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Saturday morning I was up at 6am, nearly on East Coast time, other than a bit of insomnia before following asleep the night before. I made it out of the house at 6.30 for the day's hike ... but was back within 10 minutes to take my morning pills. Whoops! So I was out of the house before 7am.
The plan was a hike up Panoramic Hill, across the fire trails above Strawberry Canyon, then to some bus stop in or around Tilden Park. And, it was a beautiful hike. The mornings have been warm, so I had my jacket off by the time I got to the Hill. It was slightly cool, slightly damo, and just overall wonderful weather for hiking. I was delighted by the emptiness of the trails, which largely held until 9am or so. Then I started seeing people out with their dogs. I was also delighted by over a half-dozen rabbits, hopping along the trails (and quick to vacate when I came by). I just about never see rabbits up there, so seeing half-a-dozen on the same day was astounding. I finally got out my camera to take a picture of the next, but there were no more. (That was about when the dog walkers started appearing, and the owner of one very happily bounding dog indeed told me that his pup has spotted a rabbit.)
I eventually landed at the bus stop at the top of the stutter ridge above TIlden, at the corner of Wild Cat & Grizzly Peak. I made it to downtown by noon, even after two stops during the hike, one to read a bit of my copy of <i>The Old Guard</I>, and one to eat lunch. It made me think that I should sacrifice a couple of hours of sleep some Saturday morning, to do another 7am hike, but this time keep going until the late hour or exhaustion stops me! I could make it further than I ever have before! (And set myself a new Fitbit record, as I managed 32,000 steps on Saturday with just my 7am-noon hike.)
Anywho, the hike was enjoyable and restful, exactly what I needed before a plane trip, and what will be three days of busy work, from Tuesday to Thursday.
Later in the day, I finished up any number of chores around the house, some for myself, some for K., who is supposed to be staying off of her foot so that she doesn't dislocate a toe before her ligament heals. Then after dinner I got to packing.
I was just finishing up and getting ready to wind down for bed when I got a call from C., saying that the AirBnB he'd rented for us for Sunday night was short the sofa bed that was to be mine, having substituted a psychiatrist's couch instead(!). WTF!!
So here I am, on the edge of going to bed before a 5am flight, and I don't have a room for the next night, nor have I ever sent up an AirBnB account. Yeah, my relaxation is blown away and I'm now super-stressed. Joy. Cue 60 or 70 minutes of frustrating work, trying to setup an AirBnB account, going through multiple device to take a picture of my ID clear enough for AirBnB to read, and finding a barely-acceptable BnB among all of the various subpar options that have a bed available the next night. By now I'm 30 or 40 minutes past my bed time and way too wound up. So I stay up another 20 minutes before deciding to give bed a try. I'm *still* too wound up, but at least the insomnia isn't as bad as the previous evening. I'm asleep within 1 hour instead of within 2.
I'm running a little slow in the morning, and I'm only actually ready to go right when I wanted to head out the door. And that's when I call Uber (because good 'ole third-world BART doesn't run early Sunday morning). It takes agonizingly long minutes before anyone accepts my request, and when someone does he's on the Bay Bridge, listed as 19 minutes out. (He makes it in more like 13.) Still, plenty of time. I try to arrange my airline trips with enough time for a couple of problems.
Problem #2 is the huge line at bag check-in at JetBlue, despite the fact that most of the international terminal is empty. But that only takes 5 or 10 minutes.
Problem #3 is just a TSA attitude problem. I tell them I'm opting out of the naked-xray machine, as everyone should to kill this invasive, unnecessary, and poorly performing machine, but which no one else does. The jerk TSA agent is clearly pretty pissed at this, which is something I've never seen before. He spitefully tells me. "I don't know how long it'll be. It could be 5 minutes, it could be 30 minutes." Whatever, you TSA dick. It's 1 or 2 minutes, as usual.
Surrounded by sickies, as usual, on the plane. The guy over in the window seat is coughing and sneezing and snuffling from the moment
I sit down. The woman next to me, in the center seat, starts sniffling continuously after her meal. As usual, I think it'll be a miracle if I'm not sick in two days time. Which would be just as the RWOT conference is start. I continuously use hand-sanitizer that I've wastefully packaged in a quart bag to satisfy another of TSA's ridiculous and useless, fear-mongering procedures. The second I'm off the plane, I will step into a bathroom to wash even more thoroughly. Because airplane cabins are little petri dishes of recirculated disease.
But on the flight, JetBlue's legroom and wifi continue to rock. They're at the top of my list of airlines to fly because they're adding amenities rather than removing them or charging for them, like the rest of the misbegotten industry.
We circle Logan airport in Boston for twenty minutes because of a crew "painting lines on the runway". 3.30pm in the afternoon seems like a sort of bad time to do that.
JetBlue's ever-intriguing "map channel" soon shows us entirely flipped around on our flight path, as if we were heading right back to San Francisco. Soon after our plane icon begins to spin, as if it were careening wildly out of control.
(Fortunately, we were running early before this waste of time.)
Upon landing, the public transit proved to be a little more challenging than expected. The plan looked easy enough: take the Silver Line to the Red Line.
Except the Silver "Line" is apparently just a bit of branding. It's a bus, and it's a bus that was so crowded that I had to yell and cajole to get people to back up enough to get me and my suitcase in. Then I had to do the same to help some other people get in. Then it turns out that they're not running the Red Line under the Charles River during weekends, so it was off the train, up the stairs, onto one of the line of waiting buses, through the streets of Boston via grossly inefficient directions, then eventually to a stop two stops up the line, and back down the stairs and onto the train.
I got in to the AirBnB about 6pm.
I had grave concerns about my B&B room, but it looks fine. A bit of floor space, a couch, a pretty spacious bathroom. Oh, it's got fresh air problems and a stair outside right next to the bed and a bit of a musty smell in the bathroom, but it gets at least a B-.
After settling I went and wandered a bit, theoretically looking for dinner, but that was an excuse.
I wandered through MIT and was pretty surprised to find it right in the middle of the city, with major roads cutting through it.
I got back down to the Charles River and found it very attractive. I crossed it on a well-lit bridge full of students going to and fro. The sun had set by now and toward the end of the bridge I saw quite a few people with cell phones out, pointed toward the reddish sky. I looked at them as I passed and saw: photo software; photo software; photo software, hunting a Pokemon.
After a bit more wandering I ended up near Fenway Stadium, found some dinner, then circled back.
Man, the roads in Boston are invasive. Huge, gaping scars cutting through the city. I had to take quite a bit of effort to get around some of them!
It was entirely dark by now, and I was a bit leery of some of the neighborhoods which seemed big and urban, but everywhere there were students with cell phones out, totally oblivious to the world around them. So, not as muggy as Berkeley, I figured.
Eventually I made it back home, a bit footsore.
Tomorrow is my free day before the design workshop begins.
The plan was a hike up Panoramic Hill, across the fire trails above Strawberry Canyon, then to some bus stop in or around Tilden Park. And, it was a beautiful hike. The mornings have been warm, so I had my jacket off by the time I got to the Hill. It was slightly cool, slightly damo, and just overall wonderful weather for hiking. I was delighted by the emptiness of the trails, which largely held until 9am or so. Then I started seeing people out with their dogs. I was also delighted by over a half-dozen rabbits, hopping along the trails (and quick to vacate when I came by). I just about never see rabbits up there, so seeing half-a-dozen on the same day was astounding. I finally got out my camera to take a picture of the next, but there were no more. (That was about when the dog walkers started appearing, and the owner of one very happily bounding dog indeed told me that his pup has spotted a rabbit.)
I eventually landed at the bus stop at the top of the stutter ridge above TIlden, at the corner of Wild Cat & Grizzly Peak. I made it to downtown by noon, even after two stops during the hike, one to read a bit of my copy of <i>The Old Guard</I>, and one to eat lunch. It made me think that I should sacrifice a couple of hours of sleep some Saturday morning, to do another 7am hike, but this time keep going until the late hour or exhaustion stops me! I could make it further than I ever have before! (And set myself a new Fitbit record, as I managed 32,000 steps on Saturday with just my 7am-noon hike.)
Anywho, the hike was enjoyable and restful, exactly what I needed before a plane trip, and what will be three days of busy work, from Tuesday to Thursday.
Later in the day, I finished up any number of chores around the house, some for myself, some for K., who is supposed to be staying off of her foot so that she doesn't dislocate a toe before her ligament heals. Then after dinner I got to packing.
I was just finishing up and getting ready to wind down for bed when I got a call from C., saying that the AirBnB he'd rented for us for Sunday night was short the sofa bed that was to be mine, having substituted a psychiatrist's couch instead(!). WTF!!
So here I am, on the edge of going to bed before a 5am flight, and I don't have a room for the next night, nor have I ever sent up an AirBnB account. Yeah, my relaxation is blown away and I'm now super-stressed. Joy. Cue 60 or 70 minutes of frustrating work, trying to setup an AirBnB account, going through multiple device to take a picture of my ID clear enough for AirBnB to read, and finding a barely-acceptable BnB among all of the various subpar options that have a bed available the next night. By now I'm 30 or 40 minutes past my bed time and way too wound up. So I stay up another 20 minutes before deciding to give bed a try. I'm *still* too wound up, but at least the insomnia isn't as bad as the previous evening. I'm asleep within 1 hour instead of within 2.
I'm running a little slow in the morning, and I'm only actually ready to go right when I wanted to head out the door. And that's when I call Uber (because good 'ole third-world BART doesn't run early Sunday morning). It takes agonizingly long minutes before anyone accepts my request, and when someone does he's on the Bay Bridge, listed as 19 minutes out. (He makes it in more like 13.) Still, plenty of time. I try to arrange my airline trips with enough time for a couple of problems.
Problem #2 is the huge line at bag check-in at JetBlue, despite the fact that most of the international terminal is empty. But that only takes 5 or 10 minutes.
Problem #3 is just a TSA attitude problem. I tell them I'm opting out of the naked-xray machine, as everyone should to kill this invasive, unnecessary, and poorly performing machine, but which no one else does. The jerk TSA agent is clearly pretty pissed at this, which is something I've never seen before. He spitefully tells me. "I don't know how long it'll be. It could be 5 minutes, it could be 30 minutes." Whatever, you TSA dick. It's 1 or 2 minutes, as usual.
Surrounded by sickies, as usual, on the plane. The guy over in the window seat is coughing and sneezing and snuffling from the moment
I sit down. The woman next to me, in the center seat, starts sniffling continuously after her meal. As usual, I think it'll be a miracle if I'm not sick in two days time. Which would be just as the RWOT conference is start. I continuously use hand-sanitizer that I've wastefully packaged in a quart bag to satisfy another of TSA's ridiculous and useless, fear-mongering procedures. The second I'm off the plane, I will step into a bathroom to wash even more thoroughly. Because airplane cabins are little petri dishes of recirculated disease.
But on the flight, JetBlue's legroom and wifi continue to rock. They're at the top of my list of airlines to fly because they're adding amenities rather than removing them or charging for them, like the rest of the misbegotten industry.
We circle Logan airport in Boston for twenty minutes because of a crew "painting lines on the runway". 3.30pm in the afternoon seems like a sort of bad time to do that.
JetBlue's ever-intriguing "map channel" soon shows us entirely flipped around on our flight path, as if we were heading right back to San Francisco. Soon after our plane icon begins to spin, as if it were careening wildly out of control.
(Fortunately, we were running early before this waste of time.)
Upon landing, the public transit proved to be a little more challenging than expected. The plan looked easy enough: take the Silver Line to the Red Line.
Except the Silver "Line" is apparently just a bit of branding. It's a bus, and it's a bus that was so crowded that I had to yell and cajole to get people to back up enough to get me and my suitcase in. Then I had to do the same to help some other people get in. Then it turns out that they're not running the Red Line under the Charles River during weekends, so it was off the train, up the stairs, onto one of the line of waiting buses, through the streets of Boston via grossly inefficient directions, then eventually to a stop two stops up the line, and back down the stairs and onto the train.
I got in to the AirBnB about 6pm.
I had grave concerns about my B&B room, but it looks fine. A bit of floor space, a couch, a pretty spacious bathroom. Oh, it's got fresh air problems and a stair outside right next to the bed and a bit of a musty smell in the bathroom, but it gets at least a B-.
After settling I went and wandered a bit, theoretically looking for dinner, but that was an excuse.
I wandered through MIT and was pretty surprised to find it right in the middle of the city, with major roads cutting through it.
I got back down to the Charles River and found it very attractive. I crossed it on a well-lit bridge full of students going to and fro. The sun had set by now and toward the end of the bridge I saw quite a few people with cell phones out, pointed toward the reddish sky. I looked at them as I passed and saw: photo software; photo software; photo software, hunting a Pokemon.
After a bit more wandering I ended up near Fenway Stadium, found some dinner, then circled back.
Man, the roads in Boston are invasive. Huge, gaping scars cutting through the city. I had to take quite a bit of effort to get around some of them!
It was entirely dark by now, and I was a bit leery of some of the neighborhoods which seemed big and urban, but everywhere there were students with cell phones out, totally oblivious to the world around them. So, not as muggy as Berkeley, I figured.
Eventually I made it back home, a bit footsore.
Tomorrow is my free day before the design workshop begins.