Home! (again!)
I never get tired of coming home from a trip. I like traveling, but I like coming home even better. Well, not so much the traveling home per se, but the arriving home. After the luggage is picked up and I'm in the car with SNG and hearing about the dog's latest crazy antics. SNG and Goofch live up the bachelor lifestyle while I'm gone, eating pizza and playing poker and smoking cigars. Before I get home, they're really careful to hide all the evidence and clear out all the smoke smell so I won't catch on, but I know what they're really up to while the cat's away...

So last week and this week was the Big Annual Conference in San Francisco. We had a terrific time, in spite of my laptop experiencing total meltdown on Monday afternoon during a diagnostic check with the help desk guy, who was just trying to figure out why my wireless card wasn't working. The bad news? Lost all my data from the past week and can't recover from my last good backup until tomorrow. So no work gets done in the meantime. The good news? I got a brand-spanking new laptop, the next model up from my old one. Which doesn't really mean squat, except that I can gloat to Fuzzy and Tiny Dancer and other colleagues who are still stuck with those old, pathetic D600s.

Lessons learned-- no more visiting SF in March. I'm severely allergic to the whole darn city. Upon breathing my first lungful of Bay air, I started sneezing and didn't stop until I was on the airplane again 8 days later. Being in a "delicate condition," I can't take any normal allergy medicine or cough suppresants-- in fact, all that's allowed is Tylonel (a.k.a. The Placebo)-- so of course the allergies turned into a raging bronchial thing by the end of the trip. This fact, combined with the lack of useful technological work resources (the naked laptop), motivated me to stay home from the office today and read up on some old statistics books I'd been wanting to dust off. And take a super-long hike with the dog in the state park. And do some laundry. And unpack.

And tomorrow I'll go in, and the help desk guy (actually, they'll send over the help desk chick because guy is still in SF) will try to glue together the little bits and bytes from my old hard drive and hopefully recover a few programs I promised for last week's students, then she'll restore the new laptop to the Last Good Backup and I'll spend the next 2 business days installing and configuring The Software My Company Produces so I can hopefully get a little productive work done by, oh, Tuesday or Wednesday.

It's still faster than doing everything with a pocket calculator.