A Message from position 57.55.08S, 064.58.11W

After noth­ing for a few days, I was pleased to get a mes­sage this morn­ing from Pam, onboard the Explorer II. Here are some per­ti­nent excerpts:

Thank you for the “Wel­come aboard” email. It was hand deliv­ered in an air mail enve­lope when I arrived.

My inter­nal clock has no clue about the day or time. I decided to sleep until I was ready to get up around 10:30 ship’s time.

Here we are, in the mid­dle of the Atlantic/Pacific com­ing up to the con­ver­gence. I already feel it in my being, not in a sea sick way, just a con­stant reminder that these 2 oceans have met. The cap­tain referred to this as small swells. Kinda nice being lulled to sleep last night.

The room is comfy. Again I took pics before mak­ing a mess of it. The cur­tains are tilt­ing about 15degrees. Didn’t try show­er­ing today. I’ve used the tub to anchor loose things. Okay, we’re really heav­ing now.…

I bought 1 hr of inter­net time ($27US) which I’ll use for the next 10 days onboard. Oh, how I wish I could send you some pics. There’s a very happy one of me as we head thru the Bea­gle Chan­nel. I’ve met a pic­ture tak­ing buddy, a busi­ness ana­lyst from Chicago. She wants a pic of her in her U of I sweat­shirt with a pen­guin for her alumni mag. We are get­ting to know each other’s cam­eras as well as our own for such doc­u­men­tary shots.

Today there were sev­eral alba­tross sight­ings. Since I don’t know exactly what they look like I’m not sure I could claim see­ing them. There are some gull type birds fol­low­ing the ship’s wake. Long wings but smaller bod­ies than all the seag­ulls we see at Granville Mkt.

I’ve saved this msg as a draft and now will make my way to the library to mail it. The Library has pub­lic ter­mi­nals and WiFi.

It sounds like pretty rough seas to me. It’s a good thing she took some Bonine (like Dra­mamine, but with less drowsi­ness) with her, just in case it gets any rockier.

As near as I can fig­ure out, here’s where that Lon­gi­tude and Lat­i­tude posi­tion is (roughly) on Google Maps (I think it’s the white dot at the cen­tre of the map):

Off She Goes

On Mon­day, Pam and I drove down to Seat­tle, where we stayed at the Rad­di­son hotel, by the entrance to the air­port. She slept well, despite more than the usual amount of ‘travel but­ter­flies’. Given that she was headed to Antarc­tica, I can imag­ine why there might be some of those.

We said our good-byes Tues­day morn­ing by the air­port load­ing zone (as shown above). I didn’t hear from her dur­ing her lay­over in Los Ange­les, but got an email on Wednes­day morn­ing from her that explained why:

“I was quite ner­vous at that point, in LAX. The Seat­tle leg was a lit­tle delayed but the dis­tance between domes­tic and inter­na­tional ter­mi­nals was unmarked. I didn’t know how far away it was. The air­port is being reno’d and you had to walk out­side to get to the Int’l ter­mi­nal. How odd for a city that only drives.”

The next pho­tos she put on Flickr are of her hotel in San­ti­ago, Chile. It cer­tainly looks lux­u­ri­ous, and I think it would make a nice des­ti­na­tion in and of itself.

Our Jeweler on the Lam

When I pro­posed to Pam, I had already got­ten a ring at Alpha Omega Jew­el­ers in Cam­bridge. It was a small shop in Har­vard Square, fam­ily run, with not spec­tac­u­larly high or low prices. In the years since then, we used them for not only our wed­ding rings, but other bits of jewelry.

So, I was not with­out a fair amount of shock when I read this head­line on the web site boston.com:
Alpha Omega liq­ui­da­tion sale set to start tomorrow

What was even more shock­ing was why they were liq­ui­dat­ing our old fam­ily jeweler:

The invest­ment con­sor­tium that bought the assets of Alpha Omega Jew­el­ers in a bank­ruptcy court-approved sale said that the liq­ui­da­tion sale of the chain’s inven­tory will begin at its four stores tomorrow.

Every­thing must be sold before Ross-Simons, a Rhode Island-based chain, assumes the leases of Alpha Omega stores at Nat­ick Col­lec­tion and the Pru­den­tial Cen­ter in Boston, and items will be dis­counted to ensure fast sales, the con­sor­tium said.

The chain’s other two stores are located in Har­vard Square and at the Burling­ton Mall.

Accord­ing to sto­ries in the Globe data base, Alpha Omega Jew­el­ers filed for pro­tec­tion under Chap­ter 11 of the US Bank­ruptcy Code last month. The fil­ing came after owner Raman Handa unex­pect­edly left the coun­try with his wife, son, and daugh­ter, prompt­ing the company’s bank to seize Alpha Omega assets and tem­porar­ily close its stores just before Christmas.

That’s right, they were going bank­rupt because the owner fled the coun­try with his fam­ily. Sud­denly my mind filled with all the plots of Jewel heists, with the thieves head­ing for Mex­ico, hav­ing deposited some of their mis­be­got­ten wealth in a Swiss Bank Account…

And to think I was served by Mr. or Mrs. Handa (I never learned their names, nor do I remem­ber them par­tic­u­larly well), who might have been plan­ning their dis­ap­pear­ances for years!

Or per­haps it was some­thing less glam­orous and far more depress­ing, like mount­ing debts and “a threat to him­self or a mem­ber of his family”.

Am I Really a Sports Jinx?

Back when I was work­ing at RIPE, I used to joke to my co-workers that I’m bad luck to any team that I root for. When the BC Lions were in the Grey Cup, some of them either dis­cour­aged me (or encour­aged me, depend­ing on their pref­er­ence) from watch­ing the game on TV, because some­how they would always win when I missed the game and lose when­ever I watched. It was almost uncanny how the act of observ­ing the game, like some sort of twisted Heisen­berg Prin­ci­ple, made the team lose.

This year, I didn’t watch a sin­gle game that the New Eng­land Patri­ots played in, except for one: The SuperBowl.

After win­ning every other game they played dur­ing the whole year, they lost this one game I watched in the last 35 sec­onds. It was prob­a­bly one of the biggest Super Bowl upsets in his­tory. In fact, ESPN.com is now hav­ing peo­ple rank and vote what they think are the biggest upsets in his­tory, and tonight’s Super Bowl XLII (42) is listed among the can­di­dates: (here’s a screen cap­ture for posterity:)

Oh, and by the way, after miss­ing their reg­u­lar sea­son, I also saw that ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series, when the Boston Red Sox lost to the New York Yan­kees, which is, nat­u­rally, in the list.

Note to self: If your team is play­ing, and you’ve not seen them play in any other game, and they’ve won every other game, be sure to watch them, and bet against them, big time, par­tic­u­larly if it’s any team from New Eng­land vs. New York. At least you can profit from the mis­for­tune you seem to emanate.