Travels – Page 13

Disconnected.

I flew to Boston today for work/meetings for the week. As usual, I waited until this morning to pack, and since I had a morning flight, I was rushing a bit.

In my haste, I left my phone charging on the shelf in the pantry, and didn’t realize it until I got to the airport. Argh!

It will be interesting to see how I can get by without it. I’m not even that attached to it for connectivity – as I really only use it as a phone (not for internet connectivity). But, I have gotten used to being able to make a call from anywhere, without having to make arrangements to use a land line. Interestingly, the biggest inconvenience so far is not having something handy with a clock on it so I know what time it is. 🙂

I’m staying about 30 miles outside of Boston. After arriving, i had the pleasure of driving through the Ted Williams Tunnel at rush hour. It strikes me as odd that they spent so many years with the Big Dig only to have ended up with at tunnel that has about 8 feeder lanes that have to merge into only 2 lanes to go through the tunnel. That was fun (NOT – slow going).

Tomorrow, Spain plays Portugal in one of the semi-final matches of the UEFA Euro Cup 2012 soccer (er – futbol) match. I won’t be able to watch, as I’ll be in meetings, but i’m definitely rooting for España!

Surfdancing.

When I got my Mac, I realized that it could only open the windows filesystem on my old USB backup drive in read-only mode. Not great for doing backups. I’ll need to reformat it to use it. But I’ve been procrastinating, because i’m going to have to sort through what’s on there to see what to keep and what to get rid of. So this week I took the first step – I copied most of what was on the backup drive to my mac to prepare to reformat the USB drive.

Consequently, the next time I opened Picasa, it found ALL the photos that I had just copied and loaded them into its library, which took a while. But, once it finished, it makes for very easy viewing of many years of pictures. So, I’ve been spending a lot of time this morning browsing through photos I’ve taken that I haven’t looked at for years.

When I got to this one I thought I’d share it with you. This is a photo that I took when my sister, Colleen, and her son, Jacob, were visiting about 4 years ago. We drove down to Port Aransas for the weekend, and stayed a place right on the Gulf-side of the beach. This is a picture of Colleen and Jacob jumping together in the surf. I used some piece of software, can’t remember what, to create a water-color effect — oh, and I edited out the oil rig on the horizon :(. I later printed this and framed it for her.

I guess it’s kind of appropriate, too, because this is Mother’s Day weekend, and she’s a great mom.

I have to smile every time I look at this pic.

Form over function.

I do love driving up north of New York City. In about a span of 5-10 minutes the scenery quickly turns from city sprawl to forest, hills, rocks and streams. I can drive the route between La Guardia Aiport to Somers in my sleep. There’s one sight on the Hutchinson River Parkway at about exit 24 that always makes me chuckle – a curious looking pine tree.

I decided to take of picture of it as I was zooming by in traffic today, on my way back to the airport.

Tree or not a tree? 🙂

Before I punch out…

042512 — IBM 016 Electrical Duplicating Keypunch - 1929.

Just a quick post before “punching out” for the night. The meetings I’m attending this week are at an IBM facility. IBM celebrated 100 years of innovation in 2011. Let’s hope the next 100 are as impact-ful. These and other former state-of-the-art artifacts grace the lobby. The placard for this one says:

IBM 016 Electrical Duplicating Keypunch. The development of automatic feeding and ejecting mechanisms for keypunches and duplicators helped to increase the speed of key punching and reduce operator fatigue. The Type 016, introduced in 1929, fed cards into the punching unit and automatically removed or ejected the cards after punching. It was withdrawn from marketing in 1960.

This one’s even older. Not electric. Notice the hand crank.

0425122 — IBM 501 Automatic Numbering Gang Punch - 1926.

And it says:

IBM 501 Automatic Numbering Gang Punch. Brought to market in 1926, the Type 501 automatically recorded on a series of punched cards common fixed data from a master card. This punch operated at the rate of 125 cards per minute, and was withdrawn from marketing in April 1948.

I guess progress is always relative to where you’ve been…

Day and night.

This morning started early, as usual. I’m leaving for NY again this morning and I still had to pack. I took a walk out back after a few calls. This is a shot of one of the recently planted pentas, well in bloom; with droplets from this morning’s watering still there.

I made it to La Guardia without incident. This is a shot going over the Whitestone Bridge – perennially under construction. The sunset was pretty. I was hoping to get a shot of Manhattan from the port side of the plane, but for some reason, the plane approached from the east on landing, instead of the west, so I missed getting a shot.

The view from 14A.

I made it home tonight by about 11:30. Yay for no delays or major travel issues.

I am an aisle seat person. If you want to ask me to swap my aisle seat with your non-aisle seat on a flight so that you can sit next to your honey or your friend, you’d better be a little old lady, or a newlywed. Ok. Well. If it was a window seat, I’d probably swap with you, but *that’s* what I’d be thinking. You’ll have to bribe me (alot) to swap for the dreaded middle seat.

That being said, I do love looking out the window. I suspect I look a lot one of those people that you’d think was on their first plane ride. Oh, and I take pictures out the window, too. Sometimes even when my electronic devices are supposed to be turned to the off position and stowed.

The plane I flew from White Plains to Chicago today had single seats on the port side of the plane, so my window seat was also an aisle seat. About as good as it gets on a little regional jet.

Here’s your meaningless factoid of the day… did you know that American Airlines saves lots of $ a year in lower fuel costs (plane weighs less) because they don’t paint their planes? Now ya know.

Tuesday. Tax day. Traveling. And a troll.

At the party, over the weekend, several little kids were there… all about 2 years old. Monte brought out a box of toy trains and track that they played with at the picnic table on the patio. I think these were toys that he had as a kid. In the box was an old troll doll. Remember these guys? I couldn’t resist….

To those fellow-procrastinators out there…. get those tax returns in today!

I’m off to New York for the week. Ta-ta!

Bad hair day.

Today is off to a great start. Got up early to do email. Made one of those micro-pots of coffee in the hotel room. Quick shower. I’m rushing to get to my meeting on time, so I’d have to blow dry my hair. Hotel room hair dryers are typically wimpy. But it doesn’t seem worth it to stuff my big, bazillion watt ceramic, ionic, bionic hair dryer into my roll-a-board when I travel. So, I dug out the hotel dryer. And…I’m drying my hair… and halfway through, the hair dryer up and dies. Not just one of those overheating…wait 15 min interruptions. Just died.

Great. Now the left side of my hair is dry and straight. And the right side is wet… and when my hair dries naturally it has tons of curl/body in it. So… I’ll be sporting a new, split-personality, ying/yang look today… *sigh*

Is it Friday yet?

On the road again.

I’m off to Raleigh for the week. I flew through Chicago, and took this shot during my layover. You can see the Chicago skyline way off in the distance.

Back to reality.

I have been off-line for 10 glorious days – sailing through the British Virgin Islands. We just got home, and I have hundreds of photos to dig through. In the mean time, I’m posting a map showing each leg of our trip.

We headed to Tortola a week and a half ago: 12 sailors, 3 sailboats, 10 nights, 9 days and a ton of good times…. Our boat was a 51′ sloop called No Horizon. We shared it with Marty & Sue, and Tommy & Bobbie. Lori, Dave & Jake were on Sea Mist, and Wally, Kurt & Rod were on Pinta. The map above shows the route we took on No Horizon. Pinta and Sea Mist joined us for many of the legs, but everyone took their own route through the islands.

While I slept well on the boat every night, it’s going to be nice to sleep on my bed tonight and shower for as long as I want to! If I make it through my first day back at work tomorrow, I will pick several photos to post. More later…

…I go to come back!

Emergency Pedi.

I’m running out of time to get all the things I need to get done, done. Today I simply had to get a pedicure, so I booked an appointment at the newly opened Milk & Honey Salon in the Arboretum Market. In honor of Valentine’s Day next week I chose a color called “Fall in Love.”

My to-do list overfloweth, but now I’m primped, pampered and ready to go!

Sleepless in Seattle.

As you may have figured out, we extended our stay in Seattle a few more days. We are working from here during the day and playing at night. Today is our anniversary, as well. It just so happens that we got engaged while on a trip to Seattle to attend Patrick and Nga’s wedding. Monte popped the question and gave me a ring in a waterfront restaurant here – Elliott’s Oyster House on Pier 56. Nice memories. So…. since we were in town, we just had to go there for dinner tonight to celebrate.

After work we popped over to Seattle on the ferry. The mountain was out, though a bit hazy.

Whenever riding the ferry, I buy a bag of cheetos to feed to the seagulls. Monte had them eating out of his hand.

In Seattle, we walked down the waterfront for a while. At Elliott’s, we had a great table by the window overlooking the Sound and watched the sailboats and ferries go by as the sun set. We sampled as much of the seafood as possible – oysters, crab cakes, scallops, salmon…..the food and wine was delicious.

Afterwards we walked up and down the waterfront on the way back to the ferry. The weather was great. The first shot in this post is of one of the horses on an antique carousel inside of Miner’s Landing on Pier 57.

A lovely evening indeed. Goodnight Seattle…

Cerulean.

We are both up in Seattle this weekend to celebrate my mom’s 80th birthday. I flew in last night and we stayed with Patrick and Nga. This morning we went to breakfast in Ballard at the Fisherman’s Terminal. It’s a marina strictly for commercial fishing boats. This is the home of many of the crab boats on the show Deadliest Catch. Below is a shot of the memorial to fisherman lost at sea..

After breakfast we drove around to the peninsula to meet up with my family for the rest of the weekend.

Friendly skies.

Headed back to Austin for a laundry run. It drizzled in Dallas this afternoon. On the approach to AUS I was hoping that was a thundercloud, but it was not.

Today is the last day of Summer 2011. Sad, but hoping cooler and, more importantly, wetter weather lies ahead.

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