Author: koalie

dulliciously smug

[This post originally appeared in Dullicious, where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years.]

schol·ar n.

  1. A learned person.
  2. A specialist in a given branch of knowledge: a classical scholar.
  3. One who attends school or studies with a teacher; a student.
  4. A student who holds or has held a particular scholarship.

I’ll be that. Yeah-huh! Isn’t it awesome?!

One day I’ll start a sentence with “oh, when i was at MIT as a visiting scholar…”

I’m *so* thrilled! Not really by the fact that MIT will host me as a “Visiting Scholar”, but by the wonderful opportunity! I’ll be closer to Amy (yay!), I’ll change venue, do new stuff (although workwise I’ll do exactly the same things), freeze in the Massachusetts winter, have truck food for lunch, I’ll have as many Starbucks Coffee caramel macchiato as I want (and I’ll want a *lot*), etcetera, etcetera 🙂

Visited 19 countries (8%)

[This post originally appeared in Dullicious, where I blogged as Barbie-dull for several years.]

map of countries, the one I visited coloured in red

2 more! so I updated my own map: + Estonia, + Finland.

19 countries visited, 8%.

Last time I wrote about travel, back in July, I had no idea I’d have the opportunity to spend a week in Estonia and Finland.

And just a week ago another opportunity arose! So I’ll travel to Boston in a few days now and I’ll stay there for 3 months. Lucky me for being able to work from anywhere.

I’m sooper psyched!

Less than impressed

I have been trying to close my accounts in a given bank since September 2005. I really thought that it was taken care of. Nope.

Mid-July I received a letter from them including the last letter I wrote them at the end of April. I had been advised at the local bank branch to enclose my credit card (that I had cut in halves, cutting right through the chip) and the blank checks too. So this letter is back. Just my letter, and theirs! Their letter says they could not close my account given that a life insurance account was still linked to it. They instructed that I meet with the local bank branch person. Again?!.

This life insurance account is closed of course. It took me months to close it and numerous phone calls and visits at the local branch of the bank.

I’m already bored writing this post! Let’s wrap it quickly. After sending my last letter, I followed the advice of my new bank and emptied the bank account I’m trying to close (after all the others linked accounts were eventually closed). Given that they just charged me the trimester fee for service (that I have stopped using back in September), my balance is now negative.

I wonder how long it will be till I’m definitely done with them. Also, it would be nice to get a refund of the service fees, all of them for the past 11 months.

Life is the only game in town

There is this card game that I’ve been playing on my pda for 5+ years. It’s a solitaire. Railroad. Not every game is winnable.

Considering that every time I deal the cards for a new game the score goes down 52 points and every time I move a card to the foundation stacks the score increases by 10, my goal is to move up at least 6 cards.

There are games which delight me. “ooh! lovely, more than I expected” and “ooh! excellent, far more than I expected. Maybe I’ll win this one”.

And there are games which make me frown and sometimes sulk.“hmpf! just one card up?” and “oh no! so close to 6!”.

And of course there are situations when I have to choose between two actions. There is no “undo”, naturally. In which case, it will either delight me or make me frown.

I’ve played around 15000 games (wow, that’s an average of 10 per day!) and only 3 times was there the situation when I deal the cards and the game is instantly lost. An on very few occasions was there only one thing to do before losing the game.

Anyway, where I was getting at is that over the last few days two notable things occured. While I was listening to a song I noticed in the lyrics something like “life is a game and love is the trophy” which made me nod and mutter “hmm-huh”. and while browsing the web later I paid particular attention to the following words about life “yeah, life is messy but it’s the only game in town”. I was reminded of those last night when I played the cards game. In fact, when I was happy to score a lot, I thought I would like to feel likewise about the other *game*. Heh, maybe get a trophy as well!.