18205 Miles, to be Exact

I was just back home for the weekend: I flew to EWR Friday (the 12th) morning, and flew out of EWR early Saturday evening, arriving back home (home! Still weird) early Sunday (the 14th) morning.

Why, do you ask? Because I needed to spend what amounted to thirty seconds in person at a U.S. Post Office to officially change our address.

And you may once again ask Not unlike a three-year-old child who is gearing up to make the next twenty minutes an enhanced interrogation session. “Why?”, which is a valid question.

We only have guesses: the first and most likely is that because (a) I was an idiot and neglected to submit a change of address while still in the United States and (b) I was then more of an idiot and forgot to turn on the VPN when I went to the USPS web site to make the change. So they saw my French IP address and said “Um, nah, you need to come in and prove that you’re you.”

The second guess is that since USPS knew that our new address is a mail-forwarding company (a Virtual Mail Forwarder in their parlance), they wanted to see someone in person to make sure we weren’t doing something janky.

Either way, I was back in town for a little more than 30 hours.

Remember the coat Caroline left in South Jersey? She had it mailed to a friend in Hoboken, so I could pick it up. And while she was at it, she had Amazon ship some things to her as well (I didn’t realize popcorn is hard to come by here ¯⁠\⁠⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠⁠/⁠¯).

So I grabbed all that, made my way back to our old building to have some tea with Martin, our old downstairs neighbor, met some friends at a bar for a quick drink, and then once again to our Friday regular joint Which would be Court Street, by the way. before heading to the hotel in Jersey City.

I could have actually made a flight back that night, but we figured the extra day was a good idea just in case something went sideways and I needed some extra time.

So of course it only took thirty seconds. But is was awesome to see some friends.

And that’s why I have now flown 18,205 miles over the last 22 days. And boy, are my arms tired…