My brother had some startling news. My old boss, at the New Jersey company I worked remotely for for a decade-plus, has died. My brother didn't have word on a cause of death or anything, although given that the guy was someone who'd had multiple freak scuba-diving accidents, I suppose it comes down to hard living. We didn't think he was much older than us, but we didn't really have a clear idea of how old he was.
I have a good bit to be grateful to him for, of course. First for giving me a job when I was fresh back from Singapore and completely unable to find anything. And for giving me just shy of a decade of remote working from Michigan, on a salary adequate to needs and accompanied by so few specific expectations that it was almost the ideal of just working whenever I felt like and taking off on a weeklong roller coaster trip when I felt like. There's few people who'd do that, especially for a programmer as within-normal-boundaries as I am.
I do remember asking him, right after he announced he was selling the company, if he was well, and he insisted he was. Still, I had suspicions then, and I guess it doesn't matter now. Do wonder about the exact circumstances, though.
On to photos. Most of Tuesday was a travel day, so there's only a couple pictures of interest, and many of them are from a supermarket in Rennes where we got some dinner.
The track for Bar-sur-Aube, the direction facing away from Paris (and Rennes). I could not get over how much this could have passed for, like, the Matawan station.
In comparison here's Paris's Gare du ... Somewhere ... and the mall that spits out trains on one end of things.
In Rennes! We had the same hotel as a decade ago and they had the same crest over this stairway mirror that we couldn't quite figure out. Parsing the words was okay, but the meaning eluded us.
The supermarket had this self-service bread-cutter that fascinated me. We didn't see anyone using it.
When FurAffinity happens in real life!
And what we ended up getting, a veggie bacon sandwich called Le British for some reason and crunchy ghost snacks.
Trivia: Thomas Fortune Ryan, who organized the Royal Typewriter Company, had previously formed American Tobacco and the Southern Railway out of mergers of smaller companies. Source: The Wonderful Writing Machine, Bruce Bliven Jr.
Currently Reading: Sabrina the Teenage Witch: 60 Magical Stories, Editor Mike Pellerito.