Tuesday, March 31, 2009

90/365 Packing for Business and Pleasure


90/365 Packing for Business and Pleasure
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

Well, we're off in less than 2 days, and we've got lots to do between now and then, so we're starting the packing process early.

The trip to San Diego has been on the books for a while now. Balboa Rendezvous. (yeah, I definitely see that link dying in 6 months) It'll make up for the dance workshops I missed last weekend. And it's better to be healthy for this trip.

Then, on the way back, I have to stick around for some meetings in LA, the first one starting at 8AM Monday morning. Joy. On the plus side, I can expense the hotel for that night.

We were planning on heading straight home after that. Red-eye. Not even time to catch a movie at the Cineramadome because of the work obligations.

March has been tough. I've been busy, but also sick. The SOOTTAD has been working like crazy on a project with a crazy aggressive schedule and crazy team logistics (most of her team is one hour back in central time, but one of her developers is based 18 hours ahead). She probably got 9 hours of sleep over the last 4 days of development, bring-up, troubleshooting and debug, plus travel across country to pacific time to present the finished product. It all went well, and they were scheduled to start phase two with another aggressive deadline for sometime in April.

During this time, a bunch of events seemed to nudge us towards our eventual destination. Wil Wheaton tweeted about watching Maui sunsets via webcam. I randomly started playing my ukulele again. A friend who grew up in Hawaii has had a bunch of pictures from high school (in Hawaii) tagged in Facebook. And then the hotel where we stayed for a night in Waikiki on our honeymoon sent me an email. Which led me to google plane fares (which seem to be at historic lows recently) to Hawaii. And then to check frequent flier rewards.

We kept looking at different flight itineraries, but they kept bumping into this work thing or that client appointment. Another workshop. A local dance weekend. And, of course, Spring in New England. It's one of the nicer times of the year -- really a shame to be away, even for Hawaii. We might have been able to pull off a shorter trip, but you really need to spend more than a week to really give yourself time to acclimate and appreciate the place.

And then her company was notified out of the blue by the client to just stop work.

And with that, it was time to Gee the Eff out of Dodge.

We figured out that we could just tack the trip onto the end of our California trip, still spend 2 weeks there and get back in time for the SOOTTAD to make another client meeting.

Which I guess is how you book an extra 2 weeks of vacation, 4 days before you leave for the trip you were already planning on taking.

Oh, and we're closing on a refinance of our mortgage 4 hours before we fly to California.

Life is good, but you have to admit that it's still kinda crazy.

Crazy AWESOME.

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