Season’s Greetings 2025: Budapest, Bomb Cyclones, and too Many TROLLS

In a few hours we board a ferry to the airport, where we’ll catch our flight to Muncie, Indiana for a Midwest Christmas family gathering.

     It’s -2°F in Muncie right now.

Today, Pacific Northwest rivers may reach historic flood stages for the second time this week, and a gale force bomb cyclone swirls in from the Pacific Ocean, according to the National Weather Service.

What could possibly go wrong with our carefully-laid travel plans? 

Ah well. Everything, of course. Absolutely everything can go wrong, at any moment, when we’re on the road or just living our ordinary daily lives. 

I like to think of unexpected life disruptions the same way I think of trolls, who lurk underneath our plans just out of sight. And yes, we’ve had a couple unexpected life ‘trolls’ in the past year: Disruptive, painful events that upended our sense of peace and equilibrium. Suddenly something huge and ugly, on legs as thick as tree trunks with a foul odor, blasted into our lives and savagely gobbled up our fragile sense of security.

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     Every single one of us has been visited by one of those nasty things. 

And everyone can use a few tools to deal with life’s trolls, right? We picked up a few useful Life Troll Tools on our travels recently, in fact, including these gems:

     Life Troll Tool # 1: The Kindness of Strangers

Travel trolls are different than life trolls, but they bring that similar sense of hysterical panic I feel when life spins out of control. Travel trolls include the weather, but also world events such as wars, pandemics, and illnesses, which have ruined more of our trips in the last few years than we can count on two hands. 

And then there was the I-phone I dropped from a two-story restaurant balcony on our recent Big Island adventure. Oops. A kind stranger retrieved it from the parking lot down below, even though I didn’t know I dropped it. (…and no, phones don’t survive twenty foot drops, despite what the phone case packaging says.)

Or when I booked a taxi from Southampton’s cruise port to London for the wrong day. Uh oh. In the midst of the typical cruise disembarkation madness at the port, a kind local driver saved us from my booking mistake when he agreed to an impromptu 100-mile cab ride, which included leisurely stops at Stonehenge and Windsor Castle. That cab ride turned out to be cheaper than our wrong day booking, in fact. Who knew? Well we know now, and I stored that weird travel fix in my troll toolkit for use when future travel messes come our way, which they inevitably will. 

     So we look for the kind people, always.

Life Troll Tool #2: The Love Inside Us

We acquired more life tools on our spring historical Eastern Europe trip, when we learned about Hitler and Stalin’s horrendous brutalities, as well as the institutionalized madness of the Holocaust. We visited Warsaw, Krakow, Auschwitz, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, and continually asked ourselves: How did people endure such monstrosity, and how did they find the strength to go on? 

Pondering such questions helps us understand our predicament as we advance to ever-older ages, and we pondered these questions even more when we attended an incredible Ashland, Oregon, performance of As You Like It in September. Shakespeare’s masterpiece speech, All the World’s A Stage, holds new power for us now, as we cross our arthritic fingers that the ‘sans’ trolls – ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’ – won’t assault us anytime soon. 

We know how fortunate we are to have made it to our 70s in relatively good health, because so many other people our age already face the ‘sans’ stage. Yet how will we have the strength and wisdom to endure, when we are sans-everything? How does one keep going, when sans-everything is the inevitable conclusion to our earthly existence?

What we learned on our Eastern Europe trip was that while the monsters might toss a person’s lifeless body in the Danube, they could never destroy the love and courage inside that person, unless that person allowed it. Scores of individuals and community groups never, never gave up, no matter what. They kept on fighting despite the terrible odds, despite inevitable death. 

In the end, the Fascist troll-monsters couldn’t stop the kindnesses people shared with each other, or their courage or cleverness. They couldn’t destroy a person’s ability to simply do the next right thing. They couldn’t take those qualities away, no matter what. The powerful and corrupt destroyed themselves and their families, in the end. Yet the memory of those who chose to have courage and love despite the horrors endure to this day, in the hearts and minds of others, including us, and throughout the world. Those are the people we remember with great respect; the honorable ones. The courageous ones. The loving ones. The kind ones. No one gets to the end of life and wishes they spent more time at work, after all. Most of us wonder if we’ve loved enough, and wonder whether others will miss us.

     So to deal with the trolls, we look for those who choose to keep the love inside alive, no matter what.

Life Troll Tool #3: The Beauty Around Us

After our trip, I started listening to my fave classical piece, Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube, first thing in the morning, before I clicked on the news.  The awful news is one big troll for me right now, since it knots up my stomach and causes aches in my heart. 

The brilliant but brutal film The Pianist, about a real-life piano player who was one of the few survivors of the monstrous Warsaw ghetto, showed us how beauty, in the form of music*, endured despite the horrors. (*and human kindness. Human kindness endured in that ghetto, as well.) 

Strauss’s uplifting Blue Danube score, though, calms me right down. Strauss wrote the piece in 1865, to boost Viennese morale during a post-war depression after a Prussian War defeat, and trust me: It can raise the spirits of anyone who feels hopeless about today’s news, like I do sometimes.

(….and yes, I am aware that evil Squid Game masters play Strauss’s score on loop as doomed players march to their inevitable deaths, just for its calming effect. And yes, I know that you’ll hear the score ad nauseum when you visit Budapest and Vienna as a tourist, because we heard it ad nauseum on our visits. I don’t care; neither of these things ruin that piece for me, since it’s such an absolutely brilliant masterpiece.)

So we learned plenty on our trip, at music concerts, art museums, and on walks through gorgeous landscapes, about Eastern Europe’s incredible music, art, and natural beauty. We could easily appreciate how such beauty sustained people as they struggled to survive during the darkest days of WWII.

 That’s also why we spent so much time last summer working in our yard and garden. The beauty of our Northwest landscape helps us forget the news for a while, as we connect with nature’s incredible, calming wonders right outside our door. So to fight the life trolls, we have learned to focus as best we can on the astounding beauty that surrounds us – including joyful birds! – if only we remember to look.

Life Troll Tool #4: Keep Your Freedom Close

Speaking of the Danube: I have meant for the longest time to write about a conversation I had with one of the quieter group members on our Eastern Europe trip. Dyung approached me as we passed the twinkling lights of gorgeous Budapest on our Danube River evening cruise. He asked why I signed up for an Eastern Europe historical tour, and I told him it was because we wanted to learn how the world allowed the atrocities of the WWII era to occur, so we could learn how to prevent such horrors from ever happening again.

He agreed, and told me a riveting story about his escape from Vietnam by boat at the age of 18, decades ago. Our devastating visit to Auschwitz the day before had affected him deeply, when it brought back painful memories of how Vietnam’s communist government didn’t treat people like people, but more like animals, just as the Nazis treated the Jews. He emphasized that Vietnam’s leaders didn’t care about people; they didn’t care if they lived or died. It was all about corruption, not human beings, and Dyung had to escape, no matter what.

Even though Dyung is now an American citizen, and even though it’s been decades, he shared that he still fears a knock on the door in the middle of the night. He fears that he will be found out, even though today, there’s nothing to find out except that as an American immigrant, he’s done remarkably well establishing a new life and supporting his family. So I learned that while at first glance Dyung seemed like any other American tourist enjoying a holiday, he was not that. His psyche had been deeply scarred by the injustices he experienced living in an authoritarian country where his life had no worth, and he felt it important to speak out about it now, no matter what.

This is one of several reasons we continue to speak out whenever we can, and fight back against encroaching authoritarianism right here in our own country. We must keep telling stories such as Dyung’s, because stories like his matter now more than ever. This is the reason we spend so much time pounding the pavement at protests, hoisting our signs high. We want to help people hear the stories. We want to help protect the freedoms of others in situations similar to Dyung’s, before it’s too late. 

Life Troll Tool #5: Remember the LIGHT Despite the Darkness

We had so many more stories, adventures, and trolls (!) during 2025, but I’ll end with a last Life Troll Tool, one we always try to remember this time of year but frequently forget:

Find the LIGHT

In a few days we’ll reach the darkest day of the year, and then the LIGHT will slowly return. It’s so easy to forget this when things seem bleak and trolls attack, or bomb cyclones swirl in, but it’s true: the LIGHT always returns; the LOVE always returns. Light and love, and justice and truth, eventually returned to Europe after WWII. Now it’s up to us to keep the lights on and the love alive here in present-day America, because we can’t let those nasty trolls win, can we? 

And you know what? J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, knew a thing or two about trolls. He illustrates the truth about them so well, through the fate of his horrible Hobbit trolls. In The Hobbit, guess what instantly turns a Tolkien troll to stone? 

LIGHT, of course. Shine enough light and hope and truth on those suckers, and POOF – they’re gone. That’s because the lights of love, justice, and truth eventually defeat the darkness every time, including the smelliest of TROLLS. (This is absolutely true, and I know this for a fact because Tolkien the genius knew a thing or two about life. I love Tolkien sooooo much.)

We hope the LIGHT of faith, hope, learning, and love fills all your lives during the New Year of 2026, and thanks, as always, for following along.

(And thank you for waiting so patiently for a new blog post – I’m in the midst of revamping the website, and plan to finish some great posts in 2026.)

FYI I wrote several other posts about our historical Eastern Europe tour (with more to go), and others documenting our participation in local protests, over on the Substack at: Annb/Substack