got enough gun training with the East German military growing up, though she failed the grenade test. Yes, the grenade test; I’ll put that out there so people can reflect on the good fortune we had never to have fought with the Soviet bloc.

I’ve been obsessed with Italo Calvino recently, after reading his book If on a winter’s night a traveler and finding it absolutely amazing. I did a quick scan of my Website files and found that I had never professed my love for him on this site (I did, however, find a copy of Salman Rushdie’s essay “Is Nothing Sacred” laying around). So I thought I’d say a few words and let my thoughts on Calvino make their way into the æther.

If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino is a book about a guy who’s trying to find If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino. He buys the book, comes home, opens it up and finds that a large portion of it is missing. So he goes back to the bookstore, asks the bookseller if he knows about the publishing error, and discovers that the book he thought was If on a winter’s night a traveler was in fact a book by some Polish author — a book which the bookstore has in abundance. He takes the Polish book home and finds some other error, and repeats this pattern throughout the book. He’s trying desperately to find the authentic Calvino book, but instead keeps finding other stories that lead him further off the path of the real If on a winter’s night a traveler.

It’s a celebration of the act of reading — a celebration of the reader. A lot of postmodern books talk about the role of the author, but this is one of the few I’ve seen which celebrates the person for whom the author does his work. The very act of reading If on a winter’s night a traveler is joyous, because it’s honoring us even as we read.

Not only that, but it’s just a great story. Two plotlines are running simultaneously: the 10 subbooks that the mythical Reader encounters while hunting for Calvino’s book, and the Reader’s hunt itself. Both are engrossing, and the 10 substories are in themselves really interesting. Part of the plotline involving the Reader is His frustration in finding that the 10 stories all reach cliffhangers and then get cut off; that was, indeed, the feeling that this Reader experienced. Calvino knows that he can write great conventional stories, but his book is so much more than a conventional story.

Anyone who loves reading should go right out and buy Calvino’s book — if only because it’s a book about us.

I’m reading Don Quixote right now, and passed a little while ago through the section where the Don “tilts at windmills.” Now, in modern parlance, “to tilt at windmills” means “to attempt against great odds.” But in Don Quixote, it’s not as though the Don is doing anything so noble. He’s a fool who’s been so programmed by reading books of knight-errantry that he imagines the windmills to be evil giants. The important point here isn’t that he’s attempting a task of impossible odds (except maybe in his own mind), but that he’s just a fool.

I’m once again convinced that most of humanity hasn’t read most books, but quotes as though it had. I noticed the same thing with Proust, where people consistently misquote the “madeleine dipped in tea” scene as “a madeleine dipped in lime-water.” Close but no cigar: dipping the madeleine reminds him of how his aunt used to dip a madeleine in lime-water. It’s a small point, but I think it’s one more bit of evidence that the educated people of the world survive by osmosing literary knowledge from those who’ve actually read the books.

Perhaps the timing is just coincidental, but I find myself reading a lot of essays about the role of the writer when the world seems on the brink of destroying itself. Perhaps literature is the final place for man to turn when unfeeling technocrats rule his planet. If that’s the case, then maybe Salman Rushdie

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

or Gabriel García Márquez

, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.

or William Faulkner

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

can help us.

Everyone has his or her addictions (yes, I’m the pedant who insists that “everyone” sounds better as a singular pronoun): some people are addicted to sex, some to food, others to shopping, still others to alcohol or drugs. I am addicted to books.

What’s more, my book-buying habits do not yet reflect the fact that I’m unemployed. Since Sunday, I’ve bought a collection of Jonathan Swift’s satirical essays; Don Quixote; Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man and Herzog; Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (since I loved Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler); Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Gayatri Chatterjee’s Mother India. I’ve justified these to myself by the fact that I’ll soon be leaving on a cross-country trip that will involve many hours in the air and on the train. But that doesn’t really cut it, excuse-wise: even without those new books, I already had 22 unread books sitting on a stack for me to read. I basically just see a book that I want to read, and I buy it if I’m in the mood. This is no good. I’ll have to learn to stop this while I’m on the public dole. I also have to stop going into the Harvard Book Store (the best damn bookstore in the world); I hardly ever leave without a book or two.

Saturday was quite good. I got a CAT scan at 8:30 a.m. to check whether my kidneys were at all messed up. Turns out they weren’t; the doctors found nothing abnormal in them at all. In celebration, I headed down to Harvard Square, got some breakfast, picked up a book, and headed up to Davis to get coffee with my friend Bijoyini (the book I picked up was Mother India, written by her mom). We spent a few hours together, then I headed to Coolidge Corner to hang out with my friend Adam. Adam and I spent a good long while together, and I got some more books (Don Quixote in a beautiful Modern Library Classics paperback edition, and one of those wonderful cheap Dover reprints of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”). I came home (along the way discovering that the MBTA had installed a walkway between the Park Street and Downtown Crossing T stops, thereby making it so much easier to get from the green line to the orange line) and met my roommate’s mom, who appears to be just as much of a sweetie as my roommate herself is.

Now it’s Sunday, and I’m a few moments away from going to New Hampshire to hang out with my coworker Seth, his wife Stephanie, and their kids. This should be fun; Seth’s a blast, and I can only assume his family is as well.

Happy Sunday to all.

In re my friend Jon’s most recent blog entry, about unlimited cell-phone pricing: Clay Shirky wrote an article a little while ago that this reminds me of.

Basically, the whole world is moving to IP, and with good reason. Imagine a world — and it’s only a few years away — where the phone companies run IP over whatever the network-layer protocol is (CDMA, TDMA, GSM, whatever). What will differentiate one cell-phone company from another? Certainly not the devices — everyone uses Nokia or Motorola or whatever. Certainly not the network — it’ll be all IP, and all GSM under that. (Europe and Asia all use GSM, so we’ll probably move over there soon enough.)

So then, what separates the companies? Technical support, mainly. Also friendly service and price.

When you move from one city to another, you can plug any landline phone at all in, make a quick phone call, and have service going instantly. Cell phones — networks generally — will probably move that way within a few years. You should be able to move into a new house, plug your Ethernet cable in, and have broadband access. And you should be able to get an IP phone working over that without any trouble.

It’s possible that the new cell market will greatly increase competition amongst the telcos. Right now, when you set up a landline, you’re choosing amongst a few geographically restricted companies (Verizon, Pac Bell, Southwestern Bell) that are holdovers from the Ma Bell monopoly decision of the early Eighties. If the market moves to everything-over-IP, then you should be able to choose amongst every international provider from every point on the globe: if they’re all providing you the same cell service using the same network, then why couldn’t you pick British Telecom as your provider when inside the U.S.? Indeed, you’d be more or less choosing amongst all the world’s ISPs. The technology is moving in such a direction that there’s no reason why this couldn’t happen. I doubt the regulatory infrastructure will ever rise to support that kind of openness (the FCC is beholden to the U.S. telcos), but it’s a dream.

The only problem with IP phones now is that they only work over landlines, but that will have to change soon enough. The cell companies want to give you Internet access while you’re on the road, so they’re already getting you out to an IP network. Isn’t it in their best interests to go all-IP?

So to give my own wild-ass prediction in response to Jon’s: the first such unlimited-pricing phone will be an IP phone.

I felt this intense stabbing pain on the right side of my back earlier tonight, so after a while I asked my roommate to drive me to the emergency room. I went through the standard array of nurses filling out forms, telling them along the way that it felt like how people ordinarily describe kidney stones. They told me to give them a urine sample, so I did, and the nurse pointed out to me that there was a little black kidney stone at the bottom of it. I had apparently passed the stone right then.

I go back tomorrow morning for a CAT scan, but basically: it both sucked (painful) and didn’t (passed quickly). Neato, hey?

I just watched about 2/3 of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the Reich that the Nazi regime commissioned in the early 1930’s. I turned it off midway through because it just got boring: hundreds of thousands of Hitler Youth, SS, and SA in various configurations, all cheering Sieg Heil after the latest wave of speeches by Reich administrators. It was enthralling at first — indeed, captivating and horrifying; it’s been a long time since I’ve been so moved and so frightened by a film. But after a while, it turned into more and more and more (and more) of the same.

Of course the normal thoughts about the Holocaust come to mind, but they’ve all been so banalified by now that I hardly know whether to mention them. I guess the big one is this: people have a habit of confining the causes of the Holocaust to Germany, and to the Depression, and to other such localized events. But one of the big things I learned from the Holocaust and Human Behavior class I took in high school — certainly the greatest class I’ve ever taken - is that we cheapen the problem if we narrow it that much. There’s a good deal of evidence that people on the Eastern front continued killing Jews long after the cease-fire had been signed and they knew they could get away without punishment. There seems to be something inherently violent about human nature; unless we bother to think about that nature, we forget all that is important about the Holocaust.

I’m nearing the end of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, a novel by Haruki Murakami that my friends Joe and Sarah lent me. It’s a really, really good book. Salon reviews the basic plot elements better than I could, and covers the essential weirdness of the protagonist’s life quite well, though I’ll warn you that there’s something of a spoiler in there. It’s a great book, though, with an incredibly well-told story. It’s pulling me along like a fish on a line.

It’s puzzling to me, though: the title no longer seems to be available, and looks like it only ever existed in hardcover. Weird. When does a book not go to paperback?

If you can find a copy in your library, you should definitely check it out.

I had a great time with some friends last night. My friends Sarah and Joe (I wish Sarah had a Website, so that we could preserve Link Parity) took me out for drinks at The Cellar in Cambridge, where I had a nicely poured Guinness and probably the best bloody Mary I’ve ever had; you know the bloody Mary is going to kick ass when there are little floaty pieces of horseradish in it. So the drinks were great, and I like Sarah and Joe an awful lot. Life was good last night. And as an added bonus, here’s something that it took me a short while to realize: being recently laid off gets you huge sympathy points. People really want to encourage you into self-destructive behaviors. Hence: free alcohol. Bonus!

I had a dentist appointment at 9:00 this morning - I’m trying to use my former employer’s benefits before they expire — and Sarah’s and Joe’s place is very near the dentist, so I crashed in their guest bedroom after playing with their dog. They lent me a book (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami) and gave me coffee when I woke up today. I’m convinced that you will not find more gracious hosts.

Life is pretty damned awesome.