Life's next adventure

The deed is done.

I’ve finally announced my impending departure from my current employer, and my intention to accept a new job--overseas. It’s going to be quite an adventure.

More details to follow.

Two thousand words

As part of getting ready for yet another move, I am currently exploring a rather large number of boxes that seemed to have made the journey all the way from Boston to Carlsbad without having previously been opened.

Among the items I found were some photos dating from all the way back in 1998, for my final days in New Haven and my first days in Boston.

The first photo was a shot of the senior class of Trumbull College, Class of 1998:



It’s a rather impressive looking photo--probably the best we had as a class. Our commencement photo would not have been nearly as “glamorous,” although that had more to do with the torrential downpour that soaked all of our clothes underneath the commencement robes (which are, in fact, dyed with a deep red dye rather than a truly black dye).

I also suspect that there haven’t been that many times where so many of my fellow classmates would have worn dresses or suites (as appropriate) at one time--maybe the senior dinner, perhaps, but outside of that, it probably hasn’t happened collectively since 1998.

The other photo is the first photo taken of me following my move to Cambridge.



The man on the right is Glenn Seaborg, who was a Nobel laureate and arguably one of the great chemists of the twentieth century. This photo was taken as part of a ceremony honoring a number of chemistry Nobel laureates held during the ACS Fall meeting held in Boston. What was not shown in the photo was that my “job” that evening was basically acting as a paparazzi, snapping photos of other people with Dr. Seaborg. This was basically the last shot available, so I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to get a photo. The most memorable thing about Dr. Seaborg was his hands--I couldn’t figure out what was the cause, but his fingers were seriously gnarled, such that each looked like a staircase--each knuckle was offset about a third of an inch from the knuckle above.

While this was my first photo, this was probably one of the last photos taken of Dr. Seaborg. A few nights later, he suffered a stroke; he never really recovered from the injuries, and died six months later.

Am I who I say I am?

One of the more refreshing trends of travel in the last few months was that I was apparently no longer being “singled out” for special treatment. This was a very recurring problem--particular when international travel was involved. That meant no advanced check-in was possible, which made flying on airlines such as Southwest, which boards by check-in order, rather difficult.

However, in recent months, some airlines started removing these conditions, so I could get boarding passes ahead of time, which made check-ins and travel slightly more pleasant. Unfortunately, this morning I got a rather rude awakening from US Airways, who did the whole “we are unable to process your request” nonsense all over again. And apparently the reasons even mystified the airline clerks--so it’s not clear whether it’s TSA doing the bungling, or the airline.

So it’s back to the piecemeal approach of recent years. Not much fun, but unfortunately that’s what it takes to fly these days.

Busy to the point of distraction

One of the things I’ve had to learn while working for my current employer is the ability to manage working on multiple projects concurrently. It’s not quite the same as multitasking per se, in that I’m not normally working on multiple things simultaneously (for instance, plotting data for one report while writing a paper on another topic). Rather, I mean the challenge of getting things done for different projects when faced with overlapping deadlines, and managing the day-to-day chaos while still meeting longer-term goals.

While I think I’ve gotten better at this time as goes on, I think that in these last few weeks, I’ve begun to hit a wall. There are too many projects and tasks, and I just don’t find myself with enough time to meet them all. Or, worse still, even when I do find myself with some time to work on them, I’m a little bit paralyzed by the problem of what to tackle first. Everything’s relatively important, so I find myself hopping back and forth between one activity and another. This is not a good way to get a lot done--I spend too much time trying to remember “where did I leave off,” which doesn’t necessarily leave a lot of time to make forward progress.

I think the time has come where it will be absolutely crucial to begin to say “no” to the assignment of any more work, at least until I can get some of these items off my to-do list.

Time to get started again

I think it’s high time to give this blogging thing another go.

It’s been several years since I’ve let my previous attempt at blogging go under. Many things have happened in my life--including a move to slightly outside the middle of nowhere.

However, there will be many more changes afoot in my life in the coming months, and I’d like to try sharing it with folks in a medium beyond what is possible with social networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

So we’ll see how this goes.