Corporate Hippy

Our trusty old Jeep is only 6 years old. She’s only a 2002, and I think we got her in 2003. I drive her to work every day and she’s our main ride for any trips we take. Races, vacations, rides, errands, whatever the trip, the Jeep is the go-to. Poor ol’ girl has 185k miles on her. And today, she got brand new shocks and strutts. She needs to take us to TN next week for Dirt, Sweat and Gears, so I’d better start giving her a lot of love, or she just might rebel.

Did an upgrade tonight, didn’t go well. Just trying to see if I can still post or not…

The Kansas City (MO) International airport feels like a big airport when you’re driving to it and when you enter the airport campus. Inside the terminal though, its a whole different story.

There are 8 gates inside the security checkpoint – but I can’t figure out why they bother with all 8 numbers since, gates 61 and 62 use the same door, 63 and 64 use the same door, and 65-69 use the same door. Inside the security checkpoint, there are no restrooms, no restaurants, and only one small food kiosk with water, premade sandwiches, etc..

I love these small airports. The TSA guys are low-key and friendly – this is a big deal for me when I’m traveling with 2 laptops in my bag. I always feel rushed and somewhat uneasy going through those checkpoints and I almost considered checking one of my laptops in my luggage to avoid the ordeal of pulling them both out at security. I decided this wasn’t a good idea and instead planned to pack my carry on bag as lightly as possible to make things easier. For the record – I’ve never had an issue with TSA in Detroit, they’re generally very pleasant there, even when the lines are long. All in all, traveling with 2 laptops hasn’t been as bad as I’d imagined.

Why 2 laptops? Well, aside from the fact that I’m a big nerd, there is a reason. Nick and I wanted to be able to use skype or ichat to have some video convo’s this week. I have a camera built into the macbook which makes things much much easier. Also, my itunes library is on my macbook and .. well .. its kind of my baby 😉 .. but, I still wanted to bring my work laptop with me since I knew I was leaving some things hanging open at work and I wanted to be able to respond if needed. My work laptop has some tools that won’t run on the Mac and our SSL VPN software doesn’t yet support the new Leopard OS – so I couldn’t have done much with my macbook for work. When I get a bigger hard drive, I want to run parallels or VM so that I can have a windows install with my work tools on it. That will be ideal. Traveling with 2 laptops isn’t terrible, but its still heavy and space consuming. And kind of ridiculous 😉

So here I am, at MCI (or is it KCI? road signs say one thing, while everything online says something else .. weird). This nice small airport even has free wi-fi – slow, but free. My flight was delayed by 20 minutes due to pilot restrictions, but I’m still expected to land in detroit before 1.

Its been a good week, but I’m ready to be home. I hope that my week away from normal life is what I needed to reset my brain and knock me out of the frantic mode I’ve been running in for the past month. February was a nightmare that I hardly remember. Our trip to Vegas seems so long ago and I have mixed guilt about my trip to Rays (as wonderful of a trip that it was, I missed my last opportunity to say goodbye to my friend before he passed away – I really thought I had more time. More on this in another post someday). John’s passing created chaos at work with hospital visits, funeral and added workload in between – not to mention, trying to plan this trip which was originally supposed to be to San Francisco and changed to KC just last week. Mix in the MMBA annual meeting, a Poto chapter event in Ypsi, a women’s night at MBF followed by a planning meeting with the ED and President and the membership suddenly interested in all things merchandise.

I was just hanging on by a thread and reached the absolute end of my patience with my 20 yr old stepson last week. We had it out over email and he’s been at is grandparents’ place ever since.

So, I think, having a week to myself with no place to go (no car to get me anywhere) was what I needed.

Why do I feel better about throwing away food that’s been cooked/prepared than about throwing away food that was never opened?

I’ve been in Kansas City, MO this week for Checkpoint Firewall training (woo hoo!). I decided to stay at a Residence Inn for 2 reasons: 1- they have shuttle service to/from my training location so I didn’t have to rent a car and 2- I wanted a kitchen so that I didn’t have to eat out all week. On Tuesday after class, I went grocery shopping and came back with 2 bags of food. Really, it wasn’t too much food, but I’ve also been sick this week and not eating nearly as much as I normally would.

Well, I’m leaving tomorrow and I decided that I really should cook up some of the 1/2 dozen eggs that I bought and finish up the breakfast sausage. I just hated the thought of leaving that stuff in the fridge to be thrown away. I wasn’t in the mood for eggs, haven’t been all week. I definitely wasn’t in the mood for sausage as its really just something I like once in awhile, and after eating it for 3 days, I’ve really had enough. But alas, I cooked it up anyway. I only cooked 3 eggs, and mixed in the sausage and white cheddar cheese that I had. I was pretty sure that once it was cooked, I’d really want to eat it.

I tried, I really did. The toast was great. I drank my full glass of milk. But the eggs .. blah.. I had a few bites, but I just can’t eat the rest. So, those eggs are going to get thrown away anyway.

The full bottle of wine that I never opened (again, I was sick all week and just never in the mood for wine like I thought I would be) will probably go to someone at the front desk. In the good old days, I could have carried the wine on the plane in my backpack. Not so much anymore. *sigh* Not sure what to do with my leftover bread, butter and cheese. I think I’ll be able to finish the milk and orange juice though.

There’s a group of IRS “auditors in training” staying here and I know one of them is sticking around through the weekend (they are in training the whole month, but most are going home for the weekend). I was hoping to bump into her again to give her my food, but I haven’t seen her.

I always feel guilty about throwing away food, but I just don’t know what else to do.

On a positive note, I bet I lost some weight this week since I really haven’t been eating much 😉

I wonder if software will help my blogging problems .. I think sometimes I don’t blog because I want to be more creative than I seem to be able to .. or … maybe I’m just making excuses .. who knows ..

Whatever the case, I’m trying out this software that I recently heard about … It seems to have some cool features .. like .. really cool (and seemingly easy, but somewhat slow) iPhoto integration ..

with options like … embedded pics :

I also see that it has an Itunes button … I’m listening to : You Enjoy Myself from the album “1996/12/6 I Las Vegas, NV” by Phish
On my new “Apple AirPort Express with Air Tunes (M9470LL/A)” (Apple Computer) (link from the “Amazon” button in my toobar) – a Christmas present from Nick

I’ll post a christmas post after I download my pics from the camera … I just wanted to test this software .. so far, it seems pretty cool 🙂

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

–Bill Cosby

I came home from work yesterday and found my husband, 2 stepsons and mother-in-law sitting in the living room. I walked around the house looking for the open door or window that was making it so cold in the house. There was no open door or window. But, it was freezing in the house.

Apparently, the pilot light was lit, but the furnace wasn’t kicking on. Nice. 6:00 on a Friday night in December and I’ve got no heat.

Who do you call? An electrician? *shrug* So, I go to the computer and browse to maps.google.com, type in “furnace repair near my zip code” and click the various links that return, looking for one with a website. Its kind of a rule of mine – find a service center with a website where I can get at least a small amount of information before I call. When I went to Great Dane’s website, the first thing I saw was “24 hour emergency service”. Good enough for me.

It was ~56 degrees in the when Karak from Great Dane showed up at 8:00. Brr.

By 9:00 our furnace was once again blazing. The fuse on the furnace itself was blown, but since we have a circuit breaker, Karak was able to just bypass the fuse and get us back in business. He also used a very cool camera snakey thingy to look into the furnace and verify that, yes, its very old and probably on its last legs. This is not news. Our plumber tells me the same thing about our pipes whenever I call for service. Its an old house. With old pipes, old furnace, old windows.

So today the house is nice and toasty. And soon we’ll be looking at new furnaces. We figure, we might as well also go with a cooling system too. It might be the first house in America to have central air but no dishwasher. Heh.