Montréal and Québec City — August 2018

Panorama of Old Montréal 

(Click the photo to view it larger.)

Group photo in Québec City

My first time visiting Montréal and Québec City. It was this Road Scholar tour. One reason I did this with a tour group was because I don't speak French!

In each city, we began with a tour by a local guide. Our overall leader and the two city guides were excellent.

The tour went well. There was a bit of rain the first full day, but I never used my umbrella. We focused mainly on Old Montréal and Old Québec City. In our free time, I visited Montréal's Gay Village one day and the Botanical Garden and Olympic Park on another day. I also made sure to try peanut butter dumplings in Montréal.

Besides the standard tourist sights, we had private concerts in each city —  an organ concert in Montréal and a chamber music concert in Québec City.

I have four sets of photos:

• Around Montréal and Québec City (6 photos; view them individually to see the captions.)
• Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (6 photos; view the photos individually to see the captions.)
• Montmorency Falls, Québec City
  (5 photos)
• Montréal Botanical Garden (9 photos)

This was my favorite painting at the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts — laugh-out-loud funny. Click the photo to view it larger.

It just so happened that my cousin's daughter Lisa and two of her children were visiting Montréal at the same time! We arranged to tour the Botanical Garden together. Here I am with Lisa and Ben (Emma is taking the photo).

More stupid rules

More State Department stupidity

After waiting 8 damn weeks, the good news is that Victor was not told he has tuberculosis. (He wasn't told no, either. The silence was the message. As I've previously complained, that's stupid.) So next, we waited to hear about the new interview. Again, as I've previously complained, no one could tell us when this would come, nor whether this would come by phone or by email, nor whether it would come to me, to Victor, or to both of us. More stupidity.

New stupid rule #1: Yesterday, about ten days later, I received an email with a new interview date. (P.S. Two days later, I also received a postal letter.) Although I chose the original interview date, this time, they assigned an interview date with no input from us! How stupid! Naturally, the date is the very day I fly to Montréal for my next trip. GRRRR!

New stupid rule #2: Despite several online references to changing appointments, this assigned date can't be changed!

New stupid rule #3: If we wait until after the assigned date, we can get a new interview date. That's right, they would rather wait than do it now. GRRRR!

Because of these stupid rules, we will have to wait until late August to re-schedule the interview. It will be at least a month later, it appears. GRRRR!

The Road Scholar trip to Montréal and Québec City has multiple departure dates. I tried to switch to a later one, but it is so close to the date, I would lose 100% of what I had paid! (Not to mention change fees for air travel)

I discussed one other possibility with Victor: We go to Juárez for his morning appointment, and then I immediately leave for Montréal and Victor returns to Mérida by himself. As I expected, he didn't like that idea and prefers to wait for the later interview.

Washington, DC — June 2018

The National Museum of African-American History and Culture and the Washington Monument​

13 photos at the U.S. Botanic Garden

19 photos​ from some of the places I visited. (View each photo individually to see the captions.)

It's been more than 20 years since I was last in Washington. I wanted to visit the many new museums I had never seen.

The weather was hot and humid, but I was indoors most of the time. It rained one afternoon, but, again, I was indoors during the rain.

I'm a rapid museum-goer. I rarely spend more than a couple of hours in any museum. Here's a day-by-day rundown of what I saw:

Saturday:

• National Postal Museum — Better than expected.
• National Building Museum — Less than expected. A nice building and store.
• International Spy Museum — OK. Not much new to me. The most crowded place I visited.

Sunday:

• Dumbarton Oaks Museum and Gardens — Better than expected.
• The Phillips Collection — OK. The featured exhibit was good.
• National Geographic Museum — Less than expected. There is a small permanent exhibition in the back building, and that is free. But you don't know that when you enter at the front, where you pay for only two exhibits, one of which I was not at all interested in seeing. There are also some fine large photos in the display windows all around the front building.

Monday:

• The Freer & Sackler Galleries — A few exceptional items.
• National Museum of African Art — OK, but not much of interest to me.
• National Museum of the American Indian — Several very good exhibits, but the tribe-by-tribe layout of some parts of the museum gets to be exhausting.
• Newseum — OK, but too many parts were just about historical events, not so much about the reporting of the events. And little about the history of news organizations. Altogether, less than I expected. A huge space. 
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial — Strong.
• National WWII Memorial — Not much at all.

Tuesday:

• U.S. Botanic Garden — Small, but enjoyable.
• National Museum of African American History and Culture — Very good material. Nicely done.
• U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — A difficult layout, but the exhibits are excellent.

Bank and card fees

Responding to a column two weeks ago, I wrote this letter, published in today's Los Angeles Times:

The “Credit Card Fee Game” [May 20, Money Matters, by Catharine Hamm] made me think of two peeves of mine, one longstanding and one brand new:

— I go to Mexico several times a year. Even though Citigroup owns Banamex, I still get charged a hefty fee for getting pesos at a Banamex ATM using my Citibank ATM card. Grrr.

— My United Airlines MileagePlus Explorer Visa card has a hefty annual fee, but at least the 10,000 bonus miles I get for spending at least $25,000 per year almost completely pays for the annual fee.

However, the card company recently notified me that the 10,000 bonus miles benefit will be disappearing. Grrr.

Even though I fly United frequently and use this card as my main one, I hate fees, and I may not keep it after this year.

Rodney Hoffman

Juarez — May 2018

Giraffe in Parque Central

Link to more photos. (View them individually to see the captions.)

As discussed in the previous post, Victor and I went to Ciudad Juarez to pursue the fiancé visa, and, due to the complications I detailed there, we had to spend two extra days there, too.

We took a tourist bus tour of the city early in our stay. We went back (by regular bus and by foot) the next day to get better photos of some of the sites.

In general, we were not too impressed with Juarez. For a city of well over 1 million, ...

• It's very unfriendly to pedestrians. It's quite difficult to cross major streets due to the weird way they handle left turns. There's almost always lots of traffic.

• There are few parks.

• Other than the single giraffe and one ostrich in Parque Central, there's no zoo.

• ​There's one rather small art museum and only one other, mostly history, museum.

• The sun and heat are unrelenting; there are rarely any clouds.

• The airport insists on immigration checks coming and going, even if you're coming from and going to other cities in Mexico.

That said, there were a few good things. Parque Central was about a 40-minute walk from our hotel. Even though the walk is not very pleasant, most mornings, we walked there and then spent two to three hours walking repeatedly around the mile-long perimeter track, sometimes going through the cactus botanical garden, stopping briefly to use the exercise machines, always admiring the lake and the many ducks and geese. Curiously, there's a second half of the park that's private and almost completely empty of people.

We also learned of a few highly-recommended small restaurants. We were able to try one for burritos and one for tortas, both excellent.

Visa progess: Step 2.5

I should have known better. I thought this trip would finish everything, but I forgot that there have been unexpected complications and delays at every step. Sigh.

Victor's medical exam x-rays yesterday showed a scar / lesion in his lungs. Now he must follow additional steps to rule out tuberculosis. Just look at what that means:

• The interview next Monday is postponed until this TB check is done.
• He needs to give early morning sputum samples for three consecutive days. Since they're closed on weekends, that means it couldn't start today, Thursday. Instead, it will be next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
• Our non-refundable flight back to Mérida was for next Tuesday. Now we have canceled that and bought new tickets for next Thursday. We have also extended our hotel stay for two more nights.
• The cultures from the sputum smears take 8 weeks to complete! We will find out the results around July 12th.
• Either immediately after that, or after treatment if he has TB, we will have to make another trip to exciting (* sarcasm *) Juarez for the postponed interview.

So, instead of this trip being the third and final step in the fiancé visa process, it turns out to be Step 2.5. The medical exam itself is complete, but the final interview is postponed. Even if everything now goes as well as it can, Victor won't be in the U.S. until late summer at the earliest. As I said above: Sigh!

My math publication

My only mathematics "publication"

In 1984, The Mathematical Intelligencer magazine asked for pithy definitions of applied and pure mathematicians. A definition just came to me, I got an honorable mention for it, and it was printed in the magazine, as you can see in the lower right above:

   An applied mathematician loves the theorem.
   A pure mathematician loves the proof.

I still like this a lot.

Autographs ― Walter Mosley

I have not yet read any of Mosley's books. I decided to attend his talk at this past weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I knew they would have his newest book for sale, but I wanted to start with one of his earliest, so I bought this one the night before at Vroman's.

(Index of autographs)

Autographs ― Lawrence Wright

I have always enjoyed Wright's work in The New Yorker, and our book group discussed The Looming Tower back in 2006.

Until I read about this new book, I didn't know he lived in Austin. I went to hear him at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this past weekend, and I bought this book. When I was getting his autograph, I told him I had been born and raised in San Antonio, went to Rice, then came to USC for grad school.

(Index of autographs)

An apparently religious boy

Chip Levine Memorial Award (CLMA) 

Rodney Hoffman

for Devotion to Jewish Studies, 1964

To all appearances, I was quite a religious boy. I'll say why, and then talk about what happened.

We didn't go to services every week, but we did go on major holidays and some other occasions. 

I started kindergarten at the synagogue, learning to read before I entered first grade. 

I went to Sunday School through confirmation at age 16. I won the Jewish Community Center's Bible Bowl (named and modeled after TV's College Bowl). 

I went to Hebrew School twice a week. Almost everyone stopped going to Hebrew School after Bar Mitzvah, but because my Bar Mitzvah was in October, and I had already begun the new academic year, I finished out that year, almost a full extra year of Hebrew School. Because of that, in May, I won the gold watch pictured above. 

I was in SAFTY, the San Antonio chapter of the the North American Federation of Temple Youth, and went to SAFTY and TOFTY (Texas) events. I won one of the Temple's four camperships to NFTY's Hagigah, a two-week arts camp in Warwick, NY. 

In college, I went to quite a few Hillel events. In grad school, I still went to a few.

But starting years earlier, I found the number of religions, each claiming The Revealed Truth, baffling and impossible and the very idea of God dubious. Conflicts between religion and science, historical and current, pushed me away from religion. Coming to terms with being gay was the final breaking point.

I have now been an atheist for decades. My hatred of religion has only grown over the years. I think raising children to be religious is child abuse. (See all my blog posts tagged 'religion.')

I reluctantly attend religious weddings and funerals, but otherwise I don't even step into churches, temples, or cathedrals. I respond negatively to anyone pushing their religion in my face, including fish on cars and crosses on homes, saying, if only silently, "Keep it to yourself!"