What's next?

I am on a trip around the world and won't be updating this blog very often.

Check my other blog at:

http://travelrats.blogspot.com

Fritz

We finally got out of our apartment today: we gave our keys back, we received our deposit check and left the garage one last time using the "open" button instead of the buzzers. I think we can indeed be called "vagabonds" starting right now...

For the last five days we worked frantically. Last Sunday we moved (almost) everything to a storage unit. Many thanks to Lemo, Mihai, Bobo, Tudor, Adrian and Joe, who helped carry all our junk to the truck and then out of it. Just don't forget to mark your calendars a year from now for the reverse move ;-)

Cleaning up and taking out all the "small" stuff that remained in the apartment after the big move was no piece of cake; I feel like I carried hundreds of bags of trash to the garbage room, and thousands of small boxes to the car. It is painfully obvious to me that we have a billion various items that we count now as candidates for a place in our backpacks. Soon we will have to set up some sort of "Survivor" system, and vote things off the backpack.

Uhm, yeah, here's our new address:

I spent a few days in San Francisco getting visas and having fun with Steve, his fiancee and their friends. Consider this a sort of preliminary training for our big trip. I walked every day for hours, up and down the city hills, until it became clear that it was either me or my shoes to win this battle. I eventually stepped in a footwear store close to Union Square and bought a pair of ecco leather shoes and a pair of Timberland canvas shoes. Both of them are feather light and very comfortable, and will be coming with me on this trip.

I tried to take as many pictures as I could, but I didn't do that well. On top of my lack of eye for interesting sights I also had the small point-and-shoot Sony camera with me, which has a hard time focusing on most sunny days; it's has to do something with the contrast. So I tried to stick with street scenes. I'll do better next time, I promise...

I love San Francisco, this city gets to you very easily. It has the air of a real town, a place where people live, they do not just work and sleep. Each time I return to Seattle after a few days spent in "The City" I feel like such a provincial...

Unless you are a sadomasochistic rich bastard.

I just paid $3292 to Uncle Sam today for our first "married and filing jointly" celebration. Enough to cure anyone of dreams of white dresses and church steps. Forget about it, unless you can buy a house fast or... travel around the world.

Before leaving Seattle for good I wanted to take some pictures form the barn and the horses that have been a constant presence in my weekends for the last four years.

Whether I got drunk or high and partied too much the night before, I would always muster enough determination to drive to Woodinville for my lesson. The reward of doing so was more than convincing; that feeling of freedom and empowerment and complete peace with the world that I would experience once the lesson was over (especially after a good lesson) could be matched only by few of the mundane satisfactions we get when doing things that we like.

Goodbye my dear horses, I think I'm going to cry now. No, wait! I have another lesson next weekend - that would be indeed the last one - for the next year, at least...

The wife is gone to Florida this week, to visit her grandparents. I'm alone with the cat. And today I felt very lonely and despondent. I worked from home, which always feels a little like being sick, I didn't eat much, the house was a mess. I hoped FedEx would deliver my package but they didn's so I drove to their delivery center, then from there to a post office that was opened until midnight (surprise, surprise, these things exist). On my way back I stopped by in Contour and had dinner alone at the counter, barely missing happy-hour. Then I couldn't prevent myself from going to En for  for a beer.

It all feels like I'm living outside of space and time. There is no routine to my life, the cycle of workdays and weekends has been broken and has lost its meaning and whatever is left of it is rushing toward this big bang that's going to be the onset of our very long trip. Where am I going? What's left of me? What will I become?

I feel somehow loopy, as if I were on drugs all the time.

I must again share my living quarters with a feline. This one's Angela's mother's cat. Angela says it's her cat and she only keeps it at her mom's because it's better for the animal to live there, in the boonies, but I that only reinforces my opinion that whoever takes care of the cat is the owner.

This one, Romeo by its human name, is not a nice, shy creature like Lulu, B's cat, who would sit in a corner or under the bed for hours. Instead, it jumps on beds and constantly pesters the human inhabitants of the apartment for attention. Once he's on the bed you can try to take him down, but to no avail; he'll jump right back up, and only drastic measures, like a swift exile out of the room with the door closed would work. Last night we were fooling around on the bed and he absolutely had to rub my back and get between us... hey buddy, I'd let you watch the discovery channel for cats, so you can learn how the humans do it, but you really want to be part of the action, and that makes the subjects uncomfortable...

I got terribly homesick seeing this picture on flickr today. This is the kind of landscape which sometimes triggers mental images that make me miss my homeland. The people... not so much...

I swear, when I saw Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's picture in the news feeds attached to the story on how he confessed to all things under the stars, I thought at first that this was Ron Jeremy... you know, the porn guy...

... for this to happen: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17592285/

The question is, was there anybody who didn't think it will happen?

Maybe this all ends with a new media deal, but either way, the golden days of the free-for-all-and-find-anything YouTube ar gone.

I just gave notice at work today. Four more weeks.

When I first mentioned it to my manager, he reacted with "you've had enough?"

No, it's a great job, but my wife and I decided to take a year off and travel around the world, etc

Most of the people that I shared this news with are very curious, where I'm going and what I will do. It's certainly not your average job departure. My manager and his manager suggested that they would be delighted to have me work in this group again when I come back. It would be nice, but of course they can't promise anything, and I don't expect them to. A lot can happen in one year.

Ok, now we're really on, there's no way back.

Some people at work, as shown by the emails they write, think that the abbreviation "to sync", which comes from "synchronize" - the copy of the source files on your own computer with the files on the source server, that is - they think the pseudo-verb "to sync" has a simple past and a participle of "sank" and "sunk", respectively as in "sinking". I don't have reliable information on how widespread this usage is, but it seems that most of the people making this mistake are Indians. Among Indians - and I'm not talking 15-year-old high-school students - the teeny shorthand of the word "you" to "u" in emails seems to be most prevalent.

But that's quite a good wedding picture isn't it?

It tool me a few hours to upload 500 wedding pictures with "flickr uploadr" (do they have something against vowels?), and that's only the first set. Quite professional I may say; April did a good job, and so she should, we paid a lot of money.

I gave my mom the link to this flickr set; now let's see what she says if she ever finds the Vegas pictures...

I just opened the last vaccuum-pack of Parmigiano Grana Padano that I have bought in Italy in September 2005. It tastes divine...
My spaghetti bolognese are always such a feast... no wonder, they take almost 2 hours to cook and I'm an expert. No modesty.

In other news: my wife has been hungover all day for drinking too much last night and my horse was spooking every minute during the riding hour, so I had to abort the lesson early. Tomorrow 7:30AM I have my Scuba open water certification dives at Alki... oh god, how will I be able to wake up? 6:30AM? On a sunday?

Let me tell you, trying to plan a trip around the world, going to the daily job, managing two blogs, taking the scuba open water certification course, changing the oil on the car, applying for visas, going to horseback riding lessons, cleaning the house and taking care of your hungover wife on a saturday morning is no walk in the park. Certainly something that would fill up a week fast to a point that some things would have to fall off the boat, like working out for example - replaced with swimming in the pool for the scuba class; that's working out as well, right? 

I slacked at work busy with other errands, like going to the bank and post office in the middle of the day, and calling consulates for visa information and talking to people who don't speak three words of english, but then I still had to do my work, resulting in late nights at the office. I haven't quit my job yet, but soon.

It's the weekend now, but the stress has no end in sight. Tomorrow we must be on Alki at 7:30 for the diving examination... in cold water... go figure...

Recently I have found myself posting many private entries. Stories that you would either publish anonymously on the internet, making sure that no one can trace them back to you, or you would rather keep for yourself, or that you would attribute to some made-up characters in a story. Stuff that I'm ashamed of, that I only want to write down in order to clear my mind of guilt and stuff that would qualify as "too much information" by any standards, were it to be exposed publicly. Brutal honesty that you don't want your friends list to read, especially if some of them are people who you actually interact with in "real life" (as if livejournal weren't real, but hey, I have to use this expression).

I don't even know why I'm writing this. Maybe it's to say that although I'm a shameless pig and I am pretty open about myself and my weaknesses publicly, there are demons deep down in my soul that I would never be able to talk about with anyone, for any reason. And I don't need a therapist.

I honestly think that people who put CDs in the cases of other CDs will go to hell and burn for all eternity.

Sadly, that means my wife doesn't have a very bright future ahead...

Too much stress is hunting my poor soul these days.

I can't really concentrate most of the time. Not at work, not at home. Sure as hell I need a break. Of everything. Silence. My way, nothing else. Well, it's not going to happen, at least not for a while. But I will be quitting my job soon, soon, and then things will be easier, I hope.

Writing feels good. Better than sex, to some extent. The sound of my fingers hitting the keyboard... mmm, music to my ears... words whirling in my head, the TV is stopped (for once, I'm alone with the whole house to myself).

My friends list is silent and I have been keeping to myself lately as well. 

I still have a great time when I go to En. The sanctuary of crunched souls, battered by the craziness of modern life.

I have to stop clenching my teeth for no reason; i'll end up swallowing pieces of my teeth at night. De-stresser, engage! Should I cut down on coffee?

I'm not making much sense. Stop. Rewind.

For the last two weeks all I did was tweak with my new blog, and I don't mean to add content, but to change layouts, add javascript, learn CSS, edit images and play with Live Maps. This stuff is downright consuming - I have spent many nights trying to figure out some hack that afterward seemed minor and obvious and being up a 4am when I was supposed to go to work the next day...

And the thing is not done and complete, by far. Now I discovered JSON feeds and I think they are the best solution for saving geographic location metadata for the posts that I intend to pin on the map. However, there's virtually no documentation about it, at least nothing official from Google Blogger, which frustrates the hell out of me.

I also found out that there's a whole community of people out there focused on hacking blogger layouts and templates and creating cool new widgets, publishing their findings for everybody to see. All this is possible because of the almost unlimited freedom that blogger gives you to muck up with the page layout and drown yourself in javascript. So much freedom that today I was able to write an accidental infinite recursion in my template and had to disable javascript temporarily to be able to get to my blog and change the code. Eeek! I really hope they don't end up paranoid like the folks from livejournal and disable this wonderful and monstrous called javascript. It would be a nightmare for many of us...

This is how my passions are: they're burning, they're consuming and they keep me up at night until I feel sick and my eyes hurt and I am about to throw up: job, books, girls, drugs, cars - I have the same attitude toward them all; they come up with a storm and a fury and I get completely immersed in them and swim and drown and get back up to the surface until this madness calms down for a while, but only to be replaced by something else, crazier, more demanding and harder to get out of.

I really don't want to neglect this old blog, because the things that I have on my mind - and they are more numerous by the day growing increasingly vociferous - those things have no place in the other blog, they cry themselves out, and weep for publishing space. 

Besides, my mother reads the other blog. Yes.

I have just discovered MediaMax. It is a file hosting and sharing service, it has a free version that can host up to 25GB of any data, with a limit of 1 GB of downloads per month and a maximum file size of 25MB. And most important - files do not expire. It also has a pretty simple and user-friendly outlook-like web file manager, unlike the other crackpot file hosting services where you can upload anything without having an account with them, and they give you a "secret" URL to delete the file.

I will use this to put up files for download from my blogs, other than images, which go on flickr.

Does anybody know of anything better? And free?