The Aerie
I have to stop reading the news, it seems to be creeping up on me.
First there was the story I read about three women in a terrible Florida accident so severe that one car went airborne and the engine of the other car was torn out and landed in the street. Two women were killed, one was severely injured. I sure remembered that story.
Then I found out that the sole survivor was my former manager. She preceded me from that client, only to end up working a floor below me at the next client. It was shocking to learn of her injuries. She had been lying down in the back seat and probably only survived because of that. She lost teeth and suffered from a mangled foot, but her two friends in the car with her were killed. I hate to imagine what she experienced.
Recently I wandered back onto the Star Tribune Online, a discussion board I've been visiting periodically for ten years or more. Unfortunately it's infested with barnacle-like reactionaries, always the same people, whose sticky adherence to single-topic issues spoils the board for anyone who visits. One self-described pastor rails against Gay Marriage, as does one retired curmudgeon whose tactic for ten years has been to raise enough diversionary non-sequiturs to confuse any discussion. A collection of gun advocates will assert that almost any news event proves that everyone in America ought to carry a six-shooter. And then there are the basic knee-jerk reactionary fools who simply sneer "Liberal!" at any suggestion more left-wing than re-lighting the ovens at Treblinka.
Amidst this mess the few reasonable people are much appreciated. Right or left, open minded sensible people are a breath of fresh air on this stupid forum. One of the frequent posters, a woman with a sensible blue-collar look at the world, is a bus driver. When the reactionaries would shriek with angry fear about the scary minorities, this woman could provide on-the-ground descriptions of the hard-working everypeople who she drove around every day. And she could, indeed, talk about the troublemakers and the hoodlums she encountered as well.
So in the "bad things happening to good people" category, I discovered when I visited that she is no longer driving a bus... and that she lost her job after her bus ran over a passenger who lost his leg. The news story makes it sound like a case of driver negligence... here's her side of it.
Some of you may remember the bus accident I had on Nov 22. I went into some detail here. A man got on my bus at the 38th St LRT station. He seemed off, but I didn't smell alcohol (I had a cold). He couldn't get his transfer in properly. He tried 3 times, and finally I put it in for him. He had an LRT transfer, so he had ridden the train previously. As I worked my way down to the VA, he came up once to ask where my last stop was. I told him the VA. He then asked if I was going to turn around and go back DT. I said yes. A few blocks later he came up again and asked how to get to Southdale. I told him to transfer to the 515 bus at the VA. Another few blocks later, he came up and asked the quickest way to get DT. I told him to transfer to the LRT at the VA. When I arrived at the VA, he got off out the front door and walked at least 6-8 feet directly into the shelter. Another man got out the back door. I waited for the man in back to get off, as you cannot move while that door is open. It has an automatic brake on it. Meanwhile, this guy was still in the shelter. I checked all of my mirrors, and still saw him directly outside my door in the stop, though I had told him to go to his rear and right to get to the LRT. I also watched the kid in the back get off. I began moving, and was extremely surprised to be flagged down by a man telling me the bus had just run over a man. I ran back, saw the damage to his leg, ran back to the bus to call for emergency, and then returned to the man to comfort him best as I could. His leg was twisted in an unnatural way. The witness, an ex-firefighter, believed it to be a compound fracture. The man stated that he was sorry, he had fallen. This was on abright, sunny day. The video is unclear. It shows a very quick blur of him almost running toward the rear of the bus. It doesn't look like a fall, but who's to say? How do you fall 8 feet? I was pretty broke up when I learned of his loss of limb. Prior to that I had assumed he would be able to be patched up, based on what I saw on internet, and what the firefighter had said. Unfortunately, I allowed myself to feel unnecessary guilt, and made some bad decisions of my own. He just recently had his deposition on the 20th. In it, he admitted to having been drinking, but he stated that he left via the back door, and that I improperly left him off on the street, and took off too soon. None of which is true, and the video shows so. He recently was on WCCO and he stated that he had ridden the bus because he was probably drunk. Ok, but he had no destination. He changed it 3 times. If he rode the bus because he didn't want to drive because he was too drunk, just where was he going? He and his attorney also put the blame square on me. Funny thing about it, is the very next day after the story ran, they got the videotape. Wonder what his lawyer is thinking now. I don't work for the bus company anymore, so you won't be hearing any more bus stories from me. It's not related to the accident. They found me not responsible for it. I will get into it at a later date. I don't want to say or do anything that might jeopardize this lawsuit. According to the story, he has been fitted for a prosthetic leg. I am glad that is so. Yet he claims he shouldn't have to be responsible for paying the medical bills. Guess what? He isn't. He has not worked in 10 years. He is 52 and already on Medical. So, he's not paying a dime. He's also claiming loss of income. In any case, I hope he does not collect a dime. Yes, I am glad he is getting a leg, and I'm sorry this happened to him, yet I cannot forgive his lying. Especially when he attempts to destroy me professionally in his attempt to get free money. Oh, and here's the story that ran on WCCO. Note: The story DOES show the exact bus stop, with some folks getting off. Look at it carefully, and try to figure out how someone well inside the actual stop ends up, instead of walking back and to the right, coming directly out to the left to the rear right tire, on a dry day. He was actually all the way in the back of the shelter, when I pulled away. It is my belief that in his state, he attempted to grab the back door, which will not open once the bus is moving. It is directly in front of the rear tire, and could, other than him deliberately going under the tire, be the only explanation for how his LEFT leg ended up under it. If he was walking to LRT, his RIGHT leg should have been alongside the bus. The other thing the article states is that he wouldn't get much, even if he won the lawsuit. I would consider $300,000 alot of money. WCCO picked a really bad case to profile the limit on damages. They would have been much better suited if they had found someone who had won their case rightfully, and was denied full damages. Metro Transit is going to continue to refuse to settle with him. The fact is, and the video shows, that not only did I wait for some time after he got off to move, due to waiting for the man in the back to get out, but that he was nowhere near the curb. I don't work for them anymore, but I support them completely. |
I can't say who is right or wrong here, but I can say that my understanding of this woman is that she was a very conscientious and caring bus driver, and furthermore was never anything but honest and straighforward in her posts to the board. It's very tragic that her passenger lost his leg, but it's also very tragic that she has had to deal with the guilt over his accident, and the publicity over this story.
So all in all, the news has been creeping altogether too close for comfort.
Here we are again in zoom-time. As I've mentioned before, sometimes work settles into a routine in which whole weeks pass unnoticed: hence the gap since my last post. This will continue for a few more weeks until my upcoming trip to Stockholm, and will resume thereafter until the summer evaporates.
It's been a busy couple of weeks. First the door fell off the refridgerator, then the firewall keeps clogging up and needing a reboot every couple of days, and now the coffeemaker has stopped making coffee. See to answer the question posed in "Rent," I measure a year in terms of things breaking around the house: "The toilet; the freezer; the gutter that's choked with garbage. The toaster; the windows; the lawn to be cut... How about CHO-O-O-OREs!"
Yes the other evening I returned home and my wife said "Could you take a look at the fridge, the door doesn't seem to be closing right." So I looked at the door and it fell off onto the floor. Well, just about. I discovered that a bolt had sheared through due to the weight of condiments stored in the door. As soon as I touched the broken bolt it fell out, and as soon as it fell out only one bolt was holding the bracket, so that started to turn downward and eventually the door came off.
I tried drilling a hole through the solid steel mounting bar, but all that did was deafen me and blunt one of my drill bits. So eventually I was forced to reverse which side the doors open on, since fridges are built to open from either side depending on how they are installed. The intervening week has been amusing as we all fumble absentmindedly at the wrong side before waking up and reaching across to open the door.
In the middle of fixing the fridge I sat on a panel at Hamline college explaining to very friendly but somewhat confused college students how one can be an atheist AND a Unitarian-Universalist at the same time. It was a very nice time, everyone was very friendly, and a good time was had by all. I worked on the fridge, spoke at a college, and then worked on the fridge again till about 11:30 p.m.
Today's breakdown was the coffee maker - purchased last September for my spouse's birthday, it has turned out to be a transgendered appliance. It began life as a coffeemaker, but deep down inside it has always known it was a humidifier. So today it finally got its hormones and scheduled its reassignment and has begun living its life as a humidifier: the water in the tank goes down, but instead of dripping through the grounds the spout releases only steam. Eight cups of water into steam in about twenty minutes - I think it is going to be very happy as a humidifier.
What else? Oh yeah, Stockholm. The training company is sending me to Stockholm the second week of May, which ought to be fun. Unlike England I don't speak the language, but I'm confident that my English will support my hand gestures and pointing in urban Stockholm. All I need is coffee and pastries and I'll be fine for the week.
And Saturday was my final class in my Build Your Own Major program, so I'm figuring I ought to get started on the actual project involved. Fortunately when we went through the "scheduling" exercise, I filled out "January, February: plan project; March, April: dawdle, prevaricate, delay, procrastinate; May: panic, weep, cram." So they can't say I didn't warn them.
So it's been a busy week, but that's no excuse for not updating the blog. Hopefully back in the habit now... that is, as long as my computer's DVD burner doesn't keep freezing the system when I use it...
Sometimes people ask me where I got my nickname from...
And sometimes they know.
I didn't have any friends. This wasn't because I was a hopeless case, a dorky teenager who had not yet wandered down and discovered a computer in the physics classrom.
While this was true, the reason I didn't have any friends was because we had just moved to Minnesota from New Jersey, and I didn't know anybody. Well, that wasn't true - in Eighth Grade I had met Joe and over the summer I had met Steve through my friend Randy, who unbeknowst to all of us was about nine months away from going insane and being locked up. So of my first three friends in Minnesota one went nuts, and two are now dead. If I were my friend Tim, I'd be more than a little nervous.
Anyway Steve had given me a piece of advice over the summer: join the high school theater group. I had performed in a play in seventh grade in New Jersey, when my Social Studies teacher had been a theater major just happy to have a job. He had decided that our Social Studies course for the entire year would be a production of Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible.' I was Ezekiel Cheever.
So the first meeting of theater group I made a point of showing up. A lonely freshman, I felt intimidated by all the Big Scary Seniors (including, *snort*, Tim). The meeting was held in the theater, which did not have the newfangled modern flip-up desks that most school theaters now sport. I was wearing an onion on my belt, that being the fashion at the time.
Since there was paperwork to accomplish and no surfaces upon which to write, I was asked to hand out clipboards. As I did so I heard The Seniors discussing Monty Python jokes from the television. My position in a theater handing stuff out reminded me of the YouTube scene above, and I began calling out "Albatross! Albatross!"
And the Seniors found me FUNNY. I was in. I had friends for the first time, well, almost ever.
A nickname was born. And soon after I stumbled across that computer in the Physics room, and when a login was needed one came quickly to mind.
Thirty years later you're visiting albatross.org.
Makes me grateful that John Cleese wasn't selling Poop-shaped novelty hats...
The big news around Minnesota is that it's snowing. Okay, snow in Minnesota is never a surprise, and snow in April hardly notable - but this snow is taking place two weeks after record-setting 80 degree temperatures. So apparently those 80 degrees constituted "summer," and last week's declining temps were "autumn," and we're now into "winter" again. Basically we're experiencing a year's cycle of weather every month.
The shoulder is improving, thanks. While it is no longer as excruciatingly tender as it was Monday, the problem now is that I'm using it. In using it I discover the particular angles and configurations that REALLY hurt. For instance, sitting up and typing it's just fine (*phew*), but if I lean back in my chair the weight of my arm, unsupported by the chair back, really hurts. And if I try to lift or pull something, WHAM, it can be like a knife in the shoulder, or maybe it doesn't hurt at all.
But it's all improving, and fortunately it's healing up fast enough that I'm not sunk into a funk of depression about being so old I don't heal up when injured. A couple years ago I twisted my ankle, and I swear I could still feel it 18 months later if I stretched. That was depressing: I started to feel like my kids should load me on a sleigh and push me out on the ice.
It might be a problem with having too much of a tolerance for pain - maybe my ankle twist was just really, really bad and I didn't know it. I kept playing even though I'd blown out my shoulder: I kept taking pictures even though I twisted my ankle. Maybe I'm just too stupid to stop moving when I hurt myself.
The big project at work seems to have gone off successfully, although there's a boatload of paperwork to follow up. Fortunately it's already late Wednesday afternoon, meaning that the weekend is starting to loom up on the horizon. Of course, the weekend is just a big lie - the promise of ease and rest, when in fact it's merely two days of a different kind of work. During the week I anticipate making great strides on the weekends only to have the days speed past in a blur of family obligations and household chores.
This weekend promises to be fun however because we're going to go see our friend Ellis perform at our church as part of a concert series. Ellis is great! Meanwhile, the rest of the weekend needs to be devoted to my college homework... we'll see what I'm actually able to accomplish however...
See this is why I'm a passive lump. Reading books, sitting at computers, they have their hazards, but while diabetes is a deadly peril it doesn't have the attention-focusing immediacy of dislocating one's shoulder. Or NEARLY dislocating one's shoulder.
Oh, sure. I qualify my injury with "nearly," and all your sympathy dries up. Thanks, thanks a lot. I'll go shut my hand in a car door if I want sympathy I guess. Just for that, to find out how I nearly broke my shoulder, you'll have to read about Minicon first.
Minicon is an annual science-fiction convention and a longstanding tradition in Minnesota, indeed for a long time Minicon was the annual science fiction convention in Minnesota. For as long as I've lived here they've held Minicon on Easter Weekend, and for nearly as long as I've lived here I haven't been able to go because of Easter. Still, I wanted to go, and the tradition of wanting to go to Minicon is a deeply held springtime ritual. A ritual that, alas, has come to an end.
The end began when, as many such things do, Minicon became too successful. During the 1980's when I was footloose and fancy free I visited a couple of World Science Fiction Conventions, such as Boston, Baltimore, and Denver. The 1982 World convention was attended by as about 3,500 people. By the late 1990's Minnesota's own Minicon was attracting equivalent numbers of oddballs, who reduced the then-Radisson/now-Sheraton South hotel to hysterics.
By the turn of the century Minicon had become a full-fledged bacchanal, and woe be to any non-convention guests in the hotel on Easter weekend. Crowding in under the elastic umbrella of "science fiction and fantasy," members from only-barely-related interest groups had begun regular attendance: the polyamorous crowd (Heinlein described poly families), the drummers (there was a drummer in a Stephen Brust book once), and the BDSM (or, 'Gor novels') communities all set Minicon as their annual meeting place. At the last Minicon I attended, a fellow with a gigantic swinging latex phallus marched in leather and studs down the central atrium, leading a woman by a collar. The drumming started at 3:00 p.m. Friday and did not stop until after noon Sunday. And attractive girls wandered between the con-suite parties wearing only leather loincloths and fishnet shirts.
The presence of attractive girls of any sort is a well-known sign that your science fiction convention is attracting a non-science-fiction crowd.
Alerted to the corruption of their science fiction convention, an emergency team of self-appointed guardians of Moral Order sprang into action. They seized power from the negligent slackers running the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, determined to purify Minicon with fire. And purify it they did. Their goal, as I understood it, was to return Minicon to a discussion of books, and books alone. Movies, and other media were hardly tolerable, and all this sadomasocistic sex and loud music were right out. It was like having Rio taken over by one's grandmother.
Since I knew some of the people involved in the purification, I knew from the start that the result would be disastrous. I had in the past worked with one of the key self-important organizers, and I knew anything this person was involved with would be a benighted failure. So when this crew seized power I decided to skip Minicon for a few years until their crippling influence waned.
This year was different, however, becase I got my start in computers during the 1970's on a statewide computer system called MECC. MECC offered high school students the ability to code on a big, serious mainframe computer, and it spurred Carter-era nerds to write programs that the rest of the world wouldn't experience for thirty years. Discussion forums? Interactive multi-user adventure games? Interactive chat with emotes? Had 'em. Had 'em thirty years ago, because of MECC.
So this year was different because a few former MECCies decided to pull together a reunion party, and they decided to do it at Minicon - probably under the mistaken belief that a lot of MECCies would be attending ( there being considerable overlap between science fiction readers and Cretaceous-era computer nerds).
So for the first time in forever I had a reason to attend Minicon. I donned my leather jacket, dropped my laptop into the pocket for geek points, and headed down to the Sheraton South.
My first indication that something was wrong came when I pulled into the parking lot, and parked in the first row outside the hotel. In the past the parking lot would have been full to overflowing, many vehicles pulling trailers for the dealer's room. I actually wondered if I had come to the Sheraton South out of habit, but the convention had been moved elsewhere.
I entered the hotel and my misgivings were only reinforced. While I had not expected the Phallus Barbarian or the girls in the see-through shirts, I expected to at least spot a couple of latex-browed Klingons, or even a young dork in a long Doctor Who scarf. Nothing. A squeaky-clean suburban family of five rolled wheely-luggage onto an elevator. A pretty blond girl talked on a cell phone. Nothing.
I made my way up to the designated party room, only to find that the partiers had gone off for dinner. So I decided to wander the hotel in search of Minicon.
The hotel has two portions, a tall tower, and a shorter block of rooms with an open central atrium, and the latter was where I found the first signs of a convention. A quiet registration table bore prices for the convention: $55 for the day. Ignoring the registration table - I was only here for the MECC party - I wandered into the dealer room, which was just getting ready to close.
Instead of a sprawl of merchandise arrayed in the largest hall, the dealer room held at most a dozen merchants, and shared its space with the Art Show. Each was not merely a shadow of their former selves, they were smaller than their counterpats at the Marscon convention to which I have been taking my kids for a couple of years... and I thought of Marscon as an "up-and-comer" convention.
The art show was a sad set of fan-fold display boards, lacking bids on many of the for-sale drawings of cute dragons and improbably-endowed female warriors in metal bikinis.
I wandered out of the dealer room in a somber mood, and wandered up to the meeting halls, where a purloined event schedule suggested that readings and panels would be taking place. Hall after hall was full of... chairs. Just chairs. Finally in one hall about two dozen people held a memorial discussion of the works of the late-lamented John M. Ford.
Shocked, I headed towards the pools. Certainly on the broad plaza by the pools I would find the drummers and the con-suite parties.
But no. Where once four dozen drummers had led a score of bellydancers through their paces, now a single juggler tossed bowling pins. Of all the suites facing the pool, about half a dozen showed signs of activity. And the pools, which normally I avoided lest my eyes be seared by the sight of science fiction fans in partial undress, were populated by giggling children and moms reading romance novels.
I staggered in shock past the convention suites, where in ones or twos a few scruffy science fiction fans talked, read books, or nursed their drinks. At one table a half dozen people played boxed RPG games. Finally, at the end of the row, I came across friend and author Lyda Morehouse, preparing to present a panel on science-fiction expletives. I wondered who the frack would be in attendance.
And that was it! The MECCies rang me up and swung by to bring me back to their party, briefly doubling the apparent attendance of the con suites and causing one bathrobed science fiction fan to glare at us and ask after our business. Once assured that neither we nor the wine we bore were a threat to his convention he departed, giving us the evil eye in retreat.
The MECC party was delightful - a crowd of mid-level career IT dorks all sharing a common origin. We discussed MECCies past and present, wondering where Fugly Don or Ziggy ended up, exchanging lethal details of gossip made safe by the passage of time. Catchphrases not uttered for a quarter century caused laughter all around, and I cursed myself for failing to bring my "I'm a MECC user" button.
Of Minicon, we spoke only briefly and with sober regard. Three hundred pre-registered attendees, said one fellow with connections, and maybe fifty at the door. From the vibrant, exciting, and vital celebration of a few years past, the self-appointed guardians of righteous science fiction had, literally, decimated attendance.
Of course that's the way of all such things, from mailing lists to conventions to nations themselves - they grow, they break apart, they spawn offspring from their wreckage, and so renew the cycle of life.
We celebrated the cycle of life with Easter lunch the next day at my sister-in-law's house. After the meal her husband organized a game of touch football in their big suburban back-yard. Having chivvied my kids off the couch and out the door, I was tempted to remain behind and continue reading my book, but then I thought that wouldn't be setting much of an example. And besides, they are fifteen and won't be chivvied anywhere much longer. So I put my book aside and joined them.
It took me about five minutes to injure myself. Carrying the football and fleeing my son on the opposing team, I got out of balance. For a couple of seconds I knew I was going to fall and tried to right myself. But finally I gave in to gravity and tumbled head over heels. And, despite training in aikido in how to safely fall and roll, my velocity, angle, and, face it, age, meant that I didn't quite roll on my shoulder.
No, it was more as if I was attempting to use my shoulder to plow the lawn for planting corn or wheat. The joint, the same one injured when I was hit by a truck in 2001, slammed down almost perfectly perpendicular to the ground, and in line with my momentum. Honestly it hurt so much I was surprised that I hadn't dislocated it.
Not wishing to wimp out I continued playing, leading our team to a comeback victory from a 0-4 deficit. The teams ranged in age from the mid-Sixties to age five, and in weight from 60 lbs to 350, but we were uniformly determined to have a good time. Everybody was in good spirits when we finally wrapped up, but of course, once the game was over I immediately began to pay the price for my rambunction. By the time we reached Easter dinner at my mother's house I was white-faced with pain, and my right arm was largely useless. By the time we got home it was curling up like a dead spider's limb in an effort to avoid jostling.
Fortunately a hot bath and a night's sleep have helped a lot, and the pain has localized itself to the muscles underneath my scapula and the trapezius muscle - the muscle on top of the shoulder that slants diagonally up to the base of the neck. I suspect that I stretched all those muscles to the limit as they attempted to keep my shoulder from separating, and for that successful effort I am truly grateful, if sore.
My mother was delighted to remind my just how old I am, and how foolish it is for someone of my age to be loping about like a young man. Unfortunately my brother-in-law's father had already been spotted hurling his 65-year-old frame atop a loose ball, so it would have been hard for me to use age as an excuse for sitting on the sidelines. Besides, we'd had a good time.
My wife had also played, and by this morning we were quite the pair - I unable to use my right arm, and she with ridiculously sore knees. Still, it was almost (almost) worth it just to be able to say for the first time ever that my wife and I are both suffering from sports injuries. There's a laugh!
Ouch, ow, oh. Okay, gotta ease up on the laughter, it hurts. Hm. I think I'll go back to being a passive lump.
I think this is an example of why I just don't fit in almost anywhere that I go. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe everybody does this. But I think the fact that I don't know if this is normal is yet another clue as to why I don't fit in.
In order to save money at work I bought myself some coffee on a 2-for-1 sale at the nearby Lunds. By the way, everybody should shop at Lunds. I say this because one of the Lunds family is a very generous supporting member of our church, and she is not only generous and supporting, she's also tremendously cool and teaches Religious Ed with my spouse. So I am happy to support Lunds if, in the end, some of that support trickles down to her, and then on to our church.
Better'n givin' it to Rainbow, and their parent company Loopy's or Froopy's or whatever it is. Although that IS where my mother and sister work... Fine but not Cub, avoid Cub. Well, except that's where my friend Keith works... okay fine, shop wherever you like! Sheesh!
ANYway, I had bought two half-pounds of coffee at Lunds in order to avoid having to pay $0.75 a cup at work. When you drink as much coffee as I do, it can add up. Especially if, like me, you rarely have any cash on hand.
So today I finished off the first bag, and with some difficulty managed to open up the second one without destroying it or the resealable sticky-tape on top. And what did I see, in the magical dimension inside the bag? I saw beans lotsa beans lotsa beans lotsa beans, yeah yeah. Yep, one of my two bags of coffee was not pre-ground.
Now, here's where a normal person would differ from me. A normal person would probably have shrugged, maybe cursed their luck, and settled for brewing a cup of green tea from the box in the drawer. And I thought about it, I really did. But what I wanted was a cup of coffee, not tea. And I had no money.
So it occurred to me that the only difference between ground coffee and bean coffee was the grinding part. And grinding is nothing more than a sort of systematic form of crushing. And truly, I could crush a coffee bean, couldn't I?
I poured a measure of beans into a filter, and folded it shut. Then I pinched one of the beans between my fingers. It cracked, but it was by no means ground, and if I was going to crush the beans this way I would end up with an unsatisfactory grind and very sore hands. I looked at my coffee cup, then back at the beans. Then I noted that the cup was both hard and round.
I laid another filter on top of the beans, and positioned my ceramic coffee cup sideways above the beans. Pressing down, I was rewarded with a satisfying crunch of beans pulverizing... almost grinding as a matter of fact. Unfortunately my desktop acted like a drum, amplifying and transmitting the crunch of the beans so that everyone nearby could hear it. That wouldn't do.
I tried putting the beans on a notepad on the floor, but the crushing sound was only slightly quieter.
Finally I stuffed the beans and filters into my coffee cup, and wandered off in search of an empty conference room. Spotting one I slipped inside and set up my impromptu mortar and pestle.
*Crunch*
*CRUNCH*
I peeked... grounds! There were still beans in there, but they were surrounded by what definitely looked like coffee grounds. I resumed rolling my ceramic mug on top of the beans: *Crunch* *crunch* *crunch* *crunch* *crunch.* Click!
Click?
There was somebody at the door to the conference room!
Fortunately they stood outside the room, hand on the latch, talking for a few precious seconds as I stuffed my filters and beans back into the coffee cup, picked up my notepad, and swept a few fragmented beans onto the floor. When they opened the door they found only me, notebook and innocent coffee cup (carefully held so my hand covered the opening), walking towards the door.
"Oh, I'm sorry, are you using this?" the woman said.
"No, just leaving," I smiled.
"It smells like coffee," said the man as I walked away.
I went back to my desk, and then set up my coffee maker in the kitchen and brewed up a pot. The verdict?
Coffee!
Unfortunately as I sit drinking my coffee I am developing a craving for a peanut-butter sandwich. But all I have is this jar of roasted peanuts...
Well sorry about not blogging along the way, but the trip to England has been completed. Unfortunately I was too crazy-busy most of that time to blog.
The trip started off with Northwest Airlines failing to get me to Detroit on time to make my connecting flight, followed by the discovery that there is only one flight a day that leaves Detroit for Great Britain. Along with two others who were stranded in Detroit, I pounded on the glass as we watched our plane back away from the gate without us. We managed to get to London eventually, but by the time I reached my hotel I had been awake for 36 straight hours and had no change of clothes.
And my return trip began with the statement, "I'm sorry, but I have no record of your flight reservation."
What with all that business, plus the accompanying exhaustion, there was just very little opportunity to blog. Which is too bad, because it was all great material. I'll link to the details of the outbound fiasco in a little while, as soon as I can get home and upload the information.
However, there was fun involved with this trip. I managed to meet a fellow named Simon, whom I had only known from the Internet prior to this. I got to tour London on the 31st, including riding the giant Ferris wheel that someone decided to install beside the Thames. And I got to watch the Season 3 premiere of Doctor Who, which was kind of fun seeing as the experience of most Americans is that we get to see the Doctor Who episodes about a year after they air in Great Britain.
Nevertheless I have to say this was a terribly tiring trip. Last night I went home after work with the best intentions of transcribing some of my events, only to pass out after dinner. I slept for over twelve straight hours as my body attempted to recover from bidirectional jet lag and extended periods of stressful sleeplessness.
Hopefully now I am recovered from the stresses of travel and can set about the process of uploading my shamefully small collection of photographs and documenting the nightmare that was travel.
And then I can send some very pointed letters to both Northwest Airlines and British Air. Not that they will care.
