The Joy of Working from Home

I miss the days of not posting a story daily from my Italian life, but I have learned a few things from getting in the habit of always thinking: "What will I be blogging about today? How will I word this little experience?" So now I think more consciously about everything that happens on a daily basis. I find myself having simple interactions with locals in Boston and realizing that if I had had the exact same experience in Italy with an Italian, I would have blogged about it. So here goes.

My Boston Life

People here are friendly and I see strangers striking up conversation on the bus all of the time. It makes the commute a bit more worth it, expecting pleasant people to always be on my bus...if the bus comes and goes where it's supposed to go. Nearly daily I have an interesting story of how the bus system is completely not about transporting people. Yesterday morning, it took 2 hours to get to work. I was pretty sure it would take 6 hrs to get home based on the weather and worse weather conditions when it was time to leave...and it turned out to be the fastest ride home ever! Give credit where credit is due, eh?

Today, saving the hours of commute time by staying home, I had a chance to get work done and then do some research. It's refreshing working in an industry where it's possible to do a lot of research...and have fun doing it.

Research Results

Getting back up on Twitter, Flickr, digging around a bit more on Facebook has yielded some neat stuff. It also is giving me a chance to blog-stalk like I once did religiously...to find out who's racing what, who's training where, what are the latest thoughts on sports nutrition and training philosophies. This is now somewhat job-related. Actually, very job-related (not that I'm spending work time on this), but it does make one a whole lot more effective if one knows what current events in the industry are. In my case, active travel is at a beautiful cross-section of bicycling, racing, traveling and Italy.


One thing I learned today of particular interest: Taylor Phinney (son of Davis Phinney & Connie Carpenter) is living and training in Lucca, Italy.

He mentioned possibly doing the Giro di Sardegna as his knee is keeping him out of the Tour of Qatar. I didn't know about the Giro di Sardegna...but considering how amazing Sardegna sounds, that has got to be a good course (Sardegna is an island off the west coast of Italy & is part of Italy, quite loved by Italians).

It's interesting that it is time now to be thinking of planning for the summer. Of course, that makes sense, but in my personal life I'm unable to plan more than a month ahead based on everything that depends on everything else. I had to get used to not knowing much when I moved to Italy last spring, now I'm eerily completely okay with it.

That's a wrap...tomorrow will be a YakTrax day because of all of the ice. I had forgotten ice rain of the east coast and ice-coated trees. But aside from that, the snow is so big, fluffy and exactly what most kids beg for every winter. I hear the kids around here are starting to miss school there have been so many snow days!