It’s been a good week.

Emily got word yesterday that Yale is offering to pay her tuition for two years should we choose to move to New Haven. This is the third piece of good news in five business days and is putting us at risk of seeming like we’re gloating. It also raises the bar on good news for the future, so I expect our reaction to most things to be dulled for the next few weeks. Unless, y’know, the Iraq War ends or something.

It brought back memories of Brandeis’ big package, except without the detailed itemization of expenses matched with what funding source would be covering them. Brandeis was very detailed over many pages, while Yale’s letter just said “tuition fees”, causing me to wonder whether they dropped an “and” or that’s just how they talk in Connecticut.

Regardless of which, it’s at least a $63,000 value, which moves the bar significantly. Given that Yale was already the stateside school Em was most excited about, it’s starting to look like I should start dusting off the blue and white from my days at ‘Deis.

Emily and I went out to celebrate last night, a knee-jerk reaction that is starting to become at least somewhat problematic for our mutual diet. It’s kind of surreal to think that one is celebrating too much because there’s too much good happening. How obnoxious. Exciting, but obnoxious.

Lest I get too carried away with exuberance, I’m getting cavities drilled and filled this afternoon. I used to call periods like this “Mack Truck Time”, to indicate that the universe was unlikely to put up with such an extended winning streak without some balancing effects. I’m going to redeem this Friday the 13th appointment for such balance. After all, the timing’s right. Dental insurance: use it before you lose it.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I know it’s all out in the open and stuff, but I kind of liked the code system.

So, at the risk of ridiculousness…

ELGC-GS: 2/2 (?C, ?H, ?O, +P, +Y)

No word on money yet. The postal service is slow.

Everything’s back out in the open. I’m leaving Glide, my place of employ for a staggering three years, on or about May 15th. Emily and I will be moving some indeterminate number of miles east (between 2,800-5,400) this summer for Emily’s fall enrollment in a school to be named later.

So far, she’s only heard from Yale and she’s in (congratulations to those who cracked the code a few days ago). We will be getting their financial package in the (physical) mail sometime this week, along with e-word from Columbia. Then Princeton probably next week, with Harvard and Oxford a weekish thereafter. While possible stipends and such will impact the final decision, Yale is looking like the clubhouse leader at the moment. It was tied with Oxford as Em’s “first choice” and she can’t stop looking at New Haven apartments on Craigslist. But a lot can happen in a month, so don’t count on Connecticut just yet.

Meanwhile, something of a West Coast Farewell Tour is emerging already, with trips to LA over the March-April border, Seattle in late May, and a return to LA in late June (though we may have started moving by then, so it may be a post-farewell return). It’s going to be hard leaving the region of Earth whose land and people make me feel most comfortable (though Russia was close), but it’s clearly time to move on. It’ll be approaching seven consecutive years by the time we leave and that is really longer than I was cut out to live anywhere.

The next ten weeks are going to be emotional. I wasn’t really prepared for the outpouring of shock and grief that people have shown me at work upon my announcement. I told several people in person, sad that I couldn’t tell a couple more face-to-face because of conflicting schedules or untimely illness. I was prepared to surprise some folks, but the rate at which people thought I would be staying for 5+ more years blew my mind. I sent the All-Staff e-mail just after hours yesterday and have already gotten several responses, including a very moving visit and hug from someone I work with weekly at most. Besides a nice big helping of guilt (perhaps my resident emotion), I just feel overwhelmed by this reaction and can’t even imagine how much more I’m going to feel today when most people actually find out. It’s one thing to be able to intellectually articulate that a lot of key people might not see this coming ahead of time; quite another to witness the series of stunned faces and e-mails.

And yet, even most Gliders can recognize it’s exciting and for the best. Almost equal to the shock has been an incredible offering of support and energy for new adventures and opportunities in a new town. Emily now has hundreds of people pulling for her, between her work, mine, and all our friends and family. It’s good groundwork for the very foreseeable announcement of a move to Africa in 2011. Though if you can accurately predict one thing about the year 2011, you are well ahead of pretty much everybody.

And as that sentiment may indicate, this is only the beginning of the uncertainty. The move and transition will be highly time-consuming. We have to move the world’s least mobility-inclined cat across the country or even the Atlantic. We have to potentially prepare for switching countries. We have to find a new place to live, make decisions about how much stuff we really need, determine a whole new pattern for our lives that have really only been settled in one metro area. And the exciting boundlessness of possibility still lingers, more tantalizing than scary, beckoning toward a multifarious future whose options will narrow, but slowly.

People, this is an exciting time to be alive.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Yes, I will be back to major posting sometime soonish. It is March, after all, and in force. But I am hamstrung and that limits creativity.

For a variety of reasons, I have to keep many secrets in my life at this juncture. I hate secrets. They make me sad. As someone who doesn’t really believe in privacy beyond passwords and social security numbers, secrets are antithetical to the way I aspire to live my life. And yet, I have some other obligations and constraints at times in this life.

So all I can offer you now is at the bottom of this message. I promised people I would keep them updated. Someday, hopefully soon, I will be able to use English to convey what’s going on and what I feel.

ELGC-GS: 1/1 (?C, ?H, ?O, ?P, +Y)

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Let’s just say it’s a good thing that I’m not trying to write full-time right now. I just don’t have much of anything to say.

I turned 29 last Friday. Emily pulled off the first surprise party I think I’d ever had in my life, with a bunch of folks from work. I was having a terrible day and in a foul mood up till that point, even though I knew we were on our way to eat green chile in San Francisco’s new New Mexican restaurant. I was so legitimately surprised that my bad mood evaporated entirely.

We watched the worst Oscar show ever on Sunday, while playing my new favorite board game (Thebes) with Gris & Anna. There were even a bunch of movies I really liked winning, but they really have to start replacing that show with a monotone script-reading or something.

The jury I was on disbanded on Monday, after the case was settled. I was pretty sure I’d be excited to write about that experience, but the conclusion of the proceedings were so anticlimactic as to seemingly render the experience moot. There were two phases of the trial and our ruling on the first was supposed to lead to the second. Instead, it prompted the parties to settle the second rather than have a few more days of trial. Clearly the preferred solution for the parties and for my fellow jurors, but I was hoping for a full experience. So it goes.

The week was another week at work. I’m trying to appreciate them but most of my efforts are coming up short. I’m taking joy in my statistical reports while lamenting how little response they garner and how little they’ll probably influence anyone’s decisions.

The weekend was lazy and unproductive by design. Kind of like a decision to binge-eat junk food – it sounds good at the time and one gets settled into the idea and even excited. And agreeing to do it makes it better, but fails to leave one with something other than a bad feeling in one’s stomach at the end. Something like that.

March, I expect better of you. I should be all inspired and stuff by now. Maybe I’m just too old.