Blog notes, written at 35,000 feet with the screen not quite angled properly--but at least I have an empty seat next to me. I'm determined to write a bit in this thing each day, for better or worse, although when I was prowling around the "real" blogosphere (is there such a thing?) earlier this Spring, I couldn't help wondering when some of these folks found time to have sleep, much less have friends or lives. I sure hope no reader needs or wants a minute-by-minute Twitterthon, 'cause that ain't gonna happen.
Being the Officiant for my friend and chorus-mate Gene's wedding on Friday served as an odd prelude to this adventure, signing the papers with Gene and Sharon up at North Tahoe at the post-wedding brunch and then hustling home to pick up Alex who's spent one night with a friend and another with a cousin--and stopping in Davis (beginning to be boiling hot, finally) to pick up ridiculous amounts of stuff for the Tour. Last year I off-loaded a dozen pounds of tickets and railpasses and gear onto my on-site coordinator Andrew, but this year my coordinator Tiffany had to leave early for a wedding in Chicago, so I found myself this morning at the American Airlines baggage check-in being told to lighten my load or face a $50 charge. Luckily I had finally bought new luggage--a rolling convertible-pack that had a zip-on-daypack that I could just zip off. I guess I could've billed Uncle Charles for it, but the UC has enough troubles of its own, heh heh.
Besides the aftereffects of the wedding duties--the service went well, everyone seemed pleased--I'm feeling a little bleary from only four hours of sleep last night: it wasn't packing so much as some unexpected computer follies: a new breed of "honey-do" list that morphed into transferring thousands of photos from our trusty iMac onto Amelie's newish laptop so she could sort them during Tahoe family time in July, as well as getting round to installing Office on that little machine so she could manipulate her spreadsheets, as well as (most maddeningly) configuring and reconfiguring AppleMail to accommodate both her account and a new subaccount for Alex, in the interest of not only staying in touch with the lad but also giving him incentive to do more keyboarding / writing, which his teacher confirms he truly needs. That said, it felt good to compose a couple of paper letters for Alex to get at music camp later this week--a nice connection with my father, now seventeen years passed, wow, who was always very diligent about writing to us on the not too frequent occasions when he was away.
The mail server problems were just that mixture of frustration and inexplicable partial success that I find absolutely maddening, especially since error messages sometimes appeared and sometimes nothing at all seemed to happen, as the outging messages resolutely stayed in the outbox and the little icon spinning aimlessly away: by the end of an hour, I had rejiggered the settings several times and the damned machine appeared to work, but I still don't know whether the problem was on my end or at ATT's. I'm sure I'll be doing some long-distance tech help with Amelie via Skype, bringing its own brand of stress.
As the language turns from mostly English to the mixture of tongues that always shocks me out of my monoglot stupor (this flight to Brussels has ultra-loud announcements in English and French and Flemish, and there are a bunch of Germans around me), I'm acutely aware of how rusty my French is bound to be, not having done as much of my non-English reading of late. Then again, I laugh at my smattering of Italian, gleaned from my Chistmas-gift language CDs put on my iPod and studied on the train, mostly. Yet here too, another opportunity to simply accept what is, and not beat myself up for not having done more to prepare.
That may be a refrain I'll have to be aware of these coming weeks. So much can go awry, no matter how well one plans and scouts, and the fact that I am only returning to one of the locales that I familiarized myself with last summer--the little family hotel near Chamonix--engenders a strange sense of unfairness, as if I should be able to relax with something familiar a little more this year. Recognizing how fine the line is between success and disaster is also a little unnerving: pawing through a messy drawer while I was looking for the charger to Alex's camera last night, I gulped as I saw the 30-odd tickets for the Globe Theater performance on July 7th: they'd been sent to me way back in January when I ordered them, unlike last year where they were held at the theater until I claimed them. Just how bad would that have been, trying to get them Fed Ex'd or something? And, the little voice asks, is that the same time as the World Cup final? should I have foreseen that possible conflict?
[The fact that these are posted is testimony to my having safely landed, and figured out a wifi connection at my brother's house in a suburb of Brussels.]
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