I’m in Prague. Just thought you should know. Also, for the next few weeks, I won’t have regular Internet access, so you probably won’t hear too much from me. Savor the break, because I’ll be coming back with a vengeance in February. Happy New Year, everybody
Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, kiss my ass. Kiss his ass. Kiss your ass. Happy Hanukkah. — Clark Griswold
Hey all, your 3rd or 4th favorite blogger (depending on how Internet-savvy you may be) is back. I apologize for the long absence, but the holiday season has been a busy one, with trips all over the country and a few days breaking bread with the family, boozing, and busting open presents. The holidays are always a strange/wondrous/busy time, and this year was no exception. I arrived back from Atlanta on Christmas Eve, and I had just enough time to wrap my presents and get my suit steamed and pressed before it was time to go to Mass. (BTW – it was 60 degrees in Hotlanta – thank goodness I live in Boston, where the concept of a White Christmas exists not only in song but in reality). After Mass came a trip to Brighton where we were hosted by various family members that we haven’t seen since last Christmas. Good times, indeed.
The wake-up call came early the next morning, and I joined my family in opening a glorious pile of presents. I won’t bore you with what I got, but even if it is better to give than to receive, it was a very merry Christmas. The merriment continued with dinner at my grandmother’s house, where I saw the extended maternal family. A good time was had by all, but unfortunately, as soon as we left the house the post-holiday hangover began.
I don’t mean that in the hangover sense, even if I did have a few cocktails on the holiday. I mean it in the sense that the first few days after any big day (Christmas, birthday, graduation day, wedding day, etc.) seem like a huge letdown merely because they are relatively uneventful. Such has been life the last few days. I have spent quality time with several friends and friends of family members, and have enjoyed myself thoroughly, but nothing can compare to the high that comes on a big holiday. Everything else suffers by comparison.
Complicating this cocktail of emotion is the impending reality of Prague. As of writing this, I officially have slightly less than a week until I head to Central Europe for a period of indeterminable length. Am I freaking out? Well, that depends on your definition of “freaking out” is. It is clearly coming up fast, and yet, I have so much to do in the meantime, I have yet to really seriously contemplate the big changes in my life. I have to decide which jacket(s)/shirt(s)/pair of shoes/book(s) to bring with me, and which to leave behind to languish in my closet. Once I make those decisions, I have massive amounts of cleaning, organizing, packing, and laundry to do. I have to see many friends and family in the next few days. I have to decide whether to purchase the iPod classic or the iPod Touch. I have to book a train from Frankfurt to Prague. I have to figure out what I am doing for New Year’s Eve…any ideas that are cheap and fun? Well, you get the point – life is hectic, frantic, and exciting. But never fear, brave reader – no matter how crazy life gets, I will have time to share my thoughts and occasionally irrational viewpoints with the cyber community. Coming tomorrow or soon thereafter will be a wrap of the year in music, featuring my partial and probably completely irrational and arbitrary ranking of the Top 10 albums of the year. Enjoy the leftover eggnog, readers, and check back early and check back often.
P.S. Enjoy the falling snow – it’s my way of bringing the holiday spirit to the Internetz. (Or at the least the microscopically small portion of the Internet that reads my blog). In any case, happy holidays, and best wishes for a happy and healthy 2008. 
It might be a terrible movie, but when we actually have reasons to be proud (and not just enthusiastic) of the hometown five…it’s pretty awesome. With that in mind:
Effin’ sweet. The Patriots, Red Sox, Revolution, and even the Bruins are doing alright, too.
Love you all madly,
Since I’m going for another long airplane ride tomorrow, I thought this was appropriate. Enjoy…
My apologies…it’s been quite some time. In all fairness, I do have an excuse and a make-up present. First, the present. This article is the most humorous thing I have read all week, despite being based on rather tragic events.
Enjoy your present? A little sugar makes the medicine go down, so here’s my excuse…(No, this isn’t one of those “my dog ate my homework” stories). I wish a dog had been involved, that would have been a lot easier to deal with – I’d just rewrite my homework. There’s no rewriting this development…my laptop currently looks like this:
Except featuring slightly less Apple-like content. I have no idea how it happened, and I am rather peeved with the whole situation, since it will cost me plenty of $$$. Money I don’t really have the luxury of spending, to be quite honest. But c’est la vie.
Otherwise, life is pretty decent. The job goes well, the Red Sox won the ALDS, I am taking care of some other stuff outside the workplace, and now it’s the weekend. More news to come soon, but first, I have to get my full attention back on Game One and the rest of my extracurricular activities. Talk to you soon, folks…
P.S. – No iTunes info tonight since that’s on the laptop. Hopefully that feature will be coming back soon…
Me – “So, yeah. It’s been a while since I’ve called (or in this case, blogged).”
You – “You bet your ass it has been a while – I already deleted you from my phone.”
Me – “I apologize – it’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been busy lately, and I haven’t taken enough time out for me, never mind you.”
You – “Like I haven’t heard that one before… “
Me – “I made a mistake, but now I’m back, I’m going to do my best to write every day, and I hope you’ll take me back.”
You- “Oh Chris, I could never forget you…I forgive you, as long as you keep writing…and I’ll read your blog every day! I’ll even read your blog…naked.”
Now that we’ve gotten the awkward “two weeks after the hook-up” conversation out of the way, I think it’s time for me to do a little catching up on the blogging.
I realize that in my last post, I made promises to fill you all in on my Californication adventures. I will do so, but since I have yet to figure out a logical way to begin a discussion of two months of my life, I’m going to start with what happened after I got home from the Bear Republic.
I spent a whole day or so with the fam decompressing and getting used to EST again. After that, it was a quick run up to New Hampshire for a few days of camping with this collection of rogues and rapscallions:
As you might expect, there was much communing with nature, some serious consumption of hot dogs, burgers, and other such camping grub, and a few adult beverages shared over good conversation around an alternatively roaring and dying campfire. Good times were had by everyone, although it was nice to get back for a shower.
Pretty much as soon as I took that shower I headed down to the Cape for a week with the family. Anyone who has been a long-time reader knows of my affinity for one piece of Cape architecture, but we will get to that in a moment. It was a great week full of beaches, family bonding, fish and chips, midnight swims, sandy pants, and picnic lunches. Of course, no week down the Cape would be complete without some serious time in my 2nd favorite meditating spot. (Anyone who can name my favorite meditating spot has a creepy ability to read my mind, so if you know the answer, you deserve a pretty sweet prize – to be determined later). Anyhow, my 2nd favorite spot is one of these:
That’s right, an outdoor shower. Now, you eagle-eyed readers might notice some foliage that is distinctly not indigenous to Cape Cod, but that is due to the vagaries of Google image search. Regardless of visual semantics, I quite enjoy outdoor showers. It was an excellent week, and I’m sorry it had to end.
Now I’m back home, and doing the find a temporary job until January thing. I haven’t had a whole lot of luck yet, but hopes are high that something will work out this upcoming week. With that in mind, I’m off to make use of the Internetz to do a little employment research. Before I go, let me drop you a big line about a new feature in the blog – somewhere in my posts you’ll get a chance to get a little insight into my aural insides – what track is playing on my iTunes as I blog. The initial iteration can be found at the end of the post. Have some fun with the linkage – Foxytunes is a solid download for many reasons. Wish me luck with the job searching, and if all goes well, I will be in touch on here soon. In the meantime, have a good night kids.
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iTunes info: Less than jake – Sugar In Your Gas Tank
A partial list of the reasons why I suck:
1. I am unable to whistle
2. I have never read Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
3. I sometimes don’t follow through on my big ideas
4. I don’t know the definition of the word “macerate”
5. I haven’t blogged in forever…
For those of you keeping score at home, 2 of those are likely never to change, 2 of them changed tonight, and 1 might change in the long run – if I ever follow through on following through. For the record, “macerate” means to “soften and separate by soaking; grow or make lean.” Obviously, tonight I also rectified the lack of recent blog post situation, although this entry will be less than entirely pleasing to those who have been waiting – it’ll be a short one, although I’m not lacking material.
There are certainly all sorts of knowledge, pictures, anecdotes, and even videos to drop on you all, from my visits to Alcatraz and Mexico to my struggles to understand the nuances of the Turkish language. For now, I will leave you with one of the aformentioned videos – if you spend a summer in the Bay Area you gotta get down with hyphy. Here’s one song that’s totally slumper:
You gotta admit – that sampling is pretty ridiculously awesome. Hopefully the good tune will compensate you for my weak effort tonight, but no worries – there are many more stories and pictures to follow, and I imagine I will try to break the summer down into bite-size pieces for those of you who don’t enjoy blog posts that would make James Joyce jealous. For now, I’m off to watch the Red Sox (man, I’ve missed NESN) and to find a tall, cold beverage. Have a good night, kids – expect more soon.
So, it’s a Friday night, and for the first time I can remember, I am surrounded by people with books and laptops. It’s usually a night for revelry, but not tonight. I have been assigned to be a proctor for study hall. Study hall is assigned to all the students who didn’t do something they should have done or did something they probably shouldn’t have done. It’s two hours of time during a free period of the day where the kids are cooped up with an RA in a classroom, instead of running around town or joining in on planned activities. At present, I am halfway through, so there is light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, not much to report from the last couple of days, although tomorrow should be exciting…
Tomorrow, we head to Fisherman’s Wharf (pictured above) to do a little exploring (and for the students, probably a lot of shopping). We will also be grabbing lunch on the water, and I have long heard stories of how good the seafood is out here, so I look forward to seeing how it stacks up to Boston seafood. I may not be a Michelin inspector, but I do know what I like, and that’ll pretty much be the only criteria used in evaluating tomorrow afternoon’s repast. After that, we have the pleasure of visiting one of America’s most famous prisons – a detention facility from which only one man has ever managed to escape. That man? John Patrick Mason:
That’s right – tomorrow I get welcomed to “The Rock.” Even if the movie was slightly corny, I am still fairly excited to see Alcatraz, it, along with the Golden Gate Bridge, is seemingly the defining landmark of San Francisco. I have already done one, and after tomorrow, I will have done both. In the meantime, however, it is time to get back to cracking down on talkers. Stories and perhaps some photos to follow after tomorrow’s adventures. In the meantime, have a good night, kids.
So, what’s going on everybody? It’s been a little while since we last talked, and I admit, it’s all my fault. In all fairness, I deserve a break, .uʍop ǝpısdn puɐ ʇno ǝpısuı pǝuɹnʇ uǝǝq ʎ11ɐɹǝʇı1 sɐɥ p1ɹoʍ ʎɯ ǝsnɐɔǝq
Alright, now that you’ve either strained your splenius capitis or mistakenly dropped your laptop on the ground while flipping it upside down, let’s get down to business. I have moved across the country and stepped up my summer activity level from lounging on the swing to heavy-duty work. The last couple of days have been seriously intense, as I have been in RA Boot Camp.
To be fair, our boss is a kinder, gentler man, but he is expecting a lot out of us, and so we were trained pretty hard this week. Many days were in excess of 12 hours, and many people are still aching from the activity designed to familiarize us with San Francisco that had us walking up and down miles of hills.
There has been little sleep, and that situation has been compounded by the fact that many of us have decided, in the interests of creating a fully cohesive and reliable staff, to bond over a few drinks. Despite all the challenges, it has been a rewarding week, and tonight, the students arrived on campus. There were a few kinks to be ironed out, but everyone eventually got to Berkeley and got checked in, and the evening activities went fairly well. I have seven crazy Turks that are part of a great group of guys on my floor, and I really like my coworkers. It looks like it will be an interesting summer…
P.S. There is actually one small anecdote to relay, as well. During the time after our evening activities, I was playing catch with a coworker in the parking lot when a girl walked in with luggage with tears on our face. We both recognized her as someone who had been dropped off earlier in the wrong place, and it appeared obvious that her situation had deteriorated even further in the time since our last meeting. We calmed her down, and learned that she was supposed to be in a particular building that was across campus, but she was not quite sure which building it was. She was a college student from Hamburg, Germany, who was spending the summer taking classes at Berkeley, and apparently, the program organizers had let her down, big time. She was overwhelmed and under-assisted. I sprung into action I made like Sherlock Holmes and got on the case.
After about 20 minutes of detective work, I found out what I needed to know and called the poor girl a taxi. I sat outside with her waiting for it, and eventually it arrived. It was an excellent conversation, the sort that you really learn about another culture or point of view firsthand, and I like to think she thought the same things. In any case, it was a nice opportunity to do a solid, and I was lucky enough to be able to have the resources to help a fellow traveler out. It really made my night. Speaking of nights, it’s time for me to call it a good one – catch you all on the morrow.
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