Life has a way of throwing curves, and mine certainly has. My wife of 11 years has become ill again, and in her illness, she has decided that we should no longer live together. We have been separated since April of 2008. It’s a truly trying time. I get up and go to work, I come home from one job and go to the other, and I wait for and cherish every minute that I get to spend with my girls.

I helped Scott move to the US. He lives just up the road a few miles from our Vermont house now. I don’t see him much anymore since I’m no longer working in tech and we’ve been out of the country for over a year, but I still read his stuff and I’m proud of the relationship we’ve had.

It’s funny, a couple of weeks back I followed a link from somewhere to the Rixstep site. I poked around and tried to figure out who the hell this guy was. He had an attitude that didn’t seem to make much sense to me. Most of the posts at his site smelled holier-than-thou, “I’m a unix guru and everyone else is moron.” I looked at a few of the utilities available and even downloaded one. As near as I could tell, virtually everything at his site already existed in some other, easier to use format. Most of it was fugly (much like the site itself). He had some asinine comment about how content was king at his site and that they wouldn’t mess up their content with unnecessary crap.

But it turns out, it isn’t his content. He’s stolen significant portions of it from Stepwise. Except for my own site, Stepwise is the only place where I’ve ever published anything. My content (First Year / 3400 Install) is on Stepwise (it’s pretty darn old–kind of like me–but it’s still there). The First Year piece was borrowed (with permission) by Apple to use as an introduction OpenStep technologies for pre-NeXT Apple engineers. Scott is thus my publisher, and now this asswipe at Rixstep is ripping off Scott, my publisher. Will my stuff be next?

I can assure you I will not ever be buying anything from Rixstep. Aside from the fact that most of it is useless, fugly reinterpretation of stuff that already exists, the guy is a thief (oh, and an asswipe, as I’ve already mentioned).

For years I used to dial in to a BBS system called the Jack-Mac-Attack that ran on a Lisa. It was pretty cool stuff back then….

Extra points if you recognize the actor in the above commercial.

When I’m late, I can feel my blood pressure rise, and I begin to sweat. I don’t like being late. I’ve had to learn to use breathing techniques to try to control my anxiety, and that day in addition to that, I was watching the store fronts and trying to take my mind off the fact that I was going to miss the start of my meeting.

It was curious. Virtually all of the screens were showing the same movie–some action/adventure flick that was obviously a remake of Towering Inferno. Except that more than one store seemed to showing the same movie…

We reached the intersection of 7th Avenue and 14th Street and all traffic came to a dead stop. I glanced down 7th and the movie turned out to be live action. North tower was spewing tons of smoke. I yelled at the driver to turn on the radio, and I, like hundreds of others around stepped out of their cars and cabs and stood staring down at the towers. Just after 9 am, South Tower was hit from the southern side and the north side of it exploded as we watched. The radio was still suggesting that it had been a small private plane that had hit north tower–all of us at the intersection of 7th at 14th knew differently.

For three days I stayed in a mid-town hotel overlooking Times Square, waiting for a way to get out of the city and back to Ana and Vermont. At 8am the next morning, Times Square, normally a sea of yellow cabs and 10s of thousands of people walking was virtually empty. Twenty four hours after the attacks, pieces of office paper still rained down from the skies; the sidewalks were gritty with ash. It was the calm after the apocalypse, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Todd was me in many respects. Every day I’d see him and in him see so much of what I once was: a reasonably bright kid from a small conservative town who knew that that which he knew as “normal” was by definition “right.” Anything that was different from that “norm” was “queer” (though now, my students say “gay”).

On several occasions I tried talking to Todd. I know that I hated “advice” when I was a young guy–I knew better after all–so Todd responded pretty much as I would have. He essentially rejected everything, but I still had to try. Instead of pushing advice, I basically made a few predictions for his future. That was pretty straightforward–just like reading my subtly modified autobiography to him. He didn’t seem to pay attention, but then neither did I when I was in a similar position.

Life, as it has a way of doing, stepped in both of our cases, and made it pretty clear that that certainty we held dear, was nothing but an illusion, and maybe even nothing more than a defense mechanism. In my case, I got on a plane to Central America to work as an archeologist. I learned directly what it was like to be the odd one living with a new “norm.” In Todd’s case, he blew out his knee and suddenly an elite military force was no longer an option.

Todd came to see me today now that I am back teaching. He’s been through some rough times with substance abuse, depression and thoughts of suicide. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Turns out he watched a man die–someone he tried to save but couldn’t. He came to tell me that when he took a couple of weeks off from work after the incident, he got in his car and drove with no destination in mind. He had a few bucks in the bank and found himself in the southwest. As he told me the story, he was lying on the hood of his car, watching the sun rise in New Mexico, and some of the things I had told him ran through his mind. Things that had happened to him since high school, mistakes he now realized he had made, and damn it, it all seemed to line up pretty closely with some of my predictions. He watched the sun rise, got back in his car, and drove home to Vermont and came to see me.

These moments in time with students and former students are the fuel which gets me out of bed at 5 am every day to prepare and review lessons. I earn 1/3 of what I used to make in the tech world, but today, Todd just made me the richest man in Vermont.

Leaving a place always generates ambivalent emotions. I am happy to be going home (even though I won’t be able to get into our house until the first of August. I’m looking forward to summer in Vermont, to getting back to work at the Inn and to mowing the lawn of my house (even if I can’t really get back inside). I am definitely looking forward to getting back to work at Fair Haven in the fall.

Of course I’m also sad to leave Spain. I love Spain (though as I’ve written before, I’m not crazy about Pamplona). Navarra is a beautiful province–similar geographically to Vermont. I love the history of this place. I love the small villages. I do wish people in Pamplona would smile once in a while at strangers. It’s easy to tell the immigrants–they’re the ones who smile back when I pass them on the street. Native Pamplonans only smile at people they already know–they frown at everyone else. It feels very cold to me.

I will miss the inexpensive, excellent wine. I will miss the pinchos. I will definitely miss excellent coffee in virtually every bar. I will miss bicycling to work (though I hope I never ever have to teach English again). I will miss all my Irish friends from ESIC–and Etienne as well, even though he’s from Gibralter… ;-)

I’m definitely looking forward to my night in Madrid on Sunday–my favorite city. I hope to make it to the Prado for the afternoon, and then I have tickets to the rejoneo (a type of bullfight on horseback–a beautiful thing). Un día guiri!

In just a few days I’m headed back to the US and I have a couple of months to buy two vehicles to replace the cars we sold before coming here. I’ve been doing some searching and while there are a few diesel vehicles in the US, they’re pretty rare. I’m really hopeful that I can find a diesel for myself. Given my commute in the US, in which I hit 60 miles per hour within 2 minutes of pulling out of my driveway, and maintain 60 miles an hour until 2 minutes before pulling into the parking lot at the school, a diesel would be the perfect commuter vehicle for me. Most of the models I’m seeing are getting 45 miles to the gallon of diesel, which would mean that I could get back and forth to work on one gallon of fuel instead of the two gallons it would take me on gasoline.

Why is the US so backwards with respect to transportation? Our trains suck and don’t go anywhere, and our cars suck gasoline. I guess I’m focussing on the many negatives of life in the US as my return date nears, but forgive me if I continue to think that the US could have the best if we’d only get our heads out of our asses and get rid of the repubtards permanently.