hrj

The original theory was to do the packing (for both Maine and 12th night) last night. But since my plane doesn't leave until this evening I decided to leave it to morning and finished up the sewing project instead, which was probably a better choice. So xrian, if you're going to be at 12th night, you can take delivery of the undergown that was supposed to go with your Laureling outfit a couple years ago. And now the packing is all completed as well and I have all day to tidy the house and worry about possible blizzards in New York. So far the Delta flight-status website still lists my flight as on-schedule, but the radio keeps saying things about the weather that will keep me on edge until tomorrow morning's leg to Portland actually touches down.

So the remainder of today's to-dos are: wrap a couple of 12th night presents; hang the birdseed bells on the redwood tree out front; drop off some obsolete electronics at the drop-off event over at IKEA; do as much tidying up of the house as I feel like doing; start some random project that will not be completed before I leave and for which there is no urgency whatsoever but that will suddenly seem very important to do.

Got up at too:early AM to get to BWI. They were asking for volunteers to get bumped from my flight with the sweetener of a free round-trip coupon so I figure what the heck? As long as I get home sometime today, it's all good. So they'd gotten as far as booking me on a later flight (getting in to SFO instead) when, at the very last minute, they discovered that someone who'd done on-line check-in last night hadn't actually boarded the plane after all, so they got me on the original flight after all. But I still got the free flight coupon. Score! And now that someone is staffing the podium at the gate here in Denver, I can double-check to make sure that my re-booking got un-booked and I really am on the fight I have a boarding pass for. (I tried verifying this on the phone, but got someone who couldn't quite untangle the rebooking from yesterday and the rebooking today. Finally she said, "If you have a boarding pass, you should be ok. I want more than a "should".)

ETA: So I'm in line at the podium to check on my status when the guy behind the counter calls my name and asks me to come up to the podium. (They wanted to swap my seat to keep a family together.) So clearly I am booked on this flight.

It was a long day, but uneventful. Left the house at 6am for the airport, changed planes in Denver, arrived BWI, only a 5 minute wait for my ride, now ensconced in the Timonium Crowne Plaza. (Rm 130, for any of my peeps also coming to Darkovercon.) My luck even held out for the 3 month old baby in the next seat not crying at all! And just because I'm obsessing over it, I've been working on some complex data correlations for work, trying to pin down When Things Changed for the thingie I'm currently investigating. And the more I did, the more complicated it starts looking. It just spent a long time being complicated in extremely innocuous ways.

So the proximal excuse for last weekend's road trip was that klwilliams wanted to see the Star Trek Experience one more time before the close of its 10-year run and I was amenable to seeing it for a first time and ... hey, who needs too much of an excuse for a road trip? So we figured we'd do the classic Vegas thing and got tickets to a show as well. Took off right from work on Friday, drove straight through, and arrived in the wee hours, at which time the hotel had run out of standard 2xqueen rooms and had to stick us in a rather nice, rather large semi-corner room with a king. (We decided we could cope.)

Since the STE doesn't (didn't?) open until 11:30, we set the alarm for "decadently late" and had brunch at Quark's Bar first thing after buying our tour tickets. There was Drama and Tragedy going on in the kitchen resulting in very slow service (and one change of order), but we began a string of perfect timing events, catching the Klingon Attack show just in time to make our reserveations for the behind-the-scenes tour immediately afterwards. (And, as klwilliams had assured me in advance, I really didn't want to see behind the scenes before getting the full, naive Klingon Attack experience.) Really great use of special effects technology for an amusement park ride. Our tour guide for the behind-the-scenes was absolutely stupendous -- great at getting everyone engaged, remembered everyone's names, and truly enjoyed his subject. After that we hit the gifts store and the staged photo sessions (which were part of the package) then finished up with the Borg Attack show (which was nowhere near as good as the Klingons).

It was really a bit odd looking around at our fellow tourists and realizing just how instantly recognizable fans are, even outside the usual convention circuit. (I don't know what proportion of their overall clientele are fannish -- things may have been skewed when we were there by the whole "one last time before it closes" phenomenon.)

We'd planned to have dinner at a buffet at the Paris Las Vegas that klwilliams had been to before, but the line was so long that we decided the better part of valor was to go across the street (street? mall-hallway? aisle? hard to know what the right word is) to a French bakery and dine on crossant sandwiches and an assortment of desserts. After that was Phantom of the Opera which I'd never seen live (and klwilliams had never seen before at all). Very enjoyable and great staging, although it reminds one that -- as for operas -- musicals are best enjoyed if you know the plot and major lyrics in advance, since you aren't going to follow them just from the performance.

Another decadently late morning, lazy breakfast, and on the road again to get home at a decent (if evening) hour. Lots of excellent chattage in the car. Driving places with fellow writers means you can enjoy the "live books-on-tape" experience. ( Car mileage geeking )

Overall gambling losses: $2.00 (for the two of us, an overall gain of $0.86 I think)
Overall drunken debauchery: none. Who needs drunken debauchery when you have congenial company?

One of the weekend's projects has been to pull the several Boxes of Holding from the car and sort through and update what I really need to be carrying around these days. (E.g., the new car no longer requires that I carry a jug of radiator fluid at all times. And it's been a couple of vehicles since I really needed to carry extra oil as a general rule. And I really need to find a safe and eco-friendly way to dispose of a semi-used aerosol can of "super start spray" -- I believe it's basically pure ether -- which I picked up on some trip or other to snowy mountains when I was having trouble with starting. But today is about refurbishing the first aid kit and sorting through maps. The GPS now makes most of my map-hoarding proclivities unnecessary, so here's an inventory of what I'm discarding. (It will become obvious that I almost never throw maps out.) ( I added a few more items, but since this is really a for-fun meaningless post, there's no point in doing more than adding them. )

I could swear I already made this post, but I think I must have been working on it when the DSL went out Wednesday evening. I got two fun new transportation-related gadgets this week. My bicycle now has a speedometer thingie (also does odometer, trip odometer, average trip speed, max trip speed, and clock). Unlike the bike speedometer gadgets of my youth, this one doesn't rely on mechanically using the wheel to drive a mechanism (thus making you work harder), but instead has a small magnet fastened to one spoke with a sensor on the fork nearby to time revolutions.

And the new car now has a GPS (Garmin's Nüvi 760). I'm still mostly playing around with it on known routes (to evaluate how smart it is). In theory, I can also use it when walking or biking (although I don't have a bike mount for it yet). It does have a few quirks. It gets a bit discombobulated if you turn it on in a different location than it was when you turned it off. (Has to re-acquire the satellite fix.) Although it's perfectly happy to do Bluetooth pairing with my Treo, it has not yet managed to actually respond appropriately to an incoming phone call. And in theory it will transmit the audio directions to my radio, but this hasn't actually worked yet (possibly because it isn't happy about the station I picked). On the other hand, I'm utterly delighted to know that it will provide me with driving directions in several dozen different languages, including in some cases multiple dialect and gender options. So if I should need to know how to get somewhere in Estonian or in Serbian, I'm good to go. (No Welsh, alas.)

Thanks for all the birthday wishes, everyone.

I have only one final comment on my digestive adventures. Good idea: achieving my target weight[*] as a birthday present. Really really really bad idea: food poisoning as a weight-loss tool.

[*] Actually probably overshot it, since I was 150.8 when I got home and my afternoon weight is usually 2 lb above my first-thing-in-the-morning weight.

So when your airplane is coming in over the end of the runway at O'Hare, and you're about 20 ft off the ground, and then suddenly the pilot guns the jets and pulls up at about a 45-degree ascent, it is a reasonable conclusion that you have just missed having A Really Bad Air Day. Turns out some other plane was crossing the runway we were about to land on.

After that, it's hard to get excited about having spent 2 hours on the tarmac in Salt Lake City waiting for permission to take off, discovering that my rental car company shuts down for the night at 10 pm (something they neglected to mention when I reserved the car), and finally making it in to Kalamazoo at 5:30 am.

So one of the major premises of this trip was that back when I did my PNW road trip last fall Liz was off gallivanting in France and she was one of the core of people I'd wanted to see on that trip. And the second major premise is that over the years I've made an assortment of trips up to An Tir with the plausible excuse of teaching some classes (in a wide variety of venues), which have been extremely enjoyable, and xrian wanted to come too, and then Liz said, "Well there's this local event the first weekend of February that we're running Ithra classes at ..." and the next thing you know we had plane reservations.

So we each did several classes at the Dragon's Laire A&S event. I reprised my "Embroidered Clothing Before AD 1000" and "Survey of Sewing Work Containers" (the two I had to sweat over re-creating the slide-shows for), and then got some enthusiastic converts for the Birka wire "embroidery" presentation and lab. (Given how many Viking enthusiasts there are up there, I was a little worried that it might be old hat, but evidently not.) Finished up with a nice little feast. I think xrian rather enjoyed the whole "touring rock star with groupies" aspect and seemed to be surrounded by enthusiastic fans all weekend. I kept getting assured second-hand that I had groupies too, but as often happens I guess they were too intimidated to hang out and chat with me (although my classes were all very well attended).

Sunday was for "use the out-of-town visitors as an excuse for a shopping party" and we went to a local yarn/spinning/weaving store (at which I picked up a couple pounds of wool top to finish up the spin-directional cloak project ... one of these decades ... without first considering that it wouldn't compress small enough to go into my suitcase) followed by a leisurely lunch at a truly excellent Indian restaurant. (How excellent? Well, in addition to the delicious food, when the time came to pay the bill for our large and amorphous party, they just had each of us recite our dishes to the cashier, who toted up individual receipts.)

My return flight had significant overlap with the Superbowl, which seems to be the most direct explanation for the plane being only one-third full.

My An Tirian friends are under standing orders to find me not less than one excuse-to-come-teach per year.

I managed to get everything into the roll-away, class handouts, wire supplies, medieval clothing and all. (Hey, it's just for a weekend, why should this be difficult?) I hope the security folks have fun x-raying all the spools of wire and the braided demo pieces ... but not too much fun. Didn't get around to preping the class materials, but I have one period off before the class, so worst case I can do it then while hanging out. (Well, worst case is the students have to do their own, but since I'm combining the slide show and the hands-on, I'd rather not lose the time having them cut wire and wind it on spools and whatnot.) Now I just have to flip a coin on whether to take the raincoat (not as warm) or wool coat (not water-resistant). The web says Seattle might even get snow Saturday.