• A blue jay unfortunately brought an end to our baby bird odyssey. After the jay’s first visit only three of the five birds remained, all of them scattered in the backyard after jumping out of the nest to escape. Having gotten rather attached to our little friends, we decided to put them back in the nest, and then went on blue jay patrol for several days. During that time there was more shuttling of baby birds back into the nest, until finally the jay showed up and the birds were big enough to fly away.
• In a move that proves I am finally a grown up, Audrey and I now get HBO and our movies no longer make a beeping noise when someone says a naughty word.
• Holliday IT Services, Inc is now a licensed California corporation. I am hoping that my meteoric rise to the role of company president will one day be chronicled by Hollywood in a film written by Aaron Sorkin.
• The house continues to come together. So far we’ve become proud owners of an area rug, a new couch, and some end tables. It is a truly disturbing experience to walk into Best Buy and be excited about looking at appliances.

02-July-1998

Yesterday was the first day I haven’t written anything, so here goes – I took the 1:00 AM train from Genoa to Pisa, woke up at 4:30 having long ago passed Pisa, and then took the 5:15 back to Pisa, arriving at 6:45. On the first train I met a really nice Tunisian fellow who spoke some French and was thrilled to tell me about how Michael Jackson had been to Tunisia. I also met an annoying German.

In Pisa I found the tower by 7:15, and no one was there so I didn’t have to pay or deal with crowds. They’re apparently shoring up the foundations – the tower was really funky. Neat architecture, but with the tilt it looked very odd. I later got a cappuccino and then caught the 9:15 to Florence.

Florence was really cool. After running around with several Mexicans looking for a room I found one on my own. I then went to visit the Uffizi, which houses some great art. The Duomo is their big cathedral, which is huge and has an amazing dome. St. John’s baptistery has the famous bronze doors. The streets and buildings were all in good taste, unlike the baroque mess in Northern Europe.

The heat and lack of sleep got to me by 5:00, and by 6:30 I was in bed. I woke up at midnight, did laundry in the hostel sink, and overslept until 6:30 (I wanted to get up at 4:30). Now I’m on the train to Rome.

11:48 PM

Rome so far has been amazing. If I could afford it I could easily spend a month here. I first went to the Colosseum and met a Mexican guy named Raoul. We went to the Colosseum and Pantheon, he gave me a sandwich for lunch, then we went to some museums. After he left I bought a map of Rome, went back to the Colosseum, revisited the Forum, then walked along the Appian Way. It was awesome – I stood on the spot where Julius Caesar was cremated, saw some of the most famous sights in the world, and I’ve only seen a tiny fraction of Rome. Tonight I have no place to stay although I may try to get a train.

Caveat: I’ve got nothing against Germans in general, but that guy on the train was a weirdo.

• The two bird feeders are bringing in flocks of finches, sparrows, and doves, as well a variety of less-frequent visitors. It can be loud.
• Proving the bird feeders support multiple levels of the food chain, a young sharp-shinned hawk has made the backyard his play area, and hangs out to terrorize the smaller birds on occasion. His attention isn’t only directed at birds: while I was doing some yard work he also took a shot at my head, apparently to ensure that I didn’t feel excluded.
• There’s a crow who visits occasionally and has shown an irrational fear of salami.
• The mammal situation consists of some wrestling baby squirrels, some very un-subtle neighborhood cats, and a family of tree-climbing rats that have made the area under the feeders their late night dining area.

It’s unclear what the future holds for the wildlife oasis that is our backyard, although some sort of water supply and potentially an owl house may be needed additions.

• Carl Sagan. If there is anyone who better encapsulates science, spirituality, and an ability to communicate, I couldn’t think of them. The opportunity to eat with someone who could explain details of the cosmos in understandable ways, who could expound on how the scientific wonders of the universe made him believe all the more in God, and who was infinitely curious about human nature and evolution, are all things that would make him a great dinner partner.
• Jesus. I suspect Jesus would be on a lot of people’s lists, but for different reasons. It is questionable whether anyone has had a greater influence on philosophy and morality, and the opportunity to hear his thoughts about the world today would be a revelation in all senses of the word. Whether or not the real Jesus would have a direct line to the Almighty or simply be a teacher with profound views, spending a meal with him would be the most enlightening experience imaginable.
• Teddy Roosevelt. America’s greatest conservationist President, the man who made the Panama Canal a reality, and an adventurer whose hunting and outdoor exploits are still revered. While he did a number of things that were worth questioning, a dinner with Teddy would be filled with stories and wisdom, and one that was sure to inspire.

The comments link is below – coming up with a list of three is a fun thought exercise, and I’d be very interested to hear what type of folks others would choose.

In the summer of 1996 I was working as a glorified janitor for the mechanical engineering department at Case Western Reserve University. Money was tight – $6.25 an hour didn’t go very far, even in days before monthly cell phone bills – and options for vacations were limited. However, about a week before the Games started it struck me that I’d wanted to go to the Olympics my entire life, and they were in the United States for only the second time since 1932.

My boss’s response to a request for a few days off to go to the Games consisted of three questions: “Do you know how you’re going to get there?”, “Do you have anywhere to stay?” and “Do you have any plan at all?”. After answering all of these in the negative, the extraordinarily cool Dave Conger laughed, told me to have the time of my life, and asked that I bring him back “something weird”.

At the time Greyhound was offering a student pass for something like $100 that allowed you to ride any bus to any destination, as often as you wanted, for one week. As a result, the transportation and lodging plan that developed was to take Greyhound round-trip to Atlanta, and to then sleep on overnight buses each night so I’d have a safe-ish place to spend the evening. The economics of this plan were hard to argue with, although the logistics left something to be desired. Nevertheless, my good friend Mike Collins dropped me at the Greyhound station after work and, bus ticket in hand, the adventure began.

Event tickets were limited to the cheapest ones available: $11 for men’s field hockey on July 21, $7 for USA vs. who-cares in baseball on July 22. While waiting in a long line to pick up tickets strangers I met started offering places to sleep – one guy had a rental apartment downtown and told me he’d simply give me the key, free of charge. I was twenty at the time and very self-conscious about always wanting to be able to repay any kindness, so I declined, but was nevertheless blown away at how generous and trusting people were being. Had I known that sleeping on a Greyhound would prove almost impossible, and that night two would find me curled up outdoors in a construction site in the suburbs, I might have reconsidered.

The Olympics itself were pretty much everything that could have been hoped for. I sat in downtown Atlanta in front of a fifty foot tall TV and cheered with a few thousand people when Kerri Strug clinched the gymnastics gold medal on a sprained ankle. I watched road cycling in the rain (because it was free) and met a former professional cyclist who insisted I sleep on her family’s couch that night. I scalped a ticket to swimming for less than face value shortly after the event started, took off running the two miles or so towards the swimming venue, and was later escorted out of the Athlete’s Village by Marines after unknowingly running through it and somehow getting past the first security checkpoint.

The highlight of the events I attended came after scalping a ticket to the cheapest tennis match available. On the bus there I met guy from Belgium who had a ticket to center court, and he told me that he would change tickets with me for one match so I could experience seeing the best players in the world. After enjoying a match between two obscure players on Court 14 (or wherever my ticket was for) I met him outside of center court and he told me that, instead of exchanging tickets, I should follow him and act like I knew what we were doing. No one checked my ticket closely, and we confidently strolled down next to the court and sat in the second row – apparently the corporate seats were all filled with squatters who then enjoyed matches featuring Gabriela Sabatini, Monica Seles, and Andre Agassi. After the third match I got up to get water and was busted on the way back in, but it was still a ridiculously cool experience.

After four days in Atlanta I came back to Cleveland, a Korean press guide in hand for Dave. The cyclist and the Belgian and I kept in touch for some time thereafter, recalling the few days that we had shared such excitement. While I won’t be in attendance for London, it’s a good bet that in the future the Olympic experience will be revisited, albeit with slightly more comfortable transportation and lodging that includes a bed.

• For eight days in January 2004 during my first Antarctica trip.
• For seventeen days in October 2004 on the South Georgia trip.
• For eight days in January 2006 during my second Antarctica trip.

As amazing as it is today, South Georgia was once the most important seabird nesting site in the world, home to over 100 million nesting birds. The arrival of whalers and the introduction of rats to the island changed everything; birds that nest on the ground stand little or no chance against rats, and today it is mostly only the small offshore islands surrounding South Georgia that support large bird colonies.

South Georgia’s future will change dramatically this year. After a successful test run last year, 2013 and 2014 will see the largest rat eradication effort ever undertaken, with the hope of restoring South Georgia to its pre-whaling glory. The effort will be seven times larger than the largest eradication program previously undertaken, which was on Campbell Island in New Zealand.

While there is a lot to be discouraged about in the world today, particularly in the field of conservation, there are also a lot of good things going on. In the case of South Georgia, to know that the natural environment will be even more pristine in the future is a truly rare thing that is extraordinarily exciting to consider.

• The heavy items all got moved on Friday with the help of a U-Haul and two lovely gentlemen who happened to be hanging out in the Home Depot parking lot looking for work. They did the vast majority of the lifting, and two twenty-foot truckloads later nearly everything had magically transported four miles across town.
• After a late night of cleaning, the old place was emptied and ready for inspection by the landlady; tomorrow will be the first day in my adult life where I am not paying rent. In a precursor to what could be future drama the landlady answered “I can’t tell you that” when asked if we would be getting our full security deposit back, so we may be exchanging letters that cite California renter law in the not-too-distant future.
• In a poorly-conceived plan we had the asbestos removed prior to moving in, but haven’t yet been able to schedule the heating folks to put in replacement ducts. God noticed this oversight and thought it would be fun to send LA a week of temperatures in the forties, so the hats and scarves were some of the first items we unpacked.
• In non-house news, due to tax law changes Holliday IT Services will soon become Holliday IT Services, Inc. Company president Holliday is looking forward to his reign of corporate terror.

Today, the move to our new casa is ongoing. There has been some drama as the old owner needed extra time to move out, but at this point his stuff is nearly gone, we’ve done some initial work (changing locks, removing asbestos), have scrubbed until our hands went numb, and have moved about a dozen carloads of stuff, including some of Audrey’s giant rolling shelves that were transported on the roof of the Subaru Beverly Hillbillies-style. The dust plume resulting from all of this activity has reduced us both to walking sinus colds, but breathing is clearly overrated.

In the midst of all of this moving I somehow managed to end up out of town in Boise for three days. Luckily I’ll be back on Thursday night in time to complete a mad scramble culminating in a U-Haul rental and the end of Great Move of 2012, followed by the beginning of the Neosho era.

• Spend time looking. It took several months for us to get an understanding of what neighborhoods we liked and what prices were fair. Being able to know where to look, and knowing what kind of house you can get for a specific price in each neighborhood is a huge advantage.
• Use the internet. We got on Redfin early on, but during the first few months would also occasionally just follow signs to open houses. The latter approach isn’t productive – filter the houses before you go out.
• Know the budget. We set a range, and only considered houses that were at the top of the range when we were really excited about them. This approach helped us categorize our interest – we automatically eliminated anything too expensive, and had to justify pricier homes by asking what feature of the house made it worth the extra price.
• Be ready to move fast. We put an offer on our new house the day after the open house, and even moving that quickly we were competing with two other offers. Get pre-qualified, and if you find something you like jump on it.
• Follow up. Audrey did a lot of follow-up with the agents, the escrow company, and others once we’d put down an offer, and it made a big difference – with different companies involved and a million things to do there are going to be issues that get missed, and it’s far easier to fix a problem earlier than doing so after it becomes a crisis.
• Expect problems. With many documents we’ve had to send them, and then re-send them, and then send them again. Apparently with so many files to keep track of things get lost, don’t go to the right person, or need clarification, so expect to do a lot of things twice.
• Title insurance is a scam. Just sayin’. Any insurance that pays out just 4.3% in claims of what it takes in as premiums is bogus, but the mortgage company won’t let you buy a house without it.