spring is when...

...the temperatures start regularly hitting 70 degrees most days, and we get more sunny days than cloudy days, and fewer rainy days than in winter. OK, I can understand that, that makes sense. Apparently, however, it is also when some of the trees grow new leaves or burst into bloom, and others let their leaves turn red and fall to the ground. Couldn't they come to some sort of consensus on proper arboreal seasonal behavior? The six month perfect summer is only a month away. Schizophrenic as the climate is, I have no complaints. Just mystified confusion.

what is this madness of which you speak?

The other day, I was at work and I walked up to my manager and another coworker as they were engrossed in conversation. My manager turned to me and asked if I had filled out a bracket. 

It was the beginning of the day, we were about to go into a meeting, and I had no idea what he was talking about, and was momentarily concerned that I had overlooked some work-related thing that I was supposed to have filled out. 

My confusion must have been very apparent on my face, as he then said, "March Madness? ...Basketball? ...College basketball? ...The championship? ...Are you filling out a bracket for the office pool?" 

Oh!! Much relieved, I said that I had not, and did not plan on filling one out, due to my (very obvious) total lack of knowledge and interest when it comes to sports. 

I was better able to seem less ignorant in Europe, where the only sport that anyone ever talks about is soccer. In the States, however, there is always something going on -- football, basketball, baseball, hockey -- and they overlap, so a non-sports person can never be sure what kind of game people are referring to watching "the game," and someone who is completely uninformed about sports (like me) is clueless about what kind of playoffs are going on at any given time. 

Sigh. 

At least it wasn't some work-related thing that I had forgotten to do.

rage, rage against the dying of the light

One of the random benefits of living in the States is that Daylight Saving Time starts two weeks earlier and ends one week later than it does in Europe, so we get three more weeks of light lasting later in the evening. This makes an even bigger difference when you take into consideration the relative likelihood of sunny days in California versus Switzerland. 

Perhaps in Switzerland, where people wake up at ungodly hours to get to work by 9, 8, or even (gasp!) 7 in the morning (and where clouds often obscure any direct sunlight), it makes the morning commute darker for a while, but here, where people wake up a bit later (and the sun is more likely to shine cloud-free), it just means that the sun is around for more actual waking hours. Sweet.

wintergreen

I've lived in a few different places before moving to California -- Denver, Houston, Delaware, Cambridge, New York, and Zurich -- and they are all very different places, but one thing that they have in common is the way the seasons work. 

In the spring, the grass starts growing and the trees start budding and growing leaves. In the summer, everything is green. In the fall, things turn colors, then turn brown and die. In the winter, the world just waits for spring to come back again.

Not here. Here, the seasons are all backwards, inside out, and upside down. Confused. In the summer, the grass is brown and yellow, fried to a crisp in the dry sun, but the trees are green. In the fall, nothing changes. In the winter, some of the trees get with the program and shed their leaves, but the grass gets confused by the sudden appearance of rain and turns green, and the flowers come out. 

I'm not sure what will happen in spring. Probably something weird. Spring is probably when the marshmallow bushes grow Peeps, which are then picked by hippie elves and sent to drugstores around the country.

not so flexible

In an attempt to use up more of my 2008 flex dollars, I went to the eye doctor to get new contacts. I wear contacts maybe once or twice a month these days, but it's good to have them for scuba diving and for days when I want to wear sunglasses. We went through the whole rigmarole of eye tests, ordering various brands of lenses, trying them out, and having followup visits. We finally settled on a brand, and I went to pay for them.

Apparently, if your eyes are bad enough, and your vision plan is good enough, the checkups, fittings, and lenses are all free, because they are a medical necessity. So the good news is that I got free contacts. The bad news is that my eyes are really bad, and I still have to use up my flex account.

To make matters worse, I found out that the handy dandy debit card that they issue for the flex account, and which I've been using to avoid having to submit expense reports, has been drawing from my 2009 flex account. So a bunch of my hard-spent expenses haven't even gone towards my goal of using up my old flex dollars.

In a last fit of desperation, I bought a bunch of random things from drugstore.com, like super duper first aid kits for home and car, and will go get prescription sunglasses. And if that doesn't work, then I guess I was never meant to use those flex dollars.

college days

Going back even further, before Zurich and New York, I spent five years in Cambridge.

Five things I miss about Cambridge:

(1) The lobster stand in Faneuil Hall, where twelve bucks got you a lobster, a soda, and corn on the cob.  

(2) Snowball fights.  

(3) Living within walking distance of all of my friends.  

(4) The Lomo de Buey a las Frutas at Dali in Somerville -- I have repeatedly tried to reverse engineer this dish, but have never managed it so far.  

(5) Hot chocolate at L. A. Burdick's.

canines

One of my favorite things about living in Switzerland was that my dog Fiver could go almost anywhere I was allowed to go. Fiver went to work, he went to bars, he went on trains and trams, he stayed in hotels. He went to restaurants, and in some restaurants, the waitstaff would bring him special treats or dog food, so that he wouldn't be left out of the dining experience. I loved it almost as much as he did.

The U.S. is not quite as dog-friendly as Switzerland is, but I was lucky enough to get a job with a company that allows dogs at work. Fiver stays home when I go to bars and restaurants, however, and I have to sneak him into most hotels and hope he stays quiet. Public transportation isn't an issue, since I live in the suburbs, and he just rides in my Prius wherever we go.

Today, however, I found one pocket of America that is more dog-friendly than Switzerland. I went to the dentist to get a filling repaired. My dentist usually keeps one of her dogs in the back of the office. She knows I have a dog, so she told me to bring him in, and Fiver sat in my lap the entire time I was in the dentist's chair, and he alternated between zoning out and watching the proceedings with great interest. My dentist said that her dog often naps on patients' laps while they are getting work done, and that it calms them down. 

So I may not be able to take my dog out to eat anymore, but he can come hang out at the dentist's any time.

flex those dollars

During my very brief stint at a law firm in New York, we paid less than $100 a month for our insurance premiums, and the rest was covered by the firm. We had the option to put pre-tax dollars into a flex spending account, to be used on any non-covered medical or dental costs. Pretty standard stuff. I don't remember how much I put away, but I remember that it was pretty accurate -- I was able to basically predict how much I would need to pay out-of-pocket, and set it aside in my flex account.

Then I moved to Switzerland. We paid our insurance premiums totally out-of-pocket, and it was about $200 a month, but to be honest, the insurance was pretty irrelevant. It didn't cover dental work or vision costs at all, so if you went to the dentist and had a filling done or if you had to get new glasses, you paid for it yourself, and as much as people complain about how expensive dentists and eye doctors are in the States, they are far worse in Switzerland. And the annual deductible was high enough to make the stated co-pays pretty irrelevant. Unless you spent more than $3000 a year on doctor's bills and prescriptions, it was all out-of-pocket. (Of course, there was an option to pay a much higher premium to bring the deductible down, but it didn't seem worth it if you were fairly healthy).

I moved back to the States, and my employer now covers 100% of my insurance premiums, and my co-pays are pretty minimal. I have dental insurance and a vision plan (a company full of nerds needs a good vision plan), and I can once again set money aside in a flex account. I made my election for 2008 when I showed up in May, and then in November, I had to make my election for 2009. The 2008 money needs to be used up by the middle of March 2009. Yay for using pre-tax money on my expenses, right?

The problem is this: I made my elections before I started doing any relevant spending, and I forgot that I have no overall deductible, and my co-pays are so low that it's very hard to actually spend all of my flex money. I set money aside as if I were still living in Switzerland, paying for everything out-of-pocket, and now my pockets are too full.

I think I will have to get laser eye surgery to use it up.

Say what you want about American health care, but if you're lucky enough to have health insurance here, then your out-of-pocket medical expenses are much cheaper than what you get elsewhere.

And so far, unlike in Switzerland, I haven't had to pay $200 out-of-pocket for an ultrasound that determined that there was poop in my intestines. Thanks, that was the most expensive piece of useless information I've ever been forced to pay for.

i still heart new york

It has been almost five years since I left New York, and I still miss something about New York every week, if not every day. One of the things about moving every few years is that you accumulate a longer list of things to miss from all the places you've been.  

Ten random things I miss about New York: 

(1) FreshDirect.com  

(2) My doorman  

(3) All-night diners  

(4) Skyscrapers  

(5) Sunday walks through Central Park to the Met  

(6) Easy navigation  

(7) Unbeatable restaurant and bar scene  

(8) Quirky shops and boutiques  

(9) New Yorkers  

(10) Same-day book delivery from Barnes & Noble

rat on a cat on a dog

I was walking around in San Francisco yesterday, and my friend and I did a double take, because there was a man walking a dog, and on the dog was a cat, and on the cat was a rat. It was like a modern-day version of the Brementown musicians, or something. The dog was walking along quite normally, and the rat and cat were perched on top as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

We immediately whipped out our BlackBerrys to do some on-the-spot Googling, and it turns out that the dog-cat-rat-man is something of a (crack-smoking) San Francisco institution, and he makes upwards of $100 a day from random admirers and passersby.