Work and walking tours

A little amusement, first:  dmmaus and I were discussing a problem he came up with if whether it's possible to take a walking tour of Europe such that you skip no nation, and enter each nation only once.  To cut a long story short, it eventually appears to be the case that such a tour is possible, provided you define it as a walking tour of every secular nation in contiguous continental Europe.  You may cross only bodies of water that you can cross on foot.

Starting in Portugal, you travel to Spain, Andorra, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark.  You time your trip to arrive there in the dead of winter, because your next move is to walk across the frozen Skagerrak to Sweden, then continue to Norway and Finland before walking across the ice again to Estonia, then continue on to Russia.  (Why don't you just go to Russia first, then to Estonia, instead of walking across the ice?  Because the place you need to go to from Russia is Georgia, and if you don't go to Georgia now, you won't get another chance.)  From Georgia you continue to Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Moldava, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia (wave at Estonia again), Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, and end your trip in San Marino.  (Why, by the way, did we specify 'secular nation'?  Because otherwise, from Italy, you have to travel both to San Marino and to Vatican City, but you can't pass through Italy again to get from one to the other.)

OK, enough of that.  Now that your feet are all sore and you're out three pairs of shoes (but hey, think of how much fitter you are now!), it's time to get on to the serious news.

For those of you who haven't heard, on Tuesday I signed paperwork with Ceva DSP in San Jose, California, for a three-month contract-to-permanent position (actually, a little under three months).  I've actually been working at Ceva since Tuesday of last week, but the contract paperwork got delayed.  Tomorrow, I get my first paycheck since August 2001.  With any luck, by the end of this weekend, I'll have a more permanent place to live, and Sandy and Martin can have their living room floor back.  cymrullewes and I aren't quite certain yet what her next move is; she might get an Americorps volunteer position in Vermont that she badly wants, she might get a position at the Internet Archive, or she might just join me out here in California and go back to school to finish her master's degree.  Hopefully we'll know a little more on a couple of those options in the next few days, but I have to observe that in our dealings with Americorps thus far, they seem to have a history of dropping the ball or changing their minds at the last minute.  (Some of you might recall the Americorps position in Lakewood, Washington, which I was offered earlier this year, then the coordinator went ahead and hired someone else during the couple of days he'd given me to think it over.  I don't know about you, but I still think that was pretty shabby.)

Anyway, one way or the other, things are looking up finally.  The light at the end of the tunnel wasn't an oncoming train, it was daylight.