Vacation update (#2)
In the roaring darkness that was the last month, something quiet and luminous was a steady and reassuring ping on our chrono-radar for this week. We reached it, and have a few details to report. We made the trip from Bend to the outskirts of Olympia on Sunday afternoon, and on Monday afternoon we left our kids at my in-laws and retreated to a nearby hotel in Olympia. High-ceilinged room with a jacuzzi in the living room, vcr, etc. Very nice. When we checked in there were freshly baked cookies at the desk and I ate a couple. When we got to the room it turned out that Heather had somehow gotten five more. Mmm, chocolate with chocolate chunks.

So anyway, we’re in the room and we decide to not worry about dinner and have a nice evening reading and enjoying the hot-tub. We destroyed a cork trying to open a bottle of port that we’d brought with us, and after cleaning up that mess I poured us each 1/2 a glass of port strained through a wash-cloth and broke out a box of dark chocolate. We stayed in the tub for over an hour, Heather reading Wired magazine and me reading music reviews in Paste. At one point I poured myself another 1/2 glass of port. The water was merely warm, so we let some out and made it hot again… My wife has requested that I say nothing more than to dryly warn the reader against putting oneself in the situation I have just described.

[enough have been confused by this that I’ll clear a couple things up. This is not a “One time I got drunk…” story. Staying in a hot-tub too long can have an enervating effect, due to dehydration and a heightened body temperature. If, instead of drinking water while in the water, you drink something that in itself causes dehydration, you need to be extra careful. The basic result, for me, was fainting as I was trying to get out of the tub, and then getting very sick. It felt quite similar to being sick after running 5 miles in high heat and humidity during high school. If we’d owned our own hot tub, we’d have read some sort of user’s manual that would have warned us about dehydration and heat stroke. Now we know.]

The next day found a great place for pho and made the most of it. In the evening we watched two good films, In Case of Fire and Wit. The former is a light German drama about 80’s radicalism in Germany and how the lives of those radicals changed over the last 20 years. The latter is an Emma Thompson film about dealing with cancer and death. The main character (Emma) narrates the movie to the audience and is an English professor who specialized in research on John Donne. It’s a bit slow and depressing, but a film I’d definitely recommend to the patient, especially those who like John Donne. Heather and I are both. Actually, this was such a smart and moving film, you should see it. It does for cancer and chemotherapy what Dead Man Walking did for death row. Warning, you will have to bear watching Emma Thompson without hair for a couple of hours.