All good things come to an end. Unfortunately, life is not fair that way. And our big summer holiday is now over.

It was grand by any measure.

Total distance driven: 5106 miles.

Countries whose license plates we encountered along the way: 29.

Airports used on my hops to get back to London or to rejoin my ladies: 6.

Snapshots taken: 1085 (an average of only 25 shots a day, which shows that [a] we are awfully selective in what we photograph and [b] there were many lazy days spent entirely by the pool or on the beach with not a single photo being shot; the quality control will leave less than 40% of that number remaining, I’m sure).

Bad weather days, out of 44: 2 (on account of the mistral on the Riviera).

Bottles of various local wines imbibed: … sorry, I lost count after the first few days.

England welcomed us back with - what did you think? - leaden skies and a drizzle. There is a certain dose of relief in being home after a long adventure (notwithstanding the fact that we now firmly view this home of ours as “temporary”), but it is greatly tempered by the realization that I have no more vacation days left for the year. And not a single planned trip in our future.

As yet…

Following up on a comment by my good friend Artyom, here is an offshoot of one of my favorite Euro-pop bands, Modern Talking. Dieter Bohlen, the blond “backup” of the duo, was actually the composer of all of their material. He also groomed and wrote songs for CC Catch, among others.

I can’t say that she was ever much of a favorite of mine, but she certainly featured in discotheques frequently.

… and I’m off again, for the last time this year, it seems.

Arrivederci!

In the few days that I’ve been back home, I have tied loose ends at work, waded through piles of e-mails (both personal and business), caught up on my internet reading, watched a few movies from my PVR queue, ate some kebabs and doners, did one load of laundry - what’s up with that look you’re giving me!? - and generally prepared myself for another week in the holiday sun.

There was very little to report on as far as chronicling my busy life, which is why I’ve lately been mostly stealing other people’s content.

I’m regressing as a blogger again…

I catch glimpses of Olympic Games here or there on TV, but I look up results and commentary online regularly. Some of the assorted thoughts, below the fold.
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A number of people whose blogs I read have done this, so apologies for absence of credits. This is an online test that paints me in a whole new light.

Actually, it’s not that much off…

Your result for The Perception Personality Image Test…

NBPC - The Daydreamer

Nature, Background, Big Picture, and Color

Take The Perception Personality Image Test at HelloQuizzy

Reading through the backlog of my blog aggregator, I came across a meme that I could not pass by, courtesy of Jason.

The instructions:

1. Copy the list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2. Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3. Cross out any items that you would never consider eating (or eating again).
4. Optional extra: Post a comment at http://www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results. (The original list there provides links to Wiki articles on all of the less obvious items, which I decided not to replicate.)

When it comes to food, I am reasonably adventurous in trying almost anything once. However, there are food components and whole groups that I intensely dislike; knowing in advance that the food item contains one of those will keep me from trying it. My commentary to the items on the list reflect that.

The list - and some commentary - is below the fold.
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Man, I seriously hate England right now! It is becoming a nagging refrain this summer, but sunny skies and hot but bearable temperatures see me off at our latest stop - this time, in Tuscany, - and overcast and cold weather is what greets me in the Blighty. Heavy rain started when I was literally 50 meters away from the house. It must be a not-so-subtle hint of something…

Actually, I am told that so far it has rained every day in August in England.

Tuscany, as I noted in the past, is a strong contender for the top spot among my most favorite places. And the villa near the not-very-remarkable town of Montespertoli appears to be the first “hired” lodging (business trips excluded) that we purposefully returned to in our travels. Everything there is just as we remembered from the last year. The view. The weather. The people. The food. The wine…

A proprietor of a nearby family restaurant greeted us with “Ritornato!” (”You’re back!”). I can’t imagine that this is how he greets everyone, so we took it at the face value that he truly recognized us from the couple of meals that we’d had there last year. All the more surprising - and delightful! - given that the restaurant fills up to the seams every night of the week.

The Tuscan sea shore is too far away from Montespertoli to make beach-going practical, but the villa has a large pool shared with just one other neighboring house. The French family which is renting that villa keeps mostly to itself, so we have virtually a private pool at our disposal. Lounging by the pool - with occasional breaks to watch some of the excellent Italian Olympics coverage - occupied most of our days so far; in the evenings, we have been making leisurely excursions to nearby towns, from the familiar favorite of San Gimignano to the not previously visited Greve-in-Chianti.

Good times are going to get even better, with the arrival of a family of friends from the States. The kids are good friends, which should allow the parents relative freedoms.

With that in mind, I am changing my plans again, just as I did on the Spanish leg. Instead of re-joining the family for just the latter half of the next week (which would basically mean vacationing for just two more days and then driving home for the next two), I am re-joining them this Saturday. When we planned the whole trip months ago, we neglected to account for the Summer Bank Holiday this coming Monday; the original plan, therefore, would have me in office for just two days next week after spending the long weekend by my sad lonesome. I’d rather use my remaining vacation days on Tuesday and Wednesday - which means not a single vacation day left this year as of end of August. Oh well, what it is that they say? Carpe Diem!

Another one of my stand-alone favorites. I’m lukewarm about the movie, I’d be hard pressed to name another song by Bryan Adams that I know and like, but You know it’s true: Everything I do, I do it for you struck a chord with me the first time I heard it. The music is not half bad either.

No specific memories are associated with this song. It’s simply one of the select few: If I come across it on a radio station, I wouldn’t turn the dial.

With that, I am off again for a week. Back to Riviera, and soon to Tuscany.

Ciao!

Becky has been pestering me for quite a while to dye my hair black - she thinks I’m way past looking distinguished with all of that gray, and now just look old. So I bought Just for Men dye and tried it last night.

Amateur that I am, I realized a couple of things only after concluding the process.

One, it is not a single-person exercise. I can’t see the sides well and I obviously can’t see the back at all, so it becomes a bit of a guesswork as to whether enough of the stuff has been lathered into those areas.

Two, the smart approach would be to do this in daylight. A small mirror is bad enough, but coupled with inadequate lighting, it makes the entire process too error-prone.

The results are underwhelming. I managed to get the top look reasonably black, but there is enough gray left on the sides to expose this a hack job. And I have no idea how I might look from the back.

Behold!

My friend Brian has a rather illustrative commentary on the relationship our leading politicians have with the economy.

I urge you to head over and read for yourselves, but here is a quick summary.

When President Bush lifted the executive ban on off-shore drilling a month ago, he was soundly scorched from the left for catering to the big oil. In fact, that entirely political gesture has arguably contributed to the drop in oil prices, because, as Brian posits, oil markets these days are driven by investor sentiment as much as, if not more than, consumer demand. In the ensuing tussle to find political advantage from this, neither of the two presidential candidates is distinguishing himself for recognizing what drives the markets.

As Brian says,

… when the guy who got it wrong changes course and then tells us he still thinks he got it right, and the guy who got it right seems to be unaware of why he was right in the first place, my confidence in both men drops significantly, as does my ability to trust their next, dire predictions about the world economy.

I second that.

I hate to disappoint people waiting for recent pictures from us, but they are unlikely to appear until some time in September. We, as a rule, post photos only after our resident Photoshop maestro, Natasha, had a chance to apply some improving touches to frequently already brilliant shots, and in her absence, I feel neither empowered nor qualified to muck around with all of those Curves, Shadows/Highlights, Channel Mixers and what-have-you’s…

Actually, the only pictures I could post would be the ones from our pre-holiday outing to the Windsor Castle (yes, a single unedited picture was included in that post, but that’s my limit for exposing our “raw” photographic material). I am not about to lug my laptop with me to France to transfer current holiday pictures from the flash card.

And as far as the Windsor pictures go, there are a few with me in it, looking… how do I put this nicely?… portlier than I want to appear in public. I simply do not have the wherewithal to make myself slimmer in Photoshop. As a result, everyone will have to wait for a while for new images from us.

Sorry.

I did watch a couple of hours of Olympics today, and at some point it hit me: BBC shows them commercial-free, except for one or two promotional clips of upcoming BBC programs. Add in the fact that the multi-screen option allows me to pick from among several concurrent feeds on a single channel, and I am almost ready to forgive BBC being the reason for the abominable TV license.

How’s NBC treating American viewers these Games?

WordPress is tailor-made for customization once you have the layout of your page pinned down. Then, you only have to play around with your stylesheet parameters to get your site looking just as you want it.

It gets a bit more annoying if you decide to expropriate someone else’s theme as your new look and feel. Swapping stylesheet files has almost no chance of working, since class names are likely to be different; there are no established standards for those. And taking the entire theme from the library likely means that you’ll have to go through every single component to customize the layout to your tastes.

Still, it does not take much fiddling. A breeze, in other words. I got tired of my Travelog theme and replaced it with a new one today. I was not going for spectacular, nor even catchy, since the Travelog is primarily an archive, and I don’t care to have any bells or whistles there. The exercise of starting with a new theme and customizing it for simple “info look” took barely an hour. I consider it a credit to WordPress.

Surprising myself, I had a stretch of watching a movie roughly every other day in the first half of July.

I am not too keen on watching movies piecemeal, and my usual daily itinerary rarely leaves a two-hour block to watch one of our DVDs or one of the recordings accumulating on my PVR. Late at night, when the kids retire to their bedrooms, Natasha and I are more likely to watch a recorded episode of one of our favorite US TV dramas than a movie. We, maybe, get to watch 4-5 movies a month. But in early July, Natasha was occupied with our visiting dignitaries and worked through the photos that we kept shooting, so I regularly found myself left to my own devices after 10pm or so. Since my PVR archive contains mostly movies that I doubt Natasha has any interest in watching, I started to work through it a little.

I revisited old favorites such as Midnight Run and one of the few comparatively recent movies that I had actually managed to watch in a theater before, The Bourne Ultimatum (which I like the best of the trilogy). I also watched several titles for the very first time. The following are brief impressions.
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The Olympic opening ceremony is about to start, and I realize that for the first time since I became actively aware of the wonderful medium of television I will not be watching Olympic Games that much.

It’s not because I’ve always felt it was an irresponsible acquiescence to award the Games to an oppressive regime. (I already vented about it once.) I still feel that way, but I also feel that boycotting the Games, whether from participation standpoint or watching standpoint, is downright pointless.

It’s not because I find watching delayed coverage less exciting than the live one. I do, but it did not keep me away from enjoying Games held in Seoul or Sydney or elsewhere not in my timezone. (And let’s keep aside any discussion about the past atrocious coverages of the various Games by NBC.)

It’s not because I am always a bit conflicted whether to root for the country of my birth or the country that I love. With both of them always among the strongest contenders for the overall athletic supremacy, - as reflected in the medal counts - the mixed feelings are always there, but I truly normally manage to resolve them - by rooting for both, when possible, of course.

It’s simply because Olympics is one sporting event that I always enjoy watching together with Natasha. And for the next two weeks, we are going to be either on our holiday (surely, not much of the TV time is budgeted as part of that) or apart while I stay on my own in London. Some might say that I have a perfect opportunity to veg out in front of the TV - and I will certainly attempt to try it over the weekend - but it’s just not the same for me to watch the Olympics in solitude.

The damn Games are making me feel more lonely!

[upd] I find it a bit spooky that my Olympic rant linked to above was posted on 07/07/07, while this one appeared on 08/08/08. I’m guessing I have to schedule some Olympic-related discussion for September 9th of the next year…

I practically cried…

Disclaimer: The level of obscenity contained herein, both in English sound and in Russian subtitles, exceeds what I normally post on my blog. Not for children. Viewers beware.

Via.

If anyone cares how the call limit debacle ended, feel free to look below the fold to learn how it surprisingly concluded to my [almost] entire satisfaction.
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In my experience, it does not happen as often as people loudly talking on their mobile phones on public transport, but it is no less annoying: People singing along to whatever they listen to on their mp3 players.

Actually, such performances can almost never be classified as singing.

As mentioned before, I am temporarily taking the bus route to work. This morning I sat down in the near vicinity of a grandmotherly-looking African woman, who was quietly knitting. To my surprise, as soon as I opened my magazine, she started humming a tune, first softly and then with more and more conviction. At some point, she put aside the knitting, pressed her hands to her ears (at which point I noticed the headphone wires framing her head) and proceeded to emit sounds that I can charitably call death-throes moaning for good five minutes.

She was so obviously in a state of rapture that I did not deign to ask her to stop (not that I ever ask cell-phone talkers to cease and desist - I attempted to analyze this fairly inexplicable behavior on my part here). I did move a few rows away - the bus was thankfully far from full at that juncture.

The woman rode all the way to the final stop, which was my destination as well, treating all around her to an encore a handful of times on a 50-minute ride…

In most sports that I follow, besides rooting for a favorite home team, I have individual favorite players, whose teams transitively get my allegiance as well. For instance, I’ve been partial in the past to the Detroit Red Wings because of all the Russian players on their roster or the Utah Jazz while John Stockton was playing.

I started following American football in mid-nineties, right around the time that Brett Favre came into his own as one of the best players in the NFL. I liked the way he visibly enjoyed playing, so much so that he quickly became my favorite football player. I’ve always since said that I root for the Green Bay Packers. But I do have a requisite home team that I root for as well, the New York Jets. And to my utter delight, I learn today that my hands-down favorite player is coming to play for my home team.

Wow! I don’t think this has ever happened to me before. Alex Rodriguez to the Yankees does not really count - that was the best player in the game coming to my home team, rather than my most favorite (despite all of Rodriguez’s personal achievements, he has never merited as much esteem in my eyes as Derek Jeter).

I’m all aflutter (although you hopefully would not notice that by observing me just now).

By the way, Kostyan, sleep easy. I no longer despise the Chicago Bears

I received a package today from my UCF friend Janiece. Since I am pretty sure that everyone else in the group had received theirs ahead of me (I am one of only two “offshore” members of the club, and the other person is “near offshore”), I can safely divulge what her Super Secret UCF project was: A T-shirt with the UCF logo on the front and personalized member blog address on the back. I’m wearing it as I type this.

Janiece, I’m speechless and a bit embarrassed that I cannot think of a way to get back at you.
You rock!
Many thanks!

[update] It turns out that a US-originated delivery to Canada - and to a couple of Stateside addresses, as well! - takes longer than a delivery to the UK. Cheers for Royal Mail!