greetings from.... the good old U S of A

i'm back

i've written waaaaay too much in the past month, so brownie points if you've read even a respectable portion of it.

it's strange to be around only english again.

i have no idea what time zone my head is in right now. despite the fact that i was up for 24 hours straight while travelling (4am budapest time monday = 10pm eastern sunday) through the same time on (tuesday/monday), i still woke up at 3am ready to go this morning (that's 9am in budapest, the time i've been waking up for the past month)... luckily it wasn't hard to crash again until 7.... but now i'm up early and ready to have a stab being awake again.

the near future includes:
* a crazy day of running errands/paying bills/catching up on mail today
* tomorrow, i'm driving to pittsburgh (dude, what has the world done with gas prices while i've been gone?!?!) to hang out with my aunt priscilla the rest of the week. since my grandma died the first week i was in prague and i couldn't make it back for the funeral, she recorded it for me (and for my aunt debbee who was sick and couldn't get out of the hospital to come up from texas for the funeral either).... i'll watch the funeral with her at some point and visit my grandma's grave at some point before driving back to jersey on saturday.
(if this seems weird to you (watching a funeral on TV from a month ago), the way my family sees it is that funerals are for the living, not the dead. grandma is in heaven, and the purpose of a funeral is to help her family and friends deal with missing having her around in person and to celebrate the person that she was. this is a way for me to see the funeral for myself along with someone i love who also loved grandma a lot... i've managed to kind of just turn the emotions off for the past month, so this should be a good few days for helping me process the fact that grandma's gone, rather than ignore it.)
* school starts again next thursday. i have one class that's tuesday/friday, and a reading class with dr. z. (time TBA, but just once a week), and i teach on wednesdays. this means that as soon as i get back from pitt i have to change gears and get ready to start up with all that fun
* apparently nina and jessica (valpo friends) are coming up to visit me from SC and DE respectively next weekend... this should be fun. :)
* hopefully between all the "have to do" errands today, i'll manage to post the highlights of the 327 pictures i took in prague, and the 311 i took in budapest ;-)

time to get a move on...

later dudes :P