bktheirregular

Happy birthday to wiliqueen!

In other news ... things have been rather calm, I guess. I've been routinely walking down to Syntagma Square to get lunch, and it occurred to me the other day to check out the marble steps in front of the hotels on the northwest side of the square. When I first moved here, protesters would routinely smash up those steps and throw the fragments at police, and stonemasons would have steady work repairing them, only to see them smashed to bits in the next major protest.

Now? Those steps are not just intact, they're starting to get weather-stained. They've been intact for a couple of years now, at least.

Back in May, some person got hold of my mobile number and decided to call it on a lark. I don't remember what was going on with my job that day, but I do remember the person calling about seven or eight times that day, ending up with me yelling at him to delete my number from his phone and never call it again.

Needless to say, he didn't. Instead, he kept calling. Not every day, but enough to become annoying, while I was at work, getting ready for bed, in a meeting with partners, out to dinner, what have you. I couldn't block him, because his phone number was "private" - it doesn't go out over caller ID, and I couldn't find a way to simply block private numbers and let other calls come through.

The last straw came at 5:31am today.

Or rather, it came when I woke up at 8:30 and saw that I had two calls, at 5:31 and 5:32, from a "private number" that I had to assume was the same jackass, because anyone who possibly has a reason to call me at that hideous hour also knows my home phone. The only thing that saved me was that I had an app running that monitors my sleep time and movements, and that puts my mobile phone into silent mode when I check in that I'm going to sleep.

Otherwise, instead of annoyed, I'd be completely irate and ready to rip someone's head off.

Over lunch, I went over to OTE (the Greek national phone company) and explained my situation. I was told that while they couldn't block the specific person who'd thought it was a good idea to call me up at 5:31, they could block all "private" numbers, and give them a bounce message announcing that I was blocking private numbers. I figured that'd work for a while.

I'll have to see if it also bounces "unknown" numbers - such as international calls or Skype calls. Pain in the neck, and a sad commentary that some jackass can mess up other people's lives and not get hit with any repercussions, but it's not a perfect world.

Not by a long shot.

The past week has been busy - family visiting from New York for a couple of weeks, so that's pretty much chewed up my off-hours. Work was quiet, then got busy; it hasn't gotten crazy, and I hope that holds.

Grinding away at a project for which I don't have a deadline. Given Murphy's Law, I can only assume this means that there is a deadline, only I don't know what it is yet. Last time I got one of those, it was a big project with no set deadline, which changed to "deadline at opening of business tomorrow".

That happens every so often. I try not to throw chairs when it does.

Vacation was very nice. Getting up at half-past stupid o'clock on Christmas Day was unpleasant, but it allowed me to arrive in New York practically at midday - and since people don't usually designate Christmas Day itself as a travel day, the Van Wyck Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway, and the FDR Drive were almost entirely free of traffic - something which pretty much never happens.

So, afternoon and evening of Christmas were spent with family. Then a few days of recovery and errands (my trips Stateside are when I do things like get new eyeglasses), a trip down to Baltimore for New Year's Eve, then the snowstorm, then the fog, then a day of clearing weather, then the flight back to Athens.

Almost two full weeks, but they flew by. Very relaxing, though. And this time I remembered to build in an extra day of down-time before going back to work. Doesn't hurt that: a) two days at the office are followed by a weekend so I can finish catching up on sleep; and b) the Senior Partners appear to be mostly screamed out after the past few months.

More as it happens.

Haven't been posting much. Not much to report, really - life ticking over, surviving without major incident. Autumn has finally come to Athens, with winter not far behind; I finally broke out the bomber jacket last night, when I went out for an ad hoc Thanksgiving dinner after spending some time chatting with the family back home (video chat helps me feel like I'm not half a world away from them, which is another thing to add to the list of what I'm thankful for).

Also got hooked by another book series, which I mainlined in a few days: the "Laundry Files" of Charles Stross.

It shares some charming elements with the Dresden Files, I suppose. Our hero is one Robert Oliver Francis Howard (Bob to his friends), who starts off the series as basically the IT guy for Her Majesty's MIBs, known as "The Laundry" in much the same way the CIA is "The Company". His world is one where mathematics and magic converge, and running a graphics rendering program with the wrong parameters can open up pathways to things people are better off not interacting with (Bob got drafted into the Laundry after coming uncomfortably close to accidentally rezoning part of the West Midlands as an elder-god buffet table). As if that weren't bad enough, the Laundry is Civil Service, which means it operates like ... well, like a bureaucracy.

At its core, the series is part spy novel, part Lovecraftian mythos, part Dilbert; which part is the adventure and which part is the horror is left for the reader. It's a dark, disturbing world Bob Howard lives in, but there's humor throughout, ranging from dry, sardonic wit to near-madcap insanity; for example, book two, The Jennifer Morgue, is a complete send-up of James Bond, complete with travel to exotic locales, tuxedos, ludicrous gadgetry, martinis, and ... well, saying too much would spoil the enjoyment. Four books out (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, The Fuller Memorandum, The Apocalypse Codex), plus several novellas and short stories, with the fifth due next year, and more to come, apparently.

Back to the personal stuff: weather permitting, I fly back home for Christmas - literally on Christmas, this time, so I can spend it with the family. Staying a couple of weeks, until January 6 or so - traditionally the end of the Christmas holiday in Greece.

It'll be nice to be home.

The big news here in Greece recently has involved a borderline-insane radical fringe party that saw an upswing in popularity, overestimated the leeway it gave them to play fast and loose with the accepted norms of society, and are currently in several flavors of deep trouble.

Sounds weird and foreign, doesn't it?

When your sarcasm detectors have stopped beeping, you might be a bit surprised to know that the last big protest in Athens was actually a multilateral show of opposition to the clowns in the Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) party, who have fomented an atmosphere of anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner violence, appropriated a lot of the imagery of the Nazis (who, if you'll pardon a historical detour, actually invaded and occupied this country within the living memory of a lot of people living here, and did a lot of the same sort of stuff that got their higher-ups hanged at Nuremberg - check that, some of the stuff they did here in Greece actually did get 'em hanged at Nuremberg), and ... where was I? Oh yeah, anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, anti-people-who-don't-like-Golden-Dawn. That last category's there because it includes a popular Greek rapper who got stabbed to death on the streets of Athens by a vocal Golden Dawn supporter, which proved to be a bridge too far for the sane caucus of the Greek Parliament, which these days can't seem to come to substantial agreement on anything.

When I say that the behavior of Congress in Washington is baffling to my co-workers here in Athens, you've got to understand this is coming from people who are intimately familiar with dysfunctional legislative organizations. And like it or not, stuff that goes down in Washington is news in Athens; the shutdown was on the front page of at least one major paper here.

On a more personal note, things have actually quieted down to a great degree. Like I said, the last screaming protest to hit my neighborhood was intended to tell the Golden Dawn crazies to put a sock in it; there are general strikes on tap for November, but I don't know how much impact they're going to have. In the office, there was a shuffling around of desks and such to accommodate new hires (oh yeah, we've got new hires, so things aren't all bad), so I got shunted to one side. To an office of my own.

With a window (albeit on an airshaft, but still).

And a door.

A solid door.

Most of the time, I leave it open, so as not to isolate myself, but there are still times when people get loud enough to cross the obnoxiousness threshold (about 90 dB on the iPod's sound meter), and I can close the door to give myself a bit of noise buffer. It makes life a little more livable.

All's quiet on the home front, too. Had a series of little incidents last month - my washing machine kind of exploded when I threw a bath mat into it to wash, not realizing that whatever non-grip stuff it had on its bottom surface would slough off and completely clog the works. So I had to get a replacement. And it wasn't properly installed - more to the point, there was a piece locking the shock-absorbers of the clothing drum in place, that was supposed to be removed before operation but wasn't, so when I ran it, all the vibrations were transmitted to the full machine, which would kind of dance. Until the time I started a wash cycle and the thing vibrated about half a foot to the right and completely blocked the bathroom door. Which led to the window on the bathroom door being broken out to allow passage in to shove the washing machine back into position.

It's fixed now. The washing machine, that is. The door window still needs replacement.

And somehow it's already almost time to plan my Christmas/New Year's trip to New York to see the family. Have to see how that works out.

PS: as the native English language speaker on staff, sometimes it's a little frustrating when I'm dealing with areas where the rules are fuzzy, or depend on where the speaker comes from or lives. Ah well. It's a living, I suppose.

Thank goodness the priority translation task got finished today, because the screaming started less than two hours later. Bang goes my door, in go the earbuds, on comes the Man of Steel soundtrack. I like the tunes, but think they would have benefited from a better movie; sadly, that album is appropriate for these conditions because it's a Hans Zimmer piece, which means lots of pounding rhythm instruments, which helps drown out the temper tantrums.

I swear, some days, I want to just put out a blanket statement: I want two solid barriers between my office and any screaming. Two closed doors, two solid walls, or one of each, I don't care, so long as the screams get fbeeping attenuated.

Oh, yeah, thoughts on Man of Steel: it was ... interesting ... but I couldn't really call it fun. Not in the way that The Avengers was fun. My brother hadn't seen the film, so I slipped the disc into the PS3 and we watched it Sunday while he was resting up for Monday's travels.

Ah, yes. Travels. I didn't envy him the 6:30am takeoff time. I sympathized with the demands it placed on him, demanding he set an alarm clock for a time he refers to as "ass-early" and I prefer to think of as "stupid o'clock". I was slightly less sympathetic when he woke me up at a quarter to stupid o'clock and asked if I could spot him 20 euros for the taxi.

Of course I gave it to him. I may have grumbled about it, still being ninety percent asleep at the time, but he's my brother.

And besides, I've got my own stupid o'clock alarm to worry about. Twice this coming month, actually, to catch a 7:05am boat to the islands for a couple of long weekends.

Assuming, of course, that work permits.

"What is so unpleasant about being drunk?"

Except I wasn't drunk, just fatigued.

Er, I'm going about this all wrong.

Lessee. On Saturday, London was quite interesting, if a bit wet at the end of the day. Had a nice time exploring, seeing a city I'd never really seen before. Had a nice lunch, saw the new Star Trek movie, experienced what I assume is a typical pub, and crashed early to be up with the dawn patrol Sunday - which I could have avoided if I'd realized that setting my alarm for 5am didn't matter if I couldn't check out until 8. The "traditional English breakfast" was also at 8, but my flight was scheduled for 12:10, so I skipped that, checked out as soon as reception opened, and caught the Underground line to Heathrow, judging that three and a half hours would give me sufficient buffer time for check-in and security. With no track work, it turned out the train took an hour, and half an hour after that, I was through check-in, passport control, and security, and having a bite that I figured I'd call an early brunch.

Delays with the incoming flight pushed back departure, so we were on the ground a little late, getting me back home somewhere between 8 and 9 in the evening, with a workday staring me in the face the next morning.

And from then to now, I haven't gotten one solid night's sleep.

Even better? Friday morning (today), I had my annual thoracic MRI.

Scheduled for 06:45.

As in A.M. As in my phone alarm was set for five o'clock in the morning. And I remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the clock reading 1:30. And 4:00.

I distinctly remember going into a semi-dream state in the MRI imaging chamber. This wasn't one of those open-air machines; it was a closed-bore system, like being loaded into a torpedo tube ... not that I really noticed. In past years, I'd close my eyes and picture myself elsewhere; this time, my eyes wouldn't have stayed open if I'd wanted them to.

Claustrophobic? Loud? Pfft. I've slept in coach class on Tower Air going transatlantic, when they packed people into sardines for a nine-hour flight. The MRI didn't even last one hour.

After which, it was back to the apartment, then off to work. For what it's worth, because throughout the morning, I was nursing a splitting headache and dragging my feet - not metaphorically, but literally having trouble lifting my feet when walking. The last time I remember that happening, I was in the army.

Thank the FSM it's Friday, and I can spend the weekend recovering. And hopefully kicking the jet lag.

One of my two cousins on my father's side of the family got hit with cancer within the last few years. Everyone thought that it had been beaten into remission, but she suffered a relapse this fall, apparently, and is suffering badly.

On a brighter note, my father's recovering nicely from his hip surgery; less than a month after the operation, he's already moving around better than he was this past summer.

Also on a brighter note, my younger brother apparently is about to become a vice-president of the advertising-audit company he works for. Nice to know he's appreciated there.

And on a not-so-bright note, today marks the anniversary of a kid getting shot dead by police in Athens. Protests are scheduled, notwithstanding the fact that the cops who shot the kid have been tried, convicted, and sentenced for what they did. Today's schedule is "everyone out by six o'clock".

The screaming started early. After about five minutes of back-and-forth yelling involving staffers, associates, and partners, I got up to close the door - the screaming got more intense - and I slammed my door.

One of the partners broke off from the screaming match to come in and inform me that my response was inappropriate; if I needed the door closed, just close it, and if I wasn't feeling well, step outside until I feel better.

Then she went back to the verbal brawl.

Which got louder.

And louder.

And louder still.

I admit my reaction wasn't appropriate for civilized discourse - and by "reaction" I mean slamming my door; I didn't say a single word - but that doesn't make the screaming matches proper.

Anger short-circuits rational thought. On all sides. And it builds, in a positive feedback loop.

Everyone screams at one another, trying to verbally bludgeon the other side into submission. And when that doesn't work ... well, out in the streets, you see the results. Shattered stonework. Burned-out shells of buildings that nobody dares to restore because they're afraid all their work will be undone the next time people with firebombs get hacked off.

And there's still a part of me that resents the implications - that if my patience is exhausted over a screaming match, then I'm the one with the problem and I'm the one who needs to walk away to calm down. As if the brawl is only a problem because I'm letting it be a problem.

Sorry for the stupid self-absorbed blog posts recently. But it grates sometimes.