Galapagos and Southward

We took a trip to Galapagos, a trip that a recommend to everybody to try at least once in their life. There is more than enough written about the place that I don't have to, but there is something notable about actually experiencing an animal-rich environment where there were no major top predator land animals. As a consequence the animals are so tame you can walk up to them and grab them. Which you are not supposed to do. So you take photographs instead.

The area is highly protected and therefore you take a tour; it is next to impossible to receive permits to allow your private yacht access to the Galapagos. The selection of tour organizer is therefore important. You also really need to know what you want from a guide and be unafraid of hiring your own despite whatever your tour group might offer.

Several islands have airfields capable of handling a private jet, having been built to support the World War II effort. Some people are surprised to hear that the Galapagos is not deserted and in fact boasts a population of several tens of thousands of native inhabitants. Thus you can also fly in on a commercial jet from various Ecuadorian mainland cities. Either way you are greeted by signs that insist that you should not contribute to child prostitution, which I found odd.

The fascination of the Galapagos is that its remoteness and geologically young age created a distinctive laboratory for evolution. The unique flora and fauna there provide a compelling demonstration of the power of evolution to drive species into ecological niches. Unfortunately our ship was itself a demonstration of evolution in action as well; our fellow tourists adequately demonstrated how homo sapiens technological control over their evolutionary destiny has driven most of us into the niche of thoughtless, witless, pointless consumers. It was clear to me that the tour guides should have offered to guide for free but assessed a dollar for every stupid or repetitive question. Their gross receipts would have soared.

But the trip was worth it nonetheless.

From there we flew into Punta Arenas and managed to travel to Tierra del Fuego, hopping tiny underserviced airports such as Ushuaia Airport. As I have blogged before, the general area is breathtaking. We covered Torres del Paine National Park, Lake Pehoe, Nordenskhold, Laguna Amarga, and the amazing bonai forests of Quebrada de la Feria. We helicoptered to Cape Horn and viewed the angry waters of Drake's Sea and Shackleton's Endurance.

Jenny and I found peace and amazing inspiration on this trip, not to speak of the prodigious amount of learning from our guides. Galapagos provided the natural wonders and South America the physical ones. Definitely a trip to remember.

I almost forgot, this is also the first trip where I brought a real camera, a Nikon D80. Don't expect many photographs; the equipment is a real pain to carry around. But high quality digital photography is great when you are willing and able to carry the equipment to support it. Jenny has more mileage from her point and shoot digicam, but will admit that some of my Nikon shots were better.

I have since switched the Nikon for a Canon EOS 1D Mark III. The only thing I preferred about the Nikon was the extremely sophisticated flash system. Otherwise the Canon has been superior.

Work and Life Balance

Some people may not realize that Jenny and I spend almost a third of our time away from each other. Our work schedules do not mix.

But we have adapted. These days it seems like a nearly ideal situation, although our perceptions may change in the future.

What our current mode enables are highly concentrated segments of time where we are very focused on one thing. Unlike the days of most people, we do not have to switch between work mode, spouse mode, recreation mode, friends mode, and home mode every few hours. Rather, we do it in several day to several week increments.

This really allows us sufficient time to get into a groove on a given activity.

For example, a highly concentrated seven day interval of 24 by 7 work is very productive. During that time I eat, sleep, and breathe work. During the day I will meet people. During the evening I will have business meetings. During the night I will read or write business-related reports, research and similar items. I am not watching movies (or television), reading recreational books, or meeting non-work friends. My time is totally dedicated to work. Consequently I am so focused that I find my ability to comprehend and make decisions seems to be several times more efficient.

This also applies to recreation. When Jenny and I take a week-long vacation we will dedicate our time totally to Peau, each other and ourselves. The level of relaxation, comfort, and tuning into each other is something we cannot replicate in a single evening after dinner or a weekend fling. And we find it fun to plan out these week long excursions, to develop themes or knowledge or skills.

At any given week it does not seem like we have a work-life balance at all. Spending 20 hours a day at work geeking out with work reports and never going out socially would seem like the classic work-a-holic unbalanced lifestyle. Yet when averaged over a quarter it turns out I have done less time working than most of my working peers. Yet usually I have accomplished more.

True, we have the luxury of tailoring the rest of our lives around this kind of scheduling, such as my work support staff or even our relationship activities. But I really enjoy this way of dividing up time.

There is nothing like monomaniacal immersion to clear and focus the mind for love, work, play, and so many other things (other than sleep!)

Books to Read

Here are some interesting relationship books to read. No, they are not the typical relationship books nor are they self-help books; I am rarely writing about a typical approach nor do I really care to help you, my dear readers!

Instead these are books that outline some underlying research that Jenny and I found useful in the construction of our relationship principles. It may seem like a strange assortment of books, but we have found them useful:

Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert, a book citing some of the scientific studies that indicate the limitations of our ability to imagine, predict, and remember, and how this strongly undermines our struggle to be happy. The Amazon link includes an interesting review by Malcolm Gladwell. We found this helpful in understanding why we instinctually strive to undermine our rational relationship frameworks. It helped create sensors to warn us when we are falling into destructive patterns and ways to tempt us away from them.

Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, by Thomas E. Kida, a book that illustrates how we fail to think rationally even when we think we are, and how such tendencies can be exploited by advertising, media, and other persons. In order to understand how to build a reliable and robust relationship it is important to understand the failure modes of the individuals in the relationship. Knowing these patterns tends to move us away from blame and toward constructive remedies.

The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships, by Temple Grandin and Sean Barron, actually a book  written to help people with autism or Asperger syndrome but illuminating what most of us take for granted in the expectations in relationships. By forcing us not to assume, we can construct some new sensors, effectors and interaction patterns based on these simple underlying interaction rules.

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, Stanley Milgrim. A more updated view on the newer and more well known Stanford Prison Experiment and its context in the Abu Ghraib incidents is in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, but I found the latter book to have more grandstanding. Useful to understand some of the roots of misbehavior: authority, assumption, privacy, and so on. I have directly or indirectly referenced such warning indicia in earlier posts concerning the challenges to fidelity.

Sometimes the underlying research citations are more illuminating, but higher level thematic guide such as these can be a good place to start for those who are serious about thinking about their relationships. I will add to this as I recall other texts we found useful.

Three's a Crowd?

Recently Jenny has brought up the notion of a threesome. She has become what is called “bi-curious.” This is at the exploration stage, and she has not committed to actually trying it yet. But she brings it up from time to time, sometimes in a light jest, and sometimes in a “what if I wanted to, how would we…” kind of discussion, you know, purely hypothetical logistics.

It could also be a perversion test for me.

I once wrote that a bisexual girlfriend was an attribute that I preferred. But although there are still aspects of this that interest me and have in the past interested me, yes, in a prurient way!, I find that the whole prospect in a life-long mate is quite different. It triggers an interesting mix of feelings in me.

Does it destabilize our Peau, our relationship, our manifestation of love and trust?

Jenny has similar questions. If not for this mutual uncertainty we whould have long since tried to satisfy Jenny’s curiousity, and doubtless this posting would be bursting to the seams with hot and heavy bisexual action. Or maybe that is nothing more than a typical fantasy of mine!

But if I had to take a bet, I believe it will happen at some point in the next few years. I would guess that we will choose a person or provider unknown to both of us and probably in a foreign country. Somebody and somewhere where there is little risk of establishing a relationship.

But I have misgivings. Why?

Lord of the Rings, on Stage

A short post: Jenny and I went to see Lord of the Rings in London, a musical. Do not go with the Jackson movie in mind; but if you have an open mind and an interest in the books you will find it worthwhile.

Condensing the story into the length of a single play is, of course, a challenge doomed to failure. But keeping such constraints and the musical medium in mind, it was not as bad as I had feared. The stagecraft and constumes are well planned, creative, and have visual and auditory impact superbly tailored to the medium. I am told that the story went under revision since its opening to decidedly mixed reviews in Toronto.

Probably the closest other play that comes to mind is Lion King.

Cars

Given I now have a place to live, a few actually, I was once again in the market for an automobile.

I have kept an automobile in storage with my sister, to the delight of her husband. It is a high performance sports car in the $250k range. I may have driven it a few hundred miles in the last few years. My brother in law might have driven it a few thousand miles. It was a good deal for him. They do not charge me storage fees.

I have had a new model on order. It arrives later this month. It will be my 4th car of that Italian brand, so I suppose I should say that I like the car. There was a nice set of factory-sponsored events in different cities worldwide where they debuted the car. Jenny and I attended one. It was grand in a horrible way, and utterly boring to boot. But the cars were lovely and the wine was great.

I have had the usual assortment of high end cars back when I had a garage sufficient to the task: over the last decade I've entertained a brace of Porsches and Ferraris, a Lamborghini, a couple of Mercedes, and a few very special cars. None were very practical especially after I left the country. The depreciation was also, for the most part, pretty horrible, and I do not have the preservationist interests of a collector.

The problem is that Jenny and I will be living in large cities, which are not the best places for a high performance sports car, even the most practical member of that class, the Porsche Turbo or GT3. Although in Asia I have seen Ferraris in the cities, it looks like a real pain to drive them around at the off and on ten KPH maximum speed you see in traffic, while inhaling the pungent, unfiltered exhaust of hundreds of high pollution cars, most of which have their tailpipes at the level of your nose.

So I thought of a sedan. Something that could be amenable to a chauffer or self-driving. These days there are very fast saloons available for purchase. The merely fast saloons include the typical names: Aston Martin, Jaguar, Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari, Bentley and so on. Then there are the insanely fast saloons, of which I feel the Mercedes S65 AMG is the defining example given the constraints.

Meanwhile Jenny has her heart set on a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, which we test drove last year. It's a ridiculous car, but she enjoys the high driving position, especially as more and more SUVs dominate the roads. Apparently outside of the US and Europe, the Cayenne is the brand leader for Porsche. And there is a new model now...

Choices, choices...