Getting ready for the road home..

Our group tested our host's "out by 7 pm" rule last night, trying to get as much as possible done before breaking up for the day at 7:20 pm. I do believe I detect a pattern emerging in the end client's approach to getting things done.

Dinner was at the beer house we visited the other night, and I ordered sushi to go with my Leffe brune. After we paid the bill, someone suggested going off to look for a jazz club reputed to be in the area, but I broke away and went back to the hotel.

It is interesting to reflect on my thought processes in considering the theme of "mistaken identity" set as the challenge for this week's installment of LJ Idol. First was my reaction to the way the subject was presented in the challenge announcement:

How many times have you thought you recognized someone only to find out that you were wrong? How many times have other people thought that of you? Heck, it happens quite often online due to people with icons that look alike.

Years of working as an engineer and computer programmer - and as a translator, too, I suppose - have trained my mind to think along pretty literal paths, so my first reaction was to read the challenge pretty literally. And although there have been rare occasions when I've noticed that someone or an image of someone looks like someone else, I never recalled anything coming of it, at least nothing noteworthy.

Reading a few of the early entries helped unlimber my mind a bit, and after about a day, I had imagined a way to "twist" the topic around to suit my needs (read: to write about something I wanted to write about that was almost, but not quite, what was called for), when suddenly - for no reason at all, except that my subconscious had been processing stuff in the background - I recalled an incident in my life where it wasn't so much that my identity had been mistaken, but that it had not been part of the picture at all, except in my own mind.

I was walking along outside, coming back from the Пузата Хата two mornings ago and mentally outlining how the piece would go, when it occurred to me that the incident I had recalled would juxtapose nicely with the events of this week's actual entry, which the long-time reader of my LJ will recognize as an expanded and more polished version of those events that I wrote about nearly four years ago.

It occurs to me that this is an example of a technique often used to break out of mental ruts, for example, in brainstorming. Another example is the trick of starting to write about anything at all as a way of overcoming writer's block. In any event, I'm glad I didn't take the easy way out and declare this to be my "bye" week.

Despite the long hours (more than 40 over four days), it's been a pleasant visit to Dnepropetrovsk. I hope to come back again.

I need to do one more quick pass through my inbox and then go upstairs and pack. With any luck, I ought to be back home later today.

Cheers...

Home again!

It's been something of a long day, but I am home again, and it's good to be back!

The day went pretty much as scheduled, and I appear to have caught up on all of the lost sleep of the past few days. I slept during the hop from Dnepropetrovsk to Kiev, during the leg from Kiev to Frankfurt, and for most of the flight back to the States. The process involved three security checks, too, one for the domestic Ukraine flight, the second for the international flight leaving Ukraine, and a third to accommodate US requirements leaving Frankfurt.

Of the two connections, the one in Frankfurt had me a little worried, as I only had 85 minutes between landing and takeoff, and I had been warned that the security line could be a major time sink, but as it turned out, pretty much all of the passengers on my flight had already gone through the check quite a while previously.

We taxied for nearly half an hour after landing at JFK, which I tried to be calm about, but as it turned out, my whole flow from deplaning, through passport control, luggage pickup, Customs, and the AirTrain put me in great position for the next LIRR diesel for Oyster Bay.

There doesn't seem to be anything in the email that I can do about right now, and I'll have to try to rest tomorrow for what promises to be a pretty intensive bilateral meeting next week.

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The voting in LJ Idol this week is limited to members of the LJ Idol community. If you're a member (or will become one at therealljidol to help support your favorite traveling interpreter), the poll is located here.

Cheers...