Areas of Unrest

QOTD: "Easy Street is not a good address for innovation." - Jim Bellows

Reading: Paul Theroux (editor), The Best American Travel Writing 2001

Listening to: The Indispensable Django Reinhardt

Decluttering accomplishments: organized a whole bunch of crafts supplies, did assorted household paperwork, did tons of laundry

4 July 2002 - Lovely Parting Gifts

Careful readers might note I finally finished Douglas Mawson's book. I have to admit to disappointment. While his ordeal to return alone to base camp after the deaths of his two colleages (one fell into a crevasse, along with a sledge carrying many of their provisions, while the other died of starvation) is interesting enough, the rest of the book is fairly tame. I know that Mawson is considered the better explorer by the experts, but I will stick with my mania for Ernest Shackleton.

I spent the past few days trying to clear out my office. Not that I was very successful, since the boxes didn't show up until later yesterday afternoon. I did get rid of bunches of paper and clear email out of the folders on the server (versus the archived ones), but there's another couple of days worth of work to go. I had a few meetings to go to, more or less related to my new job. But the biggest event was my going away lunch.

Mary Joan was the prime gift organizer and very cleverly took advantage of my amazon.com wish list. So I now have another Smartees doll. Namely, Destiny the Doctor, who will keep Ashley the Attorney company. I'd really like to have the whole series at some point. They also gave me a "relocation handbook" with information on offbeat tourist attractions (e.g. a 19 foot tall mahogany chair). There were also a few books, a sushi kit and a fondue kit (so I can have both cold and hot food anywhere I go), the obligatory plaque, and an Amazon gift certificate. The cleverest gift was a t-shirt with interchangeable destinations and little velcro on labels for St. Helena, Antarctica, Tuva, Galapagos and New Guinea, plus a blank one for future use. Overall, it was a lot of fun.

My other big chore of the past few days was taking care of various medical things. I got my teeth cleaned, for example. Unfortunately, my dentist doesn't know anybody in Washington, D.C. and I am sure it will take some effort to find a dentist I like as much. I also went to the travel health clinic. I needed a typhoid booster. Last time I was able to get the oral vaccine, but apparently the Army has sucked up all the supplies, so they gave me a shot. My arm still hurts, sigh. I also got a prescription for mefloquine (anti-malarial stuff) but haven't filled it yet. My meningitis vaccination has also expired but that isn't on the list for Papua New Guinea, so it will wait until I go to a place where that's an issue. All this stuff is annoying, but it's a minor price to pay for getting to travel to offbeat locations.

Finally, I am back to D.C. tomorrow for my official house hunting trip. So I am not sure when I will be updating again. That is, of course, assuming that I can actually fly tomorrow. There's a lot of contradictory information about the shooting at LAX this morning. James Hahn is using this as an excuse to promote his plan to have a check-in facility far away from the actual terminals. It seems to me that if you did that, you'd have more security problems, as you'd have concentrated crowds at that check-in facility. No matter what you do, you're still going to have some point where people are arriving from an unsecured area and those people can have weapons. This way just one terminal was shut down. Admittedly, that terminal serves several international air lines. But under the Hahn scheme, all of the airlines (including the ones that are just domestic) would have been affected.