Keeping up and living in 4-8 time zones at a time.

Despite being unemployed, I've somehow managed to actually be busier than I was when I was working for pay. Over the last few months, I've been playing catch-up in helping Go Help put up a vehicle approval page as well as the vehicle rules. I've also been spending a great deal of time talking to people all over the planet. I have to remind myself that the nearest person to me that is working on this effort to organize these charity rallies is Dave and he's 2902 miles away in New York City. At least he's in the same country. Dulguun and Hallie, the project coordinator and accountant in Ulaanbaatar Mongolia are 5795 miles away, literally on the other side of the planet and into the next day. It's still disconcerting to me to be blanketed in darkness here in Alameda, and be able to look out their office window and see sunshine streaming in.Most of the trustees are in London, and I have regular calls with them as well. I've even been up at 4am to handle a conference call between a trustee in London and Dulguun in Mongolia. It's all made for some interesting conversations and I often forget what time it is here at home.
You may wonder how I've been keeping track of all these time zones. It's easy thanks to the web. I've enabled Yahoo widgets and I've downloaded some clocks and a Geochron-type map to help me out as well as keep me from making the mistake of calling someone at 3am. From left to right are Alameda time, Eastern Standard Time, London or GMT time, Ulaanbaatar Mongolia time, and the mini Geochron that tells me where it's daylight on the planet. These tools come in handy when making international calls as well as telling me the date as some places are ahead of the international date line.
One of my responsibilities is to help ralliers select vehicles that will be both tax exempt and provide maximum benefit to the charities we're helping in Mongolia. I've been fielding calls and emails this week from folks that want to know what to buy in order to avoid the potentially hefty Mongolian import tax. Instead of emails, I've been encouraging the teams to use Skype since that's the fastest most efficient way to get their questions answered, especially if they're bidding on a car in an auction and don't want to miss out on winning it.Selecting just the right kind of vehicle can be a trying process for these teams, but being able to call and see that someone is on the other end helping to make the selection has been a relief to a lot of these teams. Luckily I don't sleep much and I like exchanging stories about the rally and I've been having a pretty good time talking to people.

This sure beats working at a real job.