Various

I feel like blogging today, but have nothing super interesting to write about.  Since that's never stopped me before...

Cold

I have a cold.  I hate having a cold.  I hate if for two reasons: 1) it sucks.  2) Because I had pneumonia several years ago, and ever since, every little cold I get turns into a chest cold.  A chest cold that hopes and dreams of growing up into pneumonia.  My guess is this is how I will die someday: I'll be old, I'll get my usual winter cold/chest-cold/wannabe-pneumonia and the pneumonia will finally get it's wish, taking out yet another old guy.

Polish Maid

Nothing in London is cheap, except for house cleaners.  I have a house cleaner from a maid service, and for £7 per hour, she cleans, does washing, irons, sews, etc.  I have no idea if she's a legal immigrant or not, though she did bring a very shitty photocopy of of her passport once.  She's probably 19, and doesn't speak English too well.  She's polite, but a skittish.  I was home sick on Friday (normal cleaning day) taking all these calls from work, and I think she was kind of freaked out by me being in the house when she was there.  I think that maybe she's afraid that I'm going to try to get her to sleep with me or something, she has that sort of wary-eye look that says a girl thinks "this foreign pig is a molester and he'll try to get me if I turn my back to him, then I'll be stuck with half-pig half-polish baby on this Gold forsaken island in the sea... must remain vigilant!"  Maybe that's an exaggeration, but in any case I try to just leave her alone which I think makes her like 3% more comfortable. 

Christmas Plans

Reba is going to Seattle for Christmas and I am not.  There are several reasons for this:

1) she works in a research institution where everybody would flake out over the Christmas week anyway, so the administrators just say "what the f---" and let everybody go.  I don't work in this kind of a company, so I don't have the week off.

2) I used all my vacation up already this year, with trips to Spain, Greece, the Yorkshire Dales, Scotland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Bruges, etc.

3) I wanted to make a point to my wife that maybe it's not really necessary to travel to Seattle 4 times a year.

4) Holiday travel is a nightmare.

5) Reba wants to visit Seattle one last time before the baby comes, it might be a while before she can travel again.

6) I'm going to be a father in a few months, and this will be my last chance to have some extended Ean time for a while.

7) Reba and I have often taken separate vacations, after 11 years it's sort of a nice break, and we're always eager to see one another at the end.

Despite the nice long list above, I'm regretting the decision.  I want to see my family and friends, have baby brother lunch, go to dim sum with my mom, do the Nochebuena, have a mango chutney shochu eggnogg (or whatever it is they're serving) at Tiger Tail, hang out at the Javabean, see the nieces and nephews, etc.  I'm always afraid that there may be a shorter time frame for seeing my mom than previously assumed.  There's nothing specific behind this last bit, it's just a fear I have.  Also, I have found that if Reba is gone for 2 to 3 nights, I enjoy my personal time, spend time with friends, and have the pleasant experience of finding things just where I put them last.  However, I have also noticed that if she's gone for any longer than 4 nights, I inevitably find myself huddled in the eye of some sort of psychological/existential crisis which I am ill equipped to handle on my own.

On the positive side, I will have a lot of time to do the extended Ean fantastic: read weird books and magazines at cafes, buy comic books, find new hardcore bands at All Ages Records, shop for the perfect reverb pedal, admire guitars I don't need, take naps on our giant DFS (think English JC Penny) couch and watch movies that would lead my wife to suspect that I'm an idiot.  I will also be going back to Oxford for a quiet Christmas eve with my good pal Andy, who is just about to finish his thesis for his DPhil (that's Oxford for PhD).  This is a big deal, because the thesis is really a book of about 100,000 words and he has to get it done by the end of January or the whole thing is canceled.  I guess he's got a couple of chapters left.  Stressy!  Plus, Ginny and Kaysa are going to be around, so they'll probably adopt me for a bit out of sheer pity.

Baby

I'm going to be a father.  Leaving aside the recent dramatic and sudden death of my own father, my present absence from my family's home, financial crises and scarcity of jobs in the finance sector, it's still a complex and scary proposition.  Put those ingredients back in, and a guy could get really worked up about this.  I am, however, determined to NOT be a freaked out first time parent, and thus am committing to being cool about this whole thing.  It's a bit early to tell how it will all work out, but I can say that my wife is cute with a little belly, we've found a nice new neighborhood to live in and push a stroller around, and the names are set: Ernest Robert Hernandez (boy) and Isabel(le) Josephine Hernandez (girl).  Ernest comes from lots of things Reba and I hold dear: my family often names boys with an E (brothers Ethan and Eban, father Ernest, grandfather Ernesto, great uncle Evelio, great grandfather Efigenio, etc.), memorial to my dad and granddad, Shackleton, Hemingway, and reba's great uncle Ern.  Robert is Reba's dad's name, and this just seems fair given the boy's first name.  The genesis of the Isabel(le) name is a bit more vague, we both like it and it's Spanish enough to fit with Hernandez, and English enough to be genuine.  By genuine I mean that I feel a bit disingenuous giving my child a strongly Spanish first name when the kid would be less that 1/4 Spanish... a pale blonde haired blue eyed 6th generation American boy named Juan Hernandez is a bit ridiculous, and certainly not named with any sense of accuracy regarding his genealogy.  So, Isabel(le) works because it's not a purely Spanish name, but still sounds good with Hernandez.  This last bit can be difficult... Beth Hernandez?  Jane Hernandez?  Sally Hernandez?  To me, these names sound great with English last names, but with Hernandez it's just awkward.  So, finding the right English first name to go with the Spanish last name is tricky.  The (le) part is included here because I sort of like the look of the French spelling a bit better than the Spanish version, but Reba feels the opposite way and we haven't come to an agreement yet.  The name will sound the same anyway.  My secret agenda is to employ the Barclays bank principle through which simply writing something enough times makes it true.

 

that's not beer!

CV

At Shelby's urging, I have updated my resume from the current 2 page version to a new 1 page version with a separate list of key achievements.  The idea is that by having a more succinct resume it will look more professional and more effectively convey my fundamental fabulousness by not losing the reader's attention halfway through the 2nd page.  If a potential employer is really interested, they will request the key achievements list.  Economical writing is something you work on a lot in business school, and I managed to reduce 18 years of education, jobs,  personal achievements, training, methodologies and memberships to 1 A4 sheet of paper.  One nice thing about living in the UK is that you get an extra .67 of an inch per resume page over the standard US 8.5x11.

Moving

We are moving to St John's wood.  If you live London, that might be a bit funny, if not you're probably wondering what/where that is.  Right now, we live in the edgy, punky, wild night out part of the city called Camden Town.  This neighborhood is accessed by the Northern Line subway, and is popular with young waify edgy looking people, as well as throngs of tourists that come from all over the UK and Europe to shop for bongs, tie dyed wall hangings, 27 buckle high heeled S&M boots, etc.  If you were shooting a low budget version of the Matrix, you could buy all your wardrobe here.  We are abandoning this gem for St John's wood, which is only about a 20 minute's walk from our current house, but is really a world away. 

Why this is funny:

1) it's on the Jubilee Line subway, which means that it's a straight shot to Canary Wharf,where bankers (like me) work. 

2) The neighborhood is very popular with American expatriates, again because of the ease of commuting to the financial center where they all work. 

3) St John's is also full of young, fashionably dressed mothers pushing expensive "prams" while their banker husbands work in Canary Wharf. 

4) Finally, the neighborhood is quiet and cute. 

...which means that there are 4 reasons that our friends here are thinking "oh yeah, now that Ean and Reba are having a baby they're getting conservative and moving to St John's Wood...   hahahahha!"  I suppose this is like living in Capitol Hill and the moving to Kirkland as soon as you decide to have kids.  I can't deny it! 

A is the old apt, B is the new one

Ok, that's more than enough for today, next time: Practice Spaces, Charles Darwin, Books, Magazines, and Dim Sum.