I'm not dead!

OK, everybody, stop the presses: I am not, in fact dead. That said, I do understand how so many of you may have managed to fall under this particular misconception, since apparently I haven't done anything with this site since May of last year. I've had a couple of half-written posts that have been sitting on my computer since last June, and I decided at the time that I would wait to put anything new up until I finished those posts. This strategy made sense when I thought that it would just be a few weeks until I finished writing... but here we are, going on nine months later, and the whole thing is just ridiculous at this point. :-) The posts I'm talking about were written while I was traveling in Argentina, and, more recently, Cuba. My usual travel writing pattern goes like this:
Days 1-3: Write lengthy essays about what I'm up to.
Days 4-8: Try and capture a few entertaining anecdotes, make well-intentioned noises about "filling in the details later"
Days 8-n: Write nothing, feel guilty.

This is, obviously, sub-optimal, and in the future I intend to try a more sustainable approach. However, what I've got from my last two trips-- and what's been blocking my blogging pipeline-- are a couple of pages of "Day 1-3"-style material. I'd like to post them-- there's some stuff in there that I think you guys would get a kick out of-- and then get this blog back to its usual technical format. However, my inner grammar cop is upset with the fact that these posts were written months and months ago, and were meant for immediate publication, and therefore make heavy use of the present tense. A couple of times, I've thought about going through and re-writing things to use the past instead of the present tense, and that hasn't really worked out due to time considerations.

So, here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to put up what I've got, and ask that you all keep in mind that I wrote most of this months ago. Also, while I am planning on writing more about my adventures in Argentina and Cuba, I won't be able to keep up the level of detail that I go into in these half-written-and-edited posts (<sarcasm>What?! Shocking. However shall we survive? --ed.</sarcasm>). Anyway, if anybody stumbles across these, shoot me an email and let me know what you think.