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I am back in Ithaca. Here are some good things:
-Transatlantic flight, a row of three seats to myself! It was a very long and painful journey otherwise, but that was a marvellous unexpected blessing. I stretched out luxuriously and alternately read and napped my way across the ocean. One day, before I die, I'm going to fly first-class on an Emirates A380. (Yes, my daydreams are inordinately detailed, what of it.) Until then I am glad to have made it across unscathed, and I even got through immigration okay, which was my biggest worry. Also, JetBlue are a better airline than Delta. This bothers me on some level.
-My new apartment is very nice indeed. I'm not sure if I even mentioned it here in all the fuss, but at the end of last semester the nocturnal habits of my upstairs neighbours were driving me to drink, pretty much literally (the problem is that the university gives computer scientists lab time in the middle of the night, and so my neighbours were up from about 9pm to 11am, which was not doing me any good), so when my letting agents offered me the chance to move I jumped. Borrowed boxes from everyone I knew, threw all my belongings into them during the twelve hours between my last exam and my flight home, and left it all in the hands of the movers.
The new place, though billed to me as a top-floor mirror-image of my old apartment, is actually bigger, airier and newer. It also has a dishwasher, a source of endless fascination to me. (In a rare example of good design, it is a teeny, half-size dishwasher, as this is a one-bed apartment! I am oddly delighted by this.) And this morning I had TRIUMPH! I got up early and went over to contemplate my bookcase, which the movers had refused to shift on the grounds it would fall apart en route. I took it apart with the help of the compscis upstairs, and carried it bit by bit up to the new place, and put it back together again, and now it has my books in and looks no more crappy than it did before! Triumph.
-Yesterday it was very evident the difference six months makes - rather than tottering about complaining I didn't know anyone, the Siren put me up overnight so I could pick up my keys, and then we met up with a bunch of other people to do the first-day-back-bookstore-grocery-whatnot run. I didn't go out in the evening because the jet-lag had hit, but, really. I'm so over the whole moving-somewhere-new-knowing-no-one thing.
Here are some things that are bad:
-The air temperature, not accounting for windchill, is minus twenty-three degrees Celsius. According to the Weather Channel - I would like to know when I became the sort of person who took a detailed interest in the Weather Channel - this is close to the record low for Ithaca on this date. I am, a little ridiculously, planning to put on my boots and go for a five-minute walk just to see what it feels like. Am I odd, probably.
-It turns out that experience does not make homesickness any better. I had a vague half-formed feeling that the fact I was coming to somewhere not entirely unfamiliar, with friends and lots of my stuff already in place, would make it better - but it doesn't. It really doesn't. Sigh. Nothing to be said about it, of course, that hasn't been said.
Here are my not-New Year's resolutions: ( cut because of food )
-Transatlantic flight, a row of three seats to myself! It was a very long and painful journey otherwise, but that was a marvellous unexpected blessing. I stretched out luxuriously and alternately read and napped my way across the ocean. One day, before I die, I'm going to fly first-class on an Emirates A380. (Yes, my daydreams are inordinately detailed, what of it.) Until then I am glad to have made it across unscathed, and I even got through immigration okay, which was my biggest worry. Also, JetBlue are a better airline than Delta. This bothers me on some level.
-My new apartment is very nice indeed. I'm not sure if I even mentioned it here in all the fuss, but at the end of last semester the nocturnal habits of my upstairs neighbours were driving me to drink, pretty much literally (the problem is that the university gives computer scientists lab time in the middle of the night, and so my neighbours were up from about 9pm to 11am, which was not doing me any good), so when my letting agents offered me the chance to move I jumped. Borrowed boxes from everyone I knew, threw all my belongings into them during the twelve hours between my last exam and my flight home, and left it all in the hands of the movers.
The new place, though billed to me as a top-floor mirror-image of my old apartment, is actually bigger, airier and newer. It also has a dishwasher, a source of endless fascination to me. (In a rare example of good design, it is a teeny, half-size dishwasher, as this is a one-bed apartment! I am oddly delighted by this.) And this morning I had TRIUMPH! I got up early and went over to contemplate my bookcase, which the movers had refused to shift on the grounds it would fall apart en route. I took it apart with the help of the compscis upstairs, and carried it bit by bit up to the new place, and put it back together again, and now it has my books in and looks no more crappy than it did before! Triumph.
-Yesterday it was very evident the difference six months makes - rather than tottering about complaining I didn't know anyone, the Siren put me up overnight so I could pick up my keys, and then we met up with a bunch of other people to do the first-day-back-bookstore-grocery-whatnot run. I didn't go out in the evening because the jet-lag had hit, but, really. I'm so over the whole moving-somewhere-new-knowing-no-one thing.
Here are some things that are bad:
-The air temperature, not accounting for windchill, is minus twenty-three degrees Celsius. According to the Weather Channel - I would like to know when I became the sort of person who took a detailed interest in the Weather Channel - this is close to the record low for Ithaca on this date. I am, a little ridiculously, planning to put on my boots and go for a five-minute walk just to see what it feels like. Am I odd, probably.
-It turns out that experience does not make homesickness any better. I had a vague half-formed feeling that the fact I was coming to somewhere not entirely unfamiliar, with friends and lots of my stuff already in place, would make it better - but it doesn't. It really doesn't. Sigh. Nothing to be said about it, of course, that hasn't been said.
Here are my not-New Year's resolutions: ( cut because of food )
