From cold, gray, wet California. Next year, Puerto Vallarta.

I bought Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" from the iTMS. On of the movements is titled "Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua", or "With the dead in a dead language." Except that the iTMS auto-censor doesn't know Latin, so I now have a track titled "C*m Mortuis in Lingua Mortua." I'm surprised they didn't throw in an [explicit] warning, too. You never know what's in those pictures.

Apparently my hotel attracts the big stars

Hotel #1 was full this weekend so I've moved in to hotel #2. There was an awkward transition because check out time and check in time for hotels don't overlap. I asked if it was ok to bring my suitcase over early, and was told it was OK. It turns out they don't has a place to put suitcases that's out of the way, so the staff just had to maneuver around my suitcases in the cramped little front office. I checked in 15 minutes before the official check in time. Apparently they use those last 15 minutes to give you towels. I'll deal with that in the morning.

This morning I had the distinct impression of walking out without paying for my coffee. So distinct that I eventually wound up walking back and asking, just to clear the thought. It gave the coffee shop people a good laugh anyway.

In the elevator coming in, somebody had to prompt me to push a button. Apparently he sized me up to be neither a lawyer or a LearnIt! employee.

When the agent sized me up and gave me exit row seats for the 12 hour flight back from Tel Aviv, I thought things might be looking up for the longest leg of this trip. The flight was already delayed an hour, meaning showing up three hours early was looking particularly foolish already, even taking Israeli security into consideration. Perhaps if my hotel had internet connectivity, I might have been able to figure that out. But there are worse things than sitting around an airport for several hours, particularly since I still had a few sheqels to blow at the duty free shop.

The exit row was nice and roomy, and I had high hopes that I might actually be able to stretch out and sleep. A baby seated across the isle tempered my optimism a little bit, but nothing really prepared me for what I was about to experience. The guy next to me had started drinking before the flight. He hated flying, he explained. Hated flying. He repeated that a few times. He asked for a glass of ice, and pulled out a half empty bottle of vodka and proceeded to finish it off. He was from LA, but he'd just gotten out of the Israeli army, which apparently he'd joined on a whim. And he was going to Vegas. He alternated loudly discussing these three topics between myself, the people in front of us, and the people behind us. My attempts to bury my head in a book were completely ineffectual. When he'd finished his own vodka, he started ordering drinks.

When the flight attendants cut him off, he was livid, and decided it was war. He started paging the flight attendants randomly, and trying to cajole the people around him, mainly me, into getting him drinks. When I wouldn't, he resumed paging the attendants. When a baby started having medical issues in our vicinity while we were flying over Greenland, he took the opportunity to harass the the attendants who were attempting to help to get him peanuts. He shouted back at announcements over the PA. When people pointed out he was being disruptive, he would launch into long tirades against them. He was able to keep this up for the entire 12 hour flight. The baby, on the other hand, was supernaturally cute and quiet. Even the other baby, who had the medical issue, was overall more quiet.

The best part was that just because I was seated with the drunken loudmouth, people assumed I was with him. When we parted ways in Toronto, people were suddenly very sympathetic. The flight from Toronto to San Francisco was delayed an hour for mechanical problems on top of having to wait for our late flight. This meant that I got in to San Francisco just about 24 hours after leaving for the airport from Tel Aviv.

I got to the airport early because I'm compulsive and although I would like to see more of the city before I leave, the mere act of standing in the Tel Aviv heat and humidity causes me to sweat uncontrollably. Of course, my flight is delayed almost an hour. This morning's taxi driver was a speed demon, plowing through 50kph zones at over 100kph, and honking and swearing at slow cars on the freeway. His taxi was slightly more battered than most.

We went sightseeing last night. I got to see the occupied territories from behind the dividing wall. Car trips were all the tourism I got to do, and most of it was at night. Last night we checked out Jaffa from the safety of the car as well.

I crammed a 40 odd hour work week into 3 1/2 days. Monday we get to digest the results. I'm not sure the weekend is going to be long enough for me to recover.

Yesterday was long. I got in to work early (10pm PST) and stayed through the meeting with the team in San Francisco (10am PST). Long hours plus jetlag equals dazed and confused. And despite my efforts at anti-germ warfare, I have a cold. Today I slept in at the new hotel. It has a bed, which is nice, but no internet, which is annoying. It would be nice to be able to confer with my side of the planet while it's still awake.

Tomorrow I have a 12 hour flight, a two and a half hour layover, and another 5 hour flight. All coach. At least this time my security papers should be in order, so I don't have to come inches from a cavity search like last time.

The hotel problem was solved by putting my up in a studio apartment normally used for sales. It's very similar to a what you might find at a hotel, except for somewhat more bachelor pad-y. The obvious oversight is some sort of Internet connection, so despite being wide awake in what is the middle of my normal day, I feel relatively isolated. I don't really feel like hitting the dark streets of some Tel Aviv neighborhood looking for an Internet cafe. Fortunately I don't feel hungry, so hitting the dark streets of some Tel Aviv neighborhood looking for a normal cafe isn't necessary.

The room comes thoughtfully stocked with nearly empty bottle of Hankey Bannister scotch and an odd assortment of videos, including the Hebrew versions of "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles" and "The Secretary" and a Japanese version of "The Way We Were." Something occasionally causes massive interference on the TV. Now CNN looks like scrambled porn, with elicit glimpses of maps of the middle east.

The front door has a seal like a refrigerator, which I can only assume was for protection against gas attacks. There's a ultra-heavy, safe-like dead bolt which I did not get the key for, which would seem to turn the door into a blast shield.


Thanks to modern medicine I feel asleep at midnight and woke up at seven thirty. Now I need to shift gears and get back to work.

I'm on my way to Tel Aviv. It's an extremely warm, crowded flight, and my knees pushed against the seat in front of me before he reclined. His twitching is causing my laptop screen to wiggle violently. The similarly spastic child behind me at one point launched into a kick fest until a shot him a very cold look.

We're only 3 hours into a ten hour flight. El Al has real airline food, like all airlines used to have. The fact that it was Kosher had little impact on its airline foodness, except perhaps for the unfortunate choice of spicy eggplant as a side dish. They're not big on ice. My water was ice free, the tomato juice had two small cubes. Outside the plane it is -50, you'd think they could harness that.

The passengers, with the exception of the twits surrounding me, are about as sedate and clean as one could hope for in an over-crowded plane. Despite that, I've been using zycam and drinking water as burnbitter has advocated. Although there is little overt orthodoxy, me armrest allows me to summon a woman or a not woman, it appears. Also, the -/+ controls are all -/up-side-down-T, no crosses on this flight.

Traveling as a non-Jew, alone, with a new passport, got me special attention at the terminal. My handler tried to assure me that it was typical, but of the 300+ people that boarded the plane, I seemed to be the only one with a personal security escort that walked me from the Israeli security area to the gate sat with me until the plane boarded. My usual penchant for arriving early served me well, since the individual attention my baggage got took an additional 45 minutes.

He did explain to me the sporting event that resulting in all of my host's choices of hotels being booked, and the resulting hotel room a block from the US Embassy, against the US Government recommendation. Apparently it's something like the Jewish Olympics, where Jews from around the globe come to compete.

I suppose I should sleep, except I'm unable to convince myself that it isn't 1 in the afternoon, or shape my body into anything resembling a sleeping position. When I get in, it will be 6:15 am.The El Al boarding area was devoid of anything interesting, anyway, especially wireless networks, so I'm unsure what to expect when I get in. Hopefully nothing drastic has developed in the last day.

I have to hand it to my brother and his bride, they put together a nice wedding. I took lots of pictures, but they were all on my brother's camera. The photographer didn't show, so a friend of the bride and I wound up covering. I imagine I'll get to see the results at some point.

I'm in New York for my brother's wedding. I've wanted to go back to New York for a while, since I haven't been here since I was nine, but it turns out I'm a lousy traveler and don't get out much. But here I am, having a reasonable excuse to drag myself across the country, and it seems it would be a great time to score some vacation time.

However, this time it's a mere layover for my business trip to Israel. I'm not much of a seasoned domestic traveler, let a lone a world traveler, so this is a sort of diving in head first.

We're staying at the Millennium Hilton courtesy of the future inlaws. It's a very nice hotel, of course, but it has an unobstructed view of the future home of the Freedom Tower, which is a jarring juxtaposition. That, combined with traveling to Tel Aviv, creates an odd atmosphere.

Wow, so Paris Hilton and I have both worked for Hardee's. That's like 1 degree of separation, right?

It's rather surprising how many people who see us working in our yard assume that it couldn't possibly be our yard. Apparently one doesn't do yard work anymore, that's what cheap day labor is for. We're heard rumors that some of our neighbors work in their yards, but we never catch them doing it. Usually it's three guys with a rented pickup, a weed whacker and a leaf blower. I dislike weed whackers and leaf blowers as crude and noisy, sort of horticultural Flowbees.

Our efforts at landscaping have progressed slowly, as we purchased the house at the end of the rainy season when putting something in the ground meant carving at the clay with a pick axe and a possible crispy death for our subjects. But buoyed by a wet winter and persistance, our yard is starting to get complements, and not just the "Anything is better than what was there" kind.