Happy 4th of July!!

I had almost forgotten today was Independence Day... until some colleague I'd never met went out of his way to find every American in the office to invite them to a bbq. I was going to be out of the office a lot these two weeks, so my initial plan was to put in some serious overtime, go grocery shopping, and get an early night's sleep so I can be good to go when I'm up 0430 to catch a 0600 bus to Brussels tomorrow for induction training. Instead, I found out in the afternoon my office hasn't applied for my alien registration card yet, which could delay custom clearance of my goods shipped from the U.S. My office has already contributed to other delays in my shipment, so I was already unhappy about the idea of living in an empty apartment for weeks. So the idea of a further delay annoyed me a great deal so I said 'screw work'... and I took off to the BBQ. There I met more Americans, and some even seemed close to my age. I had a good time eating burgers and chatting with these people. I will be looking forward to hanging out with them again. But now I am going back to the European thing for rest of the evening and catch a World Cup match at a friend's. Anyways - Happy Birthday, America!!