UMTravels

Woke up at 8, peed, checked mail, went back to bed until 9:30.
By 10:45am I was through security at the Oakland airport and having a lovely Chinese breakfast of beef and broccoli with soba noodles.
Flights on time today — make my lunch the same chicken salad that I had on the way down, though it was [...]

Corrections, corrections, corrections. I feel like a scene from Fiddler on the Roof.
So, yesterdays post, here are the corrections:
Even the top 10 list headline was screwed up:

So, the 10 Rules To Be A Good Housewife:

That should be:

So, the 10 Rules To Be A Good HouseGUEST: - really, we aren’t in the 50’s anymore

And the biggie [...]

I woke up this morning with a kiss on the forehead from Jamie — a recent other house-guest for ark and Onyx. It’s a lovely way to wake up. I wish it came with coffee — which was brewing.
By the time I got out of bed Jamie was gone, but fortunately the coffee wasn’t.
Cleaning out [...]

Up in the air again… a 12:30pm flight to Oakland to see Mark and Onyx on one of my three cheapie tickets. How cheap? $101.20 each, and I got upgraded to first class on the way down.
I like that noon flight — in First they actually still serve you food (a light salad with chicken [...]

The standard Tuesday marketing meeting. Odd to think that they didn’t have these weekly meetings until I started consulting for them almost a year and a half ago. Wow, I guess it has been that long!
Dinner tonight is for five people at 6pm… though Jonathan showed up at 3:30 and Jeff more like 5:30, and [...]

Something that I figured out last night is that with those three round-trips to the Bay Area that I booked I get to Alaska MVP Status a trip earlier…. after the Orlando trip (Nov. 2 to 6th to see Dan and Lisa) rather than the one way to Flagstaff to catch the train to Santa [...]

Wow — and I thought Saturday was lazy… Sunday beats it hands down.
I read twelve chapters of Aaron Elkin’s A Creative Clarity, and tried to figure out if I can get to Santa Fe for Christmas (as well as Thanksgiving) for something under $500. At the moment, it’s $400 to ABQ (which I hate flying [...]

Shouldn’t Saturdays be slow?
For some reason I was up at 7:45 this morning… and decided to print the Winter Call Envelopes which I couldn’t get to print last night. It’s amazing what a lack of whiskey in my system does to getting a cranky job to print.
Then some laying around reading the morning paper and finishing [...]

Today is lots of cleaning up/finishing up of projects for E&A. Mostly pushed through the pipeline. Should have my to-do list pretty well cleaned up before the end of the month.
Speaking of the end of the month, time to pay quarterlies to the state. Damn it.
I don’t know what’s in the air, but today I [...]

Woke up late. It was a long night last night.
But lots to do. Got posters to finalize, got proofs to pick up and deliver, got more work to do…. like making a Purchase Order form for my client.
Things to order:

Generic Cards for Vancouver
Event Manager Card for Vancouver
Sales Manager for Vancouver
Asian Centric Poster for most branches
Calendars [...]

While I am inside all nice and warm and clean, Raf is out stripping the front garden of all the weeds and grass — basically taking the top 2″ off and putting it into the trailer for a dump run.
This, on top of the couple of inches he took off the area where the gate [...]

Wake-up
Meeting Prep
Meeting
Errands
Work
Dinner
TV
Bed
My day in a nut shell.
[222.9]

Not the day I expected… but it’s my own fault.
Nothing like getting a call from the Front Desk at 12:30pm asking when we were planning on checking out. Tomorrow? No — today, and we are past due.
Yes, I read the reservation wrong. And the boys were on a cheesecake run, thank goodness Rich had his [...]

Amazing — the house (condo?) is up early today … all out drinking coffee by 10am. It certainly beats yesterday when it was noon.
I could get used to Bloody Marys in the morning (made by someone else). Now I know why I don’t keep the ingredients in my house. Slippery slope that.
Breakfast? Eggs Benedict, fresh [...]

I said I wouldn’t do it again… but the temptation of American Express gift cards was too great. $75 for 45 minutes. I went in with — this WILL be 45 minutes. And it must have showed. Guessing they assumed I wasn’t going to buy anymore points even though this is the resort that I [...]

Today’s big (and only) adventure after our 11am brunch is a trip to visit the Mount Baker Winery where Rich’s father works in sales.
The interesting thing about this winery is that they are working with a lot of “minor” grapes like Tempranillo, Malbec, Viognier,Muller Thurgau and some white varieties suited to Western Washington.
We ended up [...]

Work in the morning, plus a trip to the eastside to get a replacement check since it is apparently lost in the mail someplace…. was mailed Saturday, and Monday was a mail holiday, and by today it still wasn’t across town. Who knows, maybe it got sent to the Lopez Island address, but that isn’t [...]

This must be computer hell day… I can’t wait to leave town tomorrow.
New computer:

delete all the crapware with www.pcdecrapifer.com
delete Office Student and Home edition
upgrade to Windows 7 from the party pack
install AVG 8.5 anti-virus software
scan the system
remove Norton 60-day trial from the system
install Ad-Aware
scan the system
install Microsoft Office 2007
install Adobe Creative Suite 4
install Microsoft Trips [...]

If it’s Tuesday it must be time for a marketing meeting and a paycheck.
The check is in the mail. Damn. And it was mailed Saturday, but Monday was a holiday and by the end of today it still hadn’t come. Damn. Oh well, there is always tomorrow — it wasn’t that large because of my [...]

It seems that I’m still playing catch up from my two weeks out of town.
A big chunk of my day was soaked up by work.
A big chunk of the evening was soaked up by dinner with Raf.
And tomorrow we are supposed to get soaked, by rain.
Until then a silly picture from my last trip:

Yes, now [...]