in jordan

well, i've been in jordan for 4 days now. i decided to come to aqaba without doing much research, and that's my bad. it's good for divers, and i was contemplating getting certified, but that went away after i came to my senses. aqaba is pretty small, and i've walked most of it. i have booked a tour to go to wadi rum tomorrow afternoon. i'm taking a four hours 4WD tour, then they are dropping me off at a bedouin camp in the desert overnight. the next morning, i'm getting picked up again, and we are going directly to petra where i'll walk around solo seeing what i want to see and when i want to see it. when i've got my fill, the driver will bring me back to aqaba. i think this will be the longest i've been off-the-grid in a decade. no internet, no blogs, NO LAPTOP! i'm taking a phone, but only in case of emergency. what is wrong with me?! anyways, thursday will be a day of relaxing, repacking, and organizing everything to increase the chances of me making my tight connection in germany on my way to spain. there, i'll visit TheSwedishChefDave for a few days, then possibly on to barcelona over thanksgiving to see another buddy i worked with in italy, then ON IN to B-Town. i'll keep you updated.

well, the tickets are booked

i booked my tickets to take my back-to-back R&Rs. sadly, they are paper tickets, and TheGeneral thinks jordan is as unsafe as egypt so i need special authorization which was given today. now i just hope they can ship the tickets in time. i'm leaving egypt just before noon on the 12th on my way to aqaba, jordan for a few days. i might think about possibly taking scuba lessons, i have a week to waste. i'm going to go to petra for at least one day, maybe more. i've heard i have to check out wadi rum, so i'm just taking any and all suggestions.

on the 20th, i fly to malaga, spain to visit TheSwedishChefDave, an old buddy i worked with in turkmenistan. i'm a wee bit concerned i might either lose my bags or miss my final connection in frankfurt, but we'll see how it goes. i'm going to spend 4-5 days there, then try to hop down to barcelona to see another work buddy i met in italy a few years back. he might be getting together with some other americans for thanksgiving, and i'll see if i can barge my way in.

i haven't booked the ticket yet due to being crazy busy packing and such, but i plan to fly from barcelona to the states on the 28th, thus fulfilling my 330 days out of country, cementing my one year on this second assignment in egypt, and getting me home with not a lot of time to do all the american things i want to do (mostly visit friends, and have some 'merican food). i'll try to update while i'm on the road, i used to be better, but now that i'm excited about heading home, i think it will be far easier. i still have to post the taxi grand prix that hash held a few weeks ago. good times. hope to see as many of you as i can in less than three weeks. back to packing my checked bag, and packing my shipments home. here's to hoping that shipping with fedex is less of a nightmare than intermove egypt was from the last job.

R&R alpha - (day 14/15) - the end is nigh; ney... the end is here

it's october 14th... tomorrow, TheWayne and i would head our separate ways after an awesome time in germany and the czech republic. but it's not QUITE over yet. we woke up to try to hit "mike's bikes" for a bike tour of munich. it was rainy, and we were a bit late, so we missed the tour. as per usual, we walked a lot but my blisters were doing better now, or my brain had just rewired the "agonizing foot pain" nerves to go to my "let's just get drunk" drive. all was better. we walked to the english garden which is a very nice area of munich. relaxed, greenery, beer, food. speaking of beer, we stopped at the chinese tower in the garden for a sausage and some beer. my facebook profile picture was taken from said been near said tower in said garden (man, that pic is a year old? gotta find a new one i guess). after a nice buzz was packed one, we made out way back towards town. we walked around marienplatz center for a bit. TheWayne was looking for some soccer jersey of some sort. i walked around the store for a brief bit but soon got bored, so i went outside to one of the outdoor restaurants in marienplatz and ordered a beer and some potato salad. normally, i wouldn't remark about potato salad, but i do have to say, this was the best potato salad i'd ever had in my LIFE. fantastic! and brilliant me, i forget the name of the place, and i forget the name of the sports store TheWayne was looking in, but if i could find THAT sports store, i could find this restaurant. TheWayne finished his perusing, so we headed off to near nymphenberg. there is a cool lake we walked around for no apparent reason. there must've been a field trip or something as there were hundreds of french kids running around being all... french. a few beers more, then we made our way back to the hotel and cleaned up for dinner. we went out and ate at the hofbraü haus. it is a famous brewery in germany, and the restaurant was awesome! it was just like the hofbraü haus beer tent at oktoberfest but with more room to move. they even had the brass band playing on occasion! i had a great steak, my first white sausage... a generally awesome meal in a cool environment. TheWayne and i chatted up TheAnnabelle (or was it TheAnastasia)... i don't recall. she was our waitress and very friendly. we had a good time entertaining each other. after dinner, we walked around looking for a place to grab a few beers, but were very unlucky this day. we ended up grabbing a taxi home since (we thought) we'd wandered quite a ways. funnily enough, the taxi driver was spanish, and i was drunk enough to think i could remember enough to speak it. i think he was amused by my attempt... hey, at least he didn't drop us in the middle of nowhere. it ended up we were only maybe 6-7 blocks from where we lived, but i take no responsibility for this navigational error. it is widely known that i have no sense of direction.

we woke up the next day with a heavy heart. it had been a great 15 days and now it was back to real life. TheWayne was back to jersey and his IronMan training, i was back to cairo to close out the job there and move on to alexandria. we grabbed a quick breakfast, packed and hopped on the train to the airport. we partook in goodbye beers, then TheWayne bid me adieu with a tear in his eye. i, myself, had to turn away... and order another beer. looking back, i'm kicking myself for not going this year. if TheWayne is up for it (and anyone else), next year, i think we gotta go again. so there it is... R&R alpha, documented on the blogosphere, completed within 1 day of it's one year anniversary. talk about cutting it close. as a friend recently told me... "for god's sake, finish the blog... you have to let go of the past to allow new experiences into your life.", but one thing before i do that...

take a walk with me down memory lane (soft lawrence welk in the background, bubbles in the foreground, soft filter on the camera...)
TheWayne, throwin' one back

Mmmmm. half-meter sausage

Escalators are like moving chairs when you're drunk

TheTav and TheWayne still sleeping in Berlin

TheTav being a drunk, passed out punk... and TheWayne making sure there is photographic evidence of it!!!

TheWayne at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin

me and one of the lines denoting where the berlin wall used to run

TheTav, TheJen, and TheWayne

Da Boys!

Saw this while waiting to leave germany. REALLY?! "meat wagon" is " car rental" in german? AWESOME!

Havin'a good time at the Hippodrom!!!

Until next time...

R&R alpha - (day 12/13) - things are getting blurry

12-october-2008 after having passed out around 5AM, we stirred a bit around 9AM, did some basic diagnostic tests, and realized we were still in non-functioning states. we tried again around 3:30PM with better results; that is, this time we made it out of our respective beds and managed to clean ourselves up. as i've stated before, TheWayne is a bit of a wandered, and that was the plan for the day. we knew a few places we wanted to check out for a drink or dinner, but if we didn't make it, so be it. after a bit of walking, we ended up at a place called "atmosphere". we grabbed dinner which included ONE ENTIRE POUND of potatoes. that's a LOT of fries. if i do recall, it was a decent place with funny drinking signs on the walls. after the grub, we wandered some more, and ended up at some sort of hipster bar called "kvarna praha" or something. baby blue walls, low lighting, and ABSINTHE!!! we grabbed a table where TheWayne ordered something sensible and i ordered an absinthe with a pepsi chaser. i've had absinthe before in india, and it tastes pretty foul. it's a strong licorice-like flavor, but worse, but hey, i'm all for legal tripping. it didn't work in india, i think we drank it too fast and just got drunk. this time i only had a small one, and i took it slow. again, funny faces were made, there were no hallucinations, but my face got flushed and i felt light for some reason. sadly, after this, again my memory fails me a bit. i think we went to a place called "musketeer", and maybe another place called "coyote"? my notes say something about arna beer being double trouble. i wish i could help you guys understand that, but that's what TheWayne is for. we must've had a good time, because i documented that, we again crashed out around 5AM.

13-october-2008 i think our livers were starting to fail. not really, but if they were, i wouldn't've been surprised. we dragged ourselves out of bed at 9AM to get cleaned up and checkout of the hostel around 10AM to get to the train station to make our way back to munich. we caught the train with no bother, and met two american girls who were backpacking around. they'd been touring some beer factories the day before and were now headed back to munich as well. we were running a bit late, and saw that our connecting train was already in the station as we pulled in. we barreled out of the train leaving the girls behind (they were going to wait and catch a later connection instead of hurrying with their big packs). it was short run, but i had a big suitcase so it wasn't ideal, but we did make it to the train with a bit of time to spare. we were surprised to see the girls decided to make the run as well and caught the train. TheWayne had found a small hotel barely a stone's throw away from the entrance to oktoberfest. we booked in, dropped our stuff off, and then made our way to the Augustiner for dinner. nothing much more in my notes. the end of the trip was nigh, and we may have been slowing down a bit, or the brain cells had been irreparably damaged. two more days and we'd be leaving germany and oktoberfest for good, and this, the longest story ever blogged, can be finished.

matt's new beard

you gotta check out my buddy, matt's, blog. he decided to go on a spiritual trip via his beard. he's currently sporting "the recesssion". it's quite spectacular. awesome stuff. go goad him on, and tell him i sent ya. Matt's New Beard

random catchings-up and such

WOW! it's been a while since i've updated. i hate it when that happens because i fear i lose readers, and i LOVE having you readers. so, here's what's been up lately.

• i went to sharm el-sheikh for two days at the end of ramadan. i had fun, but i would've had more fun if there were people to share it with. the first day, i went straight to the beach-side bar, got obliterated, went to my awesome room for a nap at 4PM set to wake up at 7PM to party... i woke up at 2AM, pooh! the next day, i paced myself, swam in 3 of the numerous pools, swam in the red sea, got drunk enough to go para-sailing, but i found out, though it was something new for me, it wasn't nearly as scary/exciting as i thought it would've been. still, it was cool. then back to work.


• several weeks ago, i got a call on my mobile where the name came up as TheElectricalTA. i answer it, but it's not TheElectricalTA. the conversation went a bit like this:

  caller: "do you know who zis is?"
  me: "um... TheElectricaTA?"
  caller: "no, zink a little bit harder, i know zat you can do zis"
  me: (of, fukk, shite, damn... oh, i know it... it's TheGerman who i thought was Dutch when i met him in india, oh fricksticks...) TheDETLEF!"
  caller: "very good, now i'm coming to see you"

  it's a small world in this biz. i just though that it was funny that i haven't work with him in over 3 years, and from what i gather, as soon as he found out TheElectricalTA was from TheGeneral, he asked if i was onsite. i wonder if he does this on every site he goes to. THAT would be weird. we caught up for a bit. he's here for the next year or so. he told me he ran into TheEx in dubai (again, small world), and that shipping his land rover to egypt. it was good to see an old friend. too bad he's been so busy, we haven't been able to catch up over drinks.


• i've been extended onsite until the end of october now, which sucks because i really want to get home to see friends and family, but it's also cool because i get to hang out longer with my hash friends, and after 21-oct, i get a SECOND R&R, so i can take a nice leisurely 16 day route to get home. i get my taxes back after 27-nov, so even if i spill over into november until say, oh, the 11th (which coincidentally would be my 1-year anniversary at this site), then with my 16 days R&R, despite missing thanksgiving, i'll have made my tax exemption criteria, AND i should have a decent argument for getting off through christmas.


• i did say random so... the hotel movie theater currently has showing, along with it's arabic movies: "the final destination", "slaughter", and "the hangover". WTF?! i don't the know EXACT extent of censorship here, but when i watched the last 007 movie, IT was edited for content, and i know 007 isn't graphic. my guess is "slaughter" (having no idea what it's about except from the movie poster) is gory, and will be edited down to a bunch of dark scenes, instilling fear, then cutting to the scene immediately after the "slaughter". i think "the hangover" is going to be about 8 minutes long, yeah EIGHT, and no one is going to have a clue as to how ANYONE dies in "the final destination" due to cuts.


• JUST finished watching "watchmen", and it was fantastic. i envy dr. manhattan. i learned that leonard cohen ORIGINALLY wrote "hallelujah", and i'm glad jeff buckley covered it and improved it immensely because the LC version in the movie is SHITE! i know i'm a bit slow on the uptake here, but malin akerman is HOTTTTT, especially in vinyl and garter-boots.


• this time last year, TheWayne and i were struggling to make it to the last day of oktoberfest and planning on heading to berlin. never worry, i have 4 days left before the anniversary of the last post i wrote. i MIGHT be able to pull it off, but i'm cutting it close.

the benefits of networking

i have a strange time relating to people socially. one way or another, most people are going to annoy me in some fashion that my brain-box obsesses over until i'd much prefer not be in their presence. i didn't notice this trait until being on certain assignments for so long. for the first 4 years with TheGeneral, i worked primarily maintenance jobs; that is, you hop in, work 7 days a week, 12+ hours a day for 3-6 weeks, and you leave. that's it. just enough time to meet people, make some connections, get a job done. you have have just enough time to look around the area, but not so much that you are bored by the landscape.

since 2005, i've been primarily on long term installations. india from early 2005 through late 2006, 2007 was a highlight in bad management where i didn't do much, and then i've been in egypt since january 2008. it turns out, i think, that these long term assignments are slowly but methodically driving me insane. i still cringe when i think of pretty much anything related to india. i met people there that i truly grew to despise due to either willful (or not) incompetence, and general lack of understanding who knows more about what i do. i've noticed it a lot here lately as well. there are some egyptians onsite that i would consider acquaintances, colleagues, but on occasion, they go off on how i NEED to get married and have babies and get a house, which i want to do someday. the problem is, these are from guys that live AND work in egypt. i don't work in my home country with my family. several of these people are muslims who see the world differently (and uncompromisingly) different from me. **please keep in mind, i'm not saying all muslims are like this, just the ones who are driving me crazy are**. one guy wants me to get married so i can have my wife cleanthe house, have my food ready, take care of my kids when i get home so i'll have a calm mind. he doesn't much understand that i don't think i'd be happy with a wife who didn't strive for more than that. i asked him how he would like it if his wife worked and HE took care of the kids, cooked, cleaned, etc., complete role-reversal, but he really had no answer. he basically just said that's not the way it is, not the way his god tells him it should be. but i asked him wouldn't he bored, he said yes... then what about his wife? again, not much of an answer, or at least, not much of an answer a western woman would accept without throwing a few things at him.

in short, my fuse has grown shorter and shorter every day that i'm here. i know it sounds like an excuse, but sober... i have a really hard time tolerating these people. and by these people, i don't just mean the egyptians, i mean some of my colleagues, the hotel staff, the taxi drivers. just about everyone is hitting a raw nerve nowadays.

i've gone off on a bit of tangent though. where i was going with this is, what little sober sociability i had before coming here, it is atrophying, due to the people available to socialize with. then when i joined the delta HHH a little over a month ago, things changed. maybe it's that i'd stumbled into another social group completely unrelated to work, but i'm having a wee bit more fun. granted, the HHH isn't completely (or maybe even at all) sober, but it's introduced me to people that i don't have to be tipsy to not want to asphyxiate. we've been running once a week, learning about each others' past, i've been to several dinners with TheMougli (hash name), who has a similar displeasure toward the indian continent, and his wife, ThePlasticBag (hash name). i was invited on a "diving" trip (entailing nothing but trying to get to every dive bar in alex), but i totally forgot about it after a long day at work. i just got a call from TheEweTrollop (hash name) asking if i wanted to get together at TheKiwi's (hash name yet to be given) house for dinner tonight. i was thinking about going out drinking or maybe catching a movie, but that's what is cool, they go out and do things. they all kind alive near each other which helps, while i'm about a 10 minute cab drive away, but it's pumping some life into this assignment, that after almost 8 months has grown quite stagnant. TheEweTrollop also asked if i wanted to go sailing tomorrow. sailing! i'd never been sailing in my life until last year's R&R to australia, and it was a fantastic time. i thought about learning more about sailing, i'd even bought some books which are waiting for me at home, and out of nowhere, i get invited to go again, and i'm incredibly excited to do something that's still new to me. here's to hoping i don't have to work tomorrow now.

all of this "new" experience stuff can be traced back to accidental networking (that bastard device of kiss-asses looking to climb the ladder... at least, that's how i always thought of it), but this is flesh-n-blood social networking. it's not facebook, it has nothing to do with work connections, favors, benefits. maybe this is how normal people make friends. i may have forgotten how. it all started when we had a trainer here, he met TheEweTrollop and his wife, TheCallGirl (hash name) at the hotel they were staying at as well while waiting for their apartment to be ready. TheTrainer invited us all out to meet at ThePortugueseClub (ThePC), we friended, went on a few daytrips, but i never really thought anything of it. they were nice enough, but with "friends" in this field being so transitory, i figured i mightn't see them again. then i took some time off the drink and didn't visit ThePC again for a while. i went back one night, and as i've told already, imbibed, agreed to run the hash the next morning, and the rest is history. i have a new circle of friends. they've given me names of people they know on the dubai and doha hash in case i get assigned there next, their a mixed bag of pretty interesting people.

and i'm looking forward to sailing tomorrow.

HHH (hash house harriers)

well, the rumors are true. the thursday night before last, i drunkenly and accidentally joined a running club, or more precisely, "a drinking club with a running problem". it's a bunch of rogue ex-pats that are a part of the hash house harriers (click for more info). i was talking to a welsh couple, TheGeoff and TheJanice, that TheMech and i had met at ThePortugueseClub (ThePC) a while ago. i told TheJanice that i'd taken up running every other day out of boredom and trying to get fit, and she told me that was wonderful because they had recently resurrected the local hash. i was 10-feet tall and bullet proof so i excitedly told them i'd meet them at ThePC the next day at 3:30PM for the run.

soon after, the guys i was with (plus one wife) and i decided to go check out the belly-dancing at "paradise" in agami. i'd gone several months before and had fallen in lust with a dancer named TheSabrine. excellent dancer and gorgeous. it's about a half-hour drive, but luckily one of the guys we were with had a car and didn't mind chauffeuring. we got there a little after 12AM and waited for the dancing to start. there was a girl there in street clothes that looked like TheSabrine but she was just sitting on a bench like any other customer. i'd told the wife we were with that i know a dancer named TheSabrine from before, and i thought she was very attractive. not too long after, the girl who looked like TheSabrine came over to the wife we were with, they spoke, and the wife told the girl (who was TheSabrine) that i thought she was hot. so in my embarrassment, i told her "i love you" in arabic (making her laugh was my only hope to get out of this unscathed... and it worked). she laughed, they talked, we sat and drank until the dancers came on around 1AM. at first there were two asian looking dancers that i wasn't to keen on. the rumor was that these girls were the owner's new favorites. as far as i was concerned, he could have them. i hadn't noticed, but i'm guessing around 2:00AM, TheSabrine disappeared to get ready. she came on around 2:30AM and put on a fabulous show. she tried to get me on the dance floor once but, i refused. my vast experience from strip clubs taught me it's RARE you are allowed on stage so it's almost in my genes (TheT!!!). a few more beers later, i was coerced into getting up and dancing with her. guys "make it rain" with LE 1 (1 egyptian pound notes = ~$0.18). i know it's a cheaper society, but i feel it cheapens the whole experience, though one of the guys i was with could resist doing it to me and TheSabrine. i gave her LE 200 later that night in big bills, hoping she could palm one. there's TheMoneyMidget that runs around scrambling up the small bills on the dance floor. i handed this money directly to her hoping she could show TheMoneyMidget one and keep the other for herself, though i'm not sure if we were that smooth. i was pretty hammered by the time and starting to fall asleep, so we all decided to split. i got home around 4AM, updated things on facebook telling everyone i was running the next day, and then i hit the bed hard!

the next day, i dragged myself out of bed around 1PM dreading the run. i zombie-walked around the room to my computer and checked my facebook. i had many congratulatory and pep-talking comments on my run. i'm guessing when i had updated my status on facebook the night before, i was preventing myself from handicapping my way out of running. now that i had all this positive support, i HAD to run, no matter how i felt. so... i crawled back into bed until 3:00PM, when i had beaten myself up enough that i KNEW i had to run. i threw on some clothes, grabbed my iPod and rocking bluetooth wireless iMuffs, and grabbed a cab to ThePC.

we had a pre-run beer at ThePC then were on our way to the egyptian farmland. it was maybe a 5-10 minute drive on the agricultural road toward work then we turned off into the fields, parked the cars and talked about how the run works. the night before the run, the "hares" go out and mark a trail with balls of shredded paper. if you (the followers are called the "hounds") see a ball of shredded paper, you are on the path and you yell "ON ON!" to the people behind you so they know. you run this trail until you come to three balls of paper in a triangle (since this is the delta hash club). this is a checkpoint where the path can diverge. once there you look around for the continuation of the path. this give time for the walkers to catch up to the runners (i'm a hybrid runner/walker). but beware, because the hares have laid traps. at the checkpoint there is one correct trail, and several possible false trails. so everyone spreads out, finds a trail, and starts running it. soon someone will come across TWO balls of shredded paper which denotes a false trail and they have to go back to the checkpoint to find the correct trail. i have an uncanny knack for finding false trails which means, in the end, i run/walk further than most with all the backtracking.

once the directions were given, the hares started the run. on occasion, they will intentionally take a route they know is wrong, to give the newbies an idea of what to look for in a false trail and how it goes. early on in the run we were running along a path next to a tiny irrigation ditch. the water reeds were pretty thick pushing us to jump across the ditch for about 20 yards then back on to the path. just as i was going to jump over the ditch my foot slipped INTO the ditch, covering my lower extremities in mud and, in turn, tweaking my already-bad ankle. i walked most of the rest of the way, carefully testing my ankle with short jogs here and there. after about 50-60 minutes of running around the egyptian farms like lunatics, having the field workers laugh at us, cheer us on, and offer us tea, we were back at the cars for "the circle". "the circle" is a bit like hazing. the newbies are brought into the circle and made fun of a bit, they have to sing, the have to down a more-than-likely warm and flat beer from the ceremonial mugs, jokes are told, stories about the day's run are exaggerated, regulars are given hash names if they don't already have one (one of the driver's was named TheScrewDriver and his daughter was named TheDirtyGirl), the next run is announced and then it's "ON IN"... back to the bar to socialize. this 1-hour run turned into an 8 hour event. good times!

the next day my ankles were killing me, but it was worth it. i've realized i need to strengthen my lower back because running on actual terrain as opposed to a treadmill makes my lower back ache in just a few minutes. i went again yesterday for my second run (hash #7 for the club this year), again had the back problem, but it eased up a bit. the hare who laid the course got us lost a few times. he blames the locals for burning his markers but i think he just got turned around. either way it was all good fun. that the hash update so far.

oh yeah, about TheConfederationsCup... now i'm not big on soccer, but if it's a social event i'll check it out. last sunday, USA was playing egypt and the one of the bartenders arranged for a TV for the bar so myself and a few other americans here could watch the match. as far as i know, the USA isn't really well known for their soccer team, and i HAVE seen egypt play, and i have to say they are pretty good. there were two guys (one kuwaiti and one egyptian) sitting on a couch next to us asking why we were routing for USA to which we replied that we were americans, so we were showing our pride. he explained to us that even if the USA won, it didn't mean anything because they'd lost such-and-such already, so they were out of contention so we should route for egypt. that seemed like a complete fallacy of an argument, a win is a win, so we continued routing for the US, and took great pleasure in watching him sulk when the US beat egypt 3-0. so, the next day i read that the US WAS playing for something. on the off-chance that USA scored 3 more goals that egypt and brazil beat italy by 3 goals, then we were still in... and that's what happened! i haven't YET seen TheKuwaiti to gloat a bit, but if i do see him, i will.

so, on wednesday, TheEweTrollop (hash name), formerly referred to as TheGeoff, had a going away to do for his wife, TheCallGirl (formerly known as TheJanice). she comes to visit for 5 weeks then goes back to wales for 5 weeks, then he goes to visit her for a bit. during her farewell party, the spain-USA match was on. again, everyone kind of figured spain would wipe the pitch with us since they were going for some sort of 36-game win streak record or something like that. during the game, i was getting excited to see that we were winning and got in the way of a guy sitting behind me who asked me to sit down... so i sat down in the chair next to him rather than my own seat. TheAbdullah, as i found out his name, is a professor of pharmacology at the local college. i then found out he got his bachelor's degree at TheOhioStateUniversity in the late 70's. for some reason, that made me say something along the lines of... so, around the time when i was just being birthed, you were partying like rockstar on high street in columbus, like 2 hours from my house, and now, 31 years later, halfway around the world, we cross paths?! i think my mind was blown a bit more than his was. long story short, USA beat spain, the big enchilada, 2-0, and we are moving on to the finals with brazil tomorrow. i'm actually excited for THIS game!

7-day sober, take 2

ok, several days back, i endeavored to go 7 days without drinking. i'm doing this to allay fears friends and family might have, AND it's healthy. as luck would have it, the next day, i was waiting outside the hotel for TheDriver, when a guy walked past who looked eerily familiar. i immediately thought it was a colleague i'd met almost five years ago in spain, but couldn't figure out what he would be doing here, since the only sites that i knew TheGeneral were working on were the one i'm at and the one i WAS at that is very far from here (i now know there was a small outage at an old site about 30 minutes from the hotel he was working on). apparently, he must've recognized me as well (though i had my long hair when we last worked together), but wasn't sure so he nonchalantly showed that the shirt he was wearing had TheGeneral logo on it... he said, "BigZac?", i said "TheJohn? (he shares his name with a popular fake news anchor from comedy central)", and it turns out that we were both right.

TheJohn, being scottish, likes his drink as most of us TAs do, and said that he'd see me at the bar that night to catch up, so i had one day sober and it all fell apart. i took the TheJohn on the weekly KFC run two nights ago, we caught up on where we'd been working and the like. two days ago, we had a day off, so i took him and his mechanical colleague golfing. we are absolute shite (except for the mech colleague, an american indian from oklahoma who hadn't golfed in 5 years or more, and he whooped us). it was good a time, but now his assignment is over, and today he flies out back to spain.

so now, i make my second attempt at healthiness. we'll see how it goes. i've been going to the gym fairly regularly; i do about 5 miles in 50 minutes, a leisurely pace that still works up a sweat. the gym scale says i'm at 98kg which is impossible (that's 215lb), so i need to track down a calibrated scale now. may hand is doing much better, i've updated with another picture at the bottom of this post. more updates to come. i'm still trying to tweak my keyboard to update ZUMEL. since i lost my last hard drive, i lost the specialized keyboard, so i'm rebuilding it now. hopefully, i can update there more soon. thanks to that one visitor i have who has hope i'll update it again, whomever you are.