I don’t mean to rub it in or anything, but this San Diego-style weather is pretty goddamn awesome.
It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m home from grabbing a bite ($18 for a “yiro,” chips, and a bottle of water, god help me) and running some errands. Walked probably 3K during this outing, and am now outside on my porch listening to jazz deep cuts and drinking a beer.
I wake up and have coffee on the porch most mornings, and there haven’t been more than two or three since I’ve been here where I haven’t been able to do that in shorts and a t-shirt.
It’s really an enviable way to start your day. I rank it behind those two mornings last May watching the sun come up over Notre Dame in Paris over an espresso, but it’s still pretty good.
Temps have settled, too, which means I’m not fighting flop sweats every time I stretch my legs for more than half a kilometer. This is a positive development, as we all know fat kids and heat just don’t mix.
I actually wore a sweater in to work on Friday, too. Unbelievable.
Anyway, outside can have its downside, and, just for today, it’s birds.
First off, the pigeons here are somewhere between ignorant and aggressive. Ate my yiro (I strongly prefer “gyro,” if we’re going to talk about fast food pidgin Greek) at an outdoor cafe, and a pigeon flew awfully goddamn close to my head and landed on a fence just over the edge of my table. I could tell he was eyeing my chips. He sat there for about 30 seconds, then did a flappy dismount right down to my table, about ten inches from my food. What an asshole. And it’s not as if the ibis birds are much better. They’re a hell of a lot bigger than pigeons, but at least they stay on the ground as they roam right up under your table to get crumbs.
And then there’s the crow across the street. I’m not sure what the natural predator of the crow is, but I’d like to get a couple of those for my porch. He’s noisy in the morning, and won’t shut up if he’s around during the day. It’s a little tough to listen to music at a reasonable volume on my porch with all the whinging he’s doing.
I should also mention that I had two more American appliances meet an abrupt end upon feeding off Aussie voltage for the first time. My rice cooker made a popping noise, then brought the contents to a more aggressive boil than I thought possible, and then my iron emitted smoke within ten seconds of being plugged in. That I’ve had to replace all this stuff is pretty obnoxious.
Anyway, this week I’m extending a Wed-Fri business trip into a long weekend in Sydney. I’m definitely pumped, even if it’s just Fri/Sat nights I’m staying over. I’ve also got Ho Chi Minh City on the calendar for mid-June, and need to start putting some ideas down for that trip. I’m not sure if I want to go five-star hotel style, which is definitely affordable(-ish) there, or budget travel (not that I need to, but it might be fun), but I think I’d very much like to take one of those boat trips up the river while I’m there. Other than that, it’s really all about eating pho and other street food while trying not to pass out in the tropical heat.
I’ve also got to look at my first trip back to the US to try and put something down. I had originally wanted to hit the last weekend in September and first weekend in October, but it’s looking more and more likely to be in the middle of a critical phase for me, which blows. I knew coming in to the gig that we were going to take a $50M program and turn it into $1.5B-$2B over two or three years, and it looks like our first wave of that gets turned over to me +/- two weeks from my intended travel window. If that timeline stands, no way in hell I get out of country for that. And there’s no fucking way I travel back and stay “on call” either. Not with a 15 hour time difference. Nuh-uh.
This possibly opens up something that resembles Thanksgiving plus WPBT Vegas in December, if that gets thrown together. Or Christmas, which makes it much, much harder to see the people I’d like to see while home. I could always blow off a 2011 return trip (although I get a free ticket home, per my contract, so I probably won’t blow it off) and move those days into 2012 when I’ll need to block out Bob’s wedding and Mom’s in-country visit (she’s coming with her husband and staying the entire month of March. Not all of it in Brisbane, thank god), and god knows what else that might pop up (I could easily see my step-sister getting married, should she get knocked up, for instance).
Or maybe I just try to convince someone to meet me for a long weekend somewhere halfway around the world. All sorts of options, I guess. Would just like to have something to look forward to, you know?
