October 2004: One Year In The U.S.
Can you believe it's been a year since I got back to the U.S.? A year. It's hard to believe - it feels like yesterday I was in Spain dreaming about some way to make it back home and *poof* that's happened and a year has passed already. Blink. Tomorrow I'll be hanging out with my grandkids talking about life back in naught-four.
It's a beautiful California morning and I'm up early. Perfect for me to remember what it was like last year when I got here and had jet lag. I woke up that first day to a beautiful morning - everything seemed so new and exciting. My first day back was a Sunday (just like today, so I must be off by one day) and I went down and bought a big newspaper and had breakfast at McDonald's (for the Egg McMuffins of course!) watched suburbia wake up, then went got a mobile phone at a T-Mobile store (which I had never seen before) and drove around hung out at a Barnes and Noble and went down and met Matt in the city to see the Fleet Week air show.
October is a *great* time to arrive in the Bay Area. I first moved here around this time, and every time I've left for any period - my first big three-month trip to Europe in 1998, the next year to live in LA for a bit with my brother - I've always arrived back in the fall and wondered why I ever left. You really have to live here to understand why.
To tell you how fast and complete my transition back has been, I was straightening out papers yesterday and discovered that my passport expired in May. Doh! That's really bad - if there was ever an emergency back in Spain and we had to go back it would be chaos trying to arrange a new one. But what really amazes me is that I didn't even notice. I remember when I first got my passport - 10 years ago - it was a year before I even used it. I was so crazy to travel that even though I was broke and just out of college and had no plans to go anywhere, I got the passport "just in case." It was during my six months I lived in Boca Raton Florida, in fact, so my Passport says "Miami" on it. Over the years that became a pain as I would say "I'm from California" and some dimwitted cusomts agent would say something like, "but it says you're from Miami here..." Urgh. The picture on my passport is *so* young looking (obviously) and has my old set of teeth (I got braces when I was 28yo, in case you're new to this weblog).
Blogging has definitely made much more aware of how fast time passes. It's incredible to read things from a year ago around this time and see what state my mind was in. Going back two Octobers is even more wild. How long have you been reading this weblog? Remember when I erased my hard disk messing around with Red Hat 8? That was two years ago already (have you backed up your computer yet? I forgot about Annual Back Up Day this year!). Time is just cranking by.
I think I wrote something like this not too long ago as well. Okay, this'll be the last post like this for a while. Promise. ;-)
-Russ