December '12 Update

Herb and Barb at the Festival flee market, Pompano Beach, FL. December '12

instagram makes everything look more interesting but it's also sort of ridiculous. Have you seen?: http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6853117/look-at-this-instagram-nickelback-parody

Over the past many months I have thought about writing blog entries several times. Because this blog isn't really about anything and I never know what’s blog worthy, and because I’m lazy, I've let it slide off into the oblivion. But I want to start posting more regularly soon.

Some of the things I've thought about writing about: First, there was my “I now know why they call it ‘Nap’ town” article. I ended up in Indianapolis on a business trip with nothing to do one night earlier this year in the summer. I randomly scanned the radio while driving and heard a Pacer’s-Heat playoff game. It took me a few minutes to connect to the fact that I was not only in the town where this was happening but just a few blocks away. I parked my car in a minute (easy) and found the stadium not from the noise of thousands of noisy cheering fans and street vendors outside as one would expect near a game like this, but with my Iphone. There was one hot dog vendor on the block outside the stadium, I repeat ONE hot-dog vendor. The fact that I could walk in for $40 (the game had already started and I do realize others had paid much more) to an NBA playoff game last minute, let alone against Dwayne Wade and Lebron James of the Miami Heat, at that price and that quickly, is astonishing. Indeed, it’s a sleepy city.

Second, I am on vacation right now in Florida spending lots of time with my folks. Over the years I've written a few entries titled “the Herb files.” My dad has more neuroses than Michael Jackson hit songs. One of them, as I was reminded last night at dinner, is my dad needing to smell everybody else’s food at the dinner table. He won’t actually take you up on a sampling offer; he just wants to smell it. According to Herb, by smelling any food (beverages included) he can tell if it’s one of quality. This might theoretically make some sense but it’s weird to have people putting their nose over your matzoh ball soup at dinner. Another example is Herb refusing to touch alcohol. Last night he told the story of his students taking him to a bar, one of the few times he’s been in a bar in his life: “I went to a bar, it was about three years ago when some students brought me to ra-ra’s (I think he meant RiRa in Burlington) and it was horrible! We've never gone to a bar to have a drink!” I've always enjoyed pronouncing things incorrectly myself (the prudential in Boston is not the Pru it's the Prud), but sometimes I wonder if my dad started this same way before he became him, and that does concern me some...

I don’t know who reads this blog anymore and I’m not really interested in just writing for others anyways, and I've realized lately that looking back on this blog decades down the road will be more of an interesting window into who I am than anything else. My life has been so static lately that I haven’t felt like there was that much to write about really. But now after 5 years of working at the same job, I am making a huge life change and picking up and moving to Uganda.

I've accepted a job offer at Fenix International, a Silicon Valley start-up. I’ll be starting the first week of February and will transition from EE in the next few weeks. My new job will allow me to get on the ground floor of a social business start-up that specializes in small scale alternative energy systems targeted for rural villages in developing countries. I can’t wait to be off for a couple of weeks beforehand – it will be the first time in 5 years, because when you take vacation from a job, it’s not like you really are ever truly away, since you know you’ll have even more work to do when you come back. I feel accomplishing some huge feet, like biking the Pacific coast, or saving a polar bear in the Canadian arctic, but I’ll probably just take a bus to NYC to visit some friends and get some immunizations before returning back to Africa.