Blog of the midnight flyer

What a week!

First of all, thanks for all the congratulations here and byemail and in person since we shared the news of our coming baby! 

I have so much to catch up on – we’ve been busy, and I have around a millioncute pictures plus memories I want to document. But for now, I’m just reeling from quite a wild week.  Picture this: 52 hour trip to Boston in the middle of an almost full work-week.  Thanks to in-flight Internet,  I telecommuted on my way out to Boston andafter an exhausting day today, I’m trying to get caught up on all my work onthe return flight.  I guess that’s thebeauty of the time change and the grueling 7 hour westbound trip – I can get almosta full day’s work after a full day of so-called vacation. 

Anyway, I headed out for an Advisory Board meeting for thefellowship program I work with/am part of and tacked on a little extra time todo some move planning.  I toured threepreschools and four apartment buildings, did some professional networking, andsome personal catch up with family and friends.

It was a great to stay with Emily and Adam and see their notreally new anymore but new to me place in Teele Square.  It should be known that Adam is also pullingfor the Tigers.   One of my friendsjoined me for one of the school tours – her daughter is the same age as Grace,and then we ran into one of Steve’s residency friends who was looking at theschool for her daughter.  It’s nice to bereminded that we still have a community. It was also gorgeous Boston – fall colors, warm days, bright blue skies,the kind of days that make you forget about January, February, and March. 

I think we’ve narrowed down where we want to live.  Now we just have to cross our fingers, andtoes, that something in the right building becomes available at the right timeand is not astronomically expensive.  Wewill settle for just outrageously expensive, I think. 

I also registered Grace for school!  We now just wait for them to review thematerials and send us a confirmation. Hurray, right?  Kind of…Scheduling-wise, I had to visit the first-come first-serve school beforetouring the last one on my list.  Soafter paying the non-trivial registration fee, I fell in love with the finalschool.  I knew I would and knew wecouldn’t afford it so was really just going for futureinformation/kicks/torture.  Well, turnsout they have pretty good financial aid so it might be an option afterall!  So I had two hours of feeling likewe had a decision and I could move on to new worries, and now we’re back to puzzlingover the situation.  At least now we haveher registered for a school we will be happy with, and if the other one worksout, great!

Here are the things that made me happy about being back inBoston:  my people, the energy of thecity, walking most places, convenient subway, all the good memories of our lifethere, the politics and activism of living in the capitol, brick buildings andsidewalks, and the sparking Charles River on a sunny day, the fact that whenyou order coffee not at Starbucks, they ask how many sugars and how much milkyou want.

Here are the things I realized I will really miss aboutCalifornia:  relative lack of cigarettesmoke, tremendous ethnic diversity (e.g., living in a majority minority state),recycling bins everywhere, compost bins many places, toilet seat covers in mostbathrooms (they are a luxury in Boston). The people, of course, but that goes without saying. 

Here’s to quick and exhausting trips and hopefully getting the move stuffsorted out ahead of time so we can spend the spring packing and not sleepingwith a newborn in the house!

I haven’t proofread this… and I guess I won’t.  It’s well past midnight east coast time,there’s a ton of turbulence and I need to get back to the quantitative impactof propose technology projects.