Travel
So far, in the month of September I have managed to triple my number of airplane flights for the year.
Lesson learned from too much time in airports: I am significantly below par in my ownership of nifty electronic gadgets. Seemed like everyone had something from the set of {smartphone, ipad, kindle, nook, blackberry}. Some people had two. At least my dumb-phone was sufficient for coping with disasters.
For Labor Day weekend, for the sake of honoring tradition, most of the weekend was spent at camp in Green Lake. The flare lighting to commemorate the end of the summer was a highlight, as always. An unexpected highlight was seeing my cousin's 27-month-old daughter, Ada Jo, who has an astounding vocabulary for one so young. She definitely fit the proverb of "once you get them to start talking, you can't get them to shut up." Favorite exchange of the weekend:
- "Ada Jo, let's get out of the lake and get dressed again."
- "No thank you, I like being naked."
On Labor Sunday, some rain and storms diminished the enthusiasm for sticking around and continuing to read grrm's Dance With Dragons, so instead we went back to my parents' place for the remainder of the weekend. This allowed some more time to ensure that my niece Evie will remember her uncle :-) And as always, real food was a pleasure. Even got to diagnose a fried motherboard - after all, that's what a son is good for :-p
Overall a nice, leisurely, non-rushed weekend.
Completely unlike this past weekend.
Which was spent in Seattle, helping run headquarters for the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. On the way there, the maintenance people in Philadelphia didn't want our plane looking at them in that tone of voice, so they unloaded us from our nearly-departed plane and had us wait around an hour so that they could find another one. Frustrating, but at least the timing was agreeable with Drew and Jason's trip from SF to SEA, and I was able to bum a ride with them to campus.
At campus, last minute freaking out was in full swing. I was employed stuffing envelopes with round-one puzzles, and came close to being drafted into being videotaped as a villain for the event, but Deanna/Mike wisely voted for banking some sleep, which was going to be in short supply for the rest of the weekend.
The event itself, the next morning, was sufficiently awesome to justify a posting on its own. (plus, stalling for a day gives me time to find out more about how other people thought we did in running the event.)
After puzzhunt closing, it rapidly became evident that a 10:20pm return flight into a redeye left me a lot less wiggle room than I was expecting. After a frantic series of phone calls, I got to hang out with ketsugami and harinezumi at Blue C Sushi for only about an hour before needing to worry about catching the plane back.
At the airport, they bumped me from my planned USairways redeye (via Charlotte) and on to an Alaskan Air redeye (via Boston). This added about 45 minutes to the trip, and I didn't get back to Rockville until nearly 11am.
(I made the woefully incorrect decision, while on the plane, to accept a bag of pretzels after noise from the snack cart woke me up. It ended up not really being pretzels but some sort of mix of unidentified salty food that made sleep seriously difficult despite being dead tired.)
Overall sleep count: 6h friday night, 4h saturday night, 2h sunday night. BLEH. Then 10h monday night.
Lesson learned from too much time in airports: I am significantly below par in my ownership of nifty electronic gadgets. Seemed like everyone had something from the set of {smartphone, ipad, kindle, nook, blackberry}. Some people had two. At least my dumb-phone was sufficient for coping with disasters.
For Labor Day weekend, for the sake of honoring tradition, most of the weekend was spent at camp in Green Lake. The flare lighting to commemorate the end of the summer was a highlight, as always. An unexpected highlight was seeing my cousin's 27-month-old daughter, Ada Jo, who has an astounding vocabulary for one so young. She definitely fit the proverb of "once you get them to start talking, you can't get them to shut up." Favorite exchange of the weekend:
- "Ada Jo, let's get out of the lake and get dressed again."
- "No thank you, I like being naked."
On Labor Sunday, some rain and storms diminished the enthusiasm for sticking around and continuing to read grrm's Dance With Dragons, so instead we went back to my parents' place for the remainder of the weekend. This allowed some more time to ensure that my niece Evie will remember her uncle :-) And as always, real food was a pleasure. Even got to diagnose a fried motherboard - after all, that's what a son is good for :-p
Overall a nice, leisurely, non-rushed weekend.
Completely unlike this past weekend.
Which was spent in Seattle, helping run headquarters for the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. On the way there, the maintenance people in Philadelphia didn't want our plane looking at them in that tone of voice, so they unloaded us from our nearly-departed plane and had us wait around an hour so that they could find another one. Frustrating, but at least the timing was agreeable with Drew and Jason's trip from SF to SEA, and I was able to bum a ride with them to campus.
At campus, last minute freaking out was in full swing. I was employed stuffing envelopes with round-one puzzles, and came close to being drafted into being videotaped as a villain for the event, but Deanna/Mike wisely voted for banking some sleep, which was going to be in short supply for the rest of the weekend.
The event itself, the next morning, was sufficiently awesome to justify a posting on its own. (plus, stalling for a day gives me time to find out more about how other people thought we did in running the event.)
After puzzhunt closing, it rapidly became evident that a 10:20pm return flight into a redeye left me a lot less wiggle room than I was expecting. After a frantic series of phone calls, I got to hang out with ketsugami and harinezumi at Blue C Sushi for only about an hour before needing to worry about catching the plane back.
At the airport, they bumped me from my planned USairways redeye (via Charlotte) and on to an Alaskan Air redeye (via Boston). This added about 45 minutes to the trip, and I didn't get back to Rockville until nearly 11am.
(I made the woefully incorrect decision, while on the plane, to accept a bag of pretzels after noise from the snack cart woke me up. It ended up not really being pretzels but some sort of mix of unidentified salty food that made sleep seriously difficult despite being dead tired.)
Overall sleep count: 6h friday night, 4h saturday night, 2h sunday night. BLEH. Then 10h monday night.