in Dublin. the best thing to hear after 12 hours of traveling: "i'm going to make you a genuine Irish breakfast so i hope you're hungry."

I am packing for the trip I am taking in about 19 hours and I found stuff from my last EU trip. I found the journal that I brought along on the prior journey. Since I didn’t finish my last trip I am using the same journal as it has ample room. I will reveal the contents of the first entry from my last trip - it states:

6/18/03 1pm – Chicago
excited, nervous, packing.

The entry dated 6/29/05 is similar.

If I was a character in a comedy, the re-occurring joke would have to be me being "J. Lo'd". Of course it starts as random jokes from people at university (when J. Lo becomes a part of our hideous pop culture); however it takes a radical turn when it’s brought up in interviews, leading our hero to removing the "J." from his resume (it looks better now anyways). Then when our hero begins work, his new boss immediately J. Lo's him after noticing it on his name plate, a name plate that our hero tries to ditch in vain, only to have it inter-office mailed to him. In banking, bar bouncers, flight security checks, checking into hotels... the J. Lo'ing never ceases. Just when our hero thought he was safe, he calls up his bank to be promptly J. Lo’d over the phone today! Of course, the capstone would have to be our hero’s passport being inspected by customs in Vienna and being J. Lo'd - that would have to be right before the end credits.

I leave for Dublin tomorrow. (!!!)

Rachel and John’s wedding was lovely. I wish them nothing but the best.

You may view the photo album.

Our (best) man Paul was in rare form.

If a picture can be worth a thousand words, than a short lo-fi video clip with excellent sound can be one of the funniest things you will ever see. Check it: DivX file format (3mb file, need plugin) OR windows media (36mb file)

Virtualdub is an excellent free video program to rotate AVIs. I’m sure it does other stuff too.

Why would you leave your fun job? Well, the job wasn't fun but it really was easy and lucrative and you could have been a lead in a few more months and R&D engineer (your goals after graduating, remember!) and everything. You could have just kept doing it until you decided on something else you fool! Argh!

It was too comfortable. The dark shroud of contentment and all that. That job wasn't going anywhere I wanted to be. It was clear to me early there was no person in that company who I wanted to be. It was enjoyable but not the way forward. Leaving was the right thing to do.

We're now seven weeks into my sabbatical and it has gone by fast. Other than my trip to Boston (it was fun, pictures soon) I could not point to much in the way of accomplishments. I have done some career research, stayed in decent shape, helped around the house, gone out a bit and taken care of miscellaneous odds and ends. Nothing spectacular.

Chaos at home (kitchen construction) has left me with very little personal space which has made things weird – the transition from having a huge apartment of my own to not even having a small room for myself is much more disquieting than I anticipated.

Sometimes I really freak out, because after August 1st I really don't have much planned and I'm not sure what I'd like to do and by then I will have not worked for three months and that's really a lot and sheesh... But then I have to remember that I am doing the "rightest" thing I can currently conceive. And that it's all gonna work out awesome.