Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona, Spain

The travel website says
you should leave at least
half an hour to fully enjoy

the cathedral.  It has 34
chapels, a unique exterior
and interior, and it would
take me hours even to glance

over all the glorious light and
shadow, especially because
the windows were built to
make the nature of the light
change inside as the sun
moves across the sky outside,

something I would never
have noticed on my own,
because who can sit still
and watch surrounded by
all that soot-stained stonework,
imagining the raising of the
keystone and arches with

ropes and pulleys and
sweat and blood
and Plague and Inquisition
or the time it burned for
11 days and almost fell apart.

The travel website is silly
to think 30 minutes can
contain all that beauty.

It's probably a good
thing I will never go there
because I would weep
at all those tourists

who could see all
they wanted to see
(who thought they had
seen everything
there is to see)
in 30 minutes.

above the road

.
Why does the moon seem
so much larger when it hangs
above the road?
.

Did I ever post this? Because it's a couple years old . . .

I was so proud of myself.  When I left to go visit my family over the holidays, I dropped off a notice that my chronically-clogging drain was clogged again.  This time, I remembered to put away all laundry that was hanging on the rack on the back of my bathroom door.  This way, I did not have to return to my apartment and be mortified when I picked up the note the plumbing man left to say that he'd been there and fixed it and then realized that he had had to walk past all my bras to get into the tiny bathroom. 

Sometimes it's the little triumphs in life that make us happy.

U-turns/Life

The kind of day when
you miss your exit by miles
and then turn around.

Roads not there

There is massive construction on the only road that leads away from my apartment.  Massive.  The location of the actual road changes weekly, sometimes daily.  Sometimes it's closed completely.  They're rebuilding the bridge over the highway, so the location of the exits changes frequently, too.  Right now, one is at an impossible angle, and I saw a miracle: a semi perched on the embankment after failing to make an impossible left turn onto the ramp.  A couple more feet, and it would have crashed onto the highway below.

Before the snow came, people drove like idiots even when things were clearishly marked by signs and lane painting and orange barrels.  Now that the snow is here and sometimes covers the road, I am not going to be taking that road anymore.  There are far too many idiots out there with drivers' licenses, and I don't want to meet them.

Sorry, Frost.  :)

Ear-ache buddies, birthdays, family

I'm visiting my parents this week. It's warmer here and less snowy. Tonight, I am promised an ice storm. I hope it's delivered because I love the sound of ice raining down and coating everything, and I love the way everything is transformed into glazed jewelry by a really good ice storm.

My older sister, brother-in-law, and newly minted two-year-old nephew are coming tomorrow, though, so for their sakes I hope things aren't bad. The nephew is very mobile now, like a tiny, short-haired explosion. His recently acquired knowledge of how to smile for cameras (and his huge head and lack of hair) makes him strongly resemble Julius the Monkey, but I am not supposed to tell his parents that.

We're ear-ache buddies. I might have an ear infection right now, but I think he's currently free of that affliction for once. His ear tubes are doing their jobs, so he can hear now and is a hilarious chatterbox. I'm sure someone will bring up the biting incident from his preschool, so I can hear him mispronounce "bit" as "bitch." Adults are so easily entertained.

I'm seriously considering my own doctor's advice to get tubes put in my ears again before my next airplane ride. I'm a thirty-year-old woman, but I guess you never really outgrow a head that's too small. Alas. If you could somehow average my nephew's head and mine, we would both be normal-sized, and our ears would be better for it.

How's your January going so far?