Daily Life: The Vacation Switch

I woke up this morning and I was bright and fierce. The summer sun is in my skin and the summer itself is deep in my bones today. I am sure a lot of that has to do with "The Vacation Switch". I officially start my vacation one week from today - all 17 straight days of it. Today, the "Vacation Switch" flipped and I find myself in countdown mode.

I've started to think a little deeper about what I need to pack and that led me to an amusing moment. I was counting the chargers I need to take with me…

-Personal Laptop Charger
-iPhone Charger
-Bluetooth Headset Charger
-Canon H50 Charger
-Canon DSC9 Charger
-Amazon Kindle 2 Charger
-Electric Razor Charger

Now, technically, just looking at that list, I could leave the Kindle and the electric razor behind. But, why? That is one of the good thing about what is essentially a "Stay-cation" (I am not leaving California). I also tend to not really worry about the clothes I pack - San Diego is a major metropolitan area, if I need anything, I can get it there.

I also started to think a little deeper about what I am going to do on vacation, other than eat, sleep, drink and stare at things. The organizing principle behind the vacation is the San Diego Comic Con, the ultimate pop-culture destination, where a 100,000+ people are going to gather celebrate "all things geek". Comic books. Graphic novels. Television. Movies. Among many, many other things.

I was reading on Twitter the other day that it is estimated that if you walk the entire floor of the San Diego Convention Center, past every booth on the Exhibitors floor - you will walk a total of ten miles. That sounds about right to me. I tried that one afternoon two years ago and given the crowds and the distance, it literally took me all afternoon (about five hours, including a stop midway for lunch).

I will blog through it of course I did last year as well (pop back to July 2008 on the archive over to the lower right and you can read some of those entries). Me and about ten thousand other people will be blogging and twittering our way through it. It is almost impossible to describe, but you will see it on the evening news and read about it in your local newspaper and I will be in the thick of it. Or, sitting exhausted on the sidewalk somewhere drinking a Starbucks iced mocha I stood in line for thirty minutes for.

The official program schedule of events is supposed to go up on the web sometime later today, so I will begin the process of mapping my path through the time-space quantum reality that is better than any circus! Because of my love of the written word, I will be analyzing it to calculate which writers I will be able to listen to. Last year, it was F. Paul Wilson and Dean Koontz. I am definitely looking forward to a similar prize this year.