Yayyyy!!!

It’s been a while since I did the blog. I didn’t seem to find time to sit down quietly and just write. Leo has been updating the blog more frequently than I. The process of the fiancé visa for Leo ran very smoothly and the visa was finally issued and delivered, and the airline ticket booked via Air Berlin. The special vegan meals on the plane for Leo were also ordered. The scary part was when Leo purchased the ticket before the visa was issued.  I read an article on Visa Journey that someone in the UK was waiting for a couple of weeks for the visa to be delivered. I had a few restless nights until Saturday morning when Leo sent me an email with a picture attached of him showing the page of his passport with the visa. Yayyyy… Finally! Anyway, we can breathe now. Hopefully, Leo can sleep much better after two months on the edge with all kinds of worries.

I live much closer to work after I moved in to my new apartment and it only takes me ten minutes to get there. Plenty of good parking spaces! Although still busy working an average of 10 hours a day, sometimes longer; come home late, tired, and hungry. I packed the fridge with frozen entrées for emergency meals since I don’t have time to prepare proper meals. I am not a fan of fast food except Subway. I already bought a coffee grinder to grind my own  herbs and spices when I finally have time to work in the kitchen.

I found an apartment that’s ideally located in the South Coast Metro area; in the center of everything and within walking distance for Leo to explore. Restaurants, grocery, electronics stores and a gigantic Mall – South Coast Plaza – are just across the street. The fastest internet connection in the area bundled with basic TV but by paying 10 more bucks I got HDTV. Although I don’t watch TV very much, I’ve been recording series of The Big Bang Theory, Under the Dome, and some programs from the SCI channel to watch in my leisure time without having to watch commercials.

So, we are slowly merging into the right direction, our future together. I think we are well prepared for it. Ten more days from now, I will be at the airport to pick Leo up. I love you pumpkin!!

Kitchen

The Final Wait

It took two weeks to get the results from the doctor. Unable to wait any longer, I called the lab last Friday to get the results over the phone. Everything was negative and the x-rays were clear. It turns out that the doctor had gone on holiday, not surprising because in July, this whole country goes on holiday. Not me, I’m saving my holidays for my travel and wedding.

After the lab confirmed I was healthy, I sent the checklist back to the consulate. Now the final wait is underway, the wait to be called for an interview. I really hope this doesn’t take too long. I am so anxious to get this all behind me now. My stress levels are still through the roof and nothing I do seems to calm me — except drinking cider and I’m not going that route.

Trying to limit the amount of stuff I have to ship, I have taken almost all my books to a local shop that has a bookcrossing shelf. I still have to find a home for several synthesizers and all my antique clocks. I have contacted several antique shops and dealers and no one got back to me. I always thought antiques were supposed to be an investment, but it seems like I’m going to have to send them all to recycling. Unbelievable. Before I do that, I’ll have friend store them for me. Perhaps he can sell them later. It’s very frustrating.

I expect to be shipping about five boxes of stuff; not enough to use a ‘cheap’ cargo container option, so I might just have to send them by UPS or something. When I finish the packing and I know exactly what I have to send, I’ll get a quote.

Meanwhile, Maya has moved into a nice new apartment and is waiting for me to join her. It’s heartbreaking watching her having to do it all without me there to help her. She’s currently without a proper Internet connection so she’s been Skyping me from a nearby Panera Bread cafe, which results in bad quality, background noise and getting cut off when they decide you’ve been on too long. She should have a home connection by the coming weekend.

Apart from some delays (why do these things always take so long?) the official stuff is all going very smoothly, but the closer we get to being together, the more intolerable the waiting is becoming. Hopefully we’ll be through this very soon.

Packing

[Half an hour after I published this, I got an email from the consulate giving the date of the interview as 12th August. At least now we know how long the wait will be, a light at the end of the tunnel so to speak. That’s relaxed me a fair bit.]

Stuff

This morning I switched on my gaming computer as I do every Sunday morning so I could play a bit of Minecraft while I wake up. When I pressed the power switch, nothing happened. I tried again; nothing. Checked all the cables, but no… it was dead. I had only used it at around midnight to help Maya get set up on her new phone, and the next day it’s dead. I spent a few hours troubleshooting and I think the power supply has failed. But do I really want to go out and buy a new power supply that will only work in Europe when I’m supposed to be planning an exodus to the land of 110 volts? What do I use it for anyway? I use it for Skype, Minecraft and Second Life. Skype works fine on anything and SL works reasonably well on this computer, it’s only Minecraft that needs a more powerful system with lots of memory. So what this comes down to is: can I live without Minecraft? Well, the sad fact is that Minecraft is a huge waste of time, but it’s so much fun that I am always conflicted about sitting on it for hours at the weekend. Maybe now is the time to have a break. I really just can’t be bothered to deal with it. Perhaps I’ll finally find the time to read all the books I’ve bought over the years that are sitting on my bookshelf.

This little event got me thinking again about the amount of stuff I have here that I’m going to need to get rid of. Assuming the visa comes through OK I should be sallying forth to the US in the late summer, possibly sooner. So much of what I have won’t even work outside Europe. For example, I have a large collection of region 2 DVDs that won’t play on US players (unless I can hack the player). I guess I’ll have to sell them.  Some stuff for my electronics hobby is a problem — heavy power supplies and soldering iron are all 230 volts. A lot of my audio equipment also won’t work on 110 volts. Computer screens work anywhere as do phone and laptop chargers, but the power supplies inside the computers will have to be changed. Since I don’t want to mess around with power converters, this is a great excuse to cut down on the amount of stuff I have to ship.

A strange coincidence also occurred today. I set Skype up on this computer so I can see Maya later, and while I was still setting it up, my sister called me from my dad’s house. They were clearing out his attic and she wanted to show me a load of stuff that I had left up there. It was a blast from the past — my entire Atari 800 computer system was up there, with all the discs and tapes and as far as I know, all still in working order. Since she loves selling stuff on eBay, I told her I would write the advert for that lot and she could sell it to some collector geek. But the other stuff was different. As she held up item after item, I found myself saying “chuck it out”, “recycle it”, “dump it”. All that stuff from the 80s that I had needed so badly and I didn’t even remember most of it existed. This is what the modern world is all about. Companies make stuff. Then they advertise it all over the place and convince us that we need it to be happy. All that happens is that we spend all our money on junk and eventually have to throw the junk out. Some items of course, are not junk. I do need at least one computer so that I can stay in touch with Maya and my family. But I have four computers here and one of them just died. That may have been a blessing in disguise because it has really started me on the path to clearing this place out.

Through the looking glass

I’ve noticed a strange thing during this trip — it feels as though I am living two distinct lives on the opposite sides of a camera. As soon as I arrived in Maya’s flat it was as if I had literally sent myself through the cable. Everything was as it had appeared on screen, just in much higher definition; everything that I was used to was gone. Here it’s hot and sunny; there it’s raining without end. Here everything is bigger and there are palm trees everywhere; there it’s more compact and mostly pines and spruce. Here everything looks man-made; there, mostly natural. These differences seem to have caused my brain to split my reality in two. My usual routine (which is very routine) has been replaced by a very different, less well-defined routine. If this had happened a hundred years ago, I imagine the effect would be total, because in the 21st century I can still contact the same people through the vortex by using technology. Of course, a hundred years ago, I expect I would not have met Maya at all.

There is a huge amount of culture shock as well, something I didn’t really expect to be quite so extreme. To cross the road, you must press a button. The green man does not come on if you don’t. Subway‘s vegetable choice includes raw spinach (i.e., leaves) and they don’t have Hot Louisiana sauce. How is this possible? Louisiana is a state, for goodness sake. Simple things like taking a bus ride are actually very easy to get wrong. When I first tried to get off a bus I stood at the exit door and it didn’t open. Someone shouted at me to “Push the yellow thing”. I panicked and went to the driver who let me out the front doors. When I mentioned this to Maya, she said “Well, of course you have to push the yellow thing.” Of course! Silly me! The yellow thing. Riiight. Another thing about the buses; I got into a terrible fix on the way back from Mission Viejo library because I couldn’t find the number 86 bus stop. It was getting dark, I was getting cold and hungry, I didn’t have my phone on me and the bus frequency was 60 minutes. I was starting to panic. After walking half a mile up a hill and finding an 86 bus stop, I found that the bus took me all the way back down the hill, around the corner and stopped right at an 85 stop that I had decided was no good. Where I come from, bus stops are marked with the bus numbers of all the buses serving it, not just one. I still can’t figure out how I was supposed to know that the 86 also stops at the 85 bus stop.

I sometimes wonder how Maya would feel if she had to endure Finland for a few weeks. No doubt she would find all kinds of weirdness there, not least of all the language. One of the things that is appealing about the US is the fact that everything is in English. If you haven’t lived in a non-English-speaking country, you won’t really understand just what a breath of fresh air that is.

A whole ‘nother world of hot

In Finland, or the UK for that matter, buying a couple of computer parts is a trivial task. Just pop into one of the shops near the marketplace such as Clas Ohlsen or Anttila, and you’re pretty much done. For more complicated parts, a bus trip to Jimm’s PC Store and you’re sorted. In Lake Forest, if you don’t have a car, you are going to have to employ your desert survival training. With the exception of the Nevada Desert, I have never been anywhere so hot in my life. But then, I haven’t travelled much. So imagine my surprise when a journey to a computer shop 2 miles away turned into a quest for shade, sunblock, air-conditioning and water.

I’d spent the past two weeks cursing at the clouds and the 12°C (54°F) temperature in Turku and I was champing at the bit to get over to California again where it was allegedly ‘cooling down’ to a comfortable level. Then, two days after I arrived, there was a freak heatwave — 38°C (101°F) in the shade and I’m walking home down El Toro Road which happens to face in just the right direction that there is absolutely no shade at all. My water turned into a steamy beverage so I jumped into a small grocery store which was run by a Hispanic chap who was actually telling a friend it was a little bit too hot for him. The shop had no aircon, just an enormous fan standing on the floor. I stood in front of it for a few seconds and then bought a cold water which I devoured on the last leg of the journey home.

I’d had the sense to take a bus to the shop, but just getting from the bus stop to the shop itself was a major challenge, a kind of hopping game, hopping from shade to shade as quickly as possible. I used the nearby El Toro library as a base during this mission; aircon, free wifi and silence. There I applied 50 sunblock to all my exposed parts — and since I now have no sunburn I think this was a truly wise idea.

I bought a small network switch and a couple of  cables; now we have multiple computer connectivity which reaches out to the patio without the need for a wireless access point. I consider the mission a complete success. Maya rewarded me with Indian food. This girl is a genius.

This is becoming a habit

So here I am two and a half hours into the flight to Chicago. I’m slightly wasted on free wine (of course… managed to get two bottles before they ran out [they ran out? WTF])

The 767 aircraft is clearly not as advanced as the 777 – it does not have support for individual screens, which means I am currently being subjected to a film being displayed on general monitors. Luckily you have to opt in to the sound by plugging your earphones into your chair… I have opted out. This is one of those movies that I can’t understand (the point of) at all. You don’t need to listen to the soundtrack to know that it’s total rubbish. It’s rubbish in the same way that “The Perfect Storm” was – it’s basically just a sequence of really spectacular special effects. It’s like someone got free copies of 3DS Max and  Brazil 2.0 and said “Hey, this is wicked software, I’m going to render some frames and make a movie.” I don’t actually know what film it is, because it didn’t say. All it said was “Marvel” and I saw Gwynyth Paltrow for two minutes (hmm… when she’s not wearing a fat suit she is kind of attractive). I think I also saw Scarlett Johansson but I’m not sure because her breasts were concealed by some kind of robotic outfit. Of course the worst part about this film is that almost half of the picture is missing due to the 4:3 screen. How old are these planes anyway?

The flight is comfortable but there has been a massive food fail. The special meal I ordered did not materialise. How is this possible? I mean, I had to actually make a telephone call to American Airlines (at a cost of 1.50€) to book the meal; some guy who sounded suspiciously outsourced to India definitely confirmed that the meal had been booked. Was there a network failure? Maybe the Internet in India doesn’t work as well as expected… whatever, the data was lost on its way around the world and they managed to ‘confirm’ something that was not confirmed. I can understand this happening in a computer game (you know, you remove a wall of stone and then 15 seconds later it reappears due to network failure and you are inside it – you die.) But this is not Minecraft, this is an aeroplane flight. There should not be any such failures. Aircraft are supposed to use fault-tolerant software, but clearly the booking database doesn’t. However, while my faith in software is yet again challenged, my faith in humanity is once again restored by the girl sitting next to me, who, on overhearing my conversation with Peter the flight attendant, offered me not only her salad but also her crackers and cheese spread. I declined the salad since I already had my own, but I took the crackers. She told me that she couldn’t eat most of it either as American Airlines doesn’t provide ‘lactose intolerant’ meals. I mean, what the fuck? It’s 2012 not 1962 – come on – get with the times AA! I shall be writing a rather strong letter to AA regarding this issue. Luckily the wine got me pissed enough that I don’t really care that much right now. I’d rather the programming effort went into keeping this huge vehicle airborne.

One of the more annoying things about the forced-film thing is that while the film is on the screen, I can’t access the flight information screen. I think we are almost over Greenland and the outside temperature is… cold… but I need more than that. I need facts and figures.

I keep hoping that the airspace immediately in front of us does not suddenly become filled with something hard. I hate going this fast, but walking to LA would take about 83 days and involve walking on water, so I’ll settle for this solution even though there was a chicken-and-rice threat.

Well, it’s now 7:40 in LA so I guess Maya has read my emails and is bouncing off the walls of her flat in anticipation. I’m bouncing too but I have to restrain myself because otherwise I might fracture the fuselage.

One week to go

I’m about a week away from my second visit to California and I’m more excited on the inside than I appear to be on the outside. It’s taken me a while to get around to writing this as I have had a bit of writer’s block (meaning I have been too busy watching 24 and playing Minecraft). Everything’s booked and paid for, all my papers are in order, and it’s all hopefully just a matter of getting on the plane next Friday. This time it’s a 767 which will stop in Chicago so I can change to a smaller plane for the final jump from Illinois to California. That will make four states I’ve been to, including Nevada and Arizona in April. Only 46 to go then, although I imagine I’ll skip Alaska and a fair few others whose climates are too similar to England or Finland.

Maya has been preparing her apartment for my imminent arrival by moving things around to make more space. From what I can see on the webcam she’s done a pretty good job of it too; it actually looks bigger than before. Still, I won’t need much space while I’m there since I won’t be bringing a ton of stuff with me. I’m looking forward to properly sampling Maya-cooked cuisine with a drooling tongue — she has promised me all kinds of delights involving obscene amounts of chili.

I was going to buy a new laptop and bring it with me so that I could, for example, play Minecraft while Maya’s out at work. Then I realised that if I did that, I might be tempted to play Minecraft all day every day and I could do that sitting right here. In fact, that’s how I spend most of my Sunday afternoons. I decided it’s a bit pointless travelling almost 6,000 miles just to do the same things I do here, so I’m just going to bring my little netbook which is too under-powered to play 3D games on. I should be able to have a few games of online chess with my dad during some weekday mornings, but apart from that and checking email, I’m going to distance myself from computers. After all, computers are the single most stressful thing in my life right now, and I think I’d rather sit and stare at a palm tree than battle with Windows 7 (or, God forbid, Windows 8). Having said that, I do plan to set up Maya’s network so that she doesn’t have to keep swapping a single network cable between two computers, but that should just take a few hours. In theory.

That’s about all I can think of to write at the moment. No doubt I’ll have plenty of ideas for blog entries while I’m stateside. Until then I’ll continue dreaming about the thing I’m looking forward to the most — getting my arms around my favourite girl again!

Chasing the edge of darkness

This aircraft is the size of the Titanic! Hopefully it won’t end up at the bottom of the Atlantic (not that we are actually flying that way). The Titanic sank 100 years ago on Saturday night. Err… anyway, yes, this aeroplane is bloody massive and it’s only a Boeing 777, not even a Jumbo Jet. But I feel like I’m on Air Force One just because this thing is so bloody huge. When it took off, I found myself trying to force it up by the power of my mind. Seems that it worked because there’s no way something this heavy could float otherwise.

I’ve been on the flight now for just over two hours. The in-flight meal was excellent and I thank the maker that I was able to order a vegan meal. Of course, I’m not a vegan, but this is a brilliant way of avoiding everything I can’t stand in hot food. Actually, it didn’t avoid rocket lettuce (how can people actually enjoy eating something that bitter?) but I just covered it in the salad dressing (no cream!) that came in a cute little glass bottle. If I had not ordered a special meal I would have had a choice between chicken and rice or lasange. In others words, I would have been totally stuffed (or actually not stuffed at all due to going without lunch).

The best part so far is that the wine is free (I usually have to pay for it), so I expect the entire €700 didn’t go to aviation fuel alone. Talking of the price, when you look at what is involved in the whole process of moving people half way across the world, it’s not surprising it costs so much. There are so many little things that must be paid for. For example, when I transferred from the first flight to the second at Heathrow, I was asked a sequence of questions by a woman just in front of the check-in desk. She asked me to list all the battery-operated electronic devices that I was carrying. I had almost completed the list and I made the mistake of pausing for breath, whereupon she launched into the next question and I had to talk over her to include my MP3 player. Since she cut me off, I became confused and forgot to mention my voice recorder and phone. I have to say, I find it odd that they ask you these questions without waiting for the complete answer. It was almost as if she was not really interested in the reply and was just reading from a script.

Altitude is 36,000 feet, ground speed is 531 MPH, outside air temperature is -51C (that’s nippy!)

I love the little screen in the back of the seat in front of me. It displays a constantly updating map showing our flight path, with pages giving lots of interesting information such as remaining flight time, local time at present position (very important, I’m updating my watch in real-time), and speed, altitude, local time in Los Angeles, and London. There’s even a cool day/night map showing how it’s still night time on the west coast, and how for us, we who chase the terminator between night and day, night will not fall before we arrive. It’s wicked. I want this software on my PC. Imagine being able to tap into that information for any flight. Come to mention it I’ve always wanted one of those screens like you get at airports that shows the status of arrivals and departures. You could select your favourite airport and sit and watch it update. It is technically possible to build one since the info is all available on the Internet. So, yep, forget the in-flight movies (which by the way are cropped to 4:3 and therefore unwatchable, not to mention the fact that the display is covered in RF interference) and just enjoy the exciting real-time flight data. I know you think I’m kidding, but trust me, this stuff is John-shaped. I draw the line at trainspotting though. Signals, yes. Trains, nah.

Every now and then I realise I’m flying to Los Angeles and then I remember that I planned never to do that kind of thing, that I hate travelling, am scared of heights, scared of flying, only had 5 hours sleep last night and like to be able to wash my face a lot. Then a nice American lady offers me something to drink for free and I forget again. Oh look – a squirrel!

We are about to hit Greenland (hopefully while maintaining the current flight level). Local time at Los Angeles is 06:10. Dawn on the west coast. I need the loo but the girl next to me is asleep.

Distance to Los Angeles is 4023 miles. I think we’re half way there. Oh no, still 07:50 to go. There is a baby crying. Probably hasn’t learned how to ask “Are we there yet?”

Pixel hoarding

Talking of favourite photos, I have captured so many of Maya from Skype that I expect she would be shocked to see them all. I’m a compulsive documenter; I usually take a sound recorder everywhere I go and if I had a pocket camera I would take that everywhere too. It’s probably a good thing that my camera is a bit too heavy to carry all the time.

When I travel, I usually carry more tech than clothes. I like to have at least my still camera, video camera, sound recorder, GPS receiver and chess computer. These days, all of that is on my phone but not with such good quality.

For my upcoming visit to Los Angeles, I definitely plan to take my video camera, so we should be able to post some YouTube links here as well as ordinary pictures. Anyway, for now, here are two of my favourite pictures of Maya (Heni).