2025 Switzerland/Germany: A Brief Bit Of Iceland

 Coming home, the most reasonable flight (per company policy) was transiting through Iceland, which was rather a shock to me.

Iceland Air's Saga class:

Icelandic beer brewed for Icelandair.  It was pretty good.

Lunch?  Dinner? Meal names lose meaning in time zones.

Ah, macaroons.  The cookie I never remember to ask for but love when I have them.

View of Iceland from the air.  I realized that it has been 7 years since we came here in 2018.

Literally had enough time to get off the plane, go through immigration, and transit to the boarding gate.  Which made me a bit sad; I would like to go back again.

2025 Switzerland/Germany: Wasser Und Wein

 Sign in the hotel in Germany by the bar:

Roll For Initiative

 

Apologies, friends.  A weekend of training has left me a bit befuddled and a bit beat up physically, so I fear this is the equivalent of "phoning it in" - although it is a great meme.

Training was fantastic. It is the sort of thing one does not get access to in larger groups.

For those that do not know the reference please see below. One of the best Monty Python bits ever.  Run time 5:19:

A Year Of Humility (XXX): Acceptance

 

One of the challenges I am facing as I grow older is the acceptance that everything has a shelf life, and that shelf life eventually ends.

At some point in our lives - at least for me, younger - I believe that there were things I can do and that things would go on forever.  That is not true of course: it all starts somewhere (for me, college), as things began to slip away from what they were.  Sometimes things replaced them - until they, too, slipped away.

It grinds harder in the 50's, when the body starts reminding one that the warranty really is gone and they are not making those parts anymore.

There are two ways to deal with this.

The first is to go out raging and kicking.  And perhaps there is some argument to say that "fighting" is the right correct response.  On the other side, I have seen people physically or mentally damage themselves chasing after a thing that for one reason or another has passed on beyond them.

The other way is to simply accept such changes with humility and grace.

I have heard of a Jewish saying that man is born with his hands clenched and dies with them open, that we truly cannot take anything of this world with us.  To accept that at some point, things simply pass is an act of humility.

Corrie ten Boom is quoted as saying she learned to hold things loosely, because God had taught her that if she held the tightly, it would hurt when they were pulled from her hand.

I have a long way to go in this regard.

Failure Day 2025

 At The Forty-Five, besides the usual sorts of holidays that I as an American and Christian celebrate, there are a couple that are the equivalent of a regional holiday that no-one outside of the town or province celebrates.  One of these is Failure Day.

Failure Day commemorates the day on 02 August 2005 when myself and my business partner officially decided our real estate business - The Firm - was no longer tenable. In effect, we fired ourselves.

If you have never had the privilege of firing yourself, I do not recommend it.  It comes not only with the baggage of being laid off or fired, but all of the added baggage knowing that in some form or fashion you are the one that got yourself there; if nothing else, you made the choice to leave a perfectly good job and head out on your own.

Those were dark days, that period between the beginning of August and the Middle of September 2005 when I was looking for a job.  Income had been scant - I think the last time we had gotten a commission was in early June 2005 and there was no sign of another one coming in.  And of course I had made a series of other decisions, like moving to a new house to support my lifestyle, that played very poorly in retrospect.

The failure was total and complete, at least for me:  I never went back to real estate and had to essentially start over in the Biopharmaceutical/Medical Device Industry.  The financial ramifications reverberated for years after;  by my count our losses were in the six figure range, up to and including our inability to build a financial buffer so that when my first layoff, Hammerfall, happened, I had to take the first job offer that came which was halfway across the country and ended up selling the house not quite at a loss, but with all of our equity gone.

So what do you do when you find yourself year after year living out the consequences of that decision?  You make a holiday of it.

And so, Failure Day, the day that I celebrate every failure large and small in my life.  Some of them are by my own hand and foolish, others were not my fault, and some were by my own hand and not foolish - but I went down swinging anyway.

It struck me as I wrote this that this, the 20th Anniversary of Failure Day, takes place within a month  of my 20tn anniversary of this blog. I had not thought of that until now; I suspect the combination of the two is more than coincidence.  Perhaps Failure Day, in its way, led to more writing.

And so, I invite to you raise a glass or mug or horn filled with your beverage of choice.  Celebrate your failures - which, as Governor Seymore is quoted in Orison Swett Marden's Book An Iron Will:

"If I were to wipe out twenty acts, which should they be?  Should it be my business mistakes, my foolish acts (for I suppose all do foolish things occasionally), my grievances?  No; for after all, these are the very things by which I have profited.  So I finally concluded I should expunge, instead of my mistakes, my triumphs.  I could not afford to dismiss the tonic of mortification, the refinement of sorrow; I needed them every one."

Essentialism (XXVI): Execute: Subtract

 "To attain knowledge add things every day.
To attain wisdom subtract things every day." 

- Lao Tzu

Greg McKeown starts this chapter by referencing the book The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, a fictional story written about a character trying to turn around a failing production plant in three months.  The book - which I have read and is one of the few "business fiction" books that I would heartily recommend - is a parable of the author's theory of Constraints.  

A constraint, in the story, is a bottleneck or obstacle which holds the whole system back. One can "fix" parts of the system, but unless one removes a constraint, the whole system will not improve.

The message is brought home to the main character, Alex Rogo, when he takes his son and his scout troop on a hike.  As the boys hike along, they tend to spread out and one boy - Herbie - is the slowest one of all.  Hikes become a miles-long event, trying to manage boys at the head of the hike and the end.

Then Alex comes up with an idea.  He puts Herbie at the front of the line.  Now every boy is together because every one can keep up with the boy in front of them.  But now there is a new problem: the troop movies at Herbie's pace.  Alex comes up with another idea:  Do anything he can to help Herbie go faster, because improving Herbie's pace will improve the pace of the whole troop.  He removes weight from Herbie's pack and distributes it to the other boys.  Suddenly Herbie can move faster and thus the whole group moves faster.

Alex's application to his job is, hopefully, not hard to see:  by finding the bottleneck at his job and increasing that efficiency, he increases the speed of everything.

The application for Essentialist?  "The question is this:  What is the 'slowest hiker' in your job or your life?  What is the obstacle that is keeping you back from achieving what really matters to you?  By systematically identifying and removing this 'constraint', you'll be able to significantly reduce the friction keeping you from executing what is essential."

The Essentialist then systemically looks at the overall functioning of the system to find "the slowest hiker".

A Nonessentialist does not do so.  Instead of trying to find inefficiencies, he is trying to react to them by plugging this hole, and then thus hole, and then another one.  They try to keep everything going, instead of asking the question "What is in the way of achieving what is essential?"

How, then, does the Essentialist do this, "doing more by removing more"?

1)  Be clear about Essential Intent:  We cannot know what obstacles need to be removed until we understand what the desired outcome is.  If we do not know what we are trying to do, any change will be arbitrary. How, suggests McKeown, will we know when we are done?

2)  Identify the "slowest hiker":  Rather than just attacking a project, McKeown suggests taking a few minutes to identify every obstacle or issue that might prevent the project from getting done.  After the list is in place, prioritized the list and answer the question "What is the obstacle that, if removed, would make the majority of other obstacles disappear?"

A note here:  Not ever "slowest hiker" is non-productive. It just may a semi-productive activity may not help contribute to the execution of the goal.  

There will likely be multiple obstacles; it is important to remember that there is only ever one priority.  Removing obstacles which do not budge the priority indicate they are not the "slowest hiker".

3)  Remove the obstacle:  This can take a variety of forms. It could be a way of thinking like "Things need to be perfect before I move on".  It may be a person - in which case, one might ask "What is the obstacle preventing you from moving forward (and helping me), and how can I help you to remove it?"

Removing Obstacles - Subtracting - does not have to be hard or difficult.  Things can even start small, like realizing which boy is the slowest hiker.  But once the process is started, suggests McKeown, obstacle removal leads to another obstacle removal, and suddenly small stones have become an avalanche.

---

I have not read The Goal in something like 20 years or more - I remember liking it very much; I should probably revisit it to see how it has aged.

The Constraints Theory is one that I like, possibly because it is an easy one for me to understand:  Find the rate limiting step, address that, and then move on to the next rate limiting step.  Easy in theory, harder in practice - especially in the practice of personal life.

Application in processes is easy:  map the process, find the rate limiting step, and fix it, just like the main character did in The Goal with his slowest hiker.  Mapping personal processes or projects can be much more difficult and effervescent.  

If I had to make a trial run, perhaps it would be something like practicing Iajutsu.

What is the process? In short, getting the uniform on, practicing, and then going back to street clothes.  Easy enough.  But what is the process prior to that?  Deciding to practice.

I use the word "deciding" there.  What would be a better word is "programming", in the sense of "Every day at this time, this is what I do."  That removes the bottleneck of "deciding", which too often can be pushed off until suddenly there is no time left.  Once there is an agreed upon time, then I just work backwards (to getting ready) and forward (changing back).  The bottleneck of "Time" is now reduced.

Next, of course, is intensity...but that is another bottleneck for another day.

The Collapse CXCVIII: Annals

 02 December 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

Walking between houses today, interacting with our small community and checking in on the harvesting operations (which somehow seems more palatable to me than “looting”), Young Xerxes - who obviously knows that I continue to write to you – asked me if we were really done.

Done, I questioned. What did he mean by done?

Finished, he replied. Finished as a civilization.

What a remarkable question, I responded. Made even more remarkable, I thought, by the thoughts around Hope we had when we had lit the first Advent candle.

The collapse of civilizations is (sadly) not as well documented as perhaps one would wish, if one were trying to create a template or project management tool with the ability to point “You are here”. At best we have some records of some collapses as written by either those who lived through it or by those who were the “winners” in it. At worst we have a handful of documentary evidence or no documentary evidence at all, just artifacts in the ground that tell a partial story at best.

Civilizations as such have always come and gone in the world, many of them simply subsumed into a new one or disappearing without a trace except for occasional folk customs or stories. The dwellers in Ireland before the coming of the Gaels become the Fir Bolg, the Latin peoples’ that shared the Italian peninsula with Rome became cities and regions with their languages and traditions lost. We know of Mesopotamian cities by name but likely not all of them; Mesoamerica teemed with unknown cities and people groups that even up to The Collapse we were still finding out about.

The collapse of civilizations was a thing of interest in modern times; Edward Gibbons The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire was a book more acknowledged than read in recent times and even in that, was incomplete – archaeology continued to fill in many holes that were not evident in a world that in many ways predated modern archaeology. Likely most of that modern interest was “How can we help that not happen to us?” rather than a deeper interest in the nature of the collapse of civilizations.

But that, I sighed to myself, was not Young Xerxes’ question. The danger of asking questions of the old, Lucilius, is that they always seek to give all the background up front instead of answering the question at hand first.

Are we done, I responded. Done as in a civilization, or done as in us? The two are not quite the same, although I can understand why people would confuse the issues.

Civilizations, I pointed out, are vast things, built on a multitude of small traditions and habits and large systems and practices. They gain a certain inertia over time that is hard to bring to an immediate halt. And there are individuals and organizations that have a vested interest in ensuring civilizations continue, even if they are detrimental to some or many of their inhabitants.

A civilization is also something of the mind, as suggested by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, that when people stopped identifying with and trying to build the moral community of Rome and turned instead to building other models of civility and morality, Rome final died – not as a concept, but as a viable civilization. Up to the end of the 6th Century there were still those who called themselves “Roman”; after that, one hears of the idea of Rome but not its practice.

When do civilizations end? When people stop believing in them.

When the underpinnings are no longer taken as fact, when people no longer see themselves as members of that civilization, when the things that made that civilization unique are no longer regarded as worthy of fighting for or maintaining – this is when civilizations die.

We continued walking in silence, icy snow crunching in sync with the shloop of mud and splash of puddles. Finally he asked me if I still believed.

I sighed and let the silence speak for both of us.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca

2025 Switzerland/Germany: German Countryside

Being as we were in the next town over, we did have to make about a 6 km/4 mile drive to the site.

It has been years since I have been to this part of the world.  I forgot how breathtakingly beautiful it is.

2025 Switzerland/Germany: Hotel And Meals

 Eventually, of course, the visit to Switzerland ended - and we were off to Germany.

(I find clouds from airplanes endlessly fascinating.  I have no idea why.)

Welcome to Germany!  We are now about 1.5 hours south of Munich in Bavaria.

The hotel that folks usually stay in when visiting this plant was full, so we got a very nice one in the next town down.

Welcome chocolate bar!

My one and only "good" dinner on the trip.

Schnitzel and fried potatoes, maybe some of the best I have had.

This was chocolate torte, I believe.

And breakfast.  German breakfast bars are the best - and yes, pretzels for breakfast!

July 2025 Grab Bag

 A the Cat continues his adjustment to New Home 3.0.  Here we see His Majesty benevolently surveying his domain and the live-in help.

---

Our weather here has been a bit cooler overall, in the 70's to 80's F (21-26 C).  This is a little cooler than I remember it being last year.  Really, anything below 8% F is pretty tolerable as we get pretty good evening breezes here except when it is very hot.

I have to remind myself to treasure all this.  In a mere three months, it will be mostly gone.

---

This past week The Ravishing Mrs. TB and I went to our local New Home 3.0 County fair.

In terms of size, it was probably about the same size as my hometown fair, which surprised me a bit.  The mix for these sorts of things seems to be universal - lots of folks selling things, rides, trailers selling food that likely will clog your arteries on sight, and the "actual" parts of the fair:  animals and 4-H, both of which were pretty well represented.

Judging by the 4-H displays, there may yet be hope.

---

Some years ago (in college), I was given a stuffed penguin named Napoleon.  He was my adventure buddy for years and of course came into the marriage, where he ended up going on his own set of adventures (and getting his own photo album).  

After we first got Poppy the Brave, his leather beak became a casualty of a puppy teething session.  He went beak-less for years until, after my move to New Home 3.0, I found a fantastic seamstress who seems to be able to do almost anything, including replacing a penguin's beak:

I am super happy he is back for more adventures.

A Year Of Humility (XXIX): Respecting Tradition

 In yesterday's post concerning training in the art of Iaijutsu, FOTB (Friend Of This Blog) Leigh from Five Acres and a Dream made the following comment:

"What I find curious is that people wanting to make their mark in any field prize their personal adaptation, yet seem to end up just imitating others, usually with poorer quality.  I think it takes great strength of character to follow and respect an established art and its traditions."

If true of art - and it is - it is even more true of Christianity. 

Christianity, in its truest expression, is all about A Person - Jesus Christ - and about His work to reconcile us to God.  This is the core of the Christianity, and the New Testament is all about His life and His work.  As Christians, we have the template of His life, the life of His followers, and the reflection of this same sort of relationship in the Old Testament between God and the Jewish people.  Time and time again in both Old and New Testament the example is given of how we are supposed live and act, based on how God acts.

And yet, throughout history, humans have always insisted on putting their "stamp" on Christianity.

There is a fuzzy line (at least to me) between "culture" and Christianity at times, sometimes a line that (frankly) the Church has gotten wrong as both the underlying implicit concepts of Western Thought and Western economics have sometimes been interpreted as "Scripture" and much has been done to cultures that had little to do with Christianity: we forget to our detriment that the Apostles' initial requirements for the Gentiles was pretty straightforward.  But Christians have always had to interpret Scripture in the context of the situations that they have found themselves.

Some simply followed Scripture and influenced everything around them because of it.  Others made Scripture their interpretation and, while perhaps also having an influence on things around them, perhaps not to that of Christ.

But that is "out there".  What I always have to be concerned about is "in here", or myself.

It is easy enough to point to others and how they have put their own stamp on Christianity; what is more difficult (because I do not like the implications) is how I have done it.

An overgeneralization would be to say that very often, my stamp is reflective of an excuse for me to commit sin - usually starting with sentences like "Well, what I really think this means is..." or "It seems like that was something that was true then....".   The funny part is that just as humanity has been the same for all these years, so the base things that we stumble on has also been the same:  The technology or the circumstances or the culture might have changed, but not the underlying base concepts of sin.

How much more should I have started from the phrase "Scripture says..." and have gone from there.

Gone Training 2025 Vol. III

This past Sunday and for this weekend and the next, I have the good fortune to train in my dojo with our headmaster.

Over the past two years I have had a surfeit of training with our headmaster:  training in Japan, training in New Home 2.0, and training in New Home 3.0.  If I do the training in my head, that is almost two full weeks of training with a living national treasure this year, or a month over two years.

I am blessed beyond all measure.  

---

What is like to train in a traditional art?

It is is repetition. A great deal of repetition. And a great many reminders of where one can improve (I leave every seminar with a rather long list of improvements).

One of the main points I was reminded of in 2024 was the fact that, as a traditional art, my job is not to "interpret" the art.  My job is to faithfully replicate the art - as someone noted, "Add nothing to it, subtract nothing from it".  Take is as a received item.

While that might seem like a simple thing, I find it more difficult than you might expect.  I cannot fully define why I find it so:  part of it, I suspect, is due to the fact that the level of concentration required to fully pay attention is something that I struggle with immensely.  Part of it may be that - like lots of Americans - I like to put my "stamp" on things, because "individuality" and "personal expression:.

One of the greatest changes in how one trains is the realization that it is very much not about you.  It is very much about the art.

In a way, this concept seems similar to me in the treatment of heirlooms such as swords in Japanese culture.  One does not "own" such items; one is merely a caretaker for them until they pass to the next generation.  This is one of the reasons that one finds, for example, swords of 400 years of age throughout the world:  the "collectors" understand they are merely caretakers, not owners, and while the sword may be bring them joy, ultimately it is about the sword, not them.  

In a same manner, the art is about the art, not me.

I will train hard, write down my corrections, and prepare for the next training (hopefully in Japan again).  And try, very hard, to remind myself that it is executing the thing as it is transmitted to me, not as I see fit to execute it.

The master is the die, we are the material.  We should so be like them that there is never any question what art we follow.

Essentialism (XXV): Execute: Buffer

 McKeown starts this section with the story of Joseph (Yes, that Old Testament Joseph) and the story of the seven heads of grain and seven cows.  If you are of a certain age, you will remember this story from its flannelgraph presentation:  the seven fat cows appearing and then getting eaten by the seven skinny cows, the seven full heads of grain being devoured by seven skinny heads of grain.  What did this mean?  A famine was coming; God was graciously giving warning of the fact.  The Egyptians, under Joseph's guidance, used the seven years of plenty to building up supplies for the seven years of famine.

They built a buffer of food - which, simply put, is something that prevents two things from coming into contact with one another.  States have been created as "buffers" to prevent other states from coming into direct contact.  In chemistry, a buffer solution can be used to help mitigate the direct contact between two elements of a solution.

Just as for Joseph, suggests McKeown, buffers play a key role in the life of an Essentialist. How?  By preparing, we can allow adequate time and space to accomplish everything that we need to.

How often have we estimated down to the minute the amount of time it takes us to get from point A to point B, only to find that the unexpected happens:  an accident, a ticket, a detour we had no idea was coming up.  How many times have we allocated X amount of time to accomplish Y task, only to find out that the task was more involved or complex than we thought and we spend far more time on it?

A lack of buffering can represent a sort of "Best Case" scenario thinking.  I have heard the called in my business career "Running The Perfect Race":  Assumptions are made that a year's worth of work can be executed flawlessly and that every manufacturing event will be completed, not acknowledging the fact that things happen and batches are lost. What this leads to is a series of reacting as we try to compensate for the event. Sometimes we can make it work:  the all-nighters to do the paper or report we committed to, the quick turn around to make another run, the remaking of six dozen batches of cookies for the party.  But all of that comes at a cost, most probably to ourselves at least and to others.

If these sorts of things happen - and they always do - how does the Essentialist build these buffers?

1)  Use extreme preparation: McKeown contrasts Roald Amundsen and Robert F. Scott in their race to reach the South Pole.  The short version is that Amundsen prepared heavily compared to Scott (4 thermometers to 1, 3 tons of food to ton, marking a supply depot with 20 markers miles apart instead of a single marker.  The ending?  Amundsen made the South Pole relatively painlessly; Scott and his team died.  

Preparing better - expecting issues, putting in slack times, acknowledging that you will not run the perfect race - makes success more achievable.

2)   Add 50% to your time estimate:  We are terrible at estimating the length a task will take. How many times have we suffered from transit issues as above?  How many times have estimated time on a task that was inaccurate.

Daniel Kahneman, in 1979, coined the phrase "planning fallacy" in 1979.  It refers to the fact that people tend to underestimate the amount of time a task will take, even though they have done the task before. In one study, only 30% of respondents in a study completed the task in the time they had estimated.

The solution?  Add a buffer.  McKeown suggests add a 50% time buffer:  "Not only does this relieve the stress we feel about being late (imagine how much less stressful sitting in traffic would feel if we weren't running late), but if we do find that the task was faster and easier to execute than we expected (though this is a rare experience for most of us), the extra found time feels like a bonus."

3)  Conduct scenario planning:  Or in the fancy words of business, create a risk management strategy to prepare against the risks of any task.  McKeown suggests 5 questions, based on the work of Erwann Michel-Kerjan:

1)  What risks to you face on this project?
2)  What is the worst-case scenario?
3) What would the social effects of this be?
4)  What would the financial impact of this be?
5)  How can you invest to reduce risks or strengthen financial or social resilience?

Essentialists, says McKeown, accept the reality that nothing can ever be fully anticipated in life.  What can be done to mitigate this is to build in buffers to manage the unexpected.

---

Application:

Reading this sections comes across very much as a business sort of exercise. And in one sense that is very true:  risk management and buffering against the unknown is a trait of every successful business.  And yet, how little I apply this in my own life.

Part of this I instinctively use, brought on by my high school band teacher:  If you are early, you are on time;  If you are on time, you are late.  As a results, I tend to try to leave enough time to transport myself somewhere to arrive early.  This is easy in travel terms; I do not apply this regularly enough to all other parts of my life.

A buffer (50% is a luxury) is something I also do almost haphazardly, although I am better about arguing for time at my job.  Along with a buffer, another area of success can be simply spacing out tasks - for example, writing a post with time enough for a leisurely writing and editing instead of cramming it in on the day before (not that this has ever happened here...).

Conduct scenario planning?  I do this financially - but almost nowhere else in my life.  And yet through my job, I see the benefits of this exercise every day.

I am doing some of these things.  I could do much more of them.

The Collapse CXCVII: The First Advent Candle

30 November 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

Pompeia Paulina announced to me today that it was the first day of Advent and we would be lighting an Advent Wreath.

Unaware as I was of the advent (no pun intended) of Thanksgiving, I was even less so of the Advent season. I suspect most of that is a combination of things: Christmases for years on my own combined with a loss of the traditions that once upon a time marked this time and a series of churches for which the traditional season of Advent was more of a mention than an actual practice.

That, apparently, has changed this year.

Pompeia Paulina had brought out some candles and had a wreath (a back-up wreath, she assured me; the “good” one was with Young Xerxes and Stateira for their first Christmas) and set it up on our table. The candles – three purple, one pink and one white in the center – sat amid a psuedo-greenery that was clearly not from around here at all.

She had me light one of the purple candles -a taper somewhat burned, clearly used from its charred wick and the runnels of wax down its side. The candle looked strangely cheery in its fake pine branches, as candles often seem to do in the semi-dark of cloud cover days and early evenings.

I looked at her. I admitted that I remembered nothing about this other than the candle lighting.

She smiled back at me. This is the first candle of Advent, she said, the candle of Hope. It is meant to remind us of the Old Testament prophets, who preached the coming of the Messiah through the vicissitudes of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah and the Captivity and Return – and who, through all of it, had the hope of God’s promise.

I admit I teared up.

Hope. How long it seems that we – really, I – have been without such a thing.

It has been said, Lucilius, that Hope is something that we can manufacture if needed. And it has certainly been needed for a while now.

It can take many forms with others, be it continually saying things will get better or providing plans and ideas for how to exist through one season to get to another. Without hope, people eventually give up and die – because living when one day is like another and only leading to worse days will crush the human spirit in irrevocable ways.

But while I can generate Hope for others, I struggle to generate it for myself.

Yes yes, I understand the religious aspect of it and that – at least from a Christian point of view – we hope in something beyond ourselves. But that sense of Hope of salvation can seem bleak in world where the walls feel as if they are closing in and every initiative seems to peter out before it gets started.

Which is why, I suppose, we need others around us to help us find that Hope as well.

We stood there, hand in hand, watching the candle burn, a true orange-yellow flame that went straight up in the cloudy light of Winter’s sky. We read Matthew 4:16: “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death, Light had dawned”.

And then we blew the candle out – after all, we have to light this at least four more times this year and one should be practical, now above all times.

And perhaps, Lucilius, that is the very nature of Hope itself: to blow something out, believing that you will need it again.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca

2025 Switzerland/Germany: Crossing The Rhine

 The Old City of Basel is on the Southern side of the Rhine.  There are several bridges that cross it, as we have seen previous pictures.

A Bridge has stood in this location on since A.D. 1206. Known as the Mittlere Brücke (Middle Bridge), was replaced in A.D. 1905 to allow the weight of trams.

A copy of the original shrine of Käppelijoch, where criminals were condemned to death:

Pretzel on the other side of the bridge.  It was delicious.

Ricola cough drops in Switzerland.  If you are old enough, you know.

A Vespa store.  This was the most European thing ever to me.

2025 Swizterland/Germany: The Spalentor Gate

 Like many Ancient and Medieval cities, Basel at one time was surrounded by a city wall - or rather a series of city walls.  There were a total of three walls built, one started in A.D. 1080, one starred in A.D. 1230, and one started in A.D. 1362 and finished in A.D. 1398.  The latter two were built to accommodate the growing city.

In A.D. 1859, the city fathers made the decision to pull down most of the walls.  Three gates and a short section of wall were kept; one of these was the Spalentor Gate.

Included as part of the Last and outer wall build, it stood from A.D. 1392 to the present.