Checkpoint one

For leg number one of the long journey, I’m sitting in the wrong terminal at the airport in Boston waiting for a flight to come that doesn’t leave for another two hours. I found this duck picture on my phone. Not sure if I’ve ever shared it before, but this was a phone-camera wall scan and came out well. A good thing for such a masterful work of emotion.

I’m at the wrong gate because the gate I’m supposed to be at has a different flight boarding in about half an hour, but it seems to be packed, and there isn’t much space over there. The gate I’m at is a different flight (to Los Angeles), but it seemed a little emptier. I’m within easy viewing distance of the right place, though.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do for the next two hours, but that’s standard airport fare. I’ll just listen to podcasts now so that I can start reading on the first flight.

One exciting note from the past few days is that I managed an interview at another company I’d really like to intern at — ASML — but it’s an “asynchronous, virtual” interview and I have to record myself answering three questions and then write a response to six more. I’m going to spend some of the plane time getting my thoughts down — I’ve already done two practice questions from the video portion — and once I’m in the hotel, I’ll use the single room-time that I have (even if it isn’t much) to try to record the video portion.

Apart from planning for the near future — the upcoming very long two days/day and a half/day (it really depends how you think about it) — I have the upcoming one-week program, the flight back, and then a few months of being a research assistant. I’d like to squeeze as much knowledge and experience out of these nine or ten days as I can, because it’s what I’ll have to keep with myself all summer.

I only took a backpack through airport security. That’s all I have right now — it has my clothes, toiletries, phone, Kindle, and laptop, which is reasonable. It’s a large backpack. I might want to buy a suitcase at some point, but that’s a problem for later the way I see it — I didn’t have a problem getting into the gate with just the backpack, and it took about ten minutes from walking into the airport to getting through security, so I’m hoping to keep it that way.

I’m only blogging now because of all the extra time I built in to my schedule today — it was potentially a bad idea, although I felt good about myself when the usual I-93 exit to the airport was blocked by construction work that there wasn’t any kind of notification of online (it must be new, I guess?). Changing highways to I-90 and getting off there was fine, though. Someday, I’ll just be able to take a train or a bus from home to Boston (you can take a bus now, but I’m still waiting on the Boston-DC high-speed rail, so any train dreams in and around Boston seem feasible to add to the plan. I’d like to propose the extension that cuts through Portland, Maine and Concord, New Hampshire — everybody seems to forget about the cooler places!).

My writing feels a little less-than-coherent to myself at the moment. Just saying hello to my two-person readership, both of who I know are from Boston and probably asleep at the time of writing. Thanks for the inspiration, this is a shout-out.

And for my mom, who I think looks around here on occasion.

I’ll be back in about eight hours, equally bored and ready to judge the facilities at Sea-Tac, my first view of the timeless American West.

有趣吧。

再見！