continued from here

July 16: !@#$@# can’t do a CO driver’s test in a rented car. Can’t get a car loan without a CO driver’s license. WTF am I supposed to do?

I let my California driver’s license lapse a couple of years ago, because they kept trying to get me to do jury duty which obviously I couldn’t from Italy, and I thought it might get me into trouble to keep claiming to be resident in California. By then I had an Italian license and didn’t expect ever to need any other. So much for expectations.

When you move to Colorado, you’ve theoretically got 60 days to get a local driver’s license. I was not surprised to learn that, because my California license had lapsed and Colorado does not recognize the Italian license (even though it was a lot harder to get), I’d have to redo the written and road driver’s tests. This would be the fourth complete driving test I’d suffered through in my lifetime!

I had intended to start the process back in April, but was dumbfounded to be told that, for insurance reasons, I couldn’t take a driving test in a rented car. Several colleagues offered to lend their cars, but I was nervous about doing the test in a car I’d never driven before (I was still getting accustomed to driving again, period). The only solution I could think of was to wait til I actually bought a car of my own, then do the driver’s test.

As I neared a decision on a car to buy, I was told that it might be impossible to get financing on a car if I didn’t have a Colorado license…

okay, everything’s set, I’ll borrow Lynn’s car Friday. Which means I get to spend how many hours at the DMV tomorrow for the written test?

My boss Lynn offered the use of her car, a Toyota Camry that was at least a size I felt comfortable driving (I had nightmares of trying to parallel park an enormous SUV). But first I had to do the written test.

nets full of unflattering (to put it mildly) photos of Hillary, not so much of Obama. Does HE never look evil, dorky, etc.?

I was still seething over the treatment meted out to Hillary by the American media. While visiting my dad in hospital in the UK in June, I had explained my preference for Hillary thus: In the USA today, it wouldn’t be acceptable to make racist remarks about Obama, but it’s perfectly okay to make sexist statements about Hillary. Racism is politically incorrect, sexism goes unnoticed. That’s why I’d like to see Hillary as president. (That, and her experience.)

passed my written driver’s test, only one mistake. And the DMV wasn’t such a nightmare. Driving test tomorrow in Boulder.

Fortunately, the little local DMV office in Broomfield was not crowded, and I got it done in under an hour.

17: my first (and probably last) attempt at political satire

McCain is advertising on my site again. Guess where?

and the McCain ads appear to be earning me Google money. Hmm.

18: morning poem: prairie dogs irresistibly attracted to asphalt – raven sits on a fencepost – awaiting fresh roadkill

today’s schedule: meeting – drive test – meeting – test drives

After months of spending way too much money on renting cars, I was looking for a car to buy. Which was a lot more complicated than I anticipated.

my dad does not have cancer. Phew.

Those following me on Twitter back in June would have seen some angry and worried, but not clearly explained, tweets about cancer and smoking. Dad has had pneumonia seven or more times since December: cancer was an obvious possible cause. And, after 50 years of smoking, it would not have been surprising. I was sick with fear, but also angry about all those years I pleaded with him to quit, and he always said: “I’ll quit when my life is less stressful.” Well, your life will be a lot less stressful when you’re dead…

Cancer has now been ruled out, but they still don’t know what’s causing the pneumonia.

I am now a licensed Colorado driver. Now I just have to find a car…

The road test was easy, and parallel parking was not required (although, confusingly, there is still a diagram about it in the driver’s ed manual on the Colorado DMV website).

gin & lime: very nice way to end a hectic week

WS School parent’s banquet, with interesting speeches about why they sent their kids there

Still trying to edit all the video I have from Woodstock.

car salesman today thanked me for sharing my stories. Maybe I should be doing more of that

very good documentary/interview with Philip Pullman

One of my favorite authors.

19: Stories: Duchess, a Dog

Evan Handler has great music on his website

20: awake since 4 am, and don’t even have the excuse of jet lag

Another day, same old Berlusca, same old Italy (steadily worsening)

I wish the news from Italy would get better, but it never does.

21: adding the new crop of SAGE students to the Facebook group I run for Woodstock. They fly to India next week. It’s been a year already?

About a year ago, Rossella left for Woodstock. So much has changed in my life since then.

@sol lie or lay is correct, depending on the tense. This is a GMAT question:?!?

It’s scary that such basic grammar is on the “Graduate Management Admission Test“.

my first real furniture purchase in the US: a beautiful Shaker-style desk in dark “espresso dyed” hardwood, just the right size for my study

22: spent most of yesterday assessing the video situation. Learned we have over 150 hours, most shot by me, about 60 still need editing. Intern!

looking for recs on a decent quality, compact, lightweight lapel mic kit. Anyone?

I wish he were still alive… and influential…

buying a car is way too complicated

23: OMFG I live on Wisteria Lane.

The people around here are nice, but a little scary. I just don’t know what to say to the average American soccer mom.

just ordered iPhones for myself and Ross. Let the new adventure begin!

turtles have gone to their new home: http://www.lecornelle.it/ (unfortunately, typically annoying Italian flash site!)

I am easily irritated by poor usability.

24: lesson for the day: never take a heavy-duty antibiotic first thing in the morning on an empty stomach

I threw it up.

@ThinGuy Avalox, one of the new generation of kick-your-butt but don’t actually cure the infection antibiotics…

does anyone know how to do playlists with JW Media Player? Love the player, but the documentation sucks, and I’m not a programmer.

I can has car! Picking it up tomorrow. I feel so grown up…

It’s a Toyota Rav4 (ahem, a mini-SUV, I must confess…). Got a fantastic deal on a lease, on the very day that Chevrolet announced they would not be issuing further leases because they can’t predict the future value of their cars. I guess Toyota doesn’t have this problem.

possible food poisoning and a panicking offspring… what a fun evening!

25: interesting view in our back yard this morning:

photo by my housemate Kathleen

I was too sleepy to get out and figure out what the dogs were barking at. Wish I had!

I have a new car. It is red and very shiny. And fun!

the neighbors want to come and look at my car. I feel so… American.

@lskrocki yup, even got the plastic copy [of my driver’s license] in the mail today. Absolutely awful picture. My worst ever.

The Colorado DMV is famous for bad photos. They made me take my glasses off, so I look blind as well as stupid.

26: one of the great pop videos is back on YouTube

27: curtains (I refused to call them “window treatments”) are hung

28: my head has been CAT scanned. Something nasty going on in my sinuses. Which we already knew…

picked up my new iPhone this morning, haven’t had time to play with it yet (I do have to work sometimes, in between all this buying!)

twitting from my new iPhone!

29: also received yesterday a home-style phone (DECT) to use with Skype, no computer needed. Very cool.

@darios “tacchinare” ? questa parola mi e’ nuova – spiega!

A (younger) Italian acquaintance had to explain some young-people slang.

30: Enrico arrives tonight for a one-month visit. And I actually have time and brain space to be excited about it this time!

(short) video for all you Open Solaris geeks

brilliant

phishing scam claims I have won a “loyalty prize” from Poste Italiane. Not bloody likely

Hanging at the airport. Flight’s in but immigration is always unpredictable

Enrico took so long getting through immigration and customs that I was getting worried. Turns out they cross-examined him at length, but eventually decided he wasn’t a threat to national security. I don’t need the INS or Homeland Security to make my long-distance marriage any more difficult than it already is…

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photo:good morning, sunshine! – Arvada, CO, July 2008

Okay, let’s just call this a cop-out right up front. I simply haven’t had the confluence of time and mental energy to write anything substantive in the last few months. To keep some reasonable flow of new content into this site, I’ve resorted to photo galleries (some from trips I never got around to writing up before, so actually all-new material), song translations, and a story I wrote ages ago for another purpose but had never published.

It would have easier to do a diary-type blog, simply telling you what I’m doing day by day, but that hasn’t really been my style up to now, and I don’t expect most of you to be that fascinated with me as a person(ality), or my life, however weird and unusual it is.

For those who are that fascinated, there’s Twitter, where I’ve been “micro-blogging” for some time now – jotting down little snatches of my life at random times and frequencies, for the edification and occasional amusement of those who “follow” me. When I first joined Twitter (it’s been a while), I had heard about it from my videoblogging friends, so my first followers/ followees were videobloggers.

Now there are also Italian friends and Sun colleagues. I mostly follow people whose lives and thoughts I’m actually interested in hearing about, with a few informational/marketing entities such as Amazon and Comedy Central’s Indecision 2008 blog. I mostly don’t follow people who don’t follow me, with a handful of big-name exceptions (who, if they follow proper Twitiquette, follow me back even if I’m only one among thousands of their fans and followers).

It’s interesting (and, given Twitter’s poor UI for it, irritating) to go back and see what I wrote two months ago. My days are moving so fast that they’re becoming a blur, but I can refer back to my tweets (as updates via Twitter are called) to try to recapture what I was thinking and feeling a month or two ago. (Apparently I can’t go any further back than that. I hope that Twitter kept all our tweets from the beginning and will manage to make them available to us some day, in some sort of searchable/saveable format.)

So here’s the first installment of the Twitter diaries. The original tweets (limited to 140 characters) are in bold below; I’ve added some explanatory commentary.

July 1, 2008: back in the USofA, jetlagged and awake at 4 am. hoping to avoid planes for at least 6 weeks. The insanity begins again in September.

Ross and I flew back together from Italy to Denver. I was expecting a mostly travel-free summer. Turned out I was wrong.

maybe someday, or at least in some other lifetime, I will manage to go a whole entire month without experiencing jet lag.

Ross spent a couple of days lounging and shopping while I caught up at work, then…

3: enough blog stats – it’s time to blow this popsicle stand and head for New Mexico. With a box of beer and wine…

We drove to Las Vegas, New Mexico, together to spend the (American) Independence Day holiday with a bunch of Woodstock friends. Hmm, that’s a photo gallery I haven’t done yet.

I’m glad we spent the “patriotic” holiday in the unique culture of New Mexico. Everything was red, white, and blue – but in Spanish. I don’t think I could have taken a more typical American celebration – overweening patriotism gets right up my nose.

Shilpin (in the orange shirt), Deepu, [Tara, Dorien], Ross, Sharon – listening to one of many great bands that played throughout the weekend in Las Vegas’ town square.

7: back in the office, 10 hours on the road yesterday. Need more coffee…

The long road trip was my diabolical plan to force Ross to spend some serious mother-daughter time. As anticipated, I had barely seen her during the three weeks we were in Italy together – she was too busy catching up with her friends in Lecco.

Sunday, July 6th, we drove straight from Las Vegas to Denver airport, where Ross was not allowed to carry on board the cow skull she had bought in Santa Fe – it was considered a dangerous weapon. She took off for Austin without Bob; I had to mail him later (which cost more than it had to buy him).

9: I suspect I’m heading for collapse. Maybe I can make it through Friday and then sleep all weekend.

I was getting sick, the sinus infection I’d been trying to fight off for months was demanding attention.

to my multicultural friends: Jim @jimgris poses an interesting question (and don’t miss the comments!)

Sometimes I (and many others) use Twitter to alert people to things I find interesting.

our turtles will have a new home at a wildlife park near Bergamo. We simply travel too much to take care of them. Kinda sad.

@Boh yeah, I’ll miss them.

[She asked: can’t your husband take care of them?]

@Boh not when he’s in Colorado twice a year visiting me!

[She wondered how the whole situation was working out.]

@Boh I’m very happy in my job and everything else. Remains to be seen what will happen in the long term with our long-distance marriage.

I think I’m going to invest in art by people I know like Rick Mobbs

I had just met him through our friends in Las Vegas, LOVE his work.

10: painting of the day:

By my colleague Dwayne Wolff, whose work I look forward to seeing in person. I had seen this painting on his site before, but understood it a lot better as I had my first up-close experience of Sun’s periodic layoffs. Even when you’re pretty sure your own job is safe, not knowing where the axe will fall is discomforting. Finding out later that it fell on people you know and like (and I have yet to meet anyone at Sun whom I don’t like) is… well, the painting expresses it perfectly.

11: it is frighteningly easy to increase one’s credit limit

I thought I was going to pay Ross’ tuition with a credit card, and wasn’t sure, with all the other spending I’d been doing, that I had enough credit left that month to cover it. A two-minute phone call, in which I made a statement about my salary that they could not have substantiated so quickly (though it was true) was all it took to increase my credit limit quite a bit. Given the state of American credit… well, that’s how American credit got where it is!

le avventure di Rossella nel Texas: http://www.fotolog.com/rossella

Ross published a series of very amusing essays (in Italian) on her fotolog, but I am no longer allowed to translate them.

12: would be very quiet around here if not for neighbors mowing their lawns. Which make no sense in Colorado. Xeriscape, people!

The homeowners’ association has all sorts of requirements about what your yard can and must contain, which many in this neighborhood interpret as a need for lots of green lawn. Which is completely out of place, wasteful, and expensive in this semi-desert environment. One neighbor seems to mow his lawn twice a week, which, in one of Colorado’s driest years ever, implied a hell of a lot of watering.

13: still sleepy, dunno if it’s allergies, cold, or just sheer exhaustion.

just finished watching Rang de Basanti – in tears

Great movie, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so heavy. One of many DVDs I bought in India, most of which I haven’t had time to watch yet.

14: my new baby

a little nostalgic fangirl indulgence: Elfquest prints, get ’em before Warner Bros. takes it all

An old favorite comic of mine will finally get made into a movie, but that means the creators/publishers can no longer sell their own schwag. Still available as of this writing, though, so get it while you can.

15: how did this Yahoo shit get into my Firefox and how do I get rid of it?

A toolbar mysteriously appeared, I have no idea what I installed that did that.

I only see TV news in the gym. Thankfully. I miss out on most of the utter rubbish they try to make into “issues” and “big stories.”

Don’t remember what “big story” got on my nerves that day, but every time I see the TV on in the gym, the stories seem about equally stupid, and the media opinions about them even stupider. And this is on CNN, which I used to think was an intelligent news organization.

@firefox_answers thanks, I did figure that out. Really annoying that they can sneak in like that!

What was interesting about the toolbar incident was that someone is clearly covering Twitter for Firefox and answering questions like mine as they arise – a clever use of the technology to reach out to customers (and Firefox is free – I’m not paying anyone for this service). Very good example of service-as-marketing. If I were still doing frontline support for Incat/Adaptec/Roxio, I’d be doing the same.

bought Season 1 of The Tudors. Sounds like the TV equivalent of an epic costume romance novel – about what my mushy brain can take today

Haven’t got around to watching much of this yet, but what I have seen has lived up to expectations.

Dr. Horrible part 1 was fun. Nathan Fillion does a good Elvis imitation.

As did this.

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