very simple

I didn’t even realize I was stressed out about this whole “moving to a foreign country” thing until I started waking up progressively earlier beginning on Saturday. This morning? I woke up at 2. And haven’t been able to fall asleep since.

So, in an attempt to be at least a bit productive, I decided to peruse the TSA’s prohibited items list in anticipation of my flight.

I’m going to be quite lovely after nine hours on a redeye flight with no toothpaste, lip balm, hand lotion, or deodorant.

Now look, I know the recent threats, and that’s all fine. But what really got me was the stuff I apparently still can bring on the plane, including:

• cigar cutters (so that apparently you can pre-snip that cigar you’re not allowed to bring or smoke on the plane)
• corkscrews (if you’ve ever seen me attempt to open a bottle of wine, you know just how dangerous these can actually be)
• knitting needles
• scissors with sharp/pointed edges as long as they’re less than 4-inches long
• screwdrivers

And yeah, I get that nowadays, people aren’t just going to sit still and let someone with a pair of scissors take over the plane, but how in the hell are these considered less dangerous than a pudding cup?

…because the next two weeks are (I think) going to be out of control.

Let’s start with last week though. I finally had jury duty on Wednesday (which was really convenient given the two deals I had closing on Friday). But it turned out to be quite easy. Apparently none of the judges want to start scheduling big trials and such the week before Labor Day, so there was no need for any juries all day, and they let us go completely after the first day (which is virtually unheard of in Manhattan). So, all in all, it was probably the best timing possible from a “I really don’t have time to actually serve on a criminal trial jury” perspective.

Of course, this still left the partner who was on vacation and the partner who was filling in because the other partner was on vacation dealing with some issues on Wednesday that I was obviously not available for. Oh well. I guess one of the good things about being a lawyer though, is that the bosses are always pretty understanding of the whole jury duty thing.

Now, as is usual, I’m in the Berkshires with my family…my dad’s birthday is the 5th, so I always try to make it up here for this holiday weekend even if I have other stuff going on…

Which, of course, leads me to the next two weeks…

I finally got my start date for Italy, and I booked plane tickets on Friday. I’m leaving on Friday the 15th, so that I can have the weekend to recuperate from jetlag before I start working in Milan on Monday the 18th. of September.

So. That’s, like, 11 days from now.

And I decided that it would be a really brilliant idea to have a going away party next Saturday night. Because apparently I’m a masochist. Maybe nobody will show up (actually, given the number of people I know will still be out of town on extended labor day holidays and such? It’s probably going to end up being more like 5 friends coming over to finally see my apartment).

I did decide to take off starting on Wednesday the 13th, so that, at the very least, I’d have two days of just packing and turning stuff off.

Guys, I’m moving to Italy in 11 days.

I’m totally freaking out!

Everyone that finds out has had the first reaction of “aren’t you totally excited?!” Well yeah, but the initial excitement (back in friggin’ June!) has given way to the overwhelmingly not-done-ness of all the stuff I need to do before I leave.

But I’ve already decided that when I get back? I’m totally getting a swissy.

It’s too damn hot outside. It finally seemed to cool off a bit last night after a freak thunderstorm that came through the region (on the radio at about 4:30 yesterday afternoon, we had a "wind and hail" warning. Hail! in July!), and went down to the 70s. But today, it was in the 90s again. Which is nothing compared, to say, the southwest right now, but it still makes it really difficult to get anything done.

I’ve finished my first week of Italian classes, and I’m certainly starting to get the hang of it. I certainly won’t be fluent by the end, but I think that after four more weeks, I’ll definitely be functional. Now I just need to square away the rest of the aspects of this trip (there’s nothing quite like the bureaucratic black hole that is non-attorney staff at a law firm). I still don’t have a departure date, a visa, a place to live…you know, the essentials. But I can’t stress about it, because it’s not like I can go apartment hunting in Milan.

I should, however, start making a list of all of the stuff that I’m going to need to bring, arrange, etc. I’ll definitely need to forward my mail, stop my paper, turn off the cable, and do a whole bunch of other stuff that I haven’t even thought of yet. Oh, and clearly I need to go shopping (not that I ever need an excuse for that!).

I think my anxiety about this trip is manifesting itself in other ways though. For instance, today, I rearranged my hall closet so that it was roomier and more organized. Last weekend I replaced the toilet seat and handle on my toilet (they had previously been completely functional but boring white plastic), with a retro black seat to match the bathroom and a shiny chrome handle that (sort of) matches the rest of my bathroom fixtures. Oh, and I also spend last Saturday trying to figure out a better spot for my bicycle. After I took it out for a ride, I realized that the spot that I had it in made it really inconvenient to use frequently. Particularly since the prior setup required taking the front tire off so that it didn’t block a doorway. It’s basically in the same spot, but turned around and it seems to work. This was after significant trial and error, and the realization that the only way the bike was ever going to fit in the foyer would be if I mounted it on the ceiling. Damn you, doors that allow me to move from room to room.

Oh, and I finally called the reupholster to come and pick up my ottoman and chair. I only bought the fabric about 8 months ago!! It had become so bad that every time I saw my dad and stepmom, they’d harangue me incessantly about it. My dad would call me randomly just to ask if I had called the guy. I should point out that the ottoman was stained and the cushion had actually split on the chair, so this wasn’t just a cosmetic, oh, I’ll get to it sometime thing. It’s been needing to get done pretty much since I moved in. My apartment does feel mighty empty though.

I’m off to go do some italian homework. while sitting directly in front of my air conditioner.

Ciao!!

I know, I know, I’ve been terribly lax about updating. Things have been a little…nuts around these parts. I managed to catch a cold last week, so I was a bit under the weather, and lots of random little stuff has been going on that has distracted me and kept me away from my computer (shocking!).

So, last Friday, I have my regular mid-year evaluation. All was normal, people apparently like me, but the kicker was the end. When the partner giving me my review says, “so, I’ve got this proposition for you.”

The proposition?

That I move to Milan, Italy for six months starting in the fall to “help out” our office there.

How crazy is that?

I told them on Monday that I’d do it. We still need to work out the logistical stuff (and of course, with the holiday, no one’s around to actually deal with any of it), so it’s not 100% definite, but it looks like I may move to Italy for a while starting in September.

It will be different from last fall’s Rome fiasco for a few reasons – first, it’s not a two week trip for a specific client that keeps getting extended, while I’m stuck living out of one suitcase, in a tiny hotel room. I’d have an apartment, and an office, and a variety of work. Plus, my stepmother used to live in Milan, and still knows a bunch of people in the region, so I’d have a bit of a safety net.

Also, it’s Milan. While not the touristy center that Rome is, it’s much more…cosmopolitan. Every description that I’ve read of Milan as compared to the rest of Italy sounds like I’m reading about New York as compared to the rest of the US. Extremely modern, business-oriented, fast-paced, wealthy…you get the idea.

And because of its location it’s really easy to get to a bunch of other places – The train line that runs straight down from Austria goes to Milan, Bologna, Florence, Rome…

It’s easy to get to Switzerland, Venice, and a whole bunch of other places.

I should probably also mention that the complete extent of my prior experience in Milan consists of flying there, taking a bus from Malpensa airport to the train station, and taking a train to Brig, Switzerland. Needless to say, I’m a little freaked out about moving to an entirely new city that I’ve never even (really) been to before. But our office appears to be right in the center of a nice part of town. Near lots of ridiculous shopping.

Ooh boy.

My week:

Flew to London Sunday night, landed 6:30 Monday morning. Was at my firm’s London Office by 10. Stayed until about 10:30 pm. Drank about 17 cups of espresso over the course of the day.

Worked from London Tuesday until about 9 pm.

Flew to Rome Wednesday morning. The plane takes off from Heathrow at the awesome hour of 6:40a.m. Get to wake up at the even more awesome hour of 3:45 a.m. to finish packing, dress in client-meeting appropriate attire, check out of my hotel and meet the car taking me to Heathrow at 4:45 a.m.

Work in Rome Wednesday. Go to very nice dinner with co-workers at restaurant I tried to eat at about 6 times the last time I was in Rome, but could never get a table. Our arriving at the somewhat late (even for Italy) hour of 10p.m. after checking into our hotel seems to do the trick.

Work in Rome Thursday. Go to even nicer dinner with clients and others. After, of course, spending an hour not figuring out how to send a fax from my client’s office and having to go back to the hotel to send it from there. Dinner is at the practically early-bird special hour of 9:30 p.m. I arrive late.

Get back to the hotel Friday a.m. at about 1:30 a.m.. Wake up at 6 to continue working. work right up until I check out at noon, taxi to Fiumcino airport, ask ticket agent to let me check in early so that I can go through security to get to the BA lounge for a 2pm conference call. Explain that if I waited until after the call to come to the airport, I wouldn’t make my flight. When said ticket agent says it’s “absolutely impossible and he will never ever help you”, after doing nothing to check for me, escalate fight with the ticket agent for another 20 minutes until he finally calls his manager (which is all I wanted in the first place) who manages to get me through security in time. Said fight includes ticket agent trying to hide his airport ID so I can’t see his name (classic move of someone who is totally (sarcasm) being straightforward and honest), and then telling me that if I had only smiled, maybe he would have tried to help me, because apparently, instead of actually being impossible (as disproved by the fact that, um, it was possible), his helping customers is contingent on said customer’s willingness to stroke the ego of someone who works in customer service. You can guess how much I just love people telling me to smile when they’re not bottlenecking my ability to do my job.

Work from the BA lounge until 4pm. Then go to catch plane.

Discover that plane has been delayed by 1:15. Remember that time to change planes in London, including going through customs and getting my Virgin Atlantic boarding pass at another terminal from the one I land in, is 1:30. Realize that I will not make the flight in London. It’s the last flight of the day. Spend two extra hours at Fiumicino rearranging my flights and getting a hotel room in London. And calling everyone who I had even tentative Memorial Day weekend plans with that I might be a bit…missing.

Finally fly to London. When the customs and immigration officer asks “how long are you staying in London?” try not to either (1) cry, (2) burst out laughing. Try to figure out whether “Heathrow Airport” is an appropriate destination address for my third stay in the UK in less than two weeks.

Get to Heathrow Marriott. Discover that 2 of the 4 elevators are broken. Also discover that the medical conference taking place at the hotel has just dropped off about 200 participants 3 seconds before I arrived. Finally push some old people out of the way when the 4th elevator I’ve been patiently waiting for gets rushed by said old people while I struggle with my luggage.

Get to room. do more work.

Get work done at about midnight. Decide that it’s time for a blog entry.

I’ve been sitting here for about 20 minutes staring at my computer screen, thinking about how I really want to write something, but I can’t think of a subject. So I pull up a copy of the NY Times…

This article about the image problems the Cornell students have made me laugh. Because in a 2-page article about how these students sometimes feel like they’re attending a state university and not an Ivy, nowhere is it mentioned that several schools at Cornell are essentially public (Ezra Cornell convinced some folks back when he built Cornell that it was deserving of the federal land-grant school money that was being handed out to form state university systems, which is why New York didn’t get a “real” state university system until the 1960s – because of this, about a third of the “colleges” at Cornell are priced at significantly lower rates for New Yorkers). Not to mention that everyone has college envy. I went to an Ivy law school, where students walked around in t-shirts with the Penn logo and “Not Penn State” written where the university’s name would ordinarily be. The joke around the law school (at least in the first few weeks), was that the number one reason students gave for attending Penn was “because I didn’t get in to NYU” (no joke, however, was a member of my first year class who made it off the NYU wait list a week into classes and actually withdrew from Penn and moved from Philly to NY to take them up on the offer).

May be this will work on short shuttle flights, but the idea of standing on airplane flights is just a bit screwy. As if your legs don’t get stiff enough sitting down. As bad as my feet swell from flying normally, I just have visions of walking around with balloon-shaped feet for days if I ever have to resort to one of these things. Imagine having to pay a premium to actually sit in one of those awful coach seats.

Jane Jacobs died today. She was a New York legend, facing down the likes of no less than Robert Moses in his attempts to destroy her neighborhood with his cross-manhattan expressways, and advocating for urban density as a net positive in city life. The best urban critic around, she eventually moved from Greenwich Village to Toronto.

That’s all that piqued my interest today. I did have a rough morning. Got home last night to a building notice that, due to some necessary boiler repairs, the heat and hot water would be turned off from 11 p.m. last night to 4 p.m. today. Then, I woke up for no reason at 4 this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. Because it was too cold. I ended up not having to take a cold shower though, because I was up so early that I managed to get the last of the warm water that was still in the tanks. So that was something. I don’t even know why I’m still awake at this point, except out of habit.

Two weeks later, and my photos are finally going online. I downloaded the trial version of Photoshop, which lets you try it out for 30 days, and went a little nuts cleaning up the pictures. In any event, they’re here. I’ll post later to point out some of my favorites, but they’ve got some descriptive headings if you want to take a look right now. Needless to say, as cool as these pictures are, they don’t begin to compare to what the actual beauty of the place is.

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating these albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, photos now appear directly below.

I’m home (as if you couldn’t tell from the random flurry of new blog posts that are not actually from today). I had an excellent time (other than the part where I had to fly for 26 hours in each direction), and I’m completely exhausted. I’m going to be working on cleaning up the photos from my trip for a bit (which may involve purchasing some sort of photoshop product), but in the meantime, I thought I’d share one of the coolest things ever.

There is this lake in Palau that many many years ago got cut off from the ocean, isolating a population of jellyfish from any of there natural predators. Over time, these jellyfish, not having any predators, lost their ability to sting, and live in a symbiotic relationship with the algae inside of them. They basically survive through photosynthesis, even though they’re animals. Which is just really really cool.

Even cooler? you can go swimming with them. Upwards of 16 million of them live in this lake (they were all but wiped out from the temperature changes from El Nino a few years back, but the nodules or eggs that they laid in the walls of the lake managed to survive and repopulate the lake).

Hit play to check it out for yourself.

Things that have struck me as odd as I travel the 20-odd hours back around the world to get home (mind you, I’m still sitting in the Houston airport waiting for my last leg):

• crossing the international dateline is just…weird. For instance:
• my flight from Guam to Honolulu took off at 6a.m. on Saturday, April 8th. It landed in Honolulu at 5:30p.m. on Friday, April 7th.
• I saw the sunrise Saturday morning from Guam, and I just watched it again, Saturday morning, from Houston.
• If you fly through Guam, you have to go through immigration control at least 3 different times – Once when you get off the plane in Guam, again before you get on your next plane from Guam, and yet again when you go through Honolulu. Nevermind that Guam is part of the U.S.
• you don’t automatically get lei’d when you get off the plane in Hawaii. Apparently you need to sign up for that sort of thing.
• the movie “The Family Stone” makes about the same amount of sense regardless of whether you’re watching it with or without headphones.
• the movie “Just Friends” is just awful, with or without headphones.
• the movie options flying from Honolulu to Houston were severely lacking.
• I can apparently fixate on that little GPS video of my airplane’s location for hours at a time
• a Houston airport Starbucks cappuccino (which is presumably marked up from the regular Houston Starbucks) is still an entire dollar cheaper than any New York Starbucks cappuccino.
• there is an actual Fox News Channel store in the Houston airport (that’s when you know you’re in Bush country). Ironically, the New York Times is displayed prominently for sale at the front of the shop.
• Taco Bell actually has a breakfast menu. And they won’t serve you lunch items in the morning. As if anyone is going to go to Taco Bell for eggs.
• On closer inspection, the Fox News Channel store is just another generic magazine shop selling t-shirts, candy and Martha Stewart Living, only with Fox News playing in the background.
• four hour layovers before the final leg of your trip seem like less and less of a good idea when you’re stuck sitting through them
• The Houston airport (or at least Terminal C) apparently doesn’t have wifi. much less free wifi.

Needless to say, I’m exhausted. I slept on the leg from Guam to Honolulu, but that seems like ages ago. My next vacation is definitely going to be just a bit closer to home. Like the Jersey Shore.

My bags are packed, I’m ready to go…

Unfortunately, my plane doesn’t leave for another 16 or so hours. I say unfortunately because I’ve officially reached the point in my vacation (as I do with all good vacations), where I’m just ready to go home. I’ve done enough diving, enough visiting, enough getting sunburnt and eaten by bugs that I’m ready to sit in my air conditioned apartment, watch all the crap that is hopefully stored on my TiVo, and sleep in my own, posturpedic bed with my good isotonic pillows.

Did I mention that I woke up yesterday morning with a crazy pinched nerve in my shoulder that is making it extremely painful to sit up, stand, lie down, sleep, raise my right arm, or move my head? So that’s fun. It’s also making me dread the thought (more than normal) of sitting in a coach seat for 24 straight hours. It’s feeling a bit better today than it did yesterday, but that’s not saying much. I could also be getting used to the pain, so who the hell knows. Needless to say that the overwhelmingly wicker furniture at the resort is not exactly designed for such circumstances.

Right now I’m enjoying the last few hours of air conditioning my room has to offer (I have to check out a 2 p.m., and then go to the airport at about midnight!).

Overall though, the vacation was great – I did some awesome diving, got to hang out with my brother, and generally relaxed. Met a bunch of neat folks thanks to the diving, and drank lots of margaritas. Also spent a decent amount of time making fun of the Noni juice people (although, as my brother pointed out, we laugh now, but they’re all 350 years old).

Anyway, I’m going to take one more nap before I have to give up the room (and before you make too much fun, remember that I was up at 4 this morning thanks to the shoulder).

See y’all back on the other side of the world.