Not dead, on vacation. Back soon.

PS: I'm aware of the commentspam problem and will be turning on one-time identity verification soon.

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I'm at Rachel's parents' house in rural New York outside of Rochester, with a large contingent of family (and bulldogs) below. For the moment I'm hiding out in the upstairs bedroom, taking a quick break to check email and blogs and, apparently, to write a quick post.

We're coming back to California tomorrow. In the last few days we've played in a 34-person poker tournament (I came in 5th), had Thanksgiving at Rachel's aunt's new beautiful home, visited with more relatives than I'll ever remember, but enjoyed meeting each one, lusted after the inexpensive homes and land while lamenting our lack of teleportation for commuting purposes, raked leaves for Rachel's grandparents, had some snow, raked soggy leaves for Rachel's parents, been french-kissed by an english bulldog, taken a whole slew of photos, played Monopoly for the first time in over a decade, and been offered a free horse with full tack.

Quite a busy Thanksgiving holiday! Anyhow, I'm told I'm missed downstairs and I need to get back. How was your Thanksgiving?

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Rachel and I got back from a week's vacation, kayaking and camping in the Sea of Cortez! We've got stories to tell in the next few days, as well as a house to move in to, a few hundred emails to sort through (both personal and work), and about 600 commentspam on my site and a bunch more on Rachel's. It's amazing how all the data grows when it's funnelled into a big bucket that's left unattended for a week.

By contrast, we received a total of 4 voicemails on the cellphones we wisely left behind.

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Okay, the Clif's Notes version of my last five days (take two).

Thursday I was signed up to go to a philanthropic luncheon and in the evening join up with Ammy and Karen to see War Daddy, the play that Rachel was stage managing at the Zeum.

Midday Wednesday I knew that things would get too busy so I bowed out of the luncheon and had to postpone going to the play until this weekend. It turned out it was a good thing that I cancelled because I ended up staying at work all day and all night on thursday, not coming home at all, and grabbing a quick 90 minutes of sleep in a coworker's office. First time pulling an all-nighter at Google, and hopefully not a frequent occurance.

Incidentally, we're moving offices this weekend, and cardboard boxes and stickers were passed around earlier in the week. Anyhow, I worked pretty much solid until 5pm when I found out that 'be packed by the time you leave for the weekend' actually meant 'be packed by 6 when the movers start moving' (my fault, didn't read the faq closely enough). So, by 6:15 my GoogleLife is in boxes and stickered, and I'm out the door.

I was supposed to go to Liz's birthday/housewarming party on Friday night, but running on only 90 minutes sleep in the previous 40 hours, I knew I wasn't fit to drive the 140 miles to Sacramento, especially when I knew I'd have to drive back that evening to be ready to go to the Big Game (Cal vs. Stanford) on Saturday morning. So I went home and tried to sleep for about an hour before waking up to answer the phone.

After that I didn't get back to bed until after midnight, my circadian rhythms in direct opposition to my serotonin levels, making everything feel a little distant. Friday Night Waltz was at the same time, and 100 miles closer, but I didn't even think of going. Home was my final destination for the night.

Saturday morning Karen and I made an easy journey to Stanford, thanks to Rachel dropping us off on the way to work. Good thing to, since this is the first Stanford Big Game in decades without CalTrain access, since they've shut the train down on weekends for the last year and a half and didn't change the schedule for the event. (This is stupid because the way most public transit agencies increase ridership is when they introduce new potential riders to the system when they do one-off events like games and concerts. If you only run on weekdays, then only those people who use your train for commuting find out about your train. Chicken, I'd like you to meet egg.) Anyhow, Palo Alto was a resultant mess that we got to glide through relatively unscathed.

The game was a lot of fun. Both teams played badly at first, but it was nice to come from behind and pound the other team. This was also the first time I'd actually gone to a Big Game as a bona-fide alumnus. Karen wrote up a bit more on the game and the aftermath.

Karen dropped me off at the Zeum at 7:27pm for a 7:30pm curtain and I'm so glad I made it on time, though I'm so sorry that my own planning ended up making Karen sick so that she couldn't go. The show didn't actually start for another 10 minutes or so, so I even got to catch my breath.

Watching theatre alone is such a different experience for me than watching in a group. Somehow experiencing art with others, I feel that I have to immediately encapsulate my feelings and opinions into communicable nuggets, like I'm writing an essay, or at least that I have to have formed an opinion by the time the curtain falls. Seeing a play on my own I feel freer to experience it, rather than judge it.

While experiencing the play I realized a few things about my own approach to creative endeavors. I don't like anything I make to go out into the world until it's perfect. I realized on Saturday that this isn't because I'm so much a perfectionist, as it is that the kinds of art I produce are ones that stay up for a while, where imperfections are more glaring, and where the work is such an intentional act that improvisation is almost impossible. The musician can change a riff on the fly, or a painter can be very free with their brush, knowing both that the randomness and carefree effect can boost the work, and that the act itself is quick. Inspiration does play a large role in web design, but improvisation is harder to pull off, since every effect on the page is time-consuming enough to be deliberate by nature, and the best that one can hope for is for carefree inspiration that they can hold on to while transforming it into code.

Even then, if you make tools that people will use thousands of times, utility has to take a front seat to free-expression, and while aesthetics are vital, possibly even more important than in the more ephemeral disciplines of the performing arts, they're there to indicate the piece's function, or to create an emotional space to frame the work in.

It's probably a good thing I don't go to plays alone very often.

But even so, all that said, this is one of the reasons I so enjoyed riding Amtrak to and from Yahoo, more than a year ago. Setting myself to start writing in Oakland and to have a finished piece by Santa Clara, I started to see writing as an impromptu performance art, instead of a crafted and re-crafted tailored work to be scrutinized. I don't expect anyone to read what I write twice, or to write about what I write.

Back to my weekend, I enjoyed the play. I was impressed by many of the youth actors, though I felt that the playwriting lacked significant differentiation in most of the characters' dialogue. I love the Zeum's theater. It's just intimate enough to saddle the line between a performance to the audience and a performance with the audience. And of course it was technically great. After all, it had a great stage manager. :-)

Today was a day of relative sloth. There were many small things that needed to be done around the house, and Rachel, angel that she is, got the day started for us with omelettes in bed! Add on my organizing and archiving files off my powerbook before installing OS X 10.3, catching up on a little TV, a little email, and a little websurfing, and suddenly it's after midnight and I'm wondering where the day went.

In the morning I'm heading over to the new office to unpack my boxes and set up the computer, find out whether the new office has a bathroom closer than my old cube's 79 paces. We're right next to the kitchen area, which means far too many snacks in far too close proximity. Virtually nothing will get accomplished Monday, what with everyone unpacking, learning the lay of things, and with so many of us making ready for early Thanksgivings.

Rachel and I are flying out tomorrow night for Los Angeles where we'll stay a night before flying to Kauai with the greater family for Thanksgiving in Hawaii. It'll be nice to get away.

For the past few weeks I've been feeling a little growing ennui, especially when I'm alone. I don't know if I'm experiencing it more now, or if I'm just noticing it more now, but as I sit at home when Rachel's off shopping, visiting Nym, or off running a show, I sometimes compare the mental me to the person I'd expect I'd be and I seem muted. I'm not looking for sympathy, but I feel that acknowledging this alteration is probably an important step in changing it, and so I put it here to pin this acknowledgement down.

So yeah, Tomorrow night is LA, then Kauai, then back to LA and back here on an unspecified flight.

Overall, life is very, very good. Trouble is, I can usually identify problems and fix them when things aren't going their best. Right now though, I feel like fixing the problem involves letting go of something I don't yet want to let go of, because I feel like if I loose my grip I'll forget what it was like to hold on to it.

I'm sorry if this doesn't make any sense to newer readers, or even those who have been here for a while. Maybe it makes a lot of sense. I don't really know. I'm just looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have so much to be thankful for, and though I may have less now, I value it so much more.

Anyhow, next week Rachel starts work on her next gig, a production of the Santaland Diaries, I have my company party, we might get to go to Dickens Fair, and then the next week I'll be getting my new car, and then it's only a few more weeks to Christmas.

And, as I've thought every Sunday night since I came back to the Bay Area three months ago, I know I'm lucky when I remember that tomorrow's Monday and I need to go to work, and it fills me with excitement.

I hope y'all had a good weekend.

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While I've been busy driving and snapping pictures, Ammy's been doing some proper blogging. For those who want details about the hinted-at moving horror story, or details in to what we've been doing since, read Ammy's travelogue of the trip so far.

If you leave comments here, we'll both get them. Happier trails ahead!

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Hey from Albuquerque, where so far we have made three rights and a U-turn, but no left turns. We'll have to make a point of that.

We're at Napoli Coffee, just a few blocks off Interstate 40, where they have free wireless, and really comfy chairs! Oh god, comfy chairs...

Driving's been going great. Yesterday we had our first really long leg of driving, leaving Little Rock in the morning, driving through Oklahoma and into the Texas panhandle before stopping at Amarillo, Texas. It didn't even seem like that long of a day, despite Oklahoma City's sweltering heat and humidity.

Being the pit stop that this is, I don't have time to craft a real journal entry of the trip so far, but I'm attaching a bunch of photos I've taken along the way.

I hope all is well with everyone else. Our plan for now is to make it to the Petrified Forest and stop there, see it in the morning, visit the Meteor Crater 40 miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona, then it's a little up in the air, so long as we make it to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon the following morning (Monday), where we'll spend the day and the night, then head from there to Las Vegas Tuesday morning, pick up Rick at the airport, check in to the MGM Grand, see Zumanity Tuesday evening, and "O" on Wednesday evening. Thursday morning Rick flies home and Ammy and I drive to Los Angeles to spend an evening with my family, then drive up to the SF Bay on Friday morning and afternoon!

Whew! Well, by miles we're well over halfway, and the latter part of the trip should be a little more pampering (though Hot Springs, Arkansas was a nice diversion).

For those who need to reach us, our cells should be a little more friendly now that Oklahoma and Texas are past, though I'm sure the Southwest has its fill of dead zones in the desert.

Oh yeah, Road Trip Photos.

Click for More!

Whew! That's a lot of work for one cafe stop. I think Ammy's giving me some content to post, so you may have some reading to go with the pictures.

Talk to you all soon! Oh, by the way, when you leave comments, I get them in my Sidekick inbox, and we read them from the road. Keep 'em coming!

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Pit stop in an internet cafe in Juneau to check email. No blog post today, but Rachel and I have some great pictures to process and post in the next few days.

In the meantime: What's going on in your life? I love a good discussion.

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So suddenly the five weeks I had to complete grad school has vaporized to one, two weeks spent in Los Angeles with family, one week back now, and leaving one week early to spend more much-needed time with family.

My life is suddenly thrown into fast-forward, a mixed blessing of keeping busy and of having to work fast enough to stay on my own life's train.

Within the next week I have a bunch of work do do on my masters project, and my independent study project, and I need to pack up my apartment to be ready for movers to come and take it all in their van.

Late next week Rachel and I head to Vancouver, with a 7 hour layover in San Francisco, where we can spend a little time with friends, then a week with family, then flying home from Anchorage by way of a redeye to Atlanta (can you believe there's a plane that goes from Anchorage to Atlanta?) where we'll meet Ammy and hop on another plane to complete the return to Pittsburgh. Then it's two days in Pittsburgh before Ammy and I drive off on a 12 day road trip back to San Francisco, with stops in Los Angeles, Vegas and the Grand Canyon for certain (not in that order), and a bunch of other destinations to be finalized, but likely including Mammoth Caves, Mesa Verde, and the Painted Desert.

Two days later is my first day at Google. Meanwhile I'll be staying with Ammy and Rick for a few weeks (or less) while I find an apartment and tell the movers where to appear with my stuff.

All-told I'll be living in six different environments over the next six weeks. Maybe my internal bolstering preparing for once again changing my total environment has helped a bit in dealing with the unexpected change in my life. I knew I'd be off-kilter, and so perhaps I'm a little more prepared emotionally, though just enough to keep standing, not enough to absorb the blow.

So much to do, and so little time. I need to compartmentalize. I need to make sure that when I leave next Thursday that school is checked off. I need to make sure that when I leave on the road trip, Pittsburgh is checked of. (I mean materially, not personally. Those I love here in the 'burgh will be with me for a long, long time, and do not have little boxes next to their avatars in my mind).

The last 10% is always the hardest.

Here we go!

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[Lou asked about the rides, since he's going to cedar Point this weekend. Rachel wrote up this synopsis, in temporary lieu of our forthcoming trip report, for his enjoyment and everyone else's. -Kev]

So the dragster wasn't up for our trip. We were both disappointed and relieved. Every time we looked at the coaster it brought new chills. They have done a great job with the theme though.

In any case -- I'm hoping to do some rating of the coaster on my site (their rating system is bad, they have the Millennium Force ranked a 5 for thrill, as well as the Wild Cat (a small coaster great for kids). However I don't think it will be done before Lou goes -- so here are a couple things we learned while at Cedar Point.

1. Stay in a Cedar Point Resort. You get to enter about an hour early, they open two rides and we already had the Raptor and Millennium Force done and were in line for something else before 10 when the park opened.
2. Get in line for your Freeway pass early. Freeway passes let you skip to the front of the line on two rides. But don't wait, we were confused about how they explained it; apparently they only give away about 50 passes for each hour of the day. They start handing them out at about 11 o'clock and once they are gone, they are gone.
3. Go on the Millennium Force early, everything else seems like cake after that (except the dragster) and you don't realize you are scared till the ride starts.
4. When you go on the Iron Dragon, close your eyes -- the ride gets so much better when you do that. Especially at the end of the ride.
5. If you are Kevin and I, don't assume just cause no one else got too wet on that ride, that you won't. YOU WILL!!! At least if you are Kevin and I! (However it was okay cause we were the coolest people in line for the Mantis. We heard about an hour and a half of complaining about the heat while we just worked on drying off!)
6. Go on a Monday (especially one where they are calling for thunderstorms), the park isn't empty, but it's much better.
7. When riding the Millennium Force wear your sunglasses! The wind goes so fast it's very hard to keep your eyes open on this ride, but its cool. The sunglasses get a little vibration while you are riding, but we didn't see anyone loose them and I enjoyed the ride much more with them.
8. I think that the Up side ride on the Power Tower is better than the Down side, but we didn't ride the down side cause we felt the up had best of both worlds. Shoots you up into the air and then drops as opposed to just raising you up and then dropping you.

We went on the Millennium Force twice. It was easily our favorite ride. Though as we got in the car there tended to be a lot of cursing at each other and telling Kevin we hate him for getting us on the ride (even Kevin was cursing himself). My second favorite was the Wicked Twister and then prolly the Raptor and the Mantis. In any case I highly recommend the park. We had a great time, and I'm sure there will be more up about it later, but this will help anyone going this weekend. Have fun!!!!!

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After a whirlwind weekend and nearly 1,000 miles on the road, Rachel and I got back late last night. This post is just an 'I'm alive' ping, and to get "Feast or Famine" Ammy off my back. ("Sure is a lot of beige, Kevin") Pbbth. ;-)

Weekend pictures are coming soon, but first I have school stuff and 390 emails to catch up on.

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Rachel and I are heading up to Bloomfield, New York tomorrow (near Rochester) to visit her parents. We'll be hanging out for a few days, maybe helping out in their new restaurant, and generally doing the things there are to do up there, including hiking to the waterfalls, or possibly bike riding along the Erie canal.

Sunday we're heading back south, but jagging right at Lake Erie, staying the night in Sandusky, Ohio, and getting up early Monday morning to take on Cedar Point, home of the tallest (420ft), fastest (120mph) roller coaster on the planet, the Dragster. [or, um, not. still, we won't be hurting, considering the 15 other thrill coasters they have at the park].

I don't know how much I'll be posting this weekend, but I'll try to take pictures. I hope everyone has a great weekend! Beat the heat any way you can!

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So throughout the cruise, Karen was journalling in her Little Red Book. I intended on writing up entries each evening and posting them when able, but with my lack of a power supply, I was forced to journal on paper, and I'm just not as good at that as I used to be. I'm used to thinking just slow enough to type. Thinking slowly enough to write longhand is just too hard. Maybe I should parctice.

Anyhow, the point is that Karen's Little Red Book (with beautiful Chinese designs in gold all over it, making me feel a touch guilty each time I'd look at it that it wasn't being used for its intended purpose) existed as her blog for the week of the cruise. Now she's making good on that designation by transcribing it, day by day, giving a more thorough accounting of our cruise than I ever could. I'm enjoying reading it, reliving each day as I go.

Anyhow, the short of it is that those of you who feel shortchanged by the recent dearth of Fresh Fury Fun should head over to Karen's and read the daily accounting of our Mexican cruise. That, along with the photos I posted yesterday, should paint a pretty good picture of the trip.

As for me, tomorrow me and five of my classmates will be representing Carnegie Mellon in this year's CHI Interactionary competition. I've said ridiculously little about it so far, and had better blog by morning, so you'll feel some of the anxiety that I feel at the prospect of competing in the industry's only timed Computer-Human Interaction team competition in front of most of the leaders of the industry, judged by Jared Spool, Terry Winograd, and other notables.

Ack!

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Heya, net access on the ship is thin and pricy, so I couldn't pre-compose an entry. For now, just checking in to say that Karen and I are having a great time. Tomorrow we reach Puerto Vallarta where we're going hiking and, among other shopping activities, we have to shop for a new AC adapter for my powerbook. Seems that's the one thing I left at my mom's place. I have homework due on Thursday that I was planning on doing here, but with about 90 minutes of battery left to do several hours of Flash animations, it doesn't seem likely, so it'll be shopping tomorrow, then lots of coding tomorrow night once we put out to sea at 10pm.

I hope everyone's doiong well! I'm sorry I can't send emails out to folks individually, but hopefully it'll suffice to say I miss those I should miss, and then some. I sunburned my ankle yesterday, as a warning of what would happen if I hadn't been so assiduous with the SPF 30 everywhere else.

Okay, time to go for now. I'll check in again soon, and with any luck I'l be posting pictures as well!

Be well,
Kevin

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As those of you reading my cohort's blog know, the wandering compass needle that is Karen and my vacation has fix'd itself on the seas. This afternoon we set sail on a week-long cruise to Mexico!

We're shipping out on Carnival's Elation, a 'fun boat' that should be pretty different than the more sedate family cruises I've been on with Celebrity, but then this is two people hopping to Mexico, and not 22 people cruising through Alaska or the Mediterranean, so differences already abound.

This is the Trip of Little Planning, and we're looking forward to choosing activities on the spur of the moment. We got a good deal on cruise fare because of the last-minute booking, and we've done a little research on our three destination ports: Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, and Puerto Vallarta, but have stopped short of making full plans.

Despite Karen's being the daughter of a Coast Guard captain, and loving boats and the ocean all her life, this is her first cruise, and will be the first time she's ever been on the water out of sight of land.

For my part, this will be the first time in a long time that I will be on the water out of sight of email, as I believe the Elation doesn't have a cybercafe. Nevertheless, we'll both be writing and taking pictures, and it's not inconceivable that blog posts may be made from ports of call.

I've added the ship's itinerary to the calendar in the left hand nav, and you'll notice that upon arriving back in Los Angeles, I'll be jetting off to the CHI2003 conference in Fort Lauderdale. Truly, it is a hard knock life.

In other news, Google got in touch with me this week. On the basis of an interview I had with them last week when two of their product managers came to Pittsburg,h they want to fly me out to San Francisco next month for a full day of interviews. Things are good.

[edited to place a modifier in it's proper position - Fox]

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I have way too much latency in posts. Things happen to me, and I ruminate, think of ways to relate them to the greater experience of life, decide what to blog, but then something else happens and the post is relegated to a pocket of neurons in my brain, never to escape.

Karen, on the other hand, is a good, responsible blogger. I'm glad I've spent the last week with her for a lot of reasons, but the relevant one right now is that she has been giving a good day-by-day account of our Los Angeles adventures, from Magic Mountain to the Oscars to Citywalk to movies, and all the rest. So without further ado, I invite you all to her blog to check out what we've been up to. ("Check out to what we've been up"? I figure I should watch my dangling participles when linking to the site of a writer.)

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Well, two months in to the future anyhow...

Two differences between going to the movies in Los Angeles versus goin gto the movies anywhere else:

First, theaters are at least a couple years ahead in technology. Stadium seating was the norm for new theaters here at least a year or two before it caught on elsewhere, and new theaters here now have little demi-seats under the armrests so if you raise the armrest there's no gap between you and the person next to you, for extra comfort. Also, while early stadium seats would alternate row by row with armrests that raise up or seats that rock, the current theater seats all do both, and have plenty of legroom so you don't have to scoot to let someone through in front of you.

Second, if you go on a weekend evening, you're almost sure to see people with flyers eyeing the incoming moviegoers for people who fit their assigned demographic. They'll stop you and ask you almost apologetically if you have time on a weeknight this week to come to a free screening for an unreleased movie. sometimes they'll tell yuo the movei, sometimes they'll just give you the genre and a clue or two.

Karen, my mom, and I went to the Sherman Oaks Galleria to see The Hours on Saturday night, (Karen and I hadn't seen it yet), the night before the Oscars. The flyer people stopped us for two screenings. One, for a movie called "The Italian Job" was last night, and Karen and I went down to the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, literally a few hundred feet from the Kodak Theatre, where the Oscars were held just a few days earlier.

I'm not allowed to say anything about the movie, but it wasn't a disappointment, and they even gave everyone a free canole after the screening. I was surprised that they didn't give us all feedback forms after the screening, but i guess they just wanted to gauge overall audience reaction.

Tonight the three of us are returning to the Galleria for another screening, this time for a comedy starring 'a $20 million comedy star' and a current sitcom star. Karen and I are hoping that this equates to "Bruce Almighty" which makes sense, as Jim Carry got $20 million for Ace Ventura 2, and Jennifer aniston is also in the movie. It comes out in two months, the same week as The Italian Job, so it looks promising. I've wanted to see this movie since the first preview, so the idea of getting to see it two months early is supercool. A couple hours will tell.

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I understand this old Chinese curse better now than I ever have. Two weeks ago I was sure that I would be in China right now, with Karen and almost 20 family members and friends of family, but it wasn't to be.

When the news about SARS broke out a week from last Sunday, I was concerned, but not overly so. I was glad that it was still a week until our trip, so that informed analyses would have time to replace sensationalism and we could make an informed choice as to the outcome of our trip.

As the days rolled on, and three cases in Hong Kong became 12, then 50, then 260, I grew more and more concerned. Cases had turned up in Canada, the disease was blossoming in Hanoi, and 12 nations had people with atypical pneumonia, all recent visitors to affected areas, under observation and isolation.

I raised the issue to a few people who were going on the trip, and some were concerned. My cousin, a doctor, assured us that the dangers were minimal, and that if he was taking his one-year-old son along, then it should be clear that in his informed decision there was no substantially increased danger.

Each day I'd check Google News to find out the latest on the virus investigation and spread. On the night before I was supposed to fly to Los Angeles to catch a flight to Tokyo then Beijing the next day, I did a lot of soul searching.

While cases had been cropping out in several areas connected to Hong Kong, the Chinese Ministry of Health claimed that there were no cases in China outside Hong Kong, and released a report about 305 cases (with 5 fatalities) that occurred from November to February in Guangdong province. They claimed that that outbreak was under control, and hadn't spread beyond Guangdong.

Considering that there is more personal traffic between Hong Kong and Beijing and Shanghai than several places with documented cases, it seemed questionable that Mainland China was somehow free from disease.

The New York Times published a piece discussing how infection rates are considered 'state information' and are controlled by the government. In the previous Guangdong outbreak, the government-controlled media was specifically prohibited from broadcasting information about the new disease or its spread. Investigators from the World Health Organization who came to Beijing were not allowed to travel to Guangdong province to conduct their own assessment of the current state of the disease.

...

Backing out of the trip is no small deal. Magnanimously paid for by my uncle, it probably cost about $6,000 per person. Though it sounds like we could get an 80% refund on the last minute cancellations, due to the outbreak and war policies, that's not certain. I had a lot of thinking to do, and family politics, like it or not, would play a major role.

As the infection numbers grew daily, so did my concern. Family members who claimed it was no big deal were still purchasing N95-level face masks for protection on the trip. On Thursday, word came that two people had died of SARS in Beijing. Two cases and two fatalities wouldn't concern me overly much, if not for the knowledge of the extent to which the Ministry attempts to hide this information. Sure enough, it turns out that the doctor in the medical hospital who told the French press about the fatalities was fired the next day.

Speaking with my cousin (doctor) Thursday night, I heard a few rationalizations as to why the disease wasn't a concern: First, the current risk seems to be equivalent to that of driving in China, an admittedly more hazardous activity than driving in the US. Second, the virus appears to require close contact for transmission, and the large majority of documented transmissions were between relatives or to hospital workers. Third, in response to my concern that we'll be in Shanghai for several days after the virus has a chance to go through an additional four or five incubation cycles, I was told that either the virus is non-contagious enough to be avoidable, or it is virulent enough that it will eventually reach all corners of the globe (like the Spanish Flu of 1917) so it doesn't matter whether exposure happens in China or in my home town.

Most of my family had already made a firm decision to go, and they had put their fears to rest, bolstered by these arguments. I didn't make a significant effort to try and persuade others to the validity of my views, since it was clear that I wouldn't be able to convince others to consider alternate plans at this late date, and trying to would likely only make a tense situation worse.

Having heard the arguments as to why SARS is no big deal, I still had significant reservations. Any infectious risk assessment is based on three factors: How many carriers there are, ease of transmission, and risk groups.

The number of carriers right now in Beijing and Shanghai is unknown. Today the Ministry of Health admitted that their report on the November-February outbreak was incorrect. There were over 600 cases, not 305, and there were at least 31 fatalities, not 5. Meanwhile, the Ministry continues to deny that there is any outbreak in other mainland areas, even though several SARS cases in other countries are in travellers who only visited Shanghai or Beijing. Without government support, we can't hope to know how large the outbreak in Beijing and Shanghai is, or how far it will spread amongst an uninformed populace over two weeks. In the absence of concrete information, I prefer to err on the side of caution.

On transmission vectors, the statement that documented cases of transmission are heavily weighted to personal acquaintances and hospital personnel is misleading at best. Documented cases always favor these groups because they are easier to document. Most cases at this point have no documented transmission vector, so saying that those that are identified tend to be of the type that are easier to identify is a meaningless tautology. As it turns out, as cases are being investigated further, several cases of in-aircraft transmission have been documented, along with the hundreds of cases with no identifiable source. 'Casual contact' is a completely ambiguous term, especially when it seems to cover the contact between a hospital worker and a patient known to be contagious. One patient infected 40 hospital workers in Honk Kong last week, even after it was known that he had a communicable disease. While proximity was certainly a factor in transmission, many of these hospital workers used barrier systems (face masks, gloves) when interacting with the patient, and the fact that they came down with SARS means that the means of transmission goes beyond casual contact.

Lastly is risk groups. Viral infections, especially non-airborne infections, are social diseases, in that they spread through social groups (healthcare workers, families, communities, etc.). As it happens, in the current outbreak, a high percentage of the cases in the last two weeks have been among travellers. Those cases of non-familial and non-hospital transmissions have all taken place within the social group of 'traveller'. People are being infected in hotels and airplanes. This makes some sense because the traveller comes in to contact with so many more people on a given day than someone following their regular daily routine. This localization of infection should be kept in mind when weighing total documented cases against a population in order to estimate risk. In this case, the population of greater Beijing isn't as relevant as the population of travellers in the city.

In the end, it came down to the fact that this is an emerging disease, with an unknown but growing infected population in the areas we were travelling, unknown transmission vector, unknown treatment, in a country that deliberately hides cases of the disease by transferring them to military hospitals and ordering doctors not to discuss them. In 1975, 85,000 Chinese were killed by a broken reservoir, and it went unreported for 23 years. In 1995, China finally revealed that 694 people died in a cinema fire 18 years earlier. Yesterday China announced that the November-February infections in Guangdong Province were 790 with 31 dead, not 305 with 5 dead. Even now they won't allow health officials into the province to assess the situation.

In short, vacations are supposed to be relaxing, and it wouldn't be relaxing to spend two weeks in a land with a rapidly spreading disease and a government rushing to stop the spread of information instead of disease. I believe that there is a middle ground between an epidemic that poses virtually no statistical risk of infection and one that will sweep the entire world. I believe that there are cases where travel to specific areas should be curtailed during times of local epidemics, and I believe that this is one of those times. Within days they'll likely know the causative agent, and soon after a test, and an ideal course of treatment. For now, none of those things is confirmed.

I dearly hope that none of the 20 in the group that went anyhow gets sick. If one of them catches SARS then many likely will. If one gets sick with anything else requiring a visit to a hospital, they'll find an overtaxed system and waiting rooms filled with parents worried about their coughing children (as reported). A stuffed up nose and red eyes is enough to convince ticket agents not to allow a passenger on their flight home.

All in all, I was very much looking forward to the trip, and I hope those that went have a fantastic time. It wasn't right for me and my sensibilities, even if it was for others. I know they'll be happier without a nervous Kevin spreading his paranoia, and I hope that they accept that I had to go my own way.

Throw in the Iraq War and the fact that South Korea moved to Defcon 2, their highest point in 12 years, in concern for a preemptive North Korean strike, and you truly have interesting times.

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Karen and I went to Magic Mountain yesterday, rode many rides, including a few very fun new coasters. I want to blog, but I feel my next post should be the long post explaining exactly what happened, the events leading up to my deciding not to go to China, the inner torment before, during, and after that decision, and what's happening now.

However, we're just about to go and see "View from the Top" so I'll probably work more on that blog post tonight and tomorrow morning, though later tomorrow Karen and I are visiting the Getty Center.

I hope everyone's doing well. I've got email access here, so by all means email me if you like.

Till I write more, here's a gallery of pictures, mostly from Magic Mountain, and one from the Sherman Oaks Galleria:

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Okay, so after a lot of packing yesterday, today's the crunch day. Right after finishing this post I'm packing up the computer, so you know I'm getting close to leaving!

Ammy and I will be setting forth on Saturday, and I'll try to blog each day from the road, internet-access-willing. 'Data-port' is just as big a pull when deciding which 3-star Best Western or Motel 6, 8, or 9 to stay at, though my secret plan is to spend a little time every few days driving through a suburban area, wardriving for high-speed wireless access, and parking in front of someone's house while we document and check mail.

So we'll be taking the I-90 northern route, from Yellowstone on to Chicago, and we've got lots of places on our list to visit, so be sure and check back, becuase while one person drives, the other can blog. We've got digital cameras and wanderlust, and know how to use both.

So I'll be a little slow to respond to email from this moment forward until around the 11th or 12th, and if you know my cellphone number, that's the best bet.

Augh, so much nostalgia, and so little time to blog it...

Bye!

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I'm taking a day off work today, just to have a nice 3-day weekend. Nothing really planned, just a day out of time...

Got a couple things on-deck for Fury, but right now I need to go to Karen's and take care of the sickie. Check back later!

Oh, and if you're one of the folks who feel that none of the listed cheeses were skeezy enough, you're more than welcome to add your own cheese to the mix. Dig deep in the fridge and see what you can find!

Happy Monday. Enjoy your extra hour of light!

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At long last, here's my Mardi Gras Gallery

It wouldn't have taken so long except that I took this chance to try out a new gallery model I've been thinking about. The whole layout is created dynamically, grabbing the image information out of a database. I'm planning on using this model, with more features like hide/show thumbnails and prev/next buttons and commenting functionality, for Randompixel, which means that with this gallery, randompixel is a big step closer to going live.

I'd like your feedback on what you think of the gallery design. Is it overbearing? Is it useful? I'm thinking most galleries would have smaller thumbnails, by the way.

Anyhow, enjoy the gallery. For those at work, the pics with the little exclaimation point on the corner aren't necessarily work-safe. It was, after all, Mardi Gras.

Have a great weekend all!

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My family's starting a foundation. Though still a nascent idea in need of a lot of nurturing, planning, and formalization, my uncle has brought together the larger family to found a family non-profit in the name of my grandmother, Frieda Fox, a thoroughly incredible woman. I don't want to talk about it too much now since, again, it's still just an egg of an idea.

It was to learn more about the nature of family foundations that six of us, four family, two friends of family, joined up in New Orleans on Wednesday for the 16th annual Family Foundation Conference, organized by the Council of Foundations. We were actually planning on attending last year's conference in Chicago, but extenuating family circumstances forestalled the trip until now.

I learned about a world of philanthropy that I only had a vague notion of before. I met dozens of incredible people whose foundations make a real difference to thousands, if not millions, of others. Very uplifting, very educational, and above all very supportive and positive. I've been to lots of conferences, but this was the first conference where every participant can gain more by sharing with every other participant, with no sense of corporate rivalry or other competitiveness to apply what the conference had to offer.

I'm sure I'll write more about this as things progress and evolve over the coming years, but it was a great experience.

...

And then of course, there's Mardi Gras.

I didn't even realize that Mardi Gras overlapped our time at the conference. Sure, the Superbowl was last Sunday, and I arrived (very) early Wednesday morning, due to fly out Friday evening, but I thought that Fat Tuesday (literally 'Mardi Gras') was the initiation of the festivities, not the culmination.

We didn't really have much time outside the conference to explore New Orleans N'awlins, but we did spend a few hours Thursday night walking the few blocks to the French Quarter, eating dinner, and wandering along Bourbon Street which, even then, was starting to build into something warranting an MTV broadcast pod.

It was weird, with my only real concept of Bourbon Street coming from Volkswagon Jetta commercials and random flashes of cultural knowledge. The next afternoon, between the close of the conference at 1 and our need to leave for the airport at 3, Kristina, Natalie, and I had a chance to walk along Riverwalk and the less crowded streets of the French Quarter.

What can I say? Walking into the French Quarter, I was reminded more and more of New Orleans Square at Disneyland, the ironwork balconies, sculpted faux columns, intricate and colorful paintwork and plants melding into a combination my brain only had one pattern for. I kept feeling like there should be an entrance to Pirates of the Caribbean, or a nondescript door with a buzzer that would provide an ingress to Club 33.

As we approached Bourbon Street, the illusion of Disneyland faded step-by-step into an illusion of Grad Night at Disneyland... with porn. Turning the corner on to Bourbon itself, the disillusion was complete, a bastardization of the uniqueness of the French Quarter, with neon and drunk fratboys replacing dignity and culture. I don't mean to disparage the uniqueness of Mardi Gras itself, or the doubly unique incarnation of Mardi Gras that exists on these few blocks, I'm only pointing out the extreme dichotomy of experiencing the cultural, historical, and architectural beauty of the French Quarter with the extreme cultural manifestation of that uniqueness, spawned by it, but year by year less relating to it.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to like about Mardi Gras, even (and yes, many would say specifically) on Bourbon Street. As most of you probably know, the celebration of Mardi Gras is intended to be the debauchery, the glut of gratification before the 40 days of Lent, the feast before the famine, as it were.

It's easy to look at Mardi Gras and see drunken sex-crazed teens, and of course you wouldn't be wrong, but unlike Daytona, Ft. Lauderdale, or any other Spring Break staging area, the story doesn't end there. Above all, Mardi Gras is the epitome of New Orleans, of their pleasure-seeking nature and openness and respect for others. The parades of the diverse krewes, the music, and the people bind together into an overall celebration of life.

Writing this, I realize it probably sounds stupid to some, but maybe not to everyone. Even on Bourbon street, with guys and girls hanging from the balconies, I saw people cherishing each other, and cherishing themselves. Instead of a riotous Palm Springs gropefest, this was a place with all the sexual overtone, but grounded in the energy of feeling comfortable with sexuality, your own, and that of people around you. Maybe its the beads...

So, while I came to N'awlins for one education, I got another as well, of a city melding its cultural heritage and values and reveling in them more than anyplace else I've seen.

Epilogue: This post reads pretty stupid, with book-reportish idealism and trite realizations that would make Mark Twain roll over in his grave. Twice. I realize that. A lot of it has to do with my own sexual repression. I kept re-reading and tweaking it, but I can't get past the fact that it sounds like I feel like I'm a southern prude trying to justify not being prudish. Heck, I don't know, maybe I am. More likely though, I think I feel like I'm supposed to be aloof in some sort of counter-culture Daria-esque kind of way, and that I'd sound stupid if I just wrote a gung-ho rah-rah Mardi Gras tit piece. Then again, maybe the real problem is that I wish I felt like I belonged there on Bourbon Street, while at the same time laughing at the lemming horde they blur into.

I think the truth is that I'm both at once, but just have trouble admitting it.

I held off posting this until I finished the gallery, but with my sudden flu I didn't get to it. I'd have done it on the train today, but I left the pictures in my other iPhoto. I'll put it together and put it up this weekend.

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Looks like everyone's in a blogging lull. But then, most of the readers are similarly preoccupied.

Just waiving in to say 'Hi!' I hope you're all having great holidays and have safe and memorable New Years celebrations (memorable in the good way).

My own tunnels are getting a little brighter, and hopefully there is light (and maybe a little less driving rain?) at the other end.

I have so many vivid dreams, waking dreams, sleeping dreams. It's stupid that the thing I'm missing the most nowadays is my train rides. I want to sit staring out a window and just write and write.

I'm almost tempted to spend tomorrow on a train going somewherre, and then somewhere back, just so I can get back into the creative groove, tapping my dreams, and bottling up the ensuing stream.

Have a great 2002 everyone. I'm looking forward to sharing mine with you.

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Here it is, 11:30, and I've only just realized that I'm the only person in my row of ten that's at work today. I wonder how many on my floor are here? Now I won't feel gulty about taking a long lunch. :-)

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Well, I'm packing it in for the next several days as I journey to Carmel for fun in the Family sun.

I may have intermittent web access, and I may not. I'll be taking plenty of pictures, and may even get to writing some more stories during the downtime. I'll be back in full just after Christmas, so enjoy the holiday, cherish your family, friends, and other loved ones, and have a save and joyous holiday season!

And thank you all for reading. I enjoy writing this blog as much as I like to imagine you enjoy reading it. Even though I don't know a whole lot of you, and even though some of us obviously have differences of opinions from time to time ;-) I find it really fulfilling to interact with you, and I want to let you know I'm thankful to a degree deeper than can be measure in hit-counters.

Fare thee well!

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So I finally got a call from my friends road tripping through North America. They're in Hope, Canada and are having a great time.

I wish I could tear myself out of the city for a few days. I wonder how low the airfare and hotels are for Vegas now. Hmmm...

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As I mentioned on the morning of my departure, there's a certain amount of exhilaration in the whole family (well, with a few exceptions) coming together, walking away from their everyday lives for two weeks to travel to a distant shore, like the introduction of a superhero movie. The feeling of coming together to create a greater whole is almost palpable.

To be precise, today started with Karen and I finishing my packing for the trip. Karen came over yesterday to help me put my bags together, motivate, and help make sure I didn't forget anything.

Karen took off for her home at 12:01am and I was asleep soon after. At around 6 I woke up to do my final reality check, put my bags into my car, and drive over to Karen and Crystal's, where Karen would drive me to Oakland Airport and I would meet up with Emily, creating the first grouping in the inverse tree which, days later, would eventually result in the big Fox trunk.

Jet lag is always a funny thing when you're travelling across 9 time zones in a day, but from a personal perspective, July 3rd and 4th joined into one very long day. (As I write these words I'm actually on the return flight, on the Munich-Los Angeles leg of a journey that started at 4:30am local time in Istanbul and will end over 26 hours later, somewhere around 9pm in what, at 34 hours, will literally be the longest day of my life.) Today's travel (meaning July 3rd. I'm playing fast and loose with verb tenses to hide the fact that I'm actually recapping these events two weeks removed (and using parentheses to bring that fact into clear focus, so go figure)) includes meeting up with Emily for a 10am Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland International (OAK) to Los Angeles International (LAX) where we would, an hour or so later, meet up with the majority of my family at the Bradley International Terminal to check in for our 2:20pm departure for Munich, subsequent hour-long layover, and 2 hour hop to Barcelona, our destination for the next several days.

So I arrived at Karen's on the later side of 8:30am and we piled the bags into her trunk and parked my car on Alameda's friendly streets. (Friendly, that is, compared to Berkeley's streets, where a car with expired registration tabs (bad Kev!) can go weeks without notice, then get three tickets and a complimentary tow within 73 hours.) She drove me to the airport and by the time the gate opened for check-in I had been, in rather atypical fashion, waiting around for a good 10 minutes. Emily should have had such good luck...

Emily's mode of airport transport was to be City Express. She called them the day before, arranging for an 8:30 pick-up. At 8:35 she gave them a call and they told her the shuttle would be at her door in 10 to 15 minutes. Within the next 15 minutes the only thing that rolled to her door was an ever-growing feeling of unease, and as 8:50 came and went Emily gave them another call and they told her (with just over an hour before her flight was going to take off) that they weren't going to pick her up at all.

After panic, phone calls, a hurried taxi ride and a promise from the airporter company to cover it, Em arrived intact and ready to leave San Francisco behind.

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So last night, after getting back at 10, I started to unpack the fragile items from my suitcase, and ended up getting wrapped up with unwrapping, and sifted through two suitcases and a duffel to lay out everything I acquired during the trip. This stuff is so pretty it almost made me cry.

My apartment is, of course, a mess. I have 300 work and 300 personal emails to go through (after spam filtering), and jetlag to deal with. I'm always inspired and enthused when I'm taking off for a trip, but luckily I feel the same way when I get back. I just feel like putting so much energy into making my personal and work life have some of the magic of the trip life. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I always feel like there's utopian (Plato's utopia, not Disney's utopia) ideal of how my apartment/cube/life/psyche should be, and that I'm always climbing up the hill towards that pinnacle, but it always recedes. I know I can get there, but when I stop to rest I slip a little further away. Now I really think I have the energy to make it work.

I went to sleep around 1am and when I woke up, eyes shut, I tried to guess where I was. I knew I wasn't on the ship because I remembered having left it. I'd fallen asleep in so many airports and planes, waking up on landings, jostlings, or, more pathetically, self-droolings, that I honestly didn't know where (or when) I'd be when I opened my eyes. It was so surreal to actually be home. Adding to the strangeness was that it was 7am, exactly when I would have awoke at home without jet lag. What I really need right now is a shower, a change of clothes, and a Chai tea and Cranberry scone from the shop on the corner and I'll be really to start hiking up that mountain, with more vigor than I've had in months.

This vacation was so what I needed.

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Hi there! Love you all! Internet woes. Will post pictures and journals as possible, trying on Saturday in Olympia, Sunday in Athens. Much to tell, much to share, much to read!

Stay tuned, though there's not as much blue as usual on the site these days. I'll be back inthe states soon as well, so there's that to look forward to!

PS: Venice is the best city on Earth (after San Francisco).

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Here is the first gallery of pictures, taken on the way to and in Barcelona

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I'm not rich, but I am lucky. Recently, each summer my extended family gets the opportunity to go on a group vacation together. Numbering from between 14 and 28 on a given year, we venture to a location outside the realm of our day-to-day lives, to renew bonds, to forget our work lives, to remember the familial ties we shared in our youths, and still have, though we may not notice them every day anymore.

For many years the tradition was to gather at Brown Island, a small wooded island of no more than 40 houses and as many boats and no cars, tucked into a bay called Friday Harbor, in the island of San Juan in the far northwest of Washington State. Our trips would coincide with the Jazz festival held annually in the colsing week of July.

Unlike those Jazz festivals in Sacramento and other cities that have recently been gaining popularity mirroring Jazz and Swing resurgences in my own age group, the San Juan Jazz Festival has for nearly three decades attracted a more mature, more 'authentic' crowd, if you can apply the term to those who lived through Jazz music's original heyday and keep the flame alive within themselves, both as players and listeners.

Sadly, as such a tradition must, the San Juan festival had to migrate its interest base to the younger generation, or see their flame grow smaller until it vanishes in a thin trail of smoke, reminding people of what was, and will not be again. When in 1998 it took that latter and sadder route, the Fox family chartered a new path. Instead of migrating to a brief home for the Summer and flying back home, we took to more exploratory adventures, first with seven days travelling the breadth of Morocco, next exploring the inside passage of Alaska on a weeklong cruise (with a three day homage to Brown Island, to remenice and to clense our mental palates).

This July sees the Foxes on a journey I have secretly hoped for since my first trip across the Atlantic 18 years ago. For two weeks we take to the Mediterranian, 26 strong (on a ship with another 2174 people for good measure). The ports of call read like a litany of old-world history: Barcelona, Rome, Venice, Athens, Istanbul, and a few others. With only a single day in port for each city except Barcelona, our starting point, and Venice, this cruise is a sampler, giving us each ten hours of each city's best to entice us to return as soon as possible.

To better remember this two-week feast of hors d'ovores, and to share them with my friends and readers, I have made a point of taking ample pictures along the way. As mentioned earlier on the weblog, I'm doing little if any winnowing of the pictures at this point. There are many great sites to visit if your goal is to see the places I'm visiting or the ship we're sailing on. The purpose of my photo galleries is to augment my memory, and relation to you, of my journey. At some point I'm sure I'll make a small book with only a few dozen of the best or most meaningful images, but for now I'm taking advantage of the thrift of electronic media and the linear nature these galleries will hopefully provide.

When time on the journey permits I'll conjoin the galleries with journals of the days events, and should I have more time than I ought to, I'll try to go through and correlate some pictures to events in the weblog entry itself. We'll just have to see.

On a final note, though the first of these entries won't end up being posted until our journey is nearly halfway complete, should you have any advice or experiences that you would like to share about the ports we have yet to see, please do write me. Though we will often have pre-arranged schedules, all information is good information, and I'd love to read about your experiences as you read about mine.

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Local time: 2:12 pm, Tuesday Afternoon. Location: The middle of the Adriatic Sea, en route to Venice.

I'm writing a lot, but I didn't bring my floppy down to dump it all to the site. First installment should be up within a few hours. As it's around 5am Pacific time, that means it's probably already up by the time most folks are reading this.

-Kevin

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Hey all! Hello from Barcelona! True blogging will probably wait a bit until I have a more reliable (or at least comprehensible) means for doing so. Specifically, I have two tays worth of pictures ready to go in a web gallery, but the means to only put 1.4 Megs of photos up. Blar, blar, long story, paying for access by the minute.

Anyhow, on with the trip: The flights from Oakland to LAX to Munich to Barcelona went largely without hitches with the exception of Emily´s airporter never coming. They were 5 minutes late: She called and they said they'd be there in 15 minutes. They were 20 minutes late: She called and they said they wouldn´t make it at all. Panic and Taxi later everything was okay except for a stressed Emily.

Barcelona is beautiful. The pictures would speak louder than words, and they will, but they may wait until tomorrow, when we get on board the ship which has a reliable, albeit pricy, internet cafe.

So this is how I plan to blog on the trip: Virtually all the photos I take will go into web galleries and will be posted within a day or two of the stop. Later on (possibly much later on, as in after the trip) I'll go back and do nice things like culling, cropping, color adjusting, and all the stuff most of you could probably care less about.

What I will do is attempt to supply a narrative of some of the more interesting, or otherwise incomprehensable pictures, basically letting the pictures tell the story of the journey, like a little internet sitting on my shoulder.

So the cruise portion of the trip begins tomorrow, when we set sail for Nice, France. Along the way I'll relate the sights seen in Barcelona. Right now it's hot and humid here, but the sights are great, the people nice, and I'm enjoying one of the few places I can actually speak enough of the language to understand and be understood (weird internet cafe computer rules notwithstanding).

Well, I'm off to upload the first part of the first gallery, which will probably be mostly travel pictures. Please pay no mind to the broken links clicking through to the later pictures. They'll be up soon.

Hope all is well wherever you call home, and I'll write again soon.

PS: I´m keeping a record of 'interface abnormalities' I find along the way, like the 'pull-flush' toilet. You can take the geek away from his job, but you can't take the job out of the geek I guess.

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So, after months of planning (well, mostly months of waiting and days of planning) today the Foxes set off on Vacation 2K1: Europe!

Of odd coincidences, Jim and Diane are visiting the Bay Area at the same time as I'm visiting their European shores, which means that while I won't be able to see them as much as I'd like, they'll see a whole lot of my apartment, as they're housesitting for the duration. [waiving] "Hi!"

Fred's caring for Kisa, the bags are packed, the tickets are, well, ticketles, I have my passport and my toothbrush and, most importantly, my digital camera, an extra battery and a net connection on-board ship, and so I invite you to join me on a tour through the Mediterranian. Web galleries at every stop and prosaic wit thrown in for free.

The first stop is Barcelona. Actually, the first stop is the Oakland Airport, then Los Angeles International, then Munich, then Barcelona, about 20 hours later. So, it's a day's travelling for me and probably another day or so before the first report.

There's something weird and powerful about having 20 people (okay, big family trip, did I mention?) from various places in the country wake up on the same morning, drive to their respective airports with their respective lives packed into rolling suitcases or otherwise put on pause, and hop on planes to meet at junctures along the way to the final destinations, individual nodes coming together like tributaries forming streams and a mighty river, or like an inverted family tree, racing backwards through time.

What it means to me is spending some quality time with family I really only see once or twice a year. Thanks to Alan for such a fabulous trip, and it's my goal this trip to really try to bring the excitement onto the blog.

I've got the Gameboy, Powerbook, Elph, and Archos Jukebox. I'm ready to go for a ride.

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Sleep has been my enemy this weekend. I don't know why, but yesterday I slept in until 10, then read for an hour and fell asleep for another four hours. (Okay, maybe it was because I stayed up until 2am, or because I had a cat curled up at my feet, but sleeping until 3??

Anyhow, I'm working to overcome it. After all, in a couple days I'll be a worker again and will have to get up around 6, so I'd better get used to going to sleep well before the witching hour.

Anyhow, I'm rapidly trying to do everything that I won't have time to once I start at Yahoo. Most important is cleaning my office, then going through the remaining half of my old posts (November-April) and categorize them by topic, then the AOLiza refresh, then MetaCookie or photo galleries, then Randompixel, then, who am I kidding? Well, we'll see how much gets done. If I do anything visible to you, the web visitor, then I've cleaned my office, and that's a very good thing.

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I'm just relaxing (procrastinating) on my last weekend before I start up at Yahoo on Tuesday. I had grandiose plans of stuff to do this past week. Okay, maybe not so grandiose, things like cleaning my office and doing laundry, but I stillspent most of the time relaxing, making up for lost sleep, seeing some movies, and writing really long articles.

Well, Tuesday's the big day. I have a small dilemma in that I'm supposed to be at my first day orientation at 8:30 on Tuesday, but the train/lightrail combo wouldn't get me there until about 8:45. To drive down and get there by 8:30 I'd have to leave absurdly early. Every time I've had to get to south bay around that time I've left myself a couple of hours and it's never been enough. I just know that if I leave my place at 6am I'll either end up getting there by 7:30 and have an hour to wait, or I'll still be a half-hour late.

Still, it'll be good practice to get to know just how bad traffic gets. It's just a tough call as to whether I'm better off being a certain 15 minutes late, or a wide open window where I'll more than likely not be late at all, but could be much later.

I know just how interesting my commuting connundrums are...

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I'm going to Valhalla Faire this weekend, playing and dancing with the Travellers Union and Merrie Pryanksters. I'll bring my camera so I'll have something to share when I get back.

If I really get moving today (and the IKEA movers who are dropping off Karen's sofa appear towards the latter end of their 4-hour window) I may actually get a few Cameo cameras ready to disseminate at faire as well.

Anyhow, if you're in the Lake Tahoe region this weekend (or next, it runs two weekends) go to the faire! Having worked most of the Northern California ren faires, I can say without a doubt that this is the best one. Not as big as Novato (now Vacaville), and definitely not as commercialized, it's a real blast filled with a lot of people having real fun, and you can't beat the forest location.

Hope y'all have a great weekend whatever you do!

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