[ExI] from the other side

[Amara Graps]

Hi extropes,

For what it's worth, I arrived in Boulder on November 17, with only my
toothbrush and my new passport and my extra carry-on of photocopies of
my identifications as a side-effect from the large theft of my
wallet-purse on October 29. I'm still shell-shocked and disoriented
because after I arrived on the 17th, I left on the 20th (12 hours after
my luggage from Rome finally arrived) to San Jose to have new driver's
license and social security (like the codice fiscale) cards. Those two
things took 15 minutes in total. I spent Thanksgiving with my sister and
saw two close friends (Hi Samantha), and returned to Boulder on the evening
of November 23. I was only in Boulder one day, however, before I went to
San Antonio, Texas and saw two more friends (Hi Damien and Barbara) and
to attend the 'orientation' for my new job. The 'mother ship' (I call it)
of Southwest Research Institute is located there.

So now I'm in Boulder, and probably know Denver Airport far more than
I know the town that I moved to, even though I technically moved to
Boulder 10 days ago. In my home, I have a futon mattress, two lamps,
enough warm clothes, cooking-ware, one Mac G4 laptop: useless with a
broken memory cache on the logic board that will cost $700 to replace,
a two seasons newer Mac G4 laptop to replace it, but completely
unconfigured so far with the exception of this email (Eudora) program
and Firefox browser. It seems that I picked up this newer computer from
my UK colleagues (six weeks ago), where they were storing it for me from
my UK Ebay purchase, just in time. I will not try to salvage my old
G4 laptop Mac.

The tragedy of my International-Move-From-Hell is my notebook of two
years of calculations of my water-on-the-terrestrial-planets research
project. The notebook is gone, a result of my mistake to send it through
Poste Italiane. I consider it a much larger tragedy than the theft of
all of my identifications in my wallet-purse, three weeks before. This
notebook was in one of 22 brown padded envelopes that I had sent of my
in-progress writing and research projects. After the moving company
picked up my home, I still needed to send these notes and notebooks. I
couldn't use Poste Vaticano because I didn't have any more my
identifications after the wallet-purse theft to enter the Vatican. DHL
is expensive and then (and now) and I'm still desperately broke (that's
_why_ I needed to leave Italy). I figured because I had no bad
experiences in the past 5 years with brown padded envelopes (only boxes;
seven in the last 5 years were stolen), I could trust that Poste
Italiane could send these. I was wrong. Four arrived to Boulder with
major tears at the edges, with two of them, taped up by the US Postal
Service a second time. Of those two, most of the contents had fallen
out: that was my thick calculations notebook; which had my name and
email address and phone number, by the way.  On the more recent packages,
one of the postal clerks on the US side had written: 'All Closed'. I am
still waiting for 3 more padded envelopes, but, if those were stolen
by the thieves at Poste Italiane too, then at least those contents are
orders of magnitude less valuable to my than my research notebook.

So what can I say? I will have the opportunity to sharpen up my
arguments for that project, but some significant part of it is
irreplaceable. I doubt it was an accident with so many torn; the thieves
at Poste Italiane were probably looking for valuable Christmas presents,
and I probably disappointed them. Who else would find scribbles and
photocopies of journal articles valuable?

I will tell the relocation company not to let their customers moving in
or out of Italy to use Poste Italiane. The only good thing I can say
about my move, so far, is that at least the baggage handlers at Rome
Fiumicino airport didn't steal my stuff while it was on the ground for
those two days, since my four pieces of luggage was carrying alot of
valuable things. I have my bicycle, in which I have my old Heidelberg
riding lifestyle back. And of course, the SwRI people here are
wonderful. It's incredibly nice to get so much support and interest
from my workplace after my last years of feeling like I was thrown to
the wolves.

Amara


-- 

Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado