From The Old To The New

For someone who is currently unemployed, or underemployed, I had myself a pretty busy day. I started out the first half of the day in Portsmouth, my old hometown. Portsmouth in the spring is just about one of the prettiest places you could hope to see, even though it seems like most of the streets on the east side of downtown are in the process of being ripped up.
I started out with a morning meeting about becoming involved in the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Anniversary events to be held in the summer of 2005. I believe this will be an important event and I am really happy to have the opportunity to use the skills I acquired in Japan to make a contribution to the community I grew up in, and perhaps to the larger world as well. It will be a great way to reconnect with my hometown and it will give me the chance to make a name for myself apart from the legacy of my family. I can appreciate the various advantages I have being the daughter of, niece of, sister of, but I'm looking forward to making my own mark, too.
After the meeting, I dropped by Belle Peppers to visit my friend Chip. I haven't seen him since last fall and it was great to spend a few minutes catching up. One of the wonderful things about really good friends is that months can go by and when you see them again, it's still like you just talked to them yesterday.
I met my dad for lunch and we went down to The Ferry Landing and ate out on the deck. The food is always tasty and the views, right there on the river next to the tugboats, are about as classic Portsmouth as you can get. I had the grilled tuna sandwich with sweet tomato salsa and an ice tea. It was very nice.
I took a little walk back through town with my dad, which is always a lovely thing to do. By the time we got back to his office a big thunderstorm was moving in, right in time to be pouring and flashing when I went out to Newington to submit a job application. Since I have no classes (or paycheck) until September, I'm looking for some parttime work. I never, ever get hired for normal retail jobs, but I'm going to apply for some anyway. A customer did mistake me for an employee while I was in the store on my way to the service desk to hand in the application, so maybe that's a good omen.
The storm pretty much blew over as I was driving up to Durham to check out the open house at the InterOperability Lab at UNH. They do a lot of cool stuff there and it is really impressive how the facility combines education and industry to the benefit of both. I wish some other areas of the university would take a lesson from them in combining academia with the real world.
I came home at the end of the day and found an email from a translation agency in Tokyo that sends me work fairly regularly. It looks like they might have a job for me over the weekend. Luckily, they haven't received if from the client yet, so I can just go to bed now and not worry about chasing a deadline just yet.