Events

A good friend woke up this morning to find her email and Facebook accounts hacked, with a message sent out to everyone in her address book that she'd been robbed at gunpoint while visiting London and desperately needed a credit card to get on the plane back home. Other than the story's baseline implausibility (a gun robbery in London being about as likely as getting trampled by a moose in Atlanta), there were other clues it was a phisher. For one thing, my friend is an American lawyer, not a Nigerian...

In the past seven calendar days[1], I have worked 40.3 hours[2], traveled 39.8 hours through four countries and six states, and, so far as I can tell, slept for about 40 hours. I am not sure what happened in the remaining few minutes, though part of it included walking Parker and part of it included staring into space dazedly. Fortunately traveling wasn't entirely wasted time, including as it did four episodes of This American Life and two complete novels. This is all a long way of saying I apologize...

The first day or so back is always hectic and exhausting. I still marvel that the 11½-hour time change from India was easier than the 9-hour change from St. Petersburg (or, come to think of it, the 8-hour change from Dubai.) I'm still getting back into my life, so I'll end here, but for this non-sequitur: I have t oget these cookies.

AY005, HEL-JFK (start to finish); Kindle

LaGuardia Airport; Kindle

The monument to the heroes of the seige of Leningrad: Like this guy, a hero from a different era, Alexander Pushkin: Finally, a propos of none of the above, one more photo of the hotel. This is just before dawn at 4 am:

Ah, the quandry. Quandries, in fact: there are two. The biggest is that it's 4:30am in St. Petersburg but only 7:30pm in Chicago. I need to be back on Chicago time by Tuesday morning. Thus, I'm staying up very late in order to remain conscious at work in three days. I hope it works. The other is that I took some photos of my classmates at the end-of-term party tonight, but I haven't secured permission for general publication yet. On Facebook, only Dukies and my family can see the Duke photos (if I've...

The Culture Dash took me back to Kazan Cathedral today, only this time, I went inside: