Almost ready

About to move. The day after tomorrow. I've been off work the last couple of days; was round the house again today painting and peeling off wallpaper. It's a great feeling, to be going to a real nice place in a nice area, with a garden and space and the works. The feeling of being out of the city (even if we're in reality in the city still), and of giving the kids something real good. Absolutely fantastic.
It does make me wonder about a few things. I didn't expect being a mortgage husband to actually make me happy :-) I'll think on that and write when I've thought it through.
And we've had a nice time in this appartment - which, as I write, (I'm surrounded by boxes and naked furniture) I'm about to leave. The good thing is, we came here with the plan to leave in two years to another bigger house of our own, and here we are - slightly under two years - fulfilling the plan.
The next stage is La Gomera. Es is going on studying, I'm moving up the greasy pole and learning, learning. And in the new house I think I can start writing again.
So who's to doubt our plans now?

Meanwhile - the World Cup continues.

England and Holland are on course for a quarter final meeting - which is a bugger, I hoped they'd meet in the final! No idea who I'll support - I probably won't know until my first cheer betrays me.
Saw Brazil-Japan this evening. Ronaldo equalled Muller's record for goals in World Cup finals. For a man who scored two goals, I think he moved less than I would in a typical 90 minutes at the office. Way fat and just dawdling around the D of the box. Yet still touches of the genius. And ten years ago, he was just awesome. An absolute flash of brilliance. I would have paid just to watch him play. And he seemed untouched and unfazed by all the adulation.

Then, the final of the 1998 World Cup, and hours before the final he had a fit. Whether epilepsy or nerves or what, is still undisclosed.
And he's never really been the same since. And what's happening now - I can't believe he's just being a fat bastard for the hell of it. He doesn't even look like he's able to train. The only reason I can imagine he's there, apart from being a genius, is for commercial reasons. Just like in the final of 1998.

World Cup

The English critics are full of venom and despair as usual.
They won their first game with a pedestrian 1-0 in severe heat. The English commentators went mostly ballistic. When the Dutch did the same the next day, it was a case of "not well played, but good result". That from the most demanding of stylists.
In England they say that the team that plays badly and still wins is the team that wins the league. So surely the same principle applies here? I can only imagine what these old patriots would have made of England's opening game draw with Uruguay back in 1966 :-)
In the last World Cups, England have lost to teams that were clarly better than them. Last time: Brazil. 1998: Argentina. 1990: Germany. This time round, only Brazil is arguably better, and their defence is very suspect. France, Holland and Argentina are in transition. Spain and Italy are real possibilities but I don't know how well they've got their shit together.
So it's amusing to watch the English veering between their magnetic poles of blind optimism and cultured cynicism. Ideally, I want the Dutch to win. England's a second choice, but it's more realistic than my first.

Sell out?

So we've fucking done it! Bought a house. Signed and delivered and got the keys today.
I always said I'd never get a mortgage. All those people who said they didn't want to get in debt, but didn't give a thought to getting in hock for a couple of hundred grand to the banks: the double standards and petit-bourgeois shit put me off. And still does.
Truth be told, the plan was move to Alkmaar, then after a couple of years buy a house, then after a few more years, move to La Gomera. So we're on track. But my secondary plan is that I expect to have the mortgage paid and sorted by that time - within 3-5 years.
Capitalism's an easy game. I have to play the game for a wee while, but I'm fucked if I'm not gonna win while I'm playing.
Then it's retire and goodbye and a whole new future causing more trouble :-)
Meanwhile I seem to be writing strategy documents for bloody Time Warner - and with the director that's pushing me to this, I don't know how far he might want to take it! It's a craic.
My responsible husband life should last less than 10 years all told I reckon.

We have an Alberto

Took a while getting his act together, but not even mid-June and here's Alberto...

later

So all the storm nuts on the net are excited about Alberto. The bad weather in the Caribbean is still growing. GFDL is forecasting a Cat 3 making landfall in Florida, which is just insane in June! For comparison, the first storm in 1992 was Andrew, which granted was the worst storm in US history between Katrina & Camille ( 2005 & 1969), and that was at the end of August!

Meanwhile, more real back to us here in Europe, the World Cup kicked off tonight. I'd forecast the opening game as a draw, which it would have been but for two amazing goals for Germany. And I'd forecast 1-0 for Ecuador over Poland: it ended 2-0 (but the second goal was offside :-) (Still, if flukey and wrongly reffed goals weren't counted, football would be truly dull!)
England, should they get through to the next round, will play one of these teams. On tonight's evidence, Ecuador look the strongest: well organized, Italian style of play. Only not very strong in attack. Strangely, they were also mostly African-descent players, when according to Wikipedia (and what I thought I knew of Ecuador), African/Slave descendants are only a tiny minority of the population (about 3%). I don't know why that is, but I'm curious.
Up there in the picture is Cristian Mora, the surprise goalie, who was either born on the 26th AUgust 1979 (FIFA) or on the 28th August 1982 (BBC). He'd nicely face-painted flags on his cheeks anyway...

Storm blog

When the kids are older and I have more money, I'm gonna go do a little storm chasing. In the meantime, I think it's important because it's the most visible indicator of Climate Change. (NB: I don't say Global Warming, as that's a misnomer. We don't actually know what the change will be, because we understand so little of the system. Similarily, we don't know what impact humans are having on the system. Which is why it's accurately called an uncontrolled experiment.)
And, primarily because of language and culture, the Atlantic Hurricane season is the one I'm most familiar with. There is, with us wanting to move to La Gomera, even the chance that we're going to be impacted by it in the future. So that's what I watch most carefully.
The first storm looks to be brewing in the West Caribbean, the place that Wilma and Stan came from last year. Which is bad news, cos the SSTs over the Gulf are much warmer than over the West Atlantic. Current forecasts are for a storm - strength unknown, of course - to hit between the Panhandle and Tampa. (The Tampa forecast is from GFS, normally one of the most reliable global models, but then yesterday it had it going into North Mexico, so that shows what we really know.)
And it's *real* fucking early for a storm with this potential to be developing.
Beautiful hot, going tropical, weather here in Northern Europe too this coming week. The only week we had like this last year was the last week in August. My birthday then - and Katrina.

Breathe

OK, so it's nearly a month since I wrote anything. Not surprising really; it was a given that I was gonna have a month or two of being very busy. Working weekends, delivering projects, etc... On top of that, buying a house.
Now kicking off the next weeks is also the World Cup, and I'm writing a couple of project outlines that are basically strategy documents for my work.
All sounds too fucking serious, too much like I've been co-opted :-)

Meanwhile... truth of some of the massacres in Iraq is starting to come to light, the Cold War with Iran continues to warm on us like a frog in a warming pan of water, the North Atlantic Hurricane Season kicked off yesterday (and yes, New Orleans is still a deserted disaster zone, though my money's on Tampa getting the big hit this year).
And on Climate Change, one of the most famous forecasters, Bill Gray, has come out saying that it's a hoax. He knows more than these number crunchers he says. "Few people know what I know. I've been in the tropics, I've flown in airplanes into storms." But the person who's taking his role as the most famous Hurricane commentator these days is Jeff Masters, who has flown Hurricane Hunter missions and is perhaps more to the side you'd expect froma site consciously called the 'Weather Underground'.
There's nonsense in the article, as you'd expect from any half-assed journalist interviewing some cranky old fucker. (And why are hurricane forecasts issued from Colorado of all places anyway?) ""It was a Category 3 hurricane," Smith says of Katrina. Not the Cat 5, at landfall, you keep hearing about." Well, nobody has ever said it was a Cat 5 at landfall. Not even in the media. Irrelevant point scoring off non-existent targets is the surest sign of the right-wing impotence theory. It's like the Creationsists going on about how "scientists are unable to explain the development of the eye". (FYI - Darwin himself was stumped by the eye, but was still confident that it was explicable by evoultuionary theory. These days it fits perfectly well within standard theory.)
The more I read of the article though, the more obvious it is that Gray's - well, basically bonkers. Your run-of-the-mill neo-con nutjob, perhaps, like a Keith Joseph or Alexander Haig,
but a few sandwiches short of a picnic nonetheless.
Here's a bit that gets progressively - but rapidly - madder...

"Smith takes an abrupt detour into the issue of endangered species. The solution is to let the private sector handle it. They should be privatized, like pets or livestock. Dogs, cats, chickens, pigs: These creatures won't ever go extinct.
I want to make sure I understand what he is saying, so I begin to ask a question: "For endangered species, people should --"
"-- own them," Smith says.
But isn't there a difference between animals that live in zoos and animals that live in the wild?
"Yes and no," Smith says. " 'Zoo' is a pejorative term that PETA has turned into an animal slavery community. A zoo is nothing more than an elaborate ark."
What's unnatural, Smith says, is wilderness. The so-called wilderness of early America used to be inhabited by Indians, and they changed their environment. "They burned down trees, they burned forests, they ran buffaloes over cliffs. They were not dancing with wolves," he says. "Wilderness is the least natural part of this planet."

Isn't that a wonderful final phrase? "Wilderness is the least natural part of this planet." This is right out of the Black-is-White school of thought.
Then the journalist got the quote that had him dreaming of Pullitzer: "Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews."
It's a good article to get an idea of the crap involved in the debate. There's an awful lot of poor science - and I'm just an old-fashioned amateur, not a professional. But I recognise that there are alot of nuances in the whole Climate Change scenario(s). Essentially we are observing phenomena (climate warming, chemical composition of the atmosphere, species distribution, event intensity) without any control experiment. We have nothing to compare this to. Without the control, we can only make our best assumption of what is happening. In this assumption, I'd rather err on the side of caution than the side of neo-cons.