Tomorrow, I’ll be on Delta 246 bound for FCO, and on Sunday morning, I’ll set foot in Rome. For some, my last postcard from Houston promised a return to jetset correspondence, and this was what I had in mind. Scattered showers in the forecast, 21 at the sun’s peak, and a cool 14 in the evenings.

I put in my notice at CQ-Roll Call yesterday, and the two weeks will start after I return from vacation. After those two weeks, I’ll be starting as an information architect at NavigationArts – a firm whose work I’ve respected for years. So there’s that.

In news neither related to vacations on the continent nor major career leaps, I switched out a couple light bulbs in my apartment to compact fluorescents. While some of you may gasp, given my appreciation of quality light, my electric bill the last few months has been higher than I’d have liked, especially for a place like mine. I installed them in fixtures where the bulbs would not be directly exposed in an attempt to mitigate their adverse effects on color perception.

If you’ll allow the UX designer in me to support my broader argument as an interior decorator, after living with the bulbs for a day, I realized another major problem I have with CFLs: they have loading time. Incandescents, for all their faults, give off beautiful light and do it instantaneously. The CFLs’ delay may only be a couple seconds, but I’ve installed these bulbs in my bathroom. As a use case, I’ve come home from nights of eating and drinking where those seconds matter.

In any case, I’ll be eating and drinking quite a bit over the next week. Somewhere between the gelato and Michelangelos, I’ll dispatch some postcards. In the meantime, I’m wrapping up for the week at the office and getting ready to head out in the rain – thank you to pagans and pessimists alike who helped make this happen.