I started this blog entry mid-air and promptly went right to sleep. Qatar Airways offers 30 minutes of free wifi or 8MB of data. Back in the days of dial-up internet, this would seem like a fair allocation. Nowadays that amount of data won’t even last two minutes. It’s a pretty shrewd way to encourage people to pay for an upgrade. However, there’s a pretty easy way around this if you’re using a MacBook. After your data runs out, disconnect from the network and spoof your MAC address and rejoin the network using a new email for registration. I won’t bother posting anything educational about MAC addresses or instructions on how to spoof a MAC address on my blog. I’ll leave it for people to do their own searches. It’s a copy/paste operation using the terminal window on your machine.

I’m at Gatwick now, which is turning into a pleasant surprise of an airport. Usually, when I fly through Heathrow, it’s crowded. Gatwick, by comparison, is sparse, quiet, peaceful. At least today it is. My flight is delayed, so I figure it’s a good time to do a blog entry for June. I haven’t posted any recipes lately, but there are ten drafts in the works, all in various stages of completion. Now that school is out for summer, they’ll get some attention. The trip out this year was hastily planned. I was going to work and teach summer school, but some family matters came up, and I reconsidered.

It’s worth mentioning at this point some of my rules as it pertains to my blog. I don’t mind my own privacy when I write these blog entries, but I am conscious that this blog is public, and it’s always a background thought. So, with this in mind, whenever I talk about the people in my life I use initials, or I will be purposefully vague on details out of respect for their privacy. Ok, back to the blog…

Fortunately, my supervisors at the university were supportive and sympathetic when I explained my reasons for asking to be released from teaching during the summer. So after finishing my end-of-semester tasks and sorting out a pet-sitter for my cat Gizmo, I booked my flights and even had enough time to enjoy a meal and some football with a friend.

Last’s night World Cup match was my 3rd game of football this week, and in fact ever. While I won’t go so far as to call myself a football fan yet, I am enjoying the games. I sat down with another friend a few days ago to watch Portugal versus Spain, and he was kind enough to explain some basics and subtleties of the game that made me appreciate what I was watching. The game itself was great, Ronaldo scored a hat-trick, which is very rare in soccer. If you were going to introduce someone to the football, you couldn’t ask for a better game to serve as an introduction.