The good, the bad and the I-need-to-do-this-every-day

So Mrs. Blog and I have arrived in California. Chicago is a memory, albeit a beautiful one, filled with great friends, great food and amazingly temperate summer weather. (one of the first things a Chicago friend said to me: "How can you be wearing shorts? It's freezing!")

The good part: arriving back in the states, seeing dear friends and eating bacon. Oh, glorious bacon. How I missed you. Bacon even met me at the airport--I'm not even making that up. I'll tell you about it over drinks sometime. Big, excellent, momentous things happened in Chicago. It's a wonderful place.

In transit through Heathrow. Part food court, part refugee camp.

The bad part: Moving. I hate moving in the same way I love bacon. Packing, carrying things, stressing out about what to keep and what to give away, realizing that you totally forgot about the hall closet--it's for suckers. And this is despite hiring professionals to actually haul my stuff into storage. Also bad was flying with our pets to Southern California. They were traumatized (or "traumatised," in case your name is Karl and you are worrying that I have rediscovered my American spelling roots) and we were stressed out of our minds. Fortunately, this was waiting for us:

Background: mountains. Foreground: beautiful greenery. In my stomach: a margarita.

This is the part I should be doing every day. Sitting by a "water feature"--you might know it as a "hot tub flanked by small waterfalls"--drinking a cold beer and looking out through beautiful, sunny air into a distance dominated by hazy mountains.

Evidence.

It's nice to finally be free of serious obligations and able to just, you know, be on vacation. And to celebrate that point, I'm going to go get another beer. Cheers.

It's going to get a little quiet

That's because, first, I will be sleeping on an airplane. (then being awake in an airport, then sleeping on another airplane, then waking up in Chicago!)

And then great things will be afoot. Things that don't involve laptops.

I'll post when I can about the experience of being a tourist in my own country, but expect things to be a little spotty for the next couple of weeks. So ma'a a-salaama--that means "I have a 5 a.m. cab ride to get ready for" in Arabic.

Fury, success, redemption

Ah, dear readers, it has been an interesting day. Many things have to be accomplished before I hop on a government-owned airliner and begin my 23-hour sojourn back to a magical Place Where Water Falls From the Sky.

Among them was getting Internet set up in my apartment. And not even set up--just switched from my roommate's name to mine. On Sunday, we went down to the Etisalat office, filled out some paperwork, waited in a bunch of different lines... an then learned that there was a problem with the system and the switch couldn't be made right then. Instead, they would call me when the paperwork went through, I would go back down there and we would sort it all out over coffee.

"After tomorrow." Sounds familiar, right?

Yesterday I called and was told that the paperwork we had filed didn't exist. Awesome. Today I went down to the office and spoke with the clerk who helped us the most the first time around. He told me the request couldn't be processed because of "big problems" in the system. But seeing the fury (or hopelessness?) in my eyes, he kicked me upstairs to someone else. I handed him the paper work--which, it turns out, did exist--and after reading it, he said, and I quote: "What did that guy tell you?"

Not promising. But after getting bounced to a different counter, I finally got an answer that made sense. There was a fee to pay to transfer the account. No one had collected this fee. Therefore, the service couldn't be transferred. Dirhams paid, I walked out of the building an official Etisalat customer.

Next came the post office. I don't have a great track record there. Sure, there aren't many data points, but the last time I tried to pick up a package, it did not go smoothly.

This time, though, all kinds of good things happened. First of all, my UAE driver's license worked perfectly as ID. Which is great, because it means my passport can stay in a happy, safe place. Second, they found the package fast and brought it to me. Third, they didn't try to charge me anything to take it away. And fourth, the customs guy doing the customary "is someone trying to mail you porn?" search was in good spirits.

CUSTOMS GUY
(pulls a pack of playing cards with cocktail recipes out of the box) Cards. For magic tricks?

ME
Ha. Uh, yes. Magic tricks.

And then comes the best part. Waiting in the 115-degree sun for a taxi was brutal. All of them had passengers or only wanted to take me to Musaffah, which, unfortunately for both of us, wasn't where I wanted to go. Just as I'm considering getting on the next bus I see, giant package and all, a taxi with a passenger pulls up and honks at me.

It's Kamal. He's the cab driver I have on my cell phone--a number stolen shamelessly from my Scottish friends--to call when I need an arranged ride. But the last time I called him, he just didn't show up. I thought that was it. And yet here he is, rolling up just when I needed him.

The end result? A free ride home--he refused my money--and arrangements to take me to the airport on Friday morning.

Sometimes things work out despite all the sweat, bureaucracy and giant blocks of text on a blog.

Barack Obama and I have several things in common

Most notably, we were both born in August in Kenya.



Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to celebrate by running for president.

How about something happy and interesting

I'm sitting here at my desk at work accompanied by a five-gallon drum (that was the smallest they had!) of primer. I also am drenched in approximately five gallons of sweat from carrying it to work. Why work? Because I already had carried four gallons of paint home and work was a lot closer to the store. Now I have a few hours to cool off and figure out how to fix the Internet at home, which somewhat mysteriously stopped working for my roommate's computer but hums along just fine on mine.

And speaking of Australia,

There you go. Happy? Yes. Interesting? Yes. And in the time it took me to type this post, I think I've cooled off by at least 10 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course).

But I don't have many more after tomorrows!

Went to get the Internet and phone service switched over to my name today, copies of my passport and visa in hand. Everything went smoothly until the clerk tried to put my information into the Etisalat computer.

Then the computer broke. Then I was promised a phone call when it was fixed. Then I learned that would mean another trip to the Etisalat office.

Elapsed time: two hours. But the clock continues ticking toward my flight back to Chicago on Friday....

6EQUJ5

Thirty-two years ago today, something very interesting happened. It only lasted 72 seconds and, as far as anyone knows, it never happened again. Yet in that one minute and 12 seconds, we may have experienced the first--and only--communications from another planet.

It's called the Wow! signal. And it looks like this:

A pretty restrained reaction, actually.

Those letters and numbers represent a far-stronger-than-background-noise signal that rose and fell in intensity exactly as a broadcast radio signal from a point source would. The signal was picked up from a giant array at Ohio State University called the Big Ear. (it has since been dismantled to make way for a golf course)

Scientists at the university and elsewhere looked in that same patch of sky over and over with all kinds of high-tech listening devices and never saw the signal again. That's a bad thing in terms of really nailing down what it was the array picked up. But it's a good thing in that it would appear to rule out a lot of natural explanations.

The guy who jotted down the "Wow!" note on the printout gives a pretty good summation of what all of this means three decades later:

Thus, since all of the possibilities of a terrestrial origin have been either ruled out or seem improbable, and since the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin has not been able to be ruled out, I must conclude that an ETI (ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) might have sent the signal that we received as the Wow! source. The fact that we saw the signal in only one beam could be due to an ETI sending a beacon signal in our direction and then sending it in another direction that we couldn't detect. Of course, being a scientist, I await the reception of additional signals like the Wow! source that are able to be received and analyzed by many observatories. Thus, I must state that the origin of the Wow! signal is still an open question for me. There is simply too little data to draw many conclusions. In other words, as I stated above, I choose not to "draw vast conclusions from 'half-vast' data".

But until we can draw a conclusion, I'm going to dream, because that's what I do, that someday soon the odds will catch up with us and we'll find something--whether it's a bacterium or a radio signal--that makes us all, collectively, scream "Wow!"