Virtually Home

I tried to go to bed relatively early last night -- and by that I mean around 2 a.m. Instead, I was awake until sometime after 5 a.m., and woke up when my alarm went off at 10 in a haze of dream-confusion and grainy-eyed pessimism. I got online and bought a plane ticket from London to Geneva to meet up with Rachel on Christmas Eve. The next plan was to head over to the SNCF office and get a ticket from Bordeaux to London to visit Tom, since their website has been steadfastedly refusing to show me train schedules for days now. But after a comically cold shower, while on the point of pouring cereal into a bowl, I was surprised by a phone call from our landlady regarding the washing machine problem. Yes, the washing machine problem is ongoing. Yes, this is three months. And of course, since I can't stand letting cereal sit in milk for any length of time longer than strictly necessary, I halted my breakfast preparations. As it turns out, Auchan mailed the estimate to my address in ...

Today I left the apartment with the full intention of finally completing my administrative enrollment and getting my student ID card made before I leave town this weekend. So, I hopped on the tram in time to get there about 30 minutes after the office workers were supposed to come back from lunch -- I figured I'd give them some time to NOT be back when they were expected...since that seems to be what's expected. And, of course, the tram service was "interrupted", since it so often seems to be, a few stops from my apartment, for a "suspicious package". At least, that's what I translated it as -- I hope I was correct. I guess it was a terrorist scare. Anyway, we had to disembark, and we walked what google tells me was 2.3 km to school, on the way passing the "suspicious package" which was completely invisible, but roped off and sort of swarming with police who only seemed to be keeping foot traffic away, and not really looking at the problem at...

The last few days have been pretty un-noteworthy, which I guess explains the lag in posting. I guess I've mostly been playing guitar, watching Star Trek: TNG and X-Files, and surfing YouTube. For instance, today I finally heard about President Obama's speech for the first day of school. That's one frustrating thing about living abroad -- I keep not being apprised of presidential addresses or  major pop culture events until way after. Most of what I have to show for yesterday involves successfully finding the laundromat, which was about a 3/4 of a mile from my apartment. I know there's one closer. In fact, I remember walking by one a few days ago and remarking aloud to my roommates that we should remember where it was, in case we needed it. As it turned out, we did have need of it -- and I didn't remember where it was. I'm sure it was closer than the one I found, but I didn't want to invest a lot of time and energy into the hunt when I still had to fetch...