having come home yesterday night shortly before midnight (that IC train between nürnberg and stuttgart was running 20min late, causing me to miss the connecting CIS in stuttgart with an ensuing 2hr delay 
i got up again at 6:00 in the morning: bloody business trip to the US…
the flight is luckily rather calm (a bit choppy at times but bearable), made even more bearable by that fact that i managed to get an upgrade to business class on miles 
… immigration at new york’s JFK is surprisingly swift and i’m through border control and customs within 20min. the car service chauffeur is already waiting outside and i’m on the way to hawthorne within 30min of arriving — and i arrive in record time (wouldn’t have made it in that time, if i had to drive myself, probably would have gotten lost twice and certainly would have driven much slower…;-) and actually am able to participate in most of the afternoon’s program.
dinner is at an italian place “just across the road” — meaning: 1km up the road — and we start with having a couple of beers: my fancy for guinness leads me to jump onto the availability of guinness on tap: bad decision. the brew i get tastes only very remotely like the real stuff, it’s black all right, but that’s about it, it takes like a stale & watered-down version of itself.
it’s 21:00 US east coast time when i hit the bed…
drained.
