Not that it’s really been a bad year. Hell, I made it out to Costa Rica, China, and North Korea, so 2009 was quite fantastic. Except for one slight, uh, problem. A few weeks ago I was laid off from my job and am now unemployed. But more on that later, because I have to run away to Europe for about three weeks.

In a few hours I’m off to Dulles airport, where I will board a plane bound for London and then hop another flight to Berlin. My family and I will be in Berlin for a few days, then take the train to Prague, spend a few days there, and then travel to Vienna. I’ve never been to Berlin or Vienna and am very much looking forward to finally seeing these two cities. And of course, Prague is a lovely place with copious amounts of beer and dumplings. I will also be spending a week in London to catch up with old friends and wander around a city I haven’t spent a proper amount of time in since 2005.

I’ll be back in 2010, with plenty of photos and blog entries. At least now I actually have time to write them.

I ditched Movable Type and am now using WordPress for this blog. I wish I had switched sooner, as WP is a million times better than MT. The installation was incredibly easy and the wide variety of WP plug-ins have simplified many tasks that were a major pain in the ass with MT. I just have a bit of housekeeping to do with some older posts, but once that is done you can expect some new ones.

I made a bunch of new banners because I’ve had the same ones for, like, two years or something. They’ll show up eventually, you’ll just have to keep refreshing or whatev.

I would probably say “dude” more often, though.

I am an idiot. When I was a student at LSE, my friends who were studying finance kept telling me that I should work in finance. I told them that finance sounded really boring and that I actually knew nothing about finance. They told me that it didn’t matter if I knew nothing about finance, I should just apply. But I didn’t, because I wanted to work in the oil & gas industry. After reading this article, however, it is apparent that I made the wrong choice. Instead of working for an industry that actually, you know, provides the energy that runs the world while managing to turn a profit and not completely fuck up the world economy, I should have gone to work for Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank or whatev, and then received a pink slip so I could travel the world and fulfill my dream of climbing Mt. Everest:

When Deutsche Bank determined that strategist Rod Manalo was, in the merciless language of hard times, “redundant,” it was an abrupt and humbling end to a seven-year career in finance.
But Manalo, 30, has not been trudging the gray streets of London where he was based looking for work. This week, he was in the sun-drenched Brazilian resort city of Florianopolis, taking surfing lessons and dancing in throbbing nightclubs amid Carnival revelers. That was after he had snowboarded in the Alps, golfed in Florida and prepared for a year-long world journey that he expects will take him to the Amazon, Antarctica, Australia and beyond.

[...]

Among such Type A tourists, there is often more going on than daiquiri-sipping or hammock-swinging. Take Alex Iscoe, a 28-year-old Toronto native who resigned from Goldman Sachs last May as the financial storm clouds were gathering. Recently, he was in London, hooked up to a machine that simulates the depleted oxygen conditions of high-altitude peaks, part of his training regimen to climb the highest mountain on each of the world’s seven continents, something only about 230 people have done.

Well, that sounds like fun. I’ll be daydreaming of climbing Mt. Everest while sitting in my cubicle tomorrow, wondering how I can manage to scrounge up the $65,000 to actually do so.

Ah, 2008. What the hell did I do in 2008? Well, I moved out of D.C. and into the Commonwealth of Virginia, traveled to Denver, Texas (San Antonio and Houston a few times), New York City (three freakin’ trips), and the Outer Banks in North Carolina. I also toured an oil refinery, campaigned in both real and fake Virginia, and saw Obama give his last speech of the campaign in Manassas, VA on the evening of November 3rd.

But really, two things stand out in 2008. First, after two years of working for the natural gas pipeline industry, I landed a new job working for the petroleum industry. I had originally planned to move to Houston and look for a job there, but when this opportunity came up I decided against it. For one, I really didn’t want to risk just quitting my job and moving to a new city. In retrospect, this appears to be a good decision, considering the current economic climate. Anyways, at my new job I get to work on interesting issues and do cool stuff like make maps with ArcGIS, so I am pretty content.

Second, I finally moved into my own apartment. Yeah, no more roommates, as I could finally afford to have my own place (albeit, it’s a small 490 square foot studio, but still, it’s all mine). I live in Arlington (Pentagon City, to be exact) in a hulking 1960s era apartment building that wouldn’t be out of place in the outer suburbs of Moscow, and I’m loving it. I’m so glad to finally be out of Columbia Heights (and I am constantly reminded of this whenever I hear news of drive-by shootings a block from my former house) and living in NoVA. Pentagon City is a perfect location. Almost everything I need is within walking distance and I’m a 15 minute, straight shot metro ride to work.

Since moving to Arlington, I can’t say I really despise the D.C. area any longer. In fact, I hardly ever complain about it (ok, I still bitch about the cold weather, but I’m a Californian, so it’s to be expected) and am expecting that I’ll be here for quite a while longer. And you know, I’m perfectly fine with that. A ton of my GW friends are here, and I’ve made some amazing new friends over the past three years as well. And while I love California, I am consistently amazed by the unspoiled beaches in Maryland (Assateague) and North Carolina. I imagine I’ll be spending plenty of summer weekends there.
So yeah, I’ve got nothin’ to complain about here.

More on the Inauguration later…

Sounds like fun. And you probably get a ton of free avocados!:

Luxury suites. Shopping sprees. Four-star hotels. Such was life in the high-flying world of the California Avocado Commission.

That, at least, is the image presented by a blistering report released last week by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, which painted the commission, a state-established trade group financed by growers, as a kind of free-spending, avocado-gone-wild farm party.

Indeed, even as the state’s avocado farmers suffer through one of their worst slumps in memory, the audit showed that commission employees were buying season tickets for the Los Angeles Angels and hockey’s Mighty Ducks; getting paid gym memberships, complete with stipends for vitamins and workout clothes; and running up large clothing bills.

Seriously, $2.79 for ONE Hasse avocado from Mexico? That’s insane.
Meanwhile, I filled up the XTerra for $25.72 today. Nice.

Via gchat:

Adam: your blog is sad

it needs someone to care for it

if it were a digital pet, it would be dead