Son of Holiday Travel Follies

So that 5:45 am flight out of Oakland that I got bumped to? It was "delayed indefinitely". I'm now booked on an 11am flight out of SFO via Washington-Dulles getting in to Boston ca. 11pm, which means I get to spend the night in Boston before getting a morning puddle-jumper to Augusta. This means that, in theory, I will be arriving in Augusta at 11:55am, 12/21, which will be slightly over 40 hours later than my originally-scheduled departure from Oakland Wednesday evening. There are, however, all sorts of things that can still go wrong with this plan.

But hey, I have an electrical outlet. I sprang for a day's worth of T-mobile wi-fi. I have two unread books. I have a couple notebooks worth of longhand composition (on my current novel) to be transcribed into the computer. I had a delicious sit-down breakfast of eggs Benedict with fresh Dungeness crab. The next step is to go on the web and line up a hotel room at the Boston airport for tonight. (If I were arriving at any reasonable hour, I'd try to connect up with random Bostonites for dinner ... but if I were arriving at a reasonable hour, I could make a connection to Augusta tonight.)

ETA: I now have a hotel room at the Holiday Inn Express at the Boston airport tonight. Yay.

And just because I'm hanging out

For fun: Wednesday, for work, I got to go on a "sharing best practices" tour of a major biotech company located in South San Francisco whose name starts with "G". There were 8 of us from the Big B (half from Berkeley, half from our new Emeryville site) so the guy organizing it ordered a shuttle van to take us over there. What we got was a stretch limo. Complete with mini-bar (but, alas, no potables other than soda). Nothing quite like pulling up to the security entrance of one of your competitors in a limo. There was, however, some good-natured joking about where our year-end bonuses were going. (Truth to tell, it was probably the same cost as a similarly-sized van.)

A brief review: Books 1 & 2 of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (No spoilers) Given that television tends to screw up most stories that it interprets to some degree, my default assumption is that if I like the tv adaptation of something, I'll probably like the original. And the tv series based on the supernatural mystery series The Dresden Files stood out as one of the better members of this tv season's inexplicable crop of supernatural adventure/mystery series. (I figure when a single season includes not one but two vampire-police-procedural series, then the word "inexplicable" can be brought into play.) Alas, in this case the books didn't infect me in quite the way the tv show did. The key difference seems to be in sub-genre emphasis. Butcher's novels blend the supernatural with a good old fashioned hard-boiled detective sensibility. The protagonist is a skilled magician (in the non-stage sense) but otherwise checks off all the hard-boiled tropes including regular fisticuffs, seedy living-on-the-financial-edge digs, romantic entanglements with a member of the press, and an overall pessimistic cast to life. It's a smooth and functional blend, but I'm just not that into the whole hard-boiled thing. The tv show had a somewhat different blend: more emphasis on the sense-of-wonder aspects of the supernatural (where the books have a more mechanistic feel), more Otherworldly Stuff less underworld stuff. The novels follow the standard theory that a hard-boiled protagonist must take three times as much physical punishment as any human being can function under, and will still come up swinging at the end. I tend to find this less believable than vampires and werewolves, somehow. So I probably won't be reading the rest of the series. A pity. And I'm not saying that the tv show was better than the novels -- they aren't badly written and they're actually quite nice representatives of the genre. It's just that the tv show better intersected with my own entertainment interests than the books did.

Holiday Travel (update 3)

Made it successfully to Wash-Dulles. And the boards claim my flight to Boston is still going out tonight (albeit half an hour later than originally scheduled). That just gives me a little more time to linger over a sit-down dinner. (I'm blowing a couple weeks' worth of eat-out budget on this trip, but it makes me so much happier ... and I'm more likely to get something healthy.) Looking forward to bed tonight, though.

Holiday Travel Follies: Part 4 (A New Hope)

That flight to Boston that was originally supposed to leave Dulles back at 9:06 pm? It's now been officially confirmed for departure at 12:45 am (Friday). So my "good night's sleep" in the hotel in Boston will end up being something more like 5-6 hours of sleep, but it's better than the airport floor and a kick in the head. My brain is full of sand.