Transneptune

Sometimes, life causes you to make it.  In this case, no Toronto/Montreal trip.  I was in a car accident yesterday.  I wasn’t driving, no one’s hurt.  The car lost the front driver’s side wheel.  That’s what you get when an SUV veers into your lane, and clips you.  And the SUV had only a scratch.  Makes me hate ‘em. The people who drove it were very nice, though.

In any case, thanks for the suggestions on Montreal, and when next I’m there, I’ll act on them.  As it is, this week will be good for getting done all the things I was hoping to defer.

Tags: car accidents, the unexpected, travel by kit
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I’ll be in Montreal in about a week.  This will be the tail-end of a trip which will include seeing friends in Toronto beforehand, and I know what to do in Toronto, but Montreal is all unknown to me.  What should I do there?  Let me know what’s cool in Montreal.

In other news, vests.  More vests.  Working pocket watch.  I need more nice shirts and ties; I love my black-on-black paisley tie dearly, but I need some variety.  Toronto should help for this.  Perhaps Montreal also has good vintage and used clothing stores?

No news, of course, on the real activity, which is grad school applications.  No news on that for a while, I suppose, which is the frustrating thing.

Tags: grad school, travel, vests by kit
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I just wanted to say that I’ve taken the GREs, and now am free to work on grad school apps and plan my Grand Travel Plans and go on an orgy of visiting folks and being super-social.  It’s good.  My mind is freed.

Tags: grad school, plans, travel by kit
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Monday I’ll be leaving to drive back east, across this too-large country.  It’ll be an adventure of sorts, but I won’t be dawdling in the least.  There may be some pictures.  This blog (and everything else on this box) will be down for a few days, as it sits in the back of a car with no internet access.

Tags: status, travel by kit
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I write this in the Denver airport; I am flying east, to be there for a week.  I hope to see folks.

Also, I finished Dracula last night.  Quite good, though the entire role and character of Quincey Morris is underexplored and underexplained.  I would love to see some sort of speculative backstory for him, and why he’s so ready to accept the supernatural.  Worth also noting, the use of kukris in the book… is just cool.

Tags: dracula, travel by kit
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One of the best things I learned from my dad, that.  When estimating how long something will take, remember that just because an action is simple, does not mean it takes no time.  This weekend, I got a degree better at estimating how long various coding tasks would take me.  It felt good.

Mostly, this past week has been a great trip back east, for Miranda’s graduation and seeing lots of friends in the Swarthmore area.  I also had some time in Rosemont, just being at home and enjoying the rain.  It was refreshing, and continues to make me want to be back east.

The Front Range has been having some extreme weather lately!  Flying back last night (yay 4 hour delayed flight…) we passed, for a good 10 or 15 minutes, a massive thunderhead with constant flashes of lightning in it.  It was terrifying, but truly beautiful.  It seemed otherworldly.  I learned later that there had been baseball-sized hail and tornadoes attached to that storm.

I would swear I had a point to this post when I started it, but it’s quite escaped me.  It might have to do with my still-pervasive desire to work for myself (or at least on a flexible, I-can-do-errands-in-mid-day schedule—I was so productive this past week, and I think it was mostly due to being able to work and be distracted in intense, alternating bursts.  Or perhaps it has to do with the various ways in which Burke’s latest resonates with me.

Oh yes!  Perhaps I meant to mention that I signed my first patent application today.  Exciting, but I have very mixed feelings about software patents.

Tags: craftsmanship, diy, forgetting in mid post, storm, travel by kit
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It was a pleasant one; the thing that has made it best for me, though, is probably the rain every evening, like right now, as it comes down outside, and I contemplate how much water, particularly moving water, is amazing.  (Who am I kidding?  Seeing friends and talking with random strangers was what made it best.)

I’ll be back east in less than a week, and that’s great.  I am also coming to some very clear ideas about what I want in life, and possibly how to achieve that.  Fortes fortuna adiuvat.

Tags: rain, travel by kit
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I love the weather here; the snow has been coming down all day, and it’s magical outside.  I could deal with a lovely long winter, I think; though this has had days like hiking in a t-shirt on my birthday (January 19) and an interlude in Africa…

Speaking of which, I hope people have liked the pictures.  I have little more to say about the trip, despite having given a slideshow of it to my coworkers today.  It’s more a collection of little observations than a narrative.  However, one observation I’ve consistently forgotten to mention, and which I want to not forget, is the practice of the people who walk along the street selling things: they make a sort of kissing noise, or rattle a bunch of coins together in their hands, both in a distinctive fashion that’s hard to convey in words.  That’s half of it; the other thing they do is speak in a way that my inner phonetician would love to study, when hawking their wares—it’s with a constricted vocal tract, particularly the larynx, it sounds like, and at a lower pitch than normal speech.

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In other news, Rosetta Stone had its IPO the other day; pretty exciting, but also kinda ugly-feeling.  I can’t figure out quite what I mean, but I think it’s basically that I dislike the stock market and things connected to it; it just feels vacuous.  On the other hand, we got to start the day at work with donuts and champagne, which was hilarious.

Tags: phonetics, travel, weather by kit
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Ugh, I’ve been meaning to write about Tanzania, but I just don’t know how.  It doesn’t seem to lend itself to narrative very well.  One thing I have been telling people, a highlight of the trip, was staying with a retired Tanzanian general with whom I am somehow related (getting euro-interpretable kinship terms from Tanzanians can be exciting, given the poor mapping between English and Swahili kinship terms).  He is pretty awesome, very calm and unassuming and clearly connected like crazy; when we were stuck in the horrible traffic of Dar es Salaam, trying to get to the ferry to Zanzibar, he got it to wait 10 minutes for us.

For more, see my pictures.

Tags: africa, i'm not bruce chatwin, travel by kit
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I returned from Africa a few days ago.  The shift from Tanzanian heat and humidity to snow on the streets of Boulder was jarring, but pleasant.  I’ll post about the trip over the next few days, when I get on top of all the busy-ness again.

Also, pictures forthcoming.

Tags: promises, travel, worth a thousand words by kit
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