I'm back! Yes, after the longest time away from home in my entire life, I'm back in my Aeron chair with my jumbo monitors (the better to show the S&P's relentless climb to 4,700) and all my software. The fact I'm on my regular PC laptop is a bit of a miracle in itself. My laptop gloriously died the moment I arrived in France. Any of you who have suffered through the death of a computer know was a nightmare it is to get back to how things were. In my case, I decided to take the hard drive out of the thing, order up a refurbished model for a few hundred bucks, and when I got home – – I just popped the old drive in, and it worked! Amazing.
The trip back home yesterday was epic. We woke up at 7 in the morning for a 8:30 a.m. pickup toward a 11:15 a.m. flight. After three different plane rides, we got to San Francisco at past 10 p.m. Adjusting for Paris time, that means we were traveling by air (or waiting for a plane) for about twenty hours. Try that with two young children!
The flight was Paris to Amsterdam to Memphis, which I called the Paris/Cannabis/Elvis itinerary. I had never been to Holland before, and when I stopped in the men's restroom, I was confronted with this interesting offering:
Strawberry? I don't get it. I guess I'm more naive than I thought.
Once I was on board the plane for Memphis, though, I knew America was within reach. The series of obese people on the plane – – including the beauty pictured below, whose adipose tissue took up about 30% of the aisle – – assured me that I could soon kiss native soil.
I'm going to be in "catch up" mode today, but by and large things should be back to normal. Thanks, everyone, and good luck during this final week of April!
