Some think you are kind,
Proving how well they know you.
You are a Rat-Fink.

- Fred Philips

How can you tell if the book you are reading is truly smashing? Easy. You get so wound up in reading it that even tho you know you have to get off at the next train station and are watching for it, you manage to pass right by and barely make it off the train at the next station on. ;)

This time it's Harry Turtledove's A World of Difference.
Once upon a time, Harry wrote actual books. Books. Not series. A book you could pick up and start from the beginning and when you came to the end of the book, the story had finished. Wonderful books. I suggest skipping series by anyone. Get books.

I suppose I should mention that I was in Budapest on vacation during my absence from this thing.

Have I mentioned how much I loathe tourists? Working in the Empire State Building means you can't ever escape tourists. Some needs to pound it into their little pea sized heads that it is possible to visit cities without being rude. Without acting like a complete brainless wonder. WIthout shaming all of civilization by your existence. Tourists. God's great excuse for shotguns.

Bless me father, it's been Two Months since I've last posted.

Life without labor is guilt, labor without art is brutality - Ruskin

Tho he sometimes manages to drive me mad, my son is a most admirable young man. He's a genuine "good person". That needed saying.

Have you ever noticed that the people who tell you how to live your life never pay your bills? Those people telling you where you should be living, what you should be doing, how you should do things; they never come up with the scratch to cover the costs. They never have any praise for you when you are slogging along, managing to make ends meet by putting up with unpleasant situations. Must be nice to be an irresponsible godlike being like they are. Meanwhile, I just continue to continue - and ignore their cunning plans and brilliant suggestions. When I see one scrawled on a cashier's check, I'll take the advice. Next, please.

The Empire State Building. Grand old lady of skyscrapers. Great place to work. The tourists are a never ending circus sideshow for those who work there. This weekend, I stopped by the office on Saturday to finish some work. Pouring rain! I mean gotterdamerung for rain and fog. Seriously pea soup. So, the scene is, 3 tourist ladies approach a guard and ask, "What's the visibility?", Guard says, "Zero". They think about this a few moments and then inquire, "So how far is that?". Exasperated guard who has probably been asked the same question all day says, "Zero means you can't see a damn thing, ladies, it's all fogged up!". 'Oh, so which buildings can we see up there?" I walked away at this point. A damn circus.

One of the nice things about living in Manhattan is laundries. In almost any neighborhood you can drop your laundry off on the way to work and get it back on your way home...all clean and fresh smelling and beautifully folded so it's about 1/4 the size of the massiev bag you lugged in that morning. And it's not significantly more costly than doing it yourself with the misery of waiting around bored for hours.

Poland announced it has sent troops to the Gulf to help. Mexico has no idea what to do with them.

Are you a good blogger or a bad blogger? Obviously I'm the latter for not dedicating my life to sharing my thoughts with the world.

Anyway, besides my primary current quest to find an affordable 2 bedroom apt in Manhattan, I'm reading a construction history of Union Station in Washington DC. Sounds riveting, doesn't it? It's actually quite interesting, but it's also work related.

I feel like I'm just marking time till I find an apt and can begin the settling in and making it a home process. Meanwhile, I worry about my finace in London and he worries about me. Will nations start closing borders because of SARS? In that case, I'll have to close up shop in the states ahead of time and move to London. That's my long term plan, about 2 years from now. Currently Alan and I commute across the atlantic about every 6 weeks with daily calls and email to help fill the yawning voids.Once I get an apt, we'll shorten those voids to 3-4 weeks.

Read Phillip Larkin's poems. I do, and I reread them and reread them. Even if you hate poetry, read them anyway.

So we finally decided to visit Budapest for spring holiday (Memorial Day weekend for those in the states) this year. We have a long list of places we want to visit for an extended weekend and my Other Half decided Budapest intrigued and appealed to him.I'm going to email a friend in Slovenia to see if she has any suggestions about which half of the city to stay in, the Buda or the Pest side, as the city is actually 2 divided by the Danube River. Our aims for the weekend are modest and personal, not touristy; no plans to visit as many palaces and museums as one can cram into 4 days. Rather, we want to stroll along the old streets, perhaps take a cruise down the Danube, find a few marvelous restaurants to indulge in gorgeous food and wine, a cafe to sit and people watch and lots of time to talk to each other.