The Aerie

Catching Up

Back again! Yeah, it has been rather busy, so I haven't been able to post. How busy? After a brief return to see if anything on the Star Tribune Online had changed (it hadn't) I once again quit wasting time on it last week. Despite quitting over a week ago I still haven't had the time to post here. I don't actually have the time now, I'm simply taking it.

Last week I spent in Stockholm (making time wasted on the Star Tribune Online particularly stupid) teaching another CISSP training course. Stockholm was gorgeous, I really really like that city. The beautiful 13th-century architecture is undamaged by World Wars I or II. The city is built across a series of islands, so there are water views everywhere. And since there are bike paths built into practically every street it made a lot of sense to rent a bike and spend Sunday pedaling around. Gorgeous.

The class went well, better than the first, and the students were okay. Unfortunately the desktops had active Internet connections, meaning that much of my time was spent speaking to people who were reading websites. Aside from that everything seemed to go well, and I was somehow able to balance the class time so that we ended at 3:00 on Friday afternoon despite getting ahead of ourselves earlier in the week.

That was the good part, and I'll try to post some pictures soon. Meanwhile there were also disasters. A close friend had a brief and very tragic pregnancy, capping off a year of work and personal disasters. If hardship builds character, she can fill the entire cast of 'Spartacus.' Another good friend announced that he and his partner are (probably?) splitting up after 12 years - and at the same time that he has a close friend who just died of a brain aneurysm at only 45 years of age. So much pain going around, it makes me feel bad to feel good, while simultaneously making it important to appreciate the good times.

My travel to and from Stockholm was uneventful. Outbound I could not sleep, and was trapped mid-row in between two large guys on the aisles who were dead to the world. That was a long flight on my bladder, and to top it off some kind of vent emerged from the floor beneath the seat in front of me, leaving me with no legroom.

But compared to my last trip that was nothing.

Coming back was full of adventures, the first being that I could not get to sleep the night before. In part I was anxious, because I was going to have to wake up at 3:00 a.m. to make my 6:30 a.m. departure. So I stayed up all night, only to discover that I had mis-set my alarm, and had I managed to fall sleep I would not have awakened at 3:00 a.m! It's as if I spent the whole night fruitlessly trying to get through a door only to discover that the hungry tigers were kept inside.

I discovered when I boarded that I was seated at the very back of my 6:30 a.m. shuttle to Amsterdam, which posed a problem: I only had one hour to cross the gigantic Amsterdam airport, including customs, and reach my connecting flight for Minneapolis. Being at the back of the plane shaved 20 of my 60 minutes.

Escaping the plane I managed to find a handcart, and throwing my luggage aboard I ran - or at least trotted - or walked briskly - or at least wheezed along behind my luggage until I reached customs. There was an immense line, but I tried something tricky and went 'way, way around to the far right side of the crowd.

Sure enough, the rightmost line was half the length of all the others, and I zipped through customs rather quickly. Then I had to run/slog/wheeze my way the same distance to reach the next gate.

But I got on board in time and found myself seated next to a pretty hairdresser from Salt Lake City who looked so much like my friend Tam that everytime the hairdresser spoke I thought "What's wrong with Tam's voice?"

Having not slept for over a day I struggled to remain awake through the first meal, and then lapsed into such utter unconsciousness that when I woke up next it was to think "Why are they serving another meal?" Yes, it was such seamless sleep that it really seemed like the stewards had simply decided we all looked malnourished and needed bulking up. So I ate my second sandwich while watching "Pan's Labyrinth" and then passed out again. Next thing I knew there were farm fields under the plane and we were descending to land. So where the first trip seemed endless, the second trip seemed shorter than the shuttle flight from Stockholm to Amsterdam.

That same night my wife and I were invited to a house concert featuring Justin Roth. The home was that of an acquaintance of the friends who invited us, and I knew something was odd when the driveway disappeared over a hill in the distance from the road. The house, when we reached it, was a four-story behemoth with more floorspace in the garage than our entire home. The only room I saw was the guest bathroom beside the garage and the hallway leading into the building, but it was all I needed to see to know these folks had money. The hallway was as large as my boys' bedroom, and all it did in this place was lead somewhere else.

Since that time I Googled the homeowners, our hosts, and found out that not only was their obvious wealth inherited, but the husband had recently spent two years in jail for helping his father conduct insider trading: dad got five years. I don't want to be ungrateful for their hospitality so I won't post the links to the court records, but it does provide perspective: he may have millions, but he missed two years of his kids growing up. I'll stay in my little house, thanks.

The concert was a lot of fun, although it got a little cold in the wind blowing off the lake. Justin Roth is an entertaining performer, and he ended his show by making up a song on the spot, with the help of audience ideas. The friends who invited us are a pastor and his wife, and he was just called to his first ministry, so when it came time to brainstorm song ideas, "Pastor Ken" got in there, as did "Mother's Day" and its "cosmic connection to the Minnesota fishing opener," which is always the same weekend.

Being the self-centered bastard that I am, I made a point of intercepting the idea sheet (there were about 100 people present, not everybody was going to get to add something) about halfway through. My wife, our friend Debbie and I all added ideas. The line before our section ended with "floating on the water, drifting in the wind," which I thought was a bit of a cop-out as it barely advanced any of the song's themes of pastorage, Mother's Day, or fishing. After some thought I closed its rhyme with a phrase trying to tie back to at least a couple of the stated themes, while also being a little silly.

Justin Roth ended up picking that pair of lines as the chorus of his made-up-on-the-spot song:

"Floating on the water, drifting in the wind,

Eyes fixed on the cosmic bobber to which all our hopes are pinned"

In a way it reminded me of the time that the fellow running a game convention ambushed me to write a Live Action Role Playing game (LARP) for about a dozen people in about three hours. From idea to performance was such a short time that it was like the notion popped out of my head and started running around on its own.

An idea that took a little longer to start running around on its own was a letter I sent to the Minneapolis Star Tribune back last December. I sent it in as a joke after reading an editorial describing talk show host Dennis Prager as a "gasbag." I pretended umbrage, and scolded the editors to properly describe Rush Limbaugh as the "drug-addled gasbag," while reserving "Right-wing blowhard" for Prager - all of which were labels swiped from the Stephanie Miller radio show.

Nobody was more astonished than I when my letter was printed, I even sent in a follow-up to the editors reading "That was a JOKE, I can't believe you printed it!"

Even more surprising was listening to the Stephanie Miller show today, more than six months later, and hearing her read my letter on the air. This makes the second time that something I have NOT sent in to Stephanie Miller ended up appearing on the show - the other time being when she read on the air an entry I'd posted to the Crooks and Liars website.

Meanwhile the work week has been super-busy. My first day back I was ambushed in a meeting by parties concerned with deadlines and dependencies, and I've spent til now scrambling to catch up with where other people need me to be. And it didn't help my time-management that jet lag caught up with me on Tuesday night and basically put me down from the minute I got home from work to the minute I left for work the next morning.

But I have managed some victories: I finally started biking to work after procrastinating on that change for ages. it takes less time to get here than I thought, and what's nice is that it's extremely safe and traffic-free. And last night, instead of wasting the evening sleeping or watching television, I wasted it downloading the Halo 3 videogame beta. So at least I've spread my time-wasting out across several media. Played the Halo 3 this morning, and it certainly features some high quality graphics.

Well, that's all my addled brain can summon up to remind me of what it is I've been doing for the last two weeks that has been so important that I couldn't find time to blog. Lunch is over, and it's time to get back to this 'work' thing I keep hearing so much about from the people in the cubicles around me...

Posted by Albatross at May 17, 2007 11:19 AM | TrackBack