hrj

It's not that I haven't had anything to say -- far from it! But I'm still spending a lot of time settling in to the new house and the new routine. And part of that new routine is that most of my LJ reading is done on the iPhone on BART, which is not conducive to posting long thoughtful essays. So as a way of getting back into posting, how about I review my new daily routine? This is a composite and, to some extent, an ideal (especially with regard to gym activities).

6 am - The alarm goes off. I get up, am thankful for having laid out my clothes the night before, get dressed, feed the cat, and verify that all the essentials are in my bike bag. (purse, keys, transit card, work ID, glasses case with the pair that aren't on my head, phone, and depending on other activities lunch bag, gym bag, and shopping backpack) If I've been very good and gotten to bed on time and therefore feel up to it, I've gotten dressed in my gym clothes and have the work clothes in the gym bag.

6:30 am -- Into the garage; door up; bag onto bike; helmet on; wheel out to the driveway; click the door-closer and make sure it closes; check for traffic and away we go. My ride to BART is about half on either lightly traveled residential streets or recreational paths and half on Concord Ave which has nice wide margins and not terribly heavy traffic. I get to ride past backyard roosters crowing and delinquent bunny rabbits on their way home from foraging and families of urban waterfowl swimming in the canal by the trail. The ride has one slightly hairy cut left across three lanes of traffic to make a left turn followed immediately by waiting at an intersection with a major artery (Clayton Rd) that only cycles the cross traffic every five minutes or so. (At least that's what it feels like.) Then I'm at BART, folding the bike up and waving my Clipper Card at the turnstile. I cannot say how delighted I am with the Clipper Card (eletronic transit debit card). I can remember back when I first moved to the Bay Area thinking someone should invent something like this. Especially the bit about setting it up online to auto-load when the balance gets down below a certain point.

7ish -- By now I'm on BART. The timing gets a bit loose from this point because a lot depends on the precise timing of my connections. The BART leg of the trip takes about 20 minutes, at which point I've worked my way through e-mail, facebook, and LJ. Off at MacArthur Station and switch to the Emery-go-round shuttle. In theory, at this point I've moved on to reading a magazine or book, but more often than not it's just solitaire games. The streets for this leg are a bit rough and I normally sit in the back of the shuttle to keep my bike out of people's way, so the ride is pretty bumpy.

7:30-ish -- If it's a gym day, I ride the block from the shuttle stop to the gym and spend about half an hour doing weights, showering, and changing to work clothes. (If it's not a gym day, I probably lazed in bed an extra 20 minutes or so and haven't really gotten any further ahead in the schedule.) Then ride the 3 blocks from the gym to work.

8-ish -- At work.

Lunch -- On Mon, Wed, & Fri I bike down to the Emeryville Post Office at lunch to check my PO Box (which I'm still using to transition mail from the old house to the new one). So far there's always been at least one piece of mail every time I check. On the day the box is empty, I'll go down to only checking one or two times a week. On PO Box days I often swing by Berkeley Bowl on my way back to work and pick up a few groceries (since I can keep them in the break-room fridge at work until the end of the day -- no frozen foods, though).

5-ish -- Off work. If I didn't hit the gym in the morning and I don't have to rush home for something in the evening, it does here. Otherwise, bike the few blocks to the shuttle stop, shuttle to BART, BART to Concord, repeating the "read e-mail, FB, and LJ" part as necessary. Home by 6pm if nothing else intervenes. The trickiest part of planning the commute is chosing clothing for the day: warm enough for Berkeley fog, not too warm for the afternoon bike ride home, not involving carrying multiple changes of clothing that take up too much space in the bike bag. I haven't yet mastered the trick of hitting the garage door remote while still on approach so that I can just ride up into the garage. Park the bike, put away any groceries and mail, take care of the cat, make sure stuff (clothes, food, etc.) is organized for the next morning.

Thursdays I swing by the farmers market on the way home. Wednesdays, unless I'm feeling overbooked, I'll generally go to fighter practice (odd to call it that when there isn't necessarily any fighting going on any given week). Alternate Thursdays is a sewing group. Enough other less-regular evening social events that it seems like more than half my evenings are booked. If I'm not going out for anything, I'll cook a nice meal and sit down to relax over it and try to catch up with anything online that's too awkward to do on a phone. And just about the time I'm thinking about getting some more unpacking and organization done, it's ...

10pm -- Bedtime. The computer is scheduled to automatically go to sleep. I'm less automatic about it. The later after 10pm I get to sleep, the less likely I'll get to the gym before work. If I do the gym after work, I get home proportionately later, everything gets pushed a bit later in the evening, and I'm more likely to not be in bed by 10pm. She is a vicious cycle.

And that's what my weekdays are like at the moment. The rhythms are still settling in. I've stopped worrying that I'll forget something essential, but I'm still trying to optimize what I haul around with me. Next post: the state of the unpacking.

My return travel adventures are still on-going at this point. The blow-by-blow saga has been / is being posted on Facebook and will not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that, rather than being on a plane between Newark and San Francisco at the moment (as I was originally scheduled to be), I'm on a bus between Portland and Boston. But with any luck I'll be flying out of Boston in the morning, and in the mean time Continental AIrlines is paying for all sorts of things like taxis and buses and meals and hotel rooms.

I even managed to get in some work on the novel (here on the bus ... which has wi-fi). I'm still doing a few little fill-in scenes that needed more background work. I did succeed in getting all the name work done by the end of the year, although I haven't quite completed a thrice-revised complete draft of Part I. The fill-in scenes and the detailed complete review-pass ended up needing more concentrated attention that I was able to give during holiday visiting. (The name work was quite convenient to do when I was constantly picking it up and putting it down among other activities.)

I think I'll spend the weekend recovering from my vacation.

... and looking forward to some decompression time before it's back to the family whirl. I'll know in a few days whether I'm correct that my stress levels are way back down in the green zone again. It's really hard to tell when I'm not in my own native environment.

Some time ago, I briefly toyed with the idea of popping out to Maine for a weekend to get a chance to see the middle brother performing musical theater (Cabaret) and celebrate my Dad's 80th birthday. But I'd just done a bunch of traveling, and the calendar was a little full. But then I got an email from my Dad this morning saying "cryptocosm is taking the red-eye out for my birthday party, would you like to come?". And after about 15 minutes of pondering the logistics, I decided, sure, why not?

Well, "why not" includes the question of how to e-mail my boss to ask/tell him I'm taking two days of unanticipated vacation. I have the vacation. I don't have any major deadlines pending. And if I'd simply gotten unexpectedly sick, everyone would cope and cover. But I still feel guilty. At least my boss is very understanding about family stuff.

I'm still very much in "Ack!" mode.

I called the concession group that runs most of the Yellowstone campgrounds and got reservations for Monday through Friday. (Two days at Madison, three days at Bridge Bay. Sorry, cryptocosm -- I considered following your suggestion to try for a night at the Old Faithful Inn with a geyser-view room, but although the same concession company runs both the Inn and the campgrounds, they're handled by different reservations operators, and I didn't feel like dealing with the added complication of juggling options.) I was worried that there would be major availability problems on this late notice and still (barely) within the season, but it turns out that camping out of the Element means they can fit me into sites that don't work for either full-size RVs or serous tent-campers, so they had plenty of spots I could use.

The general plan was to spend Saturday and Sunday driving there, and (ideally) sleep at a rest area those two nights, then set up at Madison (near the West Entrance) Monday and spend Monday and Tuesday doing the sites between Madison and Old Faithful. I figure one day of biking between the two and doing all the little side sights and trails, then one day driving to some of the longer hikes on that route (like Fairy Falls). Then Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I move to the Bridge Bay campground. (I'd originally thought about doing even more moving about -- since camping out of the Element means I pretty much pack everything up every day anyway -- but one of the campgrounds I'd been thinking of they don't do reservations, and a couple others were already closed for the season.)

So I was figuring for the next three days, I'd spend one hiking the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone area, one doing things around the lake, and one left unscheduled. It occurred to me that "doing things around the lake" might be improved by doing things on the lake, so I went online and turned up an outfit that does half-day guided kayak tours in the Grant Village area. So I called them up for a reservation -- it seems they require a 4-person minimum to do a tour, so my first choice of Thursday was out because they didn't have anyone else signed up for that day, but they already had a 4-person group reserved for Wednesday morning, so I went with that one. (I briefly contemplated simply seeing if I could rent a kayak, but with only that one day's lesson I've had, I'd rather be in company.) This means that Wednesday morning I need to pack up early enough to drive from Madison to Grant Village by 9:30, but I figure I'll cope. So Wednesday will be Lake Stuff Day, then Thursday will be Canyon Day. And Friday? Who knows, maybe Friday I'll just hang out in camp and do nothing.

So Saturday I'll start with a nice leisurely exit via Grand Teton Park and get as far as is reasonable, then Sunday's all about getting home.

I have a packing list. I have most of my preparatory shopping done. I have the cat and the CSA box taken care of. I have ... *ACK* Cal Shakes is this Thursday ... I have one less evening to prepare in than I thought. (Ok, that last was for dramatic effect. I actually noticed about Cal Shakes yesterday.)

TIred. Hungry. Glad there wasn't a BART strike after all. (When we landed, the flight crew told us there was a strike and I was all set to start calling Bayporter from the plane when they came on again and said, "Oops, false alarm.") I'm definitely not staying up for a regular Pacific Time bedtime, so maybe I can get back solidly on my morning-gym routine again. (The motel had an exercise room. Three pieces of equipment. Only one worked: the treadmill. It adjusted speed, but not elevation, and the automatic stats-tracking didn't work. Ah well, better than nothing.)

(posted when I get reception -- and I have discovered that the iPhone lj app can only keep one off-line composition in memory at a time)

Given that "setting up camp" is simply a matter of parking the car, by 3pm I was all set up and ready to do some hiking.

( pix and trip report Day 1 )

For every "I love my job" day, there's a day like today. Today I spent pulling 12 days of performance data on 17 fermenters, tracking down production documents on the exact 28 harvest batches that were being collected from those fermenters at the time of our two power outages, reviewing production documents for 12 media batches, 6 ultra-filtration batches, and 4 purification batches to determine what, if any, production process was going on at the time of the two power outages, reviewed and printed out historic data trends for said 17 fermenters, 3 blast freezers, and assorted temperature-controlled storage rooms. And the sum total result of all this work is the ability to say with confidence, "the two power outages did not adversely affect the quality of our product." There are fun parts of my job. Today had very few of them. And mostly I'm miffed because there was no good stopping place any time before 7:30 pm, and then when I got home I wanted to finish up the pre-appraisal housecleaning, which left me at 9pm without having eaten dinner yet. Gah.

On the up side, I think I've started to get the hang of the most efficient use of the packing-list app I got for the iPhone. And Friday I'm taking off to Salt Point State Park for the weekend (Friday being a holiday at work) for a totally-mundane-just-me-by-myself-car-camping weekend. The forecasts suggest that our current late-season rain storm may still be hanging around on Friday, but the weekend should be fairish.

But wait, I get ahead of myself.

Mom & I went to a New Years Eve potluck and games party but wimped out about an hour before midnight. New Years Day was all about traveling home. Since the guys were ensconced in front of the football games all day, Mom drove me down to Portland to catch my plane. In the interests of getting her back home early, we timed it to listen to the 1pm Capitol Steps new years concert on NPR while on the road. Even after sharing a late lunch in Portland before going to the airport, that still left me several hours before flight time. (This is relevant later.) So I was hanging out at the gate pretty much alone except for one person behind the counter when this guy comes running up to the gate carrying a large cardboard carton and with that "my plane has already left" look on his face. The counter person successfully rebooked him to his final destination via the same flight I was waiting for, so when he asked the counter person if he could leave his box of lobsters with her while he took care of some business (1st indication of Major Cluelessness -- do you expect airline personnel to serve as a luggage check? really?) I offered to keep an eye on it for him. Yeah, I know, security blah blah blah. But fergoodnessakes it was a cardboard carton full of live lobsters. You could hear them moving around. Maybe someone has invented lobster suicide vests, but ... ok, let's not go there.

So the counter agent admonished him to make sure he was at the gate half an hour before flight time and he went off to take care of whatever. Half an hour before flight time passes. Boarding is announced. The lobsters are still in my possession. Boarding begins. Still no lobster man. I hang around until the end of boarding, not so much because I feel responsible to the lobster man but because I'm going to have to explain to the (new) counter agent about the carton of lobsters that I am now going to leave sitting in the waiting area. (The infinitesimal chance of the invention of lobster suicide vests means that despite my earlier joke to the lobster man, I am not going to take someone else's box of live lobsters onto the plane with me.) At the last minute, just as I'm about to start explaining to the counter agent, this guy who'd been sitting in a nearby waiting area (with his back to me) wanders over to board and ... ta dah! it's the lobster man. He's handing his boarding pass to the agent when he suddenly looks over at the lobster box and mutters something about almost having forgotten his lobsters. At this point, it is clear that he is beyond merry. He retrieves the lobsters and thanks me for looking after them. I do not entirely succeed in refraining for pointing out that it was rude of him to have left me holding the lobsters all that time. He offers to buy me a drink on the plane. I point out that they don't serve drinks on this small a plane. This saves me from any further interactions with him. Once again, life trains me not to be generous and helpful.

I had an hour and a half layover in DC (this is relevant later) but all the flights continued on schedule. We even arrived half an hour early in SF. This is for a value of "we" that does not include my ski bag. When the ran the ID through their tracking system, they informed me that the last place it was scanned was in Chicago. WTF? "But I didn't go through Chicago!" "Well, your skis did. This can happen if you don't leave enough time to get them on the plane." I pointed out the two relevant facts mentioned above. The luggage agent shrugged and took down the delivery information. They haven't shown up yet, but the airline has secondary instructions to leave them with the downstairs tenant if I'm not home.

Irresolutions for 2009

I will get some form of the Medieval Welsh Names Database available online in searchable form.

I will set up and maintain various Lifecleaning KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), including minimum regular amounts of time spent on writing and music (e.g., at least one session per week), a minimum number of dinner party equivalents (e.g., once per month), a rejuvenation of the housecleaning program, and a minimum number of yard improvement sessions (e.g., at least one per month).

I will roll over last year's irresolutions.

Oh, and here's an ambitious one: I will do the redecorating and repurposing of the guest bedroom.

All ready to go to the airport and waaay too early to actually head out. This is the point where I start getting twitchy. If it were an option, I'd say what-the-heck and see if my driver wanted to take me over early, but she's off to dinner with a friend. The Delta web site now had the flight leaving 20 minutes later than originally scheduled, but in some ways this is a good thing: it means they've actually updated it for current information, and that current information doesn't involve drastic changes. I'm still working on the assumption that some sort of delay is more likely than not, but I'm hoping it won't be on the same scale as last year. Still, what happens happens.

I did manage to acquire a last-minute new project that got started but was never going to get finished. (No details because it involves a present for someone that will not end up being a 12th night present and I'd rather not make even the commitment of describing it until I get around to finishing it.)

*twitch* *twitch* *twitch*