It’s hard to believe, but I’ve come to the end of my first work week. I know it was only three days, but it seemed longer, probably because of the quantity of stuff that I’ve got to do now. I’m already teaching on Monday morning, have a lot of voiceover work to do for eLearning and a rather heavy load of stuff to do for the impending EDM Quality system update. I’ve already had a pile of meetings and it seems like I never left. I can’t believe how busy it is right now for everyone.

One of my favorite things was getting to place new dots on my world map. I have the map hanging on the wall in my office, and each time I go somewhere new for the first time, I add a dot. I got to place 5 on Japan, and have now finally gone to Asia. Of course, now I look at the map and realize that I’ve never been to the southern hemisphere. If Amgen would send me to the Australia office, that would take care of that, otherwise I’m looking at Brazil and East Africa as potential vacation destinations. It’s the problem with travel: once you’ve got it in your blood, there’s no turning back. I find it best summed up in one of my all-time favorite quotes:

Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere; for wherever one is, some part of oneself remains on another continent. — Margot Fonteyn

To tell the truth, I’d already started thinking about my next trip before I even left for Japan. I started thinking about how—now that i’ve gained enough seniority and vacation days at work—I should be able to take two, two-week vacations each year. That’s a pretty lucky place to be in. That means things like “April in Paris, October in Kyoto”; it means one familiar favorite and one new adventure. I’m pretty excited at the prospects, to tell the truth. Add business travel to that, and I should be pretty well setup. Of course it will all cost money too, and that could become problematic…

So another thing I think I need to do is beef up my website. Shortly before my trip, I ran into two problems: first, I bought my new MacBook Pro and due to some unfortunate data transfer accidents, I lost some of my website data. Second, I was planning on doing some reorg and restructuring and took stuff down but then didn’t have time to put it all back up again. I’m especially in need of re-doing my photo albums. I took down all my special interest pages, so now it looks like I never do anything. I’ll start adding stuff, so stay tuned.