Late for the sky? Hope not!

I might as well admit it
There's been a time or two
When I've contemplated retiring for a while
But a hundred years from now
They'll still be asking "How?"
As they gaze upon my taxidermic smile

-Jimmy Buffett, "Last Man Standing"



It's another one of those times when everything is happening at once. The biggest of everything, at the moment, is an interview in England on Wednesday, followed by a seminar and a job fair at HEC later in the week, and the class on Friday and Saturday. Somewhere in there, I have to get a little more work done on my current job. I'd rather not speculate much in public just yet as to what's up with the interview in England. There are too many question marks at the moment. I will say it's just an internship - but an internship will buy me six months more of experience and time to find a permanent job. As the permanent job search isn't going as well as I'd like, I'm happy with at least that lead just now.

Travel buff that I am, what really excites me at the moment is my first experience with the Luxembourg airport. I'm curious as to what the international airport for such a small but strategically located country might look like, not to mention the national airline. I do know that Luxair has nice uniforms for their crew, having seen enough ads for it over the past few months. With a rather tight travel schedule, I'm not really looking forward to the check-in lines and such, and I'm debating how early I'll have to leave work on Tuesday to make the flight. (They're probably not happy with me at all at work just now, but then I'm not too fond of them eiehter at the moment. More on that later, depending on when the dust clears.) Since my next stop is back in France, I'll be taking my beloved Eurostar back - at least I know how long check-in takes there. I was beginning to worry that I wouldn't have another chance to take my favorite train. Now it looks like there may yet be several such chances.

After a month of being on the go much of the time like this, it might not surprise you to hear that I'm beginning to get tired of the whole world-traveler-with-no-real-home lifestyle. Of course that brings to mind rather depressing thoughts about how I might go about settling on a place to call home, which will of course have to wait until I find a job, and then I will only have so much choice as to where home is, and at this point it could be just about anywhere in the world. (Okay, that last point isn't so bad, although I would like to be able to choose to a greater extent than I can at the moment.)

But I haven't let it get me down much. For one thing, it never takes me to long to remember my state of mind before all these adventures started. Four years later, I still remember all too well my last several months in DC, waking up in the morning and wishing I were just about anywhere else, constantly aware that I was 30 years old and still hadn't seen very much of the world. Whatever life has thrown at me since then - getting stomach flu for three weeks in Taiwan, shivering through a Denver winter because heating costs were too high to keep the heat up, dealing with snotty Parisian academic administrators, the harsh realities of finding anything to do on a weekend in Luxembourg - I have never, ever wished I could just wake up in my room back in Arlington. And that definitely hasn't changed!