We Bought The Farm

15 Years Today

Today is the 15th anniversary of my graduation from college. "College" in the American sense. University. I graduated as a Chemical Engineer from the University of Michigan ("The" University of Michigan, the resume writers would have you remember), on April 28th, 1989.

I really only remember this because I thought it was kind of novel to graduate in April. You don't really think of the Spring term ending in April, but that year, because of an early start, because of whatever other reasons, we finished in April. Hell, I wasn't complaining. I was glad it was over.

I remember Graduation Day. My parents came to Ann Arbor, and my grandmother. My classmates and I were up early. We opened our first champagne at about 7 AM and drank it while we walked to the football stadium, where they had the big ceremony. As was the custom (and probably still is), the new President (Duderstadt) of the university gave the commencement address in his first year. So, we didn't have any high-falutin' guest speakers. He came from the College of Engineering, which was cool for us. I remember we gave an honorary degree to Raoul Wallenberg, who had Michigan connections. No one knew if he was alive (he pretty certainly wasn't, from what I've read). I can't remember who else.

We sat by discipline (all the ChemE's together, for instance) and they just read out our disciplines and we gave a little shout followed by polite applause. We had to wait for later that day at the Engineering ceremony (zzz - the champagne really kicks in after a couple of bottles) to get our individual names read aloud. Scott Fogler shook my hand, handed me an (empty) diploma folder and said "Congratulations!". I had dinner with my family.

And that was the end of four years in Ann Arbor. Good years. I learned a lot about life up there. It seems so far back, and yet I can also imagine myself four years earlier, the sheltered computer geek, looking forward to wild partying and not having to try very hard (wrong!). Ann Arbor helped to form me. I left it behind - I haven't been back in probably a decade - but it's still a part of my imagination; there's still something exciting about watching UM football, remembering the thrill of 100,000+ people doing the "wave" and shouting out The Victors or begging for Bullwinkle.

I can still string together the things that happened there they way they didn't happen in my sleepy suburban upbringing. George Bush (Sr) spoke on campus to commemorate an anniversary (25th?) of the founding of the Peace Corps, which JFK announced on the steps of the Student Union during his campaign whistle-stop. Bush was shouted down by students on the left ("Stop the fighting, stop the war, US out of El Salvador"). Racial issues flared up, and we had a teach-in with Jesse Jackson (I went along). I met Phillip Glass, who was some kind of god to me after Koyaanisqatsi, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Jack Kemp, Bart Giamatti, Jonas Salk. The mens' basketball team won the National Championship in 1989. I have amazing pictures of the rioting in the streets!

I wrote for the Michigan Review, back before conservative student journalism had a voice or such financial backing. My politics were different then. I had them. I was right-of-Ann-Arbor-center, although non-partisan. It didn't take much. You just had to read the drivel in the Daily to be driven to think for yourself. I had a button that read, "If you liked Cuba, you'll (heart) Nicaragua." But I'm sure it was the eye-opening experience of such a broad spectrum, and seeing so much vitriol and intolerance from all sides, that have led me to abandon the certainty of my stance on many things, leading me to where I am today.

I left Ann Arbor with a job offer in hand, but with plans to head to Europe first. This was 1989, months ahead of all the walls falling down. It was a different world, the adult world for me just starting. The world "waking up to history". Commencement.

Could, Would, Should?

The Guardian headline reads:

Thames Gateway could house 50% more, says report

The gist. If the planners had done their job, we could squeeze 30,000 more housing units into the redeveloped Thames Gateway "wasteland" of England than the current plan envisions.

If you've ever flown into London at night, especially over the Channel over Belgium, you see a swath of land almost entirely lit up. Brussels meets Antwerp or Ghent and then there's the black band of the channel and then the lights of London emerge in the distance before the continent fades out.

By many accounts, London is desperately short of housing. Experts say the UK needs to build new cities, or turn existing towns into cities, in order to defuse the housing time bomb. The UK needs to house an additional 2m people by 2020 in hundreds of thousands of new housing units. Big chunks of Essex, Ashford and the area around Stansted airport should be developed. New types of housing, catering to new family realities, will need to be built. New rail corridors need to be built to bring these people to London [the government claims that these new developments should not be "bedroom communities" for London, but centres in their own right, but still they plan high-speed rail links, bowing to the realities].

Back to the headline: the Thames Gateway could accommodate 30,000 more units. Maybe home to up to 100k people. But is could should, or would? Is London really the place to focus all this development? Won't this just over-concentrate the population in the already overpopulated Southeast? Won't this just continue to tax the already heaving infrastructure to the point of failure? Does alt.pave.the.world still exist?

I'll declare an interest. We are London homeowners of 2001 vintage. Our home has appreciated nicely, modestly, in the intervening period. But I'm not afraid of this new housing for its market-defusing capacity so much as for its promise - that the UK will continue to respond by plan to demographic projections in an attempt to keep housing affordable. Even with high-speed rail, these houses aren't going to replace my 20-minutes-to-Waterloo connection. Not without the investment of tens of billions of public pounds into infrastructure that essentially sustains this London-centric explosion. By the time they've built it, we'll have sold on to someone who needs this convenience more than us. But London will continue to suffer while the knee-jerk feedback curve lags decades behind the present reality.

Costs in London are already outrageous - food, housing, education, child care - it all contains a built-in London weighting that, even with allowances, makes London unaffordable for the young or even the older public sector employees. The UK is doing nothing to incentivise people to move out of London, to help take the weight off of the Capital.

What about incentivising the Northwest instead? What about a focus on Liverpool, or Manchester, or Birmingham, or Scotland? Sharing the load? What about relaxing fuel duties so that covering the additional distance from London is not so punishing? Or is that just un-Green? What about preferential tax treatment for small enterprise that chooses to settle far outwith for the social benefits, creating jobs in the countryside, keeping people settled out of the cities?

I'm no expert here. I just find the kind of imagination that proposes cramming even more people into one of the most crowded parts of Europe to be a bit lacking. Just because we could?

Rocking the Boat

A timely article in today's Guardian, Cost-cutting 'jeopardises North Sea rigs', points out some real-world examples of the impact that cutting back on experienced manpower can have on reliability, safety and the environment. I was on about these from a similar perspective last week.

Fears are growing that safety is being compromised in Britain's North Sea oil and gas industry, and there are claims that corners are being cut to reduce costs.

À propos the trend of cutting costs and pushing margins to keep the pots and pans just ticking over, one man is quoted as saying:

They are trying to cuts costs on old installations (which are) falling into disrepair; plant and equipment is failing on a regular basis, systems are becoming old, valves are passing. They are pushing maintenance right to the very limit.

and here is an industry specialist talking about cutting head count, which, the article reports, has dropped by 12,000 workers over the past decade:

"It is no different from any other industry where the move over the last few years is always to get rid of people and try and operate on fewer," said Colin MacFarlane, professor of subsea engineering at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities, and himself an offshore contractor.

"The offshore staff are already stripped down. There is a very strong feeling that there are unseen hazards. You cannot quantify it, but we believe they are going up because the numbers employed in maintenance, the numbers involved in operations have been dramatically reduced and when you are talking about maintenance, that is scary. There is a stage where maintenance falls where nothing can be done to make things better. It may be that companies believe their increased focus on safety management is countering this, but recent incidents suggest not."

It's that last bit that scares me. If you want to push the operating envelope beyond its design, you probably need more, not less, human expertise in the loop. More judgement by experienced workers. If you cut your numbers to cut your costs while at the same time pushing that envelope by extending your maintenance intervals, something will eventually bite you, quite possibly catastrophically.

Why? MacFarlane nails it: "You cannot quantify it." Because the methodology wants to push the limits based on prior experience, but the old mutual fund maxim "past performance is no guarantee of future results" has to apply. We don't have enough good data to confidently push beyond a certain limit. And by cutting headcount, we've just cut back on our experience base.

Where there is good data, if you are respecting good engineering judgement, you should be okay, but if you're doing this while at the same time encouraging a culture of under-reporting and corner-cutting, you are undermining the remaining safety checks built into the safety management system.

Sad to say, but maybe the ones who are "not required back" are the lucky ones.

The Moviegoer

We're just back from a few days of vacation in nearby Paraty. Old Paraty is gorgeous - UNESCO-preserved streets full of enormous cobblestones; old churches; lots of arts and crafts shops; no cars!. We had a really relaxing getaway and I managed to get a fair bit of reading done. My most recently finished book is Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.

Wow. I was not ready for this at all. It's sort of a wander through a life deliberately lived at a shallow level. How Binx Bolling coasts along, aiming to maintain a respectable surface while dodging the expectations of his genteel relatives, who expect from him a life of purpose - a life of doing as much as you can; of a sort of noblesse oblige. Binx is searching for something real in life; a way to avoid despair; an escape, but in life. I was reading along and suddenly a passage would just gut me.

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

I'm still chewing this book over. Thinking about Bolling trying to avoid traps by refusing to engage them. The weight of expectations. Only feeling real when he is outside the realm of his everyday experience. The absence of certainty or faith in God.

Who wants to be dead last among one hundred and eighty million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of people believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics - which leaves not a percentage point for a seeker.

If you don't believe...if your whole being questions the program...how can you live? How can you stay sane?

It's been about 15 years since I read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, but in reading Percy it was crystal clear how influential he had been on Toole. I know that Percy helped to get Confederacy published. But in meeting Percy's characters, his New Orleans, I was reading right into Toole's influences.

Re-reading Hoinacki II

After re-reading Lee Hoinacki's Stumbling Toward Justice, I decided I would also re-read his El Camino:Walking to Santiago de Compostela, in which he records his thoughts as he completed his pilgrimage through Spain in 1993. I enjoyed reading both of these books the first time and found new riches in them on a second reading.

A lot of Hoinacki's comments in El Camino deal with his discovery of real faith. His discoveries in the depths of the rosary, for instance, reveal a man who didn't have faith as a priest, but came to find it in practice on the camino at the age of 65.

But apart from Hoinacki's faith journey, he also finds fertile soil for comments on his critiques of institutions and modernity. I was thinking about this as I re-read my entry below on the future of engineers in the process environment. I'm not sure someone like Hoinacki would find anything of substance in that posting. Questions that have no meaning. Who cares if the engineering is done within a company or without? It's the inevitability of progress, of technique in Ellul's sense that might occupy Hoinacki.

He meets a man along the way who makes shoes for a living. The man, his age, and his father, run a small shop that will disappear when the younger man retires. Hoinacki laments the disappearance of honest work from the countryside; dignified work. The shoemaker's children have gone off to the cities; to the universities. What is to become of the village crafstman? The shoes will come from abroad, no doubt. Imported from somewhere cheaper, made by a more mechanised process. Economic inevitabilities will hollow out the meaning of local, convivial life.

There's a Todd Rundgren song called "Honest Work". It's not exactly related to the above, but it leaves a sense of the same sadness. I reproduce the lyrics below.

I'm not afraid to bend my back
I'm not afraid of dirt
But how I fear the things I do
For lack of honest work
My family is lost to me
They couldn't bear the hurt
To see the state their boy is in
For lack of honest work

I hold no blame for anyone
'Twas I who did arrange
To pay my union dues so I'd
Not have to learn or change
And when I was replaced was I
Who started down the hill
And drank away my savings 'till
I couldn't stop myself

The prophets of a brave new world
Captains of industry
Have visions grand and great designs
But none have room for me
They see a world where everyone
Is rich and smart and young
But if I live to see such things
Too late for me they come

I know I'm not the only one
To fall beneath the wheel
Such company can not assuage
The loneliness I feel
Too many are resigned to be
Society's debris
But I will be remembered for
The life life took from me

I found a version of it (not Rundgren's, which is great, but hard to find!) on iTunes. Worth checking out.

Losing Control

A colleague of mine gave me a copy of this article to read. It's from a trade journal dedicated to a fairly narrow specialisation in my industry - the Process Engineer, and particularly the Control Engineer. These people are customarily responsible for the day-to-day operation and optimisation of industrial plant equipment. The article is long and suffers from some bad editing, but it's worth a read.

What I found interesting about the article is that here, for once, the author is not simply blaming off-shoring or outsourcing as the culprit for the loss of jobs in the engineering profession. These trends are visible, but they are only part of the big picture. This meshes with my own experience. Since these engineers are so specialised and must normally be present at the plant location, it's not that easy to farm out their work. Rather, industry is just deciding to do away with their role in the organisation.

The author, Rich Merritt, looks at some of the bigger trends in industry. It left me looking at my own career progression and thinking about some of the traditional assumptions we engineers tend to make about our importance in the process environment.

Chief among the trends is the growing importance of non-engineers in the optimisation of installed capital:

Part of the problem appears to stem from the fact that engineers and chemists no longer play as important a role in managing and operating process plants. The accountants and lawyers hold sway now, and have less of a professional stake in the work process engineers do (emphasis added).

I watched this trend pass through my industry in the mid-1990s. Industrial companies used to be largely run by the men who built them. You could look at the Fortune 500 list and see lots of chemical engineers among the industrial firms. These were the men who knew every nook and cranny of the operation. The senior management were lifers who would follow a progression from process engineer to area supervisor to operations management to general management. And they could keep the place running with duct tape and spit, as it were.

But there was something wrong with this picture, and that was the one-size-fits-all approach to management. The assumption that if a process engineer can run a plant, he can run a company. This tends to build companies full of process engineers! That's been the situation I've encountered in nearly every conventional organisation I've worked with over the past 15 years.

But some time in the 1990s, the mantra of shareholder value started to gain the upper hand. Maybe guys like Welch and Bossidy had something to do with it. Maybe MBA culture. It was obvious that senior engineers were good at what they did, but look what they cost! Wasn't it inevitable that as other costs were squeezed, the lens would turn inward on the cost of the engineers themselves? Suddenly engineers were no longer essential. The game of return-on-capital-employed (ROCE) is about reducing costs for the same asset deployment. If you're not planning to employ less capital, you can only improve the return on what you've got by cutting the costs associated with it.

Companies started to think in terms of ROCE. Some big firms decided to sell off marginal assets to improve their balance sheets. Unocal sold off its refineries altogether and decided to focus on higher-value offshore operations. BP slimmed down its refinery base and farmed out its in-house engineering functions. The capital employed by the big guys was written down. These assets were ideal for the new financial players (Tosco, Valero): pay pennies on the dollar of installed cost and run a very lean ship. The new breed had low capital employed and in order to run marginal assets profitably, they had to run with extremely low costs. Engineering department overheads were slashed. Then the big guys began to see that this seemed to be working.

At the same time, there has been a trend toward more high technology in the process environment. Basic technologies melded (e.g., computers with controllers), and synergies emerged (APC, real time optimisation, expert systems) that allowed more automation and optimisation without requiring the steady hand of the plant engineer to keep things ticking over. If you needed engineering services, you could buy it in (so, indeed, some of this operation was outsourced). Your central in-house engineering function became that of deciding what services were needed and buying them at the lowest possible price.

The article points to a bit of the vicious circle phenomenon, where overhead was squeezed out of an organisation, taxing the remaining resources to the point where they were no longer able to look critically at their own function and make improvements, which in turn made their role somewhat redundant and less valuable to the organisation overall.

There's a book on this subject that I'd like to have a look at some day: Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, by Tom Demarco. I haven't read it, but the key point is raised in this Slashdot review. Companies slip from peak efficiency when they squeeze the human factor too much.

The question comes down to the lens through which you view the organisation. From within, the engineer looks at the millions of dollars of equipment for which he is responsible. He looks at his salary, looks at the cost of suboptimal operation and says, "Darn straight I'm worth my keep." I've certainly looked at the world with that view before. When he looks at an org chart full of engineers, he feels pretty confident in his own value to the organisation.

But the MBA or accountant looks out and says, "Just how little can I spend and keep my pots and pans ticking over?" You don't pay bankers on the basis of the money they handle. You pay the minimum number you need to keep your business running. Non-essential functions slip aside. This "pay-later" strategy seem attractive in an environment of minimising cash outlay. And I will say that it can work - I've seen it do so.

When the organisation loses is when optimisation is considered a non-essential function. If you don't know how much it's costing you, you can ignore it. These days, you can buy benchmarking services that tell you how you are doing in relation to your competitors, so you don't need your own people to tell you. And that's valuable, because the worldview of your own people is primarily influenced by what they see within the fenceline. And you can also buy services of companies like mine to help you get closer to the optimum. Hiring in services is attractive, because you can look at them in terms of their value propositions. But, as the article points out, you are not likely to get the same level of experience that you would if these were your own people. When is that a losing proposition?

In my experience, the balance was tipped when short-termism came into play - the idea that period-on-period (quarter-on-quarter, for instance) improvements in efficiency (particularly in efficiency of ROCE) were necessary to drive shareholder value. This ignores the impact of longer-term projects that take time to design, implement and operate.

Engineering is all about usefully harnessing pure science. Engineers always had one eye on the financials, but they also had one eye on the plants. When you separate the technology from the finance, you are maybe gutting the core identity of the engineer.

Am I dewy-eyed here? Not really. Like I said, these days I make my living by providing optimisation services as a consultant to third parties. One of those career conundrums. The engineer in me says, "Look, it's obvious, the process engineer is worth his keep." And yet the consultant in me says, "Hey, this is how I make my living. Keep it up you greedy SOBs!"

SweeTarts

This is an amazing blog entry about the candy SweeTarts, filled with real passion. Took me right back to grade school and Mandel's pharmacy. Damned if this hasn't got my mouth watering, and I don't even particularly like the sour little buggers.

From the usually excellent Tasting Menu weblog.

Magnatune

I was playing around with the streaming "radio" stations in iTunes this weekend and came across a stream from something called "Magnatune". I followed a link to their homepage, and I have to say I was very impressed with what I found.

Here is a company applying the "shareware" model to music. They offer up their content free (at mp3 quality) for non-commercial use. If you want a better quality version, or if you want to support the artists, you are free to contribute (the range is $5-18 per album, with $8 suggested). And from any money you contribute, half goes to the artists.

I thought this was a brilliant idea. And then I found they actually have music that I've been meaning to buy. They have two albums by The Dufay Collective, a group dedicated to performing music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. I had heard some of their recording of "Songs in Praise of the Virgin Mary", 13th Century Spanish cantigas, on the BBC some years back. This particulary recording is not available from Magnatune, but I did download their Cancionero recording. First in mp3s, then, after I bought the CD (on-line), I downloaded as WAV (CD quality) files (it takes me about 5 hours per CD with my limited bandwidth - just perfect for an overnight download).

I also bought a recording by a group called Stellamara, and I've been experimenting with some of their other artists - check out the recording by the Lavra monks in particular. If you go to the site, click through "license" and then select the "non-commercial" - you just have to confirm that your use will be non-commercial and you are free to download any / all of their content.

Such potential - you can sample everything and buy what you like / keep. And the artists publish their music on a Creative Commons license, are not bound by exclusivity clauses, and get paid at probably 400% of what they would get from a major label. I'd be happy to buy more music on terms like this.

Photos

I stuck a few photos up on my earlier Chile entry.

Easter Feast

So, I've been having a pretty challenging Lenten season. I decided to keep the traditional (pre-Vatican II) Lenten fasting and abstinence, and also to abstain from all alcohol (with the exception of our week in Chile, which was designed as a wine-tasting trip, for which I gave myself an exemption). In the process, I've lost 10kg (I had it to lose). I've been to mass daily (except Chile), which has given my conversion a real kick in the pants (and my comprehension of Portuguese as well!). All the early-to-bed, early-to-rise has been tough on the family, and I can't say it's been 100% habit-forming [man are those botequins temptation made real]. But now the time has come to break the fast.

We are especially looking forward to Easter Sunday this year - for it being Easter and my wife's birthday. I am also celebrating a fact I only learned by research at the American Family Immigration History Center, which publishes the immigration history from Ellis Island.

I am 25% Italian. The rest of my ancestry is, broadly speaking, British, and those families have mostly been in the US for hundreds of years. But my Italian ancestors came to the US in the 20th century - they were the last ones to arrive in the US. My great-grandmother came to the US from Avellino in 1903, and my mother's paternal grandfather arrived in the US on April 11, 1904, from a small village called San Nicola Manfredi, in the hills above the city of Benevento, inland from Naples. He was 15 years old, trained as a hat-maker.

My great-grandparents became American citizens after the required interval, sometime in the 1910s, before the birth of my grandfather. All of my grandparents were born American citizens, as were my parents and myself. It's pretty hard to deny my all-American-ness, and I don't (I just don't live there).

In the summer of 2001, we had the chance to visit Avellino and San Nicola Manfredi. We stayed in Benevento, and it was an opportunity to be a little more familiar with my own roots. We tried to visit a distant relative, who was not at home. Still, this is the only real lead I have on any of my ancestors in "the old country", and it awoke in me a desire to stay closer to those roots and pass them down to my own children, who are not only American citizens, but also European citizens, and who are, by my marriage to a 100% Scot, slightly more than 50% Scottish and just ticking over with 12-1/2% Italian.

Anyway, that brings me back to Easter. Celebrating Easter as Easter, for my first time as a Catholic, celebrating my wife's birthday, and commemorating my Italian ancestors on the centenary of their arrival in America. Okay, and celebrating Easter the carioca way. We've designed our feast as follows (I pay homage here to Erik Keilholtz of Erik's Rants and Recipes, whose writings about his own Easter feasts (2003, 2004) has inspired me to roll our own instead of ducking out for a nice buffet brunch):

We will go to mass in the morning (I'll have been to the vigil the evening before), and will probably incorporate a walk on Ipanema beach if the weather is nice. Then, while our daughter has her morning nap, we will hide some eggs around the apartment. While she hunts for the eggs, we'll enjoy pannetone (or columba, if we can find it) with prosecco.

For dinner, we will start with bolinhos de bacalhau, a Rio tradition at Easter, and follow with roast leg of lamb (just delivered from a local supplier fresh from her farm) with rosemary and garlic, served with roast potatoes and green beans. We'll have a cheese course and follow with passionfruit (maracujá) creme brulées. I'm planning on Strega for a digestif, and good coffee and cantuccini biscotti.

We're going to drink Chilean wines with our dinner - wines we bought on our trip and have been patiently awaiting since. Two red gran reservas (Merlot, Carmenere)from the Bisquertt winery and a late-harvest white dessert wine from Viu Manent. Oh, and we'll drink Baden-Baden (Brazilian) lager, bem gelada,with the bolinhos de bacalhau.

And after that, I'll need to rethink my regime if I have any hope of keeping off any part of these 10kg I've parted with!

New Books Ordered

Have I confessed this before? I buy books I never read. I'm not sure what the ratio is, but maybe 2:1 (not read:read). I mean to read them. I flip through them, sometimes. I will read them. Some day.

Why own up to this? Because I already have, here in Brazil, more books than I could possibly read during the balance of our stay (now inside of 3 months). This includes an entire shelf of books in Portuguese - a language I can read, although slowly and with occasional need of a dicionário.

And now I've gone and ordered another stack of books for delivery by Amazon.com.

This ain't the cheapest pastime going. Shipping books here costs about $5 per title, regardless if it's a doorstop or a slender book for children. But the selection of English-language titles available in Brazil is pretty limited (usually mass-market, or "airport" fiction, and classic literature) and that, itself, is expensive when you can find it (as at Livraria da Travessa or at the wonderful FNAC bookstore in Barra de Tijuca, which might be the only good reason to go out there).

So, once again I've taken the plunge. Here are the titles Amazon tells me have shipped today:

The following items were included in this shipment:

• Mere Christianity, by CS Lewis
• Three by Annie Dillard : The Writing Life, An American Childhood, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
• Waiting for God, by Simone Weil
• The Portable Thoreau, by Henry David Thoreau
• Your Money or Your Life, by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
• Catholic Study Bible
• The Need for Roots, by Simone Weil
• Authentic Mexican, by Rick Bayless
• Tony's Bread: An Italian Folktale, by Tomie De Paola
• Strega Nona: Her Story, by Tomie De Paola
• The Right to Useful Unemployment, by Ivan Illich
• The Challenges of Ivan Illich, ed. Lee Hoinacki
• Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil
• The Simone Weil Reader, by Simone Weil
• Homebrewing - Volume I, by Al Korzonas
• Cider: Making, Using and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider, by Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols
• The Abruzzo Trilogy: Bread and Wine, Fontamara, and the Seed Beneath the Snow, by Ignazio Silone

A pretty mixed bag--er, box. And again, not possible I'm going to read all of this before we leave.

I recently came across the comment that we tend to read what reinforces our own world-view, rather than that which challenges it. I suspect this is true, especially given the above, although I do expect to be challenged by some of the titles on the list.

You can also glean the fact that I am itching to get back to my own home and my own kitchen and get back into the rhythm of the seasons I am more familiar with: cider-making, brewing - things you can't really do in the tropics.

Pilgrimage

How's your French? I found a wonderful site yesterday for the pilgrim routes to Santiago, particularly the portions passing through France. They have a feature (you have to dig a bit) where you can request maps and practical information about the trails by either post or e-mail.

64 days from Vézelay (I visited the pilgrimage church there in 2001) to Santiago. And there's an extension up to Brussels.