Monday, June 22, 2009

Daily Life: Three Days Later

Well, I had an excellent three day weekend. About 9:00 a.m. on Friday I drove over to Pierre and Helen’s. I amused myself packing that morning. Here is the scenario – I am driving across the city, about ten miles from my apartment, where I am going to spend three nights. You would think it would be simple – a few changes of clothes, the usual traveling toys, the Kindle for reading. Well, I end up taking four baskets of laundry (might as well do laundry over the weekend while I am there), three laptops (work laptop for Monday or anything that arises over the weekend, personal laptop one because that is the primary laptop I play with, and personal laptop two (my old Mac) because I want to move some data from the Mac over to the personal laptop, specific some photo files loaded on the Mac. Then of course, to support that hardware, I have to take the assorted chargers. Three laptop chargers (I forget one, we will get back to that later in this entry), my iPhone charger, my Bluetooth charger, my camera charger, my electric razor charger, my Kindle charger. Then, I take some movies that I want to watch (including Season One of “The Big Bang Theory”), I take a game I want to play (Resident Evil 3), and I take two software packages I want to load (Photoshop and Sony Audio). My suitcase is pretty much entirely packed with electronics accessories. It is a good thing I brought four baskets of laundry. In short, I have enough stuff in the car, you would think I was going away for a much longer trip! All this from the guy who prides himself on his ability to pack lightly and quickly.

Once I settle in though, it was an excellent semi-retreat style weekend. Friday was nice, Saturday I took Timmy (the dog) out for a hike. Of course, Timmy is a small dog so his idea of hiking is walk a hundred yards and then have me carry him the rest of the way. Fortunately he is small enough that you can drape him over the shoulder and he can stay comfortably perched there. (Small note – someone really needs to invent doggie Tic-Tacs. Timmy could use a whole box of them.) Then, in the afternoon I socialized with friends, which was very nice and relaxing. Saturday evening was quite – I watched the movie Knights Tale (the rock and roll jousting movie starring Heath Ledger) and some incidental televison and then read deeply into night. Sunday was the pure retreat day. I spent most of it playing on the computer and watching The Big Bang Theory – which, if you have never seen it, is a sincerely funny television show. Both Saturday and Sunday I came online and made my way through the morning wandering chat and surfing the web and laughing, both with the things I saw and at the things I saw. Sunday evening I cooked some tortellini, conversed with family and friends, and the later in the evening watched “Mama Mia”, which, I have to say, I found surprisingly good.

I woke this morning with a great phone call from T.R., and then went off to log on and attend a teleconference briefing for management about forthcoming changes in our benefits packages at work. From there, another quick pair of meetings – and then the battery on my work laptop conked out. Followed in short order by the battery on my iPhone. I plugged to iPhone into the wall and loaded Timmy up and drove home to get my work laptop charger. Timmy went absolutely insane, running through the entire apartment and crawling into everything, all the while frantically sniffing. When his whirlwind scent tour was completed, he seemed quite content. We drove back across town and I stopped to pick up a deli sandwich for lunch. Now, it is nearing 1:00 PM, lunch is finished, and I am sitting here in the cool morning listening to the fish tank bubbling, Timmy snoring, and birds singing outside. Not a bad weekend at all.

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