55 days

Back by popular demand, me! In less than 12 hours, I'm scheduled to depart Ashgabat, city of oddness, and begin my 24 hour journey home. Yes, 24 hours is a lot of travel time compared to the typical commute or even cross-country flight. But it's pretty amazing that I can go halfway around the world, crossing through 13 time zones, in less than a day. (No, running in a circle right at the North or South Pole does not count as crossing all the time zones!)

It will have been 55 days since I left by the time I step off the plane at SFO. Somehow, that seems inexplicably longer than saying nearly 8 weeks. And yet, 1,320 hours just seems nonsensical let alone 792,000 minutes or 4,752,000 seconds give or take a few thousand. This has been a long pull made longer by my relatively short time off last time, a series of difficult (and ongoing) operations for one client, and how few expats have been in the camp the last couple weeks. It really helps to have a good mix of people to hang out with after hours and it's just been a bit lacking lately. Plus, while I generally find Christmas/holiday parties to be terribly awkward, I'm still just a tinge bummed that I missed last Friday's party due to the canceled flight. At least I took in the hopefully once-in-a-lifetime experience of 11 hours on a train in Turkmenistan.

I'll be pretty busy my first roughly 32 hours back. Saturday night is theoretically open, but potentially subject to the whims of traffic. And after that, it's almost wide open beyond some planned new-unclage time. Perhaps some skiing, perhaps some lazing about, but definitely some Skrillex. Just kidding, I only listen to post-dubstep, whatever that is.