We’re all back from Vieques. Genevieve and Francesco took pictures, including the one on the right that I plundered from her Blog at www.veeves.com.

The flight attendant in the 757 announced the weather in Philadelphia as our plane sat baking on the runway of San Juan’s Luis Munoz International Airport. “The weather in Philadelphia is 18 degrees and cloudy.” When she repeated herself in Spanish, (“dies-y-ocho, damas y caballeros!”), murmurs of amused outrage burst out all over the cabin.

This morning, the doors of Amtrak train 180 to New York were glued shut with snow.

Books I read over vacation:

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
  
• Also by Heinlein: The Puppet Masters, Waldo, and Magic, Inc.
  
• Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth.
  
• Notes from a Small Island, by Bill Bryson.
  
• Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. (only halfway through this one.)
  
• Neuromancer, by William Gibson.
  
• In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson.
  
• Everything’s Eventual, by Stephen King
  
• California Sketches (just the Mark Twain part). Twain describes a thirty-five foot beached whale smelling “much larger, possibly as much as a mile and a half larger”, which was useful in describing the dead horse on the western side of the island.