Five Items and Two Lists.

Item the First.
I have returned from the UK. It was beyond awesome, and difficult to leave. I took several hundred pictures and a lot of notes, both of which I intend to share after some editing. I am now hanging out in Chicago and enjoying myself a good deal.

Item the Second.
I also took a lot of pictures at the Feast of the Hunters' Moon last weekend, which will also be shared in due time. I was expecting a sort of Renaissance Fair with pioneers and injuns, but it was about 78 times cooler than that. It is more authentic than SCA events and more relaxed than Civil War reenactments. I am really jealous that we don't have anything quite like it in the Pacific Northwest, because I would be So Into It.

Item the Third.
After the weekend, I got to witness two of my favorite sailors getting married to each other, and that was also extremely wonderful.

Item the Fourth.
So, remember that interview I kept mentioning? Today I found out that I got the job. As of October 21st, I'll be the Instruction and Electronic Services Librarian for Warner Pacific College. It's a position I was eyeing with envy way back when I was working for Cascade, and it is probably the only one that could have even motivated me to apply for a long-term library job at this point, so it's very gratifying to have actually landed it.

This means I'll be able to walk to work from my house. It also means a lot of other things, one of which is not being available for as much travel and crazy jobs and boat adventures, which is sad, but another of which is being present for a lot of wonderful Portland events that I've been missing out on, which is happy. For example, it probably means I'll be doing NaNoWriMo this November.

Item the Fifth.
I learned a lot from living out of a backpack for almost two weeks in the UK. I made some lists about packing, and I am putting them here mostly for my own reference, but perhaps also for your amusement.

Things I Wish I'd Brought:
- A more comfortable pack. Mine was plenty large and plenty sturdy, but the straps weren't padded enough for carrying it around all day, and my shoulders let me know about it. For some reason this bothered me a lot more than it did when I carried the same pack across Europe in '95.
- Chamois travel towel. I brought a thin, lightweight towel, but as we were staying in a different place almost every night, there were just too many times that towel got packed away wet. Near the end of my trip I invested in a synthetic chamois towel; it's tiny, effective, and wrings out nearly dry. Genius.
- Plastic shower shoes (flip-flops). I left them behind because I thought both flip-flops and Tevas would be overkill. But I don't dare use public (i.e. hostel) showers barefoot, because I pick up foot diseases way too easily. As a result, my Tevas were so funky by the time I got back to Chicago that, in my exhausted post-flight state, I convinced myself that putting them in the dryer would be a good idea. It wasn't. I am really missing those Tevas.
- One more t-shirt. I thought I'd buy thrift store clothes once we got there, but their thrift stores were really uninspiring. Lots of American labels, prices weren't great, and also the UK is going through this big 80s-retro phase right now. Ugh. So I spent more time than I wanted to in laundrettes (UK laundromats), when an extra shirt or two wouldn't have taken up all that much room in my pack.
- Google Maps printouts of all the towns we were going to. Easier to hand one of those to a local and ask them to point out your destination, rather than try to remember a rambling list of directions followed by the fateful phrase: "You can't miss it." Whenever we heard that, we knew we were doomed.
- Contact info for a couple of hostels in all of the cities/towns we went to, in case our host didn't work out. We had this for some places but not others. Once we were really glad we had it. Another time we really wished we had.
- Travel sized toiletries. A full sized toothbrush is just an awkward thing to have in a backpack. So is a half-empty full sized tube of toothpaste. Two tiny tubes would have been better.
- Melatonin pills. My travel buddy shared hers with me a couple of times, and it seemed to help with the jetlag, though it may be that I just like a good placebo now and then.

Things I'm Really Glad I Brought:
- A compression-type bag. Not the kind with the buckles and straps, but one that you can force all the air out of. I'm used to having less and less space in my luggage as laundry day approaches; with this thing, I actually had more.
- Inflatable neck pillow. I may never travel without one again.
- A book of short stories. Great for distracting myself from my immediate surroundings without getting lost in an extended narrative.
- Alarm clock. We didn't set it the first night in London, and we woke at noon sharp.
- Mom's iPod Shuffle. With its several limitations came the significant advantage of taking up basically no space at all. Thanks, Mom!
- Extra earplugs. Easy to lose, hard to sleep in strange places without.
- Extraordinarily compatible travel buddy. Have to admit I got really lucky there.

A Letter from Busyland.

Thank you to all of you who sent me screenshots of your feedreaders. I used several of those today in my presentation. They were the most effective and interesting part of it. I apologize to Mac users for assuming that screenshots were just one of those things all Mac people know about. But, really, come on, a little frolicking is never a bad idea.

The presentation was for an interview. The former wasn't really great, but I think the latter went all right anyway. However I am not too sure of anything right now because my brain is sort of cooked.

So, interview, check. Heating duct insulation, check, and boy am I glad to have that nightmare behind me. Now that I don't have to make myself crawl under the house anymore, I can come out and admit to myself that it was really, really horrible. Disgusting, and excruciating, and full of health hazards. The fact that I actually finished the job is evidence of my incredible stubbornness, if anybody needed that. (My parents didn't.)

The third task (aren't there always three?) remains unfinished: packing for the London/Chicago trip. So I am officially behind schedule now, because I had hoped to be in Eugene hanging out with the fam by this time. But, as I said before, my brain has already decided to call it a day. (Good thing brains aren't a requirement for blogging!) So I think the best I can do tonight is to find most of the stuff on my packing list and throw it on the floor in a big pile, and then throw myself on the bed in a little pile.

It has been really good to be back in Portland again for a little while, even though I spent way too much of that time rolling around in cobwebs and mouse poo. I am extremely grateful that staying with my renters, the Chainsaws, has not actually been at all awkward. "It should be, but it isn't," I told them, to which Mr. Chainsaw responded, "We'll have to work on that." See what I mean? So accommodating.

Aggregators in Action!

An odd request: If you use a feedreader other than Bloglines (for example, Google Reader, or whatever else the kids are using these days), could you send me a screenshot of your aggregator doing its thing? Please make sure the active content is family-friendly and, er, preferably not my blog. The resulting image will be used for educational purposes, and you will remain anonymous unless you wish credit to be given.

How to take a screenshot (Windows):
1. Push the Print Scrn button. (On my laptop keyboard, you have to hold down Shift to activate it.)
2. Open Windows Paint.
3. Paste (Ctrl-V).
4. Save the file.

How to take a screenshot (Mac):*
1. Think happy thoughts.
2. Frolic.
3. Lick the screen.
4. Isn't life grand?
*All Mac users were born knowing how to take screenshots.

How to take a screenshot (handheld):
1. I have no idea, but if you do, that would be awesome. (Come to think of it, a photo would work, too.)

This request expires the morning of Wednesday, September 10th. Mahalo!

Argust is Over, and On to September.

It's the first of September! Soon to be followed by the Third! (Hooray for airport comics!)

Today may or may not have been my last day of work, depending on whether or not we get a charter tomorrow. There are a few hours left, but... we probably won't. As last days of work go, this one (if it was indeed the last) was pretty nice. We had three passengers (you can see two of them on this page, yes, I'm serious) who were very mellow and pleasant to have on board. And they all caught some fish. Yay! And then they didn't want the fish, so I didn't have to clean them. Double yay! ...because the ride home was bumpy, and I am always a little skittish about using a sharp knife on a cutting board that keeps jumping around.

Also, Cousin K in his great mercy decided to forego the long-standing tradition of shoving harbor employees into the harbor on their last day of work. Good call, Cousin K.

Mitchey and I have been planning and planning for our UK trip. Our current itinerary looks something like this:
9/15-17 London (perhaps you've heard of it?)
9/18-19 Portsmouth (home of the HMS Victory)
9/20-21 Cardiff (capital of Wales)
9/22-24 Machynlleth (at the edge of Snowdonia National Park)
9/25-26 Manchester (where the relevant airport is)

We plan to stay in homes rather than hostels, which will allow us to connect with locals instead of just the backpacking subculture. We're setting most of that up through an international hospitality network called Couchsurfing, which seems almost too good to be true. (You didn't think we'd stay in hotels, did you? Pfff! That would be way too normal for us.)

In the meantime, my brief upcoming stay in Portland just got further congested by the addition of an all-day job interview. I am not going to say any more about that until I have something definite to tell you (but that doesn't mean you can't speculate).