That Christmas Eve feeling

Less than two weeks from today I will be in the air, heading for San Francisco Airport.  As the point of departure approaches, I am experiencing a feeling which I normally associate with the days before Christmas: the sense of being burdened by a huge list of things which must be accomplished before Christmas Day (or in this case, departure day, 1 September 2013).

 

The things on my list have been numerous and varied.  I have to fix the doors on the new kitchen cupboards (only partially achieved as of yesterday).  I have to paint the entire front of the house (totally unrealistic but nagging at me).  I have to tidy the garage, and the shed, and the airing cupboard, and the loft, and the study.  I have to finish building bookcases in the study, transfer books from the landing, and take the old bookcases to a suitable charity shop.  I have to purchase new equipment for a camping trip in 2014.  I have to plan modifications to the chicken run, research the techniques and materials on the internet, order the materials from Screwfix.  And so it goes on.

At the same time there are genuinely pressing tasks to achieve (get new prescription sunglasses, get prescription for three months of asthma medicine, make sure I have a passport, a visa, currency etc).  And thankfully I am slowly managing to get these things done, despite the voices in my head telling me to paint the kitchen ceiling.

But despite being perfectly well aware that I don't have time to do all the jobs I have put off for months (or years in some cases), I keep getting that nagging feeling, just like the voice that tells me on December 24 to drive to the Trafford Centre and buy stuff I don't need.  I know I have to ignore the voice, but at some strange detached level I observe myself and wonder why I feel this compulsion to tidy, organise, repair and decorate?

It would be nice to pretend that this is a desire to make sure my family have an ideal living environment while I am away, but I suspect the truth is a lot more selfish.  I am going to spend three months in a rented apartment, without my power tools or most of my stuff.  I feel safe in places I own and can control, so when faced with an enforced period in a strange place beyond my control, my urge to exert power over the house and bring order everywhere at once goes into overdrive (massively exceeding my time, energy and budget).

It occurs to me however that there is another useful parallel with Christmas to hang on to.  The clichéd message of most Christmas films is that relationships with family and friends is more important than the material preparations for Christmas Day, and that message also adapts itself quite well to my current situation.  So I am trying to ensure I see as many of my friends and family members and spend some quality time with them before I go.  That is more important than cleaning the shed which will still be full of spiders when I come back.  Of course I am now faced with another unpalatable truth - I have many friends that I see so rarely that they are unlikely to notice I have left the country for three months!  Unless of course I go on about it endlessly on Facebook…

First Post...

I have never kept a blog before, but my three month secondment to Palo Alto seems like the perfect opportunity to start.

I suppose the first question I have to address is why I am writing this. Blogs have always seemed to me the ultimate in vanity publishing, an opportunity (in some cases at least) for people to broadcast their opinions to the world, regardless of whether the world is interested. So if I start writing one it is either because I now think I have something of interest to say or because I am a vain hypocrite.

I know what I DON't want to do:

I don't want to keep a spiritual journal or produce a prayer letter: after all, I am going to California as a tax lawyer, not as a missionary. I think most people who know me know I am a Christian, if they don't I am definitely doing something wrong: (after all, one of the main rules of "Fight the Good Fight Club" is that we DO talk about "Fight the Good Fight Club"). It may be that some of my observations relate to differences between my experience of church in California and my experiences at home; it may be that some of my readers are praying people who feel that prayer would be an appropriate response to something I have said, in which case I would be delighted if they would pray. But I am not going to produce prayer points or sermons, not in this forum anyway.

This blog is not going to be exclusively or even principally about life as a tax lawyer in California. For one thing the average reader finds it hard to get excited about tax (most tax lawyers rarely approach a state that could be described as excitement, least of all at work). And how would I pitch it? I'm not my employer's spin doctor, I don't want to present an unrealistically glowing picture of my work life that can be quoted in the in-house newsletter. But I am not going to produce an anonymous exposé of the firm's seedy under-belly either: for one thing I don't want to hide behind a mask of anonymity (and let's face it, there aren't so many Manchester based tax lawyers being seconded to California at any given time as to make it difficult to identify both me and the firm) and for another thing, I don't suppose its under-belly is particularly seedy, if indeed it has one.

I am not writing a diary or a travelogue. Many days will be spent sitting in an air-conditioned box for hours on end reading tax books and writing emails, I may not go anywhere new and I may not have anything to say, and that's OK, I only want to write when something strikes me as interesting.

I will try to avoid too many jokes at the expense of American English. Yes, I am sure I will have to do a lot of "reaching out" and "circling back" which always sounds more like an aerobics class than it actually is, but I will have to limit myself to commenting on one Americanism a week.

And I won't post any Glee spoilers, because my daughters wouldn't like it, and it has been spoiled quite enough recently by the shock revelation that Cory Monteith was not only a drug addict but was also the oldest actor to pretend to be a high school student since Olivia Newton John in 1978.

So what am I left with? I think my aim is to share as much of my experience as I can with all my friends. One of life's greatest pleasures is to relive happy experiences with others, and to do that they must be shared. It would be such a waste to have a head full of memories which couldn't be brought out and passed around occasionally. But I expect there will also be stuff that will get me down and which I will need to share with the world just to get it off my chest. So that's it really - share the good stuff to enjoy with others, share the bad stuff so I am not carrying it alone. And if anything I write is pointless self-indulgent crap, I am sure somebody will tell me, probably my own family.

Anyway, that's my first post, just to see how it works, next time I'll be doing it for real in America.