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Current entry Archive October 2000 |
My goodness, a very productive day today.
I began actual packing. You know, putting things in boxes. I'm starting with the easy stuff, clothing and books. I'm only packing the stuff that will end up in storage; the moving company will do the packing for everything going to England.
Packing clothing turned out to be a pretty quick exercise, because when you get right down to it, there's not much point in putting clothing in storage. Either I wear it, in which case I should bring it with me, or I don't wear it, in which case why bother storing it? So the only clothing that ended up packed today is formalwear that I don't expect to need in England, but wouldn't want to have to buy again.
Packing books yielded more tangible results. Right now my bookshelves look like I was burgled by a literary thief. There are gaps everywhere, and even a few completely empty shelves. Hey, empty shelves! I could run right out and buy more books!
Well, maybe not.
Also, I cleaned up the personal site a lot more; I may go so far as to post it tonight. I'm not entirely sure whether I will or not. There's a lot more to be done with it, but it's mostly content; I think I have the pages themselves, and the structure, cleaned up and ready. The content will be an ongoing process, so there is no sense waiting for it.
Completed at 10:00 PM
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2 October 2000
Subject: Resignation from Haley & Aldrich, Inc.
Dear Steve:
The purpose of this letter is to inform you of my decision to resign my employment at Haley & Aldrich. I have enjoyed my ten years with the company, and hope that I have contributed to its success.
Guess what I did today...
Much excitement and consternation at the announcement. Steve took it calmly, but the rest of the staff had a fairly severe jaw-drop reaction. David already knew, of course, but the rest of the staff had no warning that this was coming. Granted, I've had a tendency to blither about England ever since I got back from there, but that really isn't much to draw conclusions from. They didn't know anything about Mike either (other than a vague suspicion that he existed), so it has all come as a surprise.
I've given them plenty of time--eight weeks, six of which I'll be present. Also, I asked about staying on in a temporary capacity after I move to England; after some initial uncertainty, Steve has already come back to propose that I stay on full-time indefinitely! I can't do that, because I have to make job-hunting the priority, but I could probably do half-time. That would certainly make the employment transition a lot easier.
A strange feeling, giving notice. I've worked here so long I can't remember what it was like the last time I did it. I am, to a very large degree, responsible for how everything computer-related is done at this company. It's strange to walk away from it. But I'm not sad; I've been here a long time, and stagnation is always a danger. I need a change, some new challenges.
It does feel like a large milestone, because it's really the first point of no return in this entire process. Up to now, everything we have done in preparation has been strictly between Mike and me. Also, this means the timeline is heating up--there really isn't all that much time left until the final move. It feels like things are finally getting under way.
Today was the day of giving notices. I also gave my 60 days' notice on this apartment this evening. Lots of check-marks on the to-do list today!
Tonight I've finally begun work on something I've been putting off for a long time. There are still a lot of people I know, mostly friends whom I don't see very often, who still know absolutely nothing about any of this. I have never found a good way to notify them of what's going on. I've given up, and concluded that Mike had the right idea when he sent his email announcement to his friends, so I'm now drafting a similar announcement. Mine's going to be a lot longer, though... It'll probably take a few days to finish writing it.
In the end, I did post the site last night, and told my family about its existence. Tom and Linda have already had a look, although I doubt they've read the whole thing; there's already a lot of diary to catch up with. Tom did catch, and point out, one seriously glaring omission on my "About" page, which I have already rectified.
Completed at 11:14 PM
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Didn't do much today. Oh, except I did book a flight to England for the end of November...a one-way flight, that is. It ought to feel momentous, but in reality it felt pretty much like any other on-line purchase. Getting on the actual flight--now that will feel momentous.
I also finished and sent my announcement to various friends, relations and co-workers. I really don't like doing an announcement, but in the end I just couldn't think of a better way to do it.
Completed at 10:57 PM
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Today Steve, David and I sat down to hammer out some of the practical details of my transition out of the company. I'd been wondering whether the company would try to get as many major projects as possible out of me before I go, or whether they'd consider the priority to be draining my brain as much as possible. Silly me, I forgot about the Both Principle!
Yes, the answer is, we're going to do both. I think it's do-able, though, because I've already transferred most of my day-to-day responsibilities to other staff over the last few months (after all, I knew this was coming). Much of what I still do isn't really transferrable knowledge. For instance, whenever a NetWare server appears to be behaving strangely, I do the troubleshooting. Well, I can't teach someone else how to do that, because it's not a step-by-step same-every-time kind of thing. It's never the same situation twice. And the project-related things I do, like creating WinInstalls, I can't really teach someone else either; they just have to sink their teeth into it and learn how it works. What I can do is give these responsibilities to someone else right now, and let them get some practice while I'm still around to help them.
Project-wise, we've agreed that before I go, I'm going to try to migrate the lab from NetWare to NT, upgrade the company to the latest patch of GroupWise, roll out Internet Explorer 5.5, and a few other little projects. Hmm.
We also discussed What Happens Next. Really, I couldn't ask for more favorable terms. The company will keep me on as a full-time employee for as long as I like, and when my job-hunting heats up and I need to spend more time on that, I can change over to part time. All they have asked is that I give them two weeks final notice when I do accept new employment. Not bad.
Outside work, I did a bit of fiddling with the site. Way back in March or so, when I was first creating the site, I knew less than nothing about HTML, so I used FrontPage as a crutch. This has haunted me in more ways than I can count. (But then, I never did learn to count.) For example, I used FrontPage to create links to Access databases containing my book, CD, and movie lists, so that the lists of books I own, etc. were dynamically created whenever a user clicked on their links. FrontPage accomplished this by using Active Server Pages, which I didn't know at the time. This is bad because very few web servers support ASP, so I really shouldn't use it. Plus I don't want to, because it generated enormous downloads compared to the amount of actual data that really needed to be sent, i.e. asking for a list of books that amounted to 30KB might still create a 300KB download. This made the pages slow, so I broke the lists into multiple pages, and oh never mind, suffice it to say it got complicated and wasn't worth it. But, at least with ASP I could just keep the database updated, and the pages took care of themselves.
Once I accepted that ASP was out of the question, I had to generate static pages by doing dumps from the database. This is less than ideal because it means the pages are out of date relative to the database, and also because the HTML that Access dumps is a mess and takes a long time to clean up. However, today I had a bright idea and made queries in the books database that automatically output the list the way I want it formatted. I don't have Access create the HTML now, I made the query fields themselves contain the text of the necessary HTML commands, so when I output the query to a text file, it comes out just right. Here's a typical field from one of my queries:
" <tr valign=top><td>" & [Author] & "</td><td>" & [Title] & "</td><td>" & [Rating] & "</td><td>" & [Genre] & "</td></tr>"
When I run the query, this outputs lines that look like this:
<tr valign=top><td>Banks, Iain M.</td><td>Use of Weapons</td><td>9</td><td>SF</td></tr>
So now I can open the books database, run one macro, and voila, all the book lists get updated. Now I just have to do the same thing with the movies and music databases.
But other than that, and adding an Info section to the personal site, and packing a couple of boxes, I didn't accomplish anything tonight, because I got sucked into the season premiere of Voyager. It's a guilty pleasure.
Heh. And there was me thinking this would be a really short entry.
Completed at 11:46 PM
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Yesterday I said that I couldn't really ask for more in the arrangements work has offered me for staying on once I get to England. It turns out I was wrong about that; there is more. Today Steve wandered in and asked whether that old Pentium Pro 200 was worth taking, or would I rather just take a new one? As if I'm going to say no! So on top of everything else, now I'll have a brand-new top-of-the-line computer once I get there. This red-carpet treatment is becoming a bit overwhelming.
At home, I made more progress on packing today than on anything else, which is silly because there are other things I should be doing before I go to England next week; the packing can wait till I get back. I suppose what is driving it is that I'm giving away a lot of stuff, which I'm bringing with me when I go to Maine this weekend. I hadn't quite realized how much stuff was involved; my car is jammed full. Collecting the stuff to be given away naturally spins off other packing-related tangents, so I end up doing some packing.
I'm going to Maine for the weekend primarily because Eric is turning 2. He might not do it if I'm not there, you know. I have to make sure he does his part in making the rest of us get older. For a present, I got him two sets of Duplos (Legos for toddlers), one of which is a Winnie-the-Pooh set. I bought them while Mike was here in July. Do you have any idea how hard it has been to leave them alone all this time, and not play with them?
I did some other errands this afternoon; I got yet more passport photos, this time for the spouse visa application. I also got my car inspected, only five days after it expired, which is probably a record for me.
So basically, a day of little details. Oh, except I made a few more changes and additions to this site; I got the movie lists working, and changed the site map somewhat. Also spent a few minutes on the phone with Mike. :-)
As I write these diary entries, I have noticed that so far, they are mostly a chronicle of day-to-day happenings. This is unusual; previous diaries I've kept have had a lot more thought-related content. I suspect that this focus on external events is caused by my concentrating on the details of the move.
Completed at 11:04 PM
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'You know,' he said, 'if I had my way I wouldn't let anybody who believed in star signs or the Bible or faith healing or anything like that use electric power, or ride in cars and buses and trains and aircraft, or use anything made of plastic. They want to believe the universe works according to their crazy little rules? OK, let them live that way, but why should they be allowed to use the fruits of sheer...human genius and hard work?'
--Iain Banks, The Bridge
(I thought I'd start including quotes that particularly strike me from books I'm reading. This one seems like a suitably controversial one to start with. Eventually I intend to have a Quotes section on this site, but I haven't got around to it yet. I already have lots of quotes stored up; I just haven't figured out how best to present them.)
Well, I'm back from my weekend in Maine. Eric appears to have turned 2, and with some enthusiasm. He was so excited about the whole thing that we had to sing Happy Birthday twice, and re-light his candles so he could blow them out again. Which present made the biggest hit? It's a toss-up between a disc he can sit on and spin himself around in circles till he gets dizzy and falls off, and a green worm that sings (among other things) the alphabet song. Unfortunately I'm very impressionable, so I have the alphabet song stuck in my head now, and probably will for some days to come. Still, it's better than the mailbox toy. Don't get me started about the mailbox toy.
Rats! Just thinking about the mailbox toy, I now have its tune stuck in my head instead of the alphabet song! Aaaaaaah!
In addition to Eric's birthday, I got some move-related things done. For instance, I finally settled on, and officially rented, a storage unit up there. (No sense to have one here--I won't be living here any more, and will have no ties to this area, so why keep things here when it's twice as expensive?) So now I actually have a place to put the stuff that won't be going to England.
It's mildly strange visiting Maine now. After all, I'm about to go away indefinitely. I think we all have a vague sense that we ought to be saying profound things, but we're not sure what. In the end, the only sensible thing to do is just carry on normally.
One nice surprise from the weekend--Linda had some pictures from when Mike was here in August. I had forgotten that pictures had been taken.
Mike called just minutes after I walked in the door here, which was good because I begin to go through withdrawal after a weekend away. Of course, due to the time difference, this means I was talking to him right around the time he ought to be writing a diary entry of his own. So for those of you who might be wondering why he doesn't have one tonight, well, you can blame me.
A bit more fiddling with the site this evening; the Music section now exists.
Completed at 11:15 PM
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Yesterday, and yesterday's diary entry, were cancelled due to lack of interest. It's not that I didn't do anything, but the things I'm doing aren't exactly thrilling. Still, just for the sense of progress, I'll list them in a very abbreviated form:
And I'm sure I've left a few items out. Did your eyes glaze over? I thought so.
David keeps mentioning how amazed he is that I'm getting all this tedious stuff done. It's not as though I like doing it, but I do have some momentum going, due to three excellent incentives: (1) Mike; (2) on 21 November a bunch of guys are going to put my stuff in boxes and if I'm not ready I'll have a big problem; and (3) a non-negotiable one-way flight to England a couple of days later. These are some seriously inflexible deadlines. I'll admit quite cheerfully that I'm a champion procrastinator, but I've always found that I tend to put things off until just about the point where they can't possibly be completed in the time remaining, and then I finish them all in an insane burst of activity. This is Deadline Mode, and I'm in it.
At work I wrote a quick hack VB app to allow Jaime and Chris to export GroupWise personal address books with a single click. They are working on an enormous project to take all the various individual databases the staff have created for their client/contact management and migrate them to a centralized SQL contact management system called Janna. It's an ugly project. In the end what they must produce is a single unified database so that when several staff members have the same contact, there is only one record for that contact, and when they make notes about that contact, everyone can see those notes, not just themselves. No two people record their data in the same way, and they're using something like 5 different contact management databases, of which one is the GroupWise address book. Hence the parser.
In an amusing mostly-coincidence, Pete and Mel are, even as I type this, en route to England. When they planned their trip, back in August, they didn't know that I was going to be in England in October myself. We figured this out before either of us booked tickets, but we'd have ended up overlapping even if we hadn't. Anyway, they will arrive in Manchester the day after I get there, and will be there for the next couple of days, which works out well because they are my only immediate family who haven't met Mike yet.
In a further ironic twist, they are only going to be in Manchester because they couldn't get direct flights to London. I want to fly to Manchester, not London, but I can't get direct flights to Manchester. Therefore I have to fly to London to get to Manchester, while they have to fly to Manchester to get to London.
Meanwhile, here are some pictures from the weekend:
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Happy kid (105 KB). Give a kid some balloons and he's all set... (That's Daddy hovering attentively, making sure Eric doesn't get into any trouble with the ribbons.) |
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Birthday cake (52 KB). My cousin makes cakes professionally; she even makes her own frosting, which I'm pleased to report is utterly sinful. Here, she's made a construction site; the equipment is plowing and loading the frosting. Eric was delighted. |
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Eating cake (112 KB). Well, the frosting-moving equipment did give Eric an idea: He ate his cake using the dump truck etc as utensils. He's not playing with his food, he's working with it. |
Completed at 12:19 AM
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Another day full of necessary minutiae. I spent the evening doing laundry (yuck!), packing for the trip, and packing boxes. Not terribly exciting. Consequently I'm too tired to do anything more than go to bed, which I think I'll do right now.
Completed at 10:54 PM
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PACKED!
Yes, I'm finally all packed and ready to go. Anything that isn't packed by now, I've forgotten. The suitcases are standing by the door looking like varicolored elephants.
Tomorrow morning Jill is picking me up on the way to work at oh-god-thirty, and then I'm going to the airport straight from work. I suspect that tomorrow will be an incredibly long day... That also means that there won't be a diary entry tomorrow night, nor, I suspect, for some while thereafter. I have no idea whether I will write any entries while I'm in England; I'm not sure whether I will have the time or the inclination. We'll see. (Tangentially from which, Pete and Mel must be having a good time in London, because nobody has heard from them.)
So I'm flying to England on Friday the 13th, and I'll be back to work on Halloween. Hmm. Good thing I'm not superstitious. People at work have speculated that the flight will be, er, sparse, because other people won't want to fly on such an inauspicious day. I doubt it, myself; I can't imagine people delaying their vacation by a whole day for such a silly reason.
Completed at 9:50 PM
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Hello there!
Needless to say, I made it safely back to the Land Of Consistently Good Tea. The last few days have been busy, to put it mildly, but today I have a few moments free so I thought I'd do a diary entry. Another long one I'm afraid, but that's what you get when it's been several days without benefit of brain dump, and with so much going on.
Happily, neither of my flights were more than a few minutes late, so the travel itself was as convenient as it could be. There were thick clouds the entire way across the ocean, so I was surprised to find that they had cleared and the ground was visible as we approached Heathrow. Looking down, I could see the usual motherboard-with-christmas-tree-lights that you see from the air, with of course the added bit of interest that those cars that were out at that time of the morning were driving on the left. Looking at London, and the bridges, and the mood-lit important buildings, and the cars driving on the left, I was overswept by a wave of exhilaration, perhaps best expressed as "I can do this!"
I'm sure some people must have wondered whether I am doing all this because I am unhappy with my life as it currently is. The truth is, I'm quite happy with it; I have a comfortable home filled with stuff I like, a job that is a lot of fun most of the time, and a great deal of freedom. Why, some might wonder, would I give all this up, tear out my roots and throw myself into uncertainty? The answer is that although I may be happy, it is a happiness of stasis and stagnation. Very little has changed in my life in the last several years except tiny details about stuff around the apartment. This stuff-acquiring, unchanging person isn't really who I am. I feel restless, rusty, dull. I need change, new challenges, something to wake me up and get me going. I know most people hate change and want to be settled and put down roots; that just isn't how I am, incomprehensible as it may be. This whole business, aside from the tedious details of actually getting moved here, is exciting and challenging.
Right. Anyway. I noticed a certain symmetry--when I left the UK in June, the last thing I did was have tea at a shop in the airport, and when I landed on Saturday, the first thing I did was have tea at a shop in the airport. Picking up where I left off, I guess.
I had wondered whether going through immigration might get interesting, since I wasn't entering on an ordinary tourist basis. Indeed, when I handed over my passport, the official's eyebrows went up and he said, "Hmm, one of these. Now I have to ask you lots of questions." Eeek, thought I, but it turned out painless. The only question that threw me was when he asked "Where was your intended husband born?" I thought for a moment and said "He grew up in Preston, but I'm not absolutely sure that he was actually born there. Hang on, I have a photocopy of his birth certificate here somewhere..." at which point the official blandly said, while writing on his forms, "Born in the UK, then."
It worked out well that I went through immigration at about 5:30 in the morning, because it was deserted. It took about ten minutes to clear me through, which would have held up a lot of people if it had been as crowded as it was the last time I came through.
I found Gate 5 for my Manchester flight OK, and settled in to have tea and read. But when I noticed that it was 7:15, I started thinking that it was a bit strange that there had been no announcements about my flight, considering that it was supposed to leave at 7:45; you'd think they'd be boarding soon, if they were still claiming that it was leaving on time. Well, perhaps it had been delayed while I was reading, so I looked up at the departure board and saw flight 1384, to Manchester, on time, at...changed to Gate 74?! Yipe! No wonder I wasn't hearing any boarding-related announcements! So I hustled down to Gate 74, which fortunately wasn't as far away as the number implies, and got there just as they began boarding. So I tried to miss my Manchester flight, but failed.
Let's see, what have I been up to since I got here? Well, Pete and Mel also successfully made it to Manchester the following day, although they had some entertainment when the directions to their hotel turned out to be a bit misleading. They ended up getting an unexpected grand tour of most of Manchester. We met up with them and found our way to Justin's, from whence we set out to find a curry, augmented by the addition of Justin's girlfriend. A silly time was had by all.
Mike had Monday off from work, so we went castle-hopping with Pete and Mel along the north coast of Wales. We re-visited Conwy, which, in addition to being my favorite so far, has the added advantage of being the closest. From there we went on to Beaumaris, which was good because we had not had time to visit it ourselves back in June. It's quite a nice one--it has round towers and a moat, so it's very picturesque. The way to Beaumaris happened to lead through Bangor--that's Bangor, Wales, which looks as strange to Pete and Mel as it does to me. On the way back from the castle we stopped for gas at a station in Bangor; Pete took a picture of their sign, simply because the word "Bangor" in the midst of a bunch of Welsh words isn't something you see every day. Oh yes, we also introduced them to the joys of British chocolate, which went over very well.
It took Pete a while to work up to his usual levels of bizarre silliness, but by Monday night he must have been sufficiently used to Mike that it started seeping out. Toward the end of the drive back to Liverpool, he launched into what was clearly the beginning of some kind of schtick I haven't heard before.
"Let's play Name That Animal Noise!" said Pete.
"All right," interjected Mike, "I name it...Jim."
Stunned silence from the back seat. Nobody's used to anyone getting the drop on Pete. Literal sense of humor: gets 'em every time.
Tuesday Mike did have to work, so Pete and Mel picked me up (I haven't braved driving yet--this weekend most likely, but possibly even tonight) and we went to the Trafford Centre, an enormous mall that I am just devastated to be within easy driving distance of. Most of the stores were unfamiliar, of course, although there was some crossover. The most amusing part of the day was the irony of us three Americans, set loose in England without supervision, having afternoon tea as if we had any idea what we were doing.
Over the weekend Mike's mother had called to propose that she and I go to Southport on Wednesday. That's just me and Mike's mother. <gulp> Still, she's very friendly and easygoing, so I bravely agreed. I didn't know anything about Southport, of course, but it turns out to be a Victorian seaside bathing resort. We wandered through its shops and looked at its architecture, both of which she knows very well because she worked in Southport for many years. As I expected, her extravert nature made the whole business very easy, so I survived the day intact, although of course I have no idea whether she has reached the conclusion that I am an appalling Martian or what. Figuring that any attempt to seem like a more normal female than I am would only lead to future misunderstandings, I didn't hedge when such topics as wearing jewelry or having children came up, so it's entirely possible that I was appalling, or at least incomprehensible.
I had been somewhat afraid that she might use the opportunity to work on me about going to the wedding, but she never tried. Also we ran into several friends of hers during the day, all of whom seemed to know all about the impending Big Day, but when they asked well-intentioned questions about photographers and such, Mike's mother was often the first to say "It's a low-key wedding" or something similar, which was unexpected and somewhat relieving.
All of which brings That Topic to mind, of course. On Monday we applied for our license, which I had thought would be just a matter of handing over £25 and signing our names, but it turned out that we had to answer a lot of questions about ourselves and also make decisions about the ceremony, which means that it was a lot more in-our-faces than we'd expected. My hands shook, and we found when comparing notes afterward that we'd both had a mental freezeup in which we couldn't think of the answers to some of the more difficult questions (such as "How old are you today?").
I heartily agree with Mike's sentiment, expressed a few days ago: I'll be glad when it's over with, and we can get on with pretending it never happened. It's quite difficult to get across to people that this just doesn't mean to us what it means to them. This became very clear to me while we were shopping on Tuesday and Mel expressed, to put it mildly, dismay that I'll be wearing jeans. She asked whether, if we're still together in ten years, I wouldn't wish retroactively that we'd done this more properly. Well, no. Aside from the fact that I hate dressing up anyway, this misses the point: it's not that I think it might be a bad idea to marry Mike, it's that I think it's a bad idea to marry anyone. Still being with Mike in ten years wouldn't suddenly convince me that the institution of marriage is a good idea; they are two unrelated topics as far as I'm concerned.
I have so many issues with marriage that it's very difficult to organize my thoughts about it; trains of thought quickly become complex tangles. But perhaps I'll try mentioning a reason or two every now and then in this diary, partly in hopes of accidentally ending up with lucid writing about it, and partly to help my long-suffering family understand just what my problem is. Or perhaps I'll start a Musing about it; I don't know.
Back in the real world, I've begun learning my way around, which includes some scrutinizing of maps and paying more attention when we go places, and this morning included accompanying Mike on the train when he went to work. I got a map of the train system and also learned the basics of how it all works, which is like a cross between our subway and commuter rail with a few quirks. One nice feature that I'm sure we'll never have is that there are electronic signboards at the platforms, saying what trains are due to arrive and how long until they get there.
Amusingly, people keep asking me for directions; that happened again while I was waiting for the train back home.
Oh, one more thing: I can report that you haven't lived until you've heard a nice crunchy electric guitar extemporaneously overlaid onto Enya's "Orinoco Flow". Heh heh. There's hope for Frank Sinatra yet.
Completed at 7:15 PM
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Well, we went through with it. It was quick and about as painless as it could possibly be, although the lady doing the ceremony got confused about which wording we wanted and did a much longer and more involved one. But the upshot is, it's done, and I can check it off the to-do list...
Lots of other stuff being accomplished as well, but I have a lovely cold and I'm not feeling up to writing a very long entry. It showed up on Thursday night, so I'm hoping it's nearly over with.
Completed at 7:00 PM
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It turns out that British colds are much better developed than their puny little American counterparts. I still have it, although it appears to be trailing off finally. I suspect I probably have many more of these to look forward to, since presumably there are legions of local bugs that I've never been exposed to. I only hope I didn't give it to Pete and Mel, since I'd have been in prime contagion stage while they were here. Or indeed James and Jo, although presumably they'd have already encountered this particular one before.
Lots of progress on the Mundane Details front; I'll hit some of the highlights.
I now have an official UK bank account. This almost didn't happen, because--prepare yourself, if you're American--they have no system of personal credit in this country, and therefore have evolved their own system for deciding who is creditworthy. Opening a bank account here is more of a big deal than it is in the US; they treat it as a credit-related event, and they will refuse you an account if they can't establish your creditworthiness. Their normal system here is to get a reference from your current bank. My bank, being American, had no idea what I was talking about when I asked them for a reference, but they gamely typed one up, which I brought with me. Sadly, it wasn't what the UK bank wanted at all, which isn't particularly surprising. So what they were going to do was mail off some forms to my US bank asking them for a reference. I knew this wouldn't work out very well, because if they were perplexed with me asking for a reference in person, imagine how they'd react to getting a request for one in the mail, with nobody there to try to explain. But then--deus ex machina! It fortunately occurred to the lady at the bank to ask whether my, ahem, intended was also an accountholder at the same bank, which he is. (American readers, sit down before reading this next part.) She said that they could then dispense with the entire bank-reference process, and just get a personal introduction from Mike, and that would be sufficient. That's right, simply having an existing accountholder introduce me is enough to satisfy the bank as to my creditworthiness. Having personally watched someone spend two weeks trying to clear a late payment of a $0.50 service charge on a Sears card from his credit history as a mandatory prerequisite to getting a mortgage, this casual system of introductions just boggles my mind. But I have to say I like it! Once the introduction business was over with, things moved very swiftly and smoothly. I was able to open the account, and in subsequent days various goodies have appeared in the post, including an ATM card and chequebook; a credit card threatens to appear sometime next week.
Oh, and remember the multisystem VCR saga from early October or thereabouts? We concluded that NTSC playback is a fairly common feature on mainstream VCRs here, so this weekend, we went shopping and just bought one. That's a huge relief after all that research. Of course when we unboxed it, it turned out to have a major dent in the top cover, such that tapes, once in, wouldn't eject...But handy Mike just opened up the case and gently banged out the dent. Whew, we avoided having to do a return!
And, of course, news about the topic you're all wondering about. No, not that one, the other one. Having written our wills, and taken out a 15-second advertisement on BBC1 warning the entire country of our intentions, I -- drove the car. Amazingly, we survived, and without any casualties, not even pedestrians. As I expected, it's not at all the things you'd expect that end up causing problems; it's the things you don't give a second thought to--which is precisely why they cause problems. I had two narrow escapes because I didn't properly parse which lanes had right-of-way when two merged into one (I thought my lane continued, but it was the other one). I must say, Mike really kept his screams of terror to a minimum.
I've driven a couple of times now, but won't be going at it seriously until I get back, and can go through the paperwork to get a British license (which I can't do until I'm an official resident).
Parking is going to be hard. Not only are you on the wrong side of the car, so your idea of where the car's boundaries are is seriously messed up, but spaces are smaller here on average, and cars have turning radii that would make a motorcycle jealous. I've seen a parking garage (multi-story car park) that Linda's Saturn would be physically impossible to park in, unless the garage was completely deserted. Basically I'll have to relearn parking from scratch, I think. On second thought, I'd just as soon avoid the scratches, because I really like our new car; it's very nice. Conveniently, it's similar to my Honda, layout-wise, which helps. The gear pattern on the gearshift is the same, and the location of all the instruments and dash layout is the same. (The whole driving-on-the-left thing is complicated by the fact that I'm in an unfamiliar area, in an unfamiliar car. I must say, Pete made it look deceptively easy. Note to self: Grumble at Pete next time I talk to him.)
In closing, here are a few cultural differences to amuse my fellow Americans...
'Nuff for today, I think. Back to standing on my head.
Completed at 6:15 PM
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Tea at the airport again...
If you have to go through a 5-time-zone change, you might as well combine it with Fall Back, and get it all over with at once, that's what I always say. Or that's what I say at the moment, anyway. If I said things like that in mid-June or thereabouts, people would look at me funny. Funnier than they already do, I mean.
It really does seem that jet lag finds me too slippery to grip. (I am the Teflon Traveler, traversing time zones in a single bound...) Once again I don't think I'll have any trouble with the time change. Is it 8:00? Is it 3:00? They both sound plausible to me at the moment. I'll just go to bed a bit early, feel like I'm sleeping in, and still get up in plenty of time to go to the consulate.
Ah yes, tomorrow's errand is applying for a spouse visa at the British Consulate, for which purpose I'm in a hotel in New York City at the moment, having pulled off the truly amazing feat of flying into JFK without losing any luggage. Wow. Although they could have lost it, for all I cared; the luggage is basically empty, because I left everything I could in England. Why lug it all there and back again, only to bring it yet one more time?
My cold, you'll be astonished to hear, lingers on; I've now had it for something like 10 days. It's in the cough/sniffle phase, which means it's on the way out. I thought I'd be every airline passenger's worst nightmare, but I was denied the opportunity because (a) my flight was only about 1/3 full so I had no neighbors (bliss!), and (b) everyone on the plane had a cold. We sounded like a Muppet Show sketch. "Here's Gonzo the Great, who will play 'I Love New York' on coughing airline passengers!"
Some quiet days, the last few days in England; Mike was at work, and I mostly relaxed. Last night we got around to ordering my new work computer, which was fun; it's decently high-spec, although not outrageous, so it ought to be a good computer. It'll arrive before I get back, of course, so Mike will be forced to set it up and play with it by himself. Life is hard. Oooh, and then we get to set about networking the house. It's such fun being a geek.
I did some more driving, and still haven't hit anything or anyone; I may be starting to get the hang of it (enough so that during the taxi ride from the airport, I had a couple of wrong-side-of-the-road moments). Tight curves to the left, when there is oncoming traffic, give me the willies, because my instincts say I'm coming around the corner on the wrong side of the road and I'm in the oncoming traffic's lane. It's not bad with right curves, because I can see the oncoming traffic and the whole road better.
This diary entry was almost a non-event; I got to the hotel only to realize that I'd cleverly left my telephone cord in England. No, said the front desk, they didn't have one I could borrow. I tried using the curly handset cable, but got no dial tone. Well, that most likely meant that the so-called "data jack" was digital, but I wasn't willing to give up that easily, so I took to the streets and found a place to buy a phone cord. I brought it back, plugged it in, and...no dial tone. Rats. But, later, I discovered that there is a second phone attached to the wall in the bathroom. I thought, Naaah, but I tried it anyway, and tada! Dial tone. So now the bathroom phone is dangling precariously by one wire whilst I steal its jack.
Completed at 3:41 PM
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"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Boston's Logan airport. Local time is 8:10 PM; the temperature is about 38 degrees and it is raining."
Good old Boston. Just what I'd expected.
In about as un-Lisa an act as it is possible to get, I woke up before my alarm went off this morning, leading to the bizarre situation of me ordering breakfast at 5:15 AM. I know why this happened; whenever it's vital that I get up early the next morning, I wake up constantly throughout the night, checking whether I've overslept. Around 4 AM I felt like I'd had enough sleep, no doubt due to time zone changes, but I stuck it out till 5:00, whereupon I gave up and ordered the aforementioned breakfast. Ahhh, New York. Whatever else you may say about it, it has this in its favor: You can order just about any kind of food at any time of day or night, and have it delivered to your door. (Or room, in this case. The hotels don't bother having their own room service; they just provide menus for some of the nearby places that deliver, and arrange for the tab to go on your room bill.)
Of course I then got very sleepy again around 6:00, so I snuggled back in until 7:15 or thereabouts, which still left me plenty of time to get to the British Consulate early. They begin processing visa applications at 9:00, but they let a line form beforehand. In July, Mike and I were number 19 in line, having arrived around 8:45, and waited in line until about 10:00; we learned from this that it does indeed take a pretty long time to work through a line of that size, so this time I got there just after 8:30, and was rewarded with #3 for my efforts. If anything, the process was even more low-key than last time, even though Mike wasn't there; I had all the paperwork they wanted, so it was just a matter of handing it over. There was one sticky moment when they were a bit perplexed by the fact that my passport already had a fiancée visa (it being more normal to go to the UK permanently on the fiancée visa, and send to the Home Office in London for the settlement visa), but they got over it.
While waiting, I experienced the second un-Lisa bizarre situation of the morning: I think I was the most organized and prepared person there. (I'm not sure I can take too many more of these un-Lisa shocks; two in one day [one morning, really] is far too many.) For example, the gentleman in line in front of me was also applying for a settlement visa, but he had to borrow my pen to fill out the basic forms because he hadn't done even that much already. I therefore doubt that he had brought with him any of the other items they require (e.g. both passports, marriage certificate, proof of accommodation in the UK such as mortgage papers, proof of financial support in the UK which must take the form of a letter from the sponsor's employer stating very specific things, proof of sponsor's financial status in the form of 3 recent bank statements and pay slips, letter from sponsor stating that they support this application, two passport photos, and a partridge in a pear tree). I could hear him at the booth next to me, apparently laboring under the delusion that failure to bring the necessary paperwork could be excused if he could just explain earnestly enough that his partner was in the UK waiting for him and really missed him. Hmm. I'm not the most organized person on the planet, but for something like this, where you're one tiny person attempting to beard bureaucracy in its den, even I think it pays to spend a few minutes investigating just what you're going to need, and trying to make sure you have it.
Right, enough of that. I'd also learned from last time that the application process would finish very quickly, but that I'd have to go back at 4:00 to pick up my documents, leaving hours to kill in between. I therefore cleverly didn't check out of my hotel, so I went back there for a few hours before heading out into the swirling maelstrom that is New York City. It's a complete zoo, but in tiny doses I love it. Everywhere you look there are enormous buildings with nifty architectural bits to look at, and strange stores you won't find anywhere else, and multiculturalism in your face. I went first to the Public Library, because their gift shop is very cool, and from there worked my way back up to Borders and spent the rest of the afternoon there, sipping tea and reading.
My flight back to Boston was uneventful, at least until I landed. From then on, Boston has been doing its very best to make me feel at home, which is to say it's been chaotic, surly and unhelpful. I waited optimistically at a baggage carousel for over half an hour, on the grounds that it was displaying my flight number, although the belt was completely switched off for the last 25 minutes of that time and there was absolutely nobody else there. Eventually I gave up and went to the luggage information desk, wondering if they'd just decided not to offload any of the luggage from my plane or what, only to discover my one checked bag sitting outside the luggage information office, and I swear it was looking smug (although with the amount of Terry Pratchett I've been reading lately, I think I can be excused if I anthropomorphize luggage a bit more than is strictly necessary). Turns out that because I got to Laguardia early, they put my luggage on the 5:00 flight (although they didn't tell me, and didn't put me on the 5:00 flight). It had been sitting there for quite some time.
So. Now the excitement really begins. Lots to do! It doesn't seem quite possible that I'll be back in the UK in under a month, but so it is. This is a good thing, because I miss Mike terribly. This trip had vacation-like aspects, but mostly was just me being there for a couple of weeks, so I got quite used to it.
Completed at 11:32 PM
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