Unsold homes tie down would-be transplants | The New York TimesThis is one of the things that has always freaked me out about home ownership, even before the housing market started plummeting downhill. What if I get laid off, or hate my job, or just get a really tempting offer somewhere else? I move there and pay rent or another mortgage while ( Read more... )

After nearly three months of training, dry runs, long nights and all the other assorted pleasures of starting up a newspaper, management thought we could use some an open bar and catering to celebrate. It was a lovely affair, chronicled with yellow-tinged flash-free photographs here!

Check out Time Machiner. I've been struggling to remind myself about an April 2 appointment at the company's medical clinic (an AIDS test is standard with every job application in the UAE) at the inhuman hour of 10:10 a.m., which might explain all my troubles with it. This is a good method for all of us who roll into bed after shutting down Gmail ( Read more... )

Have some links:

Horrific accident on Abu Dhabi-Dubai highway | Gulf News-Most of these stories miss the point, that while yes, there is more traffic, people here are reckless beyond belief, speeding everywhere, all the time, using turn signals as a last resort when they can't cut someone off, ignoring pedestrians and generally treating the street ( Read more... )

Scientists predict when the world will end | University of Sussex/Fox News

The good news: This won't happen for another 7.6 billion years.
The bad news: Life on Earth will end long before then.

Even though everything I know and love will be long gone in a billion years, reading that story made me feel like something was slipping away.

Woke up at 5 a.m. from a nightmare ( Read more... )

Sometime during the car ride back from moving all our worldly belongings to South Florida, half asleep and more tired than the first week we began jogging around Lake Hollingsworth, I realized we're getting on a plane tomorrow evening to live in Abu Dhabi. And all of a sudden, instead of being excited for the adventure, enthralled by the city's ( Read more... )

Resurfacing for two seconds to whine about the past week of packing, interrupted only for two back-to-back sessions of tooth-drilling. I'm not sure if my mouth or my legs hurt more. Maybe my fingers - packing boxes, cutting tape, prying and filing and carrying and scraping all mean five of my nails have been mangled nearly beyond recognition. We've ( Read more... )

If I don't occasionally cut my losses with updating, it's like nothing happened this year besides work, and that's not how I want to remember it.That is the opening line of an entry I began typing sometime late November. It involved exhaltations about this television season (Pushing Daisies! Journeyman! Chuck! Kid Nation!), seeking SGA fic from ( Read more... )

An editor colleague at my newspaper is looking for reporting interns and got an applicant who's a senior at a local college. They spoke, and the editor was interested enough to ask for her resume. For some reason, the candidate felt the need to snail mail her the documents ( Read more... )