Dateline: Jan 8, 2023
Here’s the New Year update. I’ll just highlight the important points.
I’ve changed my mind and decided to keep this blog going after all. It shall serve as an online diary for what promises to be an eventful year.
Now the lurid spectacle last week of those repulsoidal assholes in the House of Representatives did little to dissuade me from wanting to live abroad.
America is, always was, and always will be problematic at so many levels.
I have just purchased a beautiful house in Florida with all the privacy and most of the amenities one can possibly desire.
But no matter how much of a hermit I try to turned myself into — and I am someone who enjoys the company of others, providing they are not Fox News types — I am still left with the unpleasantlness of living amidst people whom I find fundamentally loathsome.
Thus my wife and I are planning to visit the Silver Coast of Portugal this Spring, with an eye to renting a villa and moving there within a year, most likely around the Caldas da Rainha / Óbidos area.
Meanwhile, I’ve accepted an offer on my late Mum’s house up in NY. Should Allah smile upon us, the closing will be sometime in March — giving us more than enough financial flexibility to choose to live in Portugal.
Speaking of Allah, I have made great strides in building my mad project: a browser-based graphical design application that is optimized for the creation of Islamic geometric patterns.
When not dealing with Web dev matters, I am also fixing up the aforementioned new house we recently bought in Florida,. Currently I am in the process of painting the 4 rooms where new carpet is going to be installed on Jan 31st.
I plan on hiring professionals to paint the rest of the house, given the cathedral ceiling situation. After all, I am going to be 72 this summer: no sense tempting gravity’s rainbow.
Barring any unforseen mishaps, such as the buyers of Mum’s place not securing a mortgage, my wife and I will be up in Bronxville in March to empty out that sad, empty abode, and plan to visit Manhattan one last time.
In particular I want to to go the Met to visit their Islamic exhibit, and the NYPL on 42nd to do some research on Mamluke architecture circa the 13th C. AD.
Soon thereafter, I hope to put our old house in Florida on the market.
It will takes some expensive fixing up, but we should more than recover our expenditures, given that I boughtt it for a song over 20 years ago.
It should sell fast, despite the down real estate market. Droves of New Yorkers are abandonning the northeast, so it should not be too difficult to secure an all-cash, as-is deal.
Now don’t get me wrong: the new house we just bought is roomy, secluded, and has beautiful views of unspoilt forest.
Hard to beat, for the price.
It just that living here in some Nazi HOA simply does not compare, for someone like me, to residing in free, private, sophisticated Western Europe, and being able at a moment’s notice to visit Palermo, Istanbul, or Granada, or spend a weekend in Sardinia and enjoy swimming, with the ghosts of my past, in the beautiful waters of my beloved Mediterranean sea.
Despite the long journey I have already travelled, I continue to heed Frost’s quietly defiant cry about still having many more miles to go, and promises to keep.
That said, it might also be prudent to keep in mind the words of another, far more ancient bard:
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
Leaving Amerika 