Til Seattle

Bergen, Flesland, morning

The symphony of life, as I've often said, has repeated themes and movements that diminish or increase as time passes. I first visited Seattle in 2007 to visit some old friends, the Longs, from GA Tech who lived in our building then and had twin daughters about the same age as ours. I planned to return to Seattle in 2015 to run my first marathon, but a job transition to precedent there and I didn't make it back until last summer. I still ran a marathon and this time we visited friends from Cara's time at Vanderbilt. I also spent an after noon running with one of my friends from Nashville who'd just moved there to take a job at Amazon. Now I'm headed back to Seattle to visit my friend Jacques again. It seems like the Seattle theme in my life is on the wax, but is it to crescendo or will the movement continue to build? Only time will tell.

I've unfortunately had to give up on the second semester of norsk at UiB because of the 75% attendance requirement. I had planned to miss exactly 25% already and then I just couldn't make it to class one day a couple weeks ago. That was really frustrating, but with so many balls in the air one had to drop eventually.

Amsterdam, Schiphiol, afternoon

Always drink a couple beers in Schiphol, because they're half the cost of what they are in Norway.

Delta flight 0145, AMS to SEA

This is the longest flight I've ever been on. Fortunately the seat next me is empty, but it seems the wifi is off for now. Already informed the team I might not have it, but I should still be able to get a fair amount of work done. This plane is a loud one and my sound in the seatback isn't so good, so I'm listening to jazz as I often do on these flights. So mellow. Tomorrow Cara is on her own way to a conference in Prague, so we'll not only be apart but apart from the kids as well. My friend Annie & her fiance Sid are staying with Maxwell and Zara for the first half of the week, and Cara's labmate Pahul for the second half. It'll be Cara's first conference away from all of us since she went to CYTO two years before in Seattle. Shades of a recurrent theme?

$22 for inflight wifi is pretty solid. Unfortunately the quality of the wifi peters out over the ocean. I still was able to get in a couple solid hours of connectivity though, and my hope is that it will come back over North America.

Schroedinger's cat as a lifestyle. All of us in 21st century America are living it. There are numerous bifurcations in our potential futures and often our decisions have no affect which one we go down. But we endure. Perhaps that is the lasting value of humanity. This uncertainty is no doubt a stressor, but it also frees us from being locked into a path that doesn't allow us to reach our full potential.

Inflight wifi, by the way, is total bullshit. I had it for maybe 2 of 10 hours and then the Delta folks just said they had no responsability for "GoGo In Flight" or whatever it's called. At least they understand what neat means when serving a drink.