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George Came to Visit

posted at 11:09 am
on Jan. 7, 2008

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I just heard from my friend George—he’s somewhere near ******, heading east.

George and I are in closer touch now—I guess for two reasons.  One, is that he’s back State-side (which is also basically Canada-side if you look at a globe). And two, is that he came to stay at my house when he first got back, and we went together and bought a Mac laptop.  So now we have a bond that goes deeper than ever before.

George was working in Iraq for a company that used to defuse things, and has since grown into protection and support and logistics for all sorts of operations over there.  No, it’s not Blackwell, it’s some acronym that sounds like “The TPS project” but isn’t.

I’ll be seeing him again soon at DisneyWorld—see future post—but for now it was nice having him in Vancouver.

George is an odd combination of easy and hard house guest.  Easy, because he doesn’t take much maintenance—he’ll go along with whatever’s happening, and doesn’t have much in the way of needs for diet or entertainment.

Hard, though, because he’s not a self-starting sight-seer.  He’ll go out when prompted—we suggested he visit the UBC Museum of Anthropology, for example—but he doesn’t make his own Top Ten list of sights and figure out what’s best to see.  This is a guy who was backpacking around Europe in November, and ended up in Paris, but ran out of things to see there.  In Paris.  Ran out.

So, he ended up doing a lot of IMing and email and job hunting and Civilization IV.  And that was probably OK for him as well.  I wish we’d had more time to spend with him, but I think we did OK—we got a Christmas tree, took a day trip to Seattle, visited our favorite restaurants, and generally had a good time.

I hope he ends up in a city that’s close or handy to us, if he doesn’t head back to Iraq.  The lure of extremely high paying jobs exerts a high fiancio-gravitational pull that I’d have a hard time escaping as well.

Overheard

“BBFF (Best Bacon Friends Forever)”

...who said it?

“I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life.”

...who said it?

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.”

...who said it?

“Ever have something in your teeth that you cannot stop tonguing?”

...who said it?

“ . . . the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

...who said it?

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