“Never a dull moment,” indeed!

May 27, 2014That Asian-Looking Chick 2 Comments

To avoid naming names of people, places or institutions, I invite you to imagine the following scenario:

You work at a place where brilliant, creative people – artist-musician-dancer-engineer crossbreeds – make cool things.

So you’re on your way to work one day, and when you get to your destination street, you see a bunch of cops and emergency vehicles crowded around the upcoming intersection. You think nothing of it. This is America. A clusterf*ck of cops and emergency vehicles is not an unusual sight.

You get upstairs to your meeting. Most everyone’s already there, except for the person leading the meeting. Then he calls someone in the room to say that he’s been delayed a few minutes, go ahead and get the meeting started.

He finally enters the room, replete with casual yet apologetic haste. He’s late, he explains, because he’d encountered an “incident” on his way in that “involved one of our people,” so he stopped and talked to the detectives to help sort it all out.

Uh….

It turns out that “one of our people” had left his cool-thing-in-progress on the street momentarily, but in that moment (of course), a passer-by found it. Police cars, fire engines and bomb squads arrived. In the end, the authoritative involvement included two cities. The intersection remained closed off for several hours, diverting traffic. News reporters entered the fray. Also, implementing communications safety procedures developed in the aftermath of tragedies at several universities in the nation, university officials alerted the entire community of students, faculty and staff on their cell phones, cautioning everyone to stay inside until an “all clear” was issued.

All because our guy’s project – a kind of animated sculpture resembling a round device with lights and flexible parts and whatnot, I don’t know exactly what – had been left in a box next to a parking meter, an unfortunate happenstance. What are the odds? And what are the odds that the exact person who could un-kerfuffle the whole thing happened to stroll through that intersection on his way to our meeting?

If you can imagine all this, you’ll know I’m not exaggerating when I say that I have an exceptionally un-boring job, as far as office jobs go. (It’s especially impossible to be bored when you go home to another creative genius.)

And on that note, I’m off to get ready for the day, which begins with taking Callaghan’s father to the airport. We’d capped off his visit from France with a side-trip to California to spend time with my parents over the holiday (Memorial Day) weekend. Our month of hosting house-guests has wound down to an end! It was fun, but I have to admit, it’s good to get back to a routine. I like routines.

The Ronnie James routine.

So does the Wrah-Wrah.

Don’t Mess with Texas!

November 6, 2013That Asian-Looking Chick 4 Comments

I was sorry to be MIA here on Monday – the schedule this week went off the rails into the great abyss of move preparation. We’re within three days of moving. We’re not overwhelmed, since we’ve been going at a pretty good pace, but each remaining moment will definitely count toward getting everything packed up and squared away.

I wanted to give a huge, hearty shout-out and “thank you” to Texas for being fantastic! When we got here we couldn’t predict we’d cut our one-year-then-we’ll-see plan short and only stay four months, but we did what we wanted to do… we went with the flow and enjoyed Texas while we were here. We spent the four months of summer in exactly the right place, and it proved to be an amazing time.

A little keychain souvenir

Texas is great for many reasons. Here are just a few highlights, things we especially appreciate:

–The people here are friendly, warm and big-hearted. They have an easy way of making one feel at home, and they’re genuine people. Good people. In three words, Texans are awesome.

–The service everywhere is outstanding. Texans know hospitality!

–It’s easy to live here… the cost of living (in Austin, anyway) is very reasonable.

–We’ve had nothing but solid, good experiences with the public transportation system here. There’s a convenient network of buses that take you everywhere you want to go, which includes buses that run late at night. Also, we’ve noticed that the freeways here are never too jammed (compared to, say, California).

–Austin is a good time! It’s interesting just by virtue of the fact that it’s the state capitol. There’s the capitol, itself, and there are many museums to explore.

–We’ll never forget the bats under the bridge, and with the Colorado River here in town and our fossil-hunting family adventure up north by Dallas and the countryside in between, we got to enjoy some sides of nature we’ve never seen before.

And the t-shirt, of course

So the next few days will flash by, and then, like the Ingalls’, we’ll pack up our covered wagon (well, a U-Haul trailer attached to the back of our truck) and head west.

Happy Trails, y’all!

BEWARE – Serial Plan-Ruiner Running Amok in France

April 5, 2013That Asian-Looking Chick 2 Comments

I can’t believe it’s already April. I can’t believe it’s already April fifth. The last time I wrote here, it was still March, and it doesn’t even seem that long ago! But there’s a lot of craziness going on right now. I’ll come back to that later because what I’m sharing with you right now is a story per Callaghan’s request. Last week, we went down to visit his family and friends on the French Riviera via covoiturage ride-sharing, and afterward, Callaghan was all, like, “YOU HAVE TO WRITE ABOUT THIS.” (The last time I wrote about covoiturage, I praised it for its entertainment value.)

This is our story about being epically late because of someone else.

The idea behind using covoiturage for transportation is that a driver can get you from Point A to Point B because he’s heading the direction you’re going. It’s basically hitch-hiking, but you organize the ride in advance, online. Passengers are picked up and dropped off at designated points along the way, and the whole thing is based on scheduling… if you’re driving south to Cannes and you want to make a little money, you post on the covoiturage site that you’ll be cruising through Valence at 2:20 in the afternoon. If anyone in the area wants to catch a ride, they can meet you there.

So this guy said. And we replied, “Sure! We’ll meet you in Valence at 2:20pm! We need to get to Cannes.” We chose that particular guy’s ride because the time he’d advertised was going to be perfect for getting us to the birthday celebration dinner on our agenda.

Maybe we brought the shenanigans upon ourselves when Callaghan pulled up the posted photo of the vehicle, and we laughed because it was a white van that looked like it should have the words “serial killer van” painted on the side in black block letters. And when we found the photo of the driver, we laughed again because he looked like he belonged with the van. Do not laugh at the photos of your driver and his vehicle. He will know, and he will get his revenge.

As it turned out, the driver wasn’t hiding bodies in his van. But he was three hours late.

There were four passengers already in the van, and they were all alive. The front seat held a rat (in a cage) and a girl, who were not together. In the middle row sat a woman and a young guy – they weren’t together, either. Callaghan and I climbed in to sit in the back. (We were together. Ha!) We settled in and cracked open our iPad to watch Zombieland again, which seemed strangely apt for the circumstances.

“C’est le Magic Bus!” said the driver, whose name was Alex. Magic, indeed!

The first passenger to depart was Middle Seat Lady. Instead of dropping her off somewhere along the route, Alex exited the highway and meandered around to a specific bus stop in Le Teil. Callaghan was furious.

But since we still weren’t late enough, there was the second passenger drop-off. Front Seat Girl was moving back in with her mother. We exited the highway again and pulled right up to her mother’s doorstep in the middle of Aix en Provence.

This was now looking more like a limousine service than covoiturage. It was also looking like a house-moving service. And like a van with undead people in it. With a rat in a cage, and a driver who’d only gotten two hours of sleep the previous night (true story).

In Aix en Provence, Callaghan and I stood back on the sidewalk to stretch while Alex, the girl and her mother unloaded her things into the house.

The third passenger off the van was the rat, who had come down from Paris. This one was okay… Alex cruised into a rest area in Fréjus, where an old couple sat waiting in their car. (They had my sympathy, because by then, it was 10:30pm. I know I’d be annoyed if I had to sit on the side of the highway at night for five hours, waiting for someone to bring me my rat.)

And half an hour later, Alex took Middle Seat Guy to his stop in Mouans-Sartoux.

That left us. Callaghan, seething mad, asked the driver to drop us off in Grasse, instead of in Cannes, as planned. We’d missed our restaurant celebration, and we were by then entitled to our own special drop-off request. Plus, there was no one left to inconvenience, so it didn’t matter.

We got down there a total of five and a half hours late.

The next day, Callaghan checked the covoiturage website and found an explosion of negative driver reviews for Alex from the hapless passengers of the last two days. People were furious. For two days, from Normandy to Nice, Alex had plowed down through France in his white serial killer van, scooping people up anywhere from three to five hours late and pissing them off. There was only one good review, and that was from the girl he’d helped move to Aix en Provence. She was thrilled with the service she got – as well she should be, since she got personal door-to-door moving service for practically nothing!

I still think Alex might be a serial killer, though, since something about him did kind of set off my serial-killer-dar. Or maybe I was just imagining it because I’m watching The Following right now, and I’m obsessed.