Diary of a Mad Scientist

I’ve been traveling like a madman this month. I started off Jan 1st by flying to Oakland to start dealing with my crosscountry move. I’m halfway through the required organizing and sellings-off and so forth. I had a class in Ohio last weekend, and had a fairly major health crash due to moving, and didn’t get done with the moving hell.

I flew back to RDU, drove home in time to pack for class and sleep, drove a gasoline car to the Ohio class 6 hours away, taught class, explored West Virginia a little on the way home, drove the gasoline car back south to my long-time friends’ house on the NC-Virginia line, spent a couple of days there decompressing with these ‘family’, headed to Pittsboro to unload the class crap, saw my room for all of 20 minutes, got on another Jet-A fossil-fueled plane and headed back across country to Oakland. It was snowing in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pittsboro. It was snow-free in Mt Airy but 10 degrees F, where I was sandwiched between snowy drives.

And I’m now in California again. I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, my luck will bring me that disposable truck I’m looking for- which would mean that I’ll be driving my shop stuff across country in the middle of early Febuary winter weather. I found myself walking across an overheated Southern California airport on a layover, carrying my winter insulated coveralls and a winter coat shoved into a stuff sack (I’m traveling without checked baggage these days, since this travel is more like going from one home to the next rather than taking a trip that requires bringing anything). I had to bring the gigantic winter gear in case I’m driving an 80’s Ford on a crosscountry winter wonderland adventure next month. More than once in the last two weeks I’ve found myself waking up confused about where I am- especially since my California experience involved a few friends whom I know as New Yorkers, not Californians, and I’ve been to too many places in the last 2.5 months for the state of health I’m in.

I don’t have a return flight yet.

This feels a bit like I’m unnaturally teleporting around the universe, I’ve seen too many regions and weathers in less than one week, and it’s dizzying and disorienting. I mentioned to an online friend in the solar industry that all the travel I’m doing has used up any fossil carbon that my biodiesel students saved through whatever I taught them. He’s in the nonprofit world promoting solar energy, and responded that they call that kind of travel for the cause “offsetting the offset.”

I started off today in Oakland by sleeping in a friend’s dark windowless cave-room till 4:30 pm, which means that by Eastern Standard Time I managed to stay down till 7:30 at night.

The last visit to Oakland was absolutely insane, I was trying to get everything done by the 16th, had the Lyme treatment Herxheimer Reaction from hell, failed miserably to get the move done, and this time around I’m going to take it a bit slower and actually have a social life again. Somewhere in all the remaining moving, buying of my theoretical disposable truck (I hope), selling of things, car repairing and rebuilding, and paid work, I have a bunch of work to do with the last of the gas chromatograph setup. Friends are coming out of the woodwork in response to my Twitter and other posts and my ‘dance card’ is filling up pretty quickly too, I should have slightly better balance to my life next week than I’d had for a few months.