Need a vacation

I have never left the North American continent before now. Soon that will change. Many of my friends are accomplished world travelers. For me, I did not have a desire to see the world until much later in life. So now that I find myself preparing to go to Germany, even if only for a single week, I have few points of reference.

Everybody mentions culture shock and predicts that I will have a lot of it. I have no way of really knowing before hand so I guess I will have to wait and see. All I know for sure right now is that everything is booked, but we somehow still have a lot of things to do. I have dreams at night that have a general theme of me forgetting something very important, but not remembering until it is too late.

This is pretty normal for me. My stress levels tend to build leading up to a trip, and somehow evaporate the moment I arrive at the airport - generally the moment when it becomes too late to return home to grab 'one more thing.'

Yes, so like the rest of the online world, my blog has suffered inattention due to me trying out Facebook. But now that my account is set up and my current friends have me added, etc. I find that my activity there is substantially less. Which is good, since that was really just a method of re-establishing social connections - at least for me.

Facebook is actually the tool I was looking for about 10 years ago when I moved out west. (Okay, it's been longer than that, but c'mon.) To see it now is nice, even if half of my old friends and family will never use a computer. Even those who strongly resisted Facebook have succumbed, which is entertainment in itself. Too bad there is still that 'kids-only' perception to this web application.

Moving right along: this morning when I got to the office I was quite tired, due to not getting to bed early enough. But that's ok, since Noel seemed to be way worse off than I was. Being so tired, I figured that I would have a cup of coffee, despite the earlier problems that forced me to give it up for a while. This is when I noticed that we got new coffee cups at work - glass ones. This would have been totally unremarkable if not for the way the coffee looks when being brewed in the office coffee machine - it looks like a freshly built Guinness beer!

Good old coffee. Now I get to give it up all over again.