In some ways, the travel thing is getting really old. Last week, I had to go to Grand Junction CO, and either later this week or next week I need to go to Perryton TX. Grand Junction wasn’t too bad, but I already know Perryton will be a bear of a trip. There isn’t any sort of a direct flight there, and it’s located far enough away where I can’t just drive up. What I’ll likely have to do is fly up to Amarillo, and then drive from there to Perryton (which is at the top of the Panhandle, right about at the Oklahoma border). I’m really hoping that this is the only time I have to go up there.
As for how this past week went, I’ll go ahead and be kind and put it under a cut. :-)
This past Tuesday, my aunt Norma came to visit from England. This time I went ahead and picked her up from the airport, as she was arriving around my normal quitting time and Intercontinental Airport is on my way home. She was kind enough to bring me some stuff from England, including the soundtrack CD from the third season of Doctor Who, a two CD set of David Tennant reading a Who novel called “The Stone Rose”, a fridge magnet with the Eighth Doctor on it, and three packs of Cadbury Crunchies. :-) The next day, though, she and Mom left for a couple of days in Vegas. I was leaving for Grand Junction that same day, but unfortunately my flight was several hours after theirs, so I couldn’t take them to the airport. The flights to Denver and then to Grand Junction were uneventful, other than quite a bit of turbulence coming into Grand Junction (I so love prop planes). What WAS eventful was getting lost on the way to the Hampton Inn. Google Maps failed me. :-/ Fortunately, the people at the hotel front desk were kind enough to help me find where they were, and I got there and settled in with no issues.
Thursday was more or less uneventful, other than spending most of the morning on a conference call with most of my coworkers. Let me tell you, it was amusing hearing them chattering in my ear while I had them muted and I was down in the breakfast room of the hotel having breakfast. One nice thing about where I was staying was that by a neat coincidence, the location there was less than three minutes from the hotel. After doing what I came out to do, and other stuff, I went back to the hotel to drop my stuff off and then go get some supper at Red Robin. Once back at the room, I got on my laptop, talked to Misty, and watched Sin: The Movie on my Netflix’s “watch it now”.
Friday was an early morning, as I had an 8 AM flight to Denver. Fortunately, despite the Grand Junction branch manager’s warning, the winter storm that was coming hadn’t arrived yet. I got to the airport, and my flight took off with a warning that if the storm reached Denver we’d be diverted to Colorado Springs. Fortunately, we arrived in Denver safely, and I was able to get on my flight to Houston and make it home. After working the rest of the afternoon from home, Dad and I went to the airport to pick up Mom and Aunt Norma (whose flight ended up being delayed by forty minutes), and from there we had dinner at Outback.
As for this weekend, well… meh. It was relatively uneventful. Mom, Dad, and Aunt Norma were supposed to go to a Christmas party for Mom’s office Saturday, but Mom was sick all weekend and I ended up ordering pizza for all of us. We were all supposed to go to PF Chang’s tonight, but Mom was still sick so only Dad, Aunt Norma, and I went. It was delicious as always. :-) The only other thing of note that happened was that I got a replacement for my beard trimmer, which had died a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately, Dad had a beard trimmer that he wasn’t using, so he let me have it. Now my beard doesn’t look like anywhere near the mess it was before.
Unfortunately, I asked a question I really shouldn’t. After he gave me the beard trimmer, I asked him why he had a beard trimmer when he’s been clean-shaven all of his life. His response? “I got it for the dogs.” Great. He assured me he had never used it… however, when I finished charging the trimmer and was about to use it, I noticed dog hair around the base. *sigh* I went ahead and cleaned everything out thoroughly, then used it… and then griped at Dad for it. Ah, well.
The rest of this week should hopefully not be that eventful, other than the work Christmas party on Tuesday and the upgrade of the company mail server tomorrow. I have to go to the data center early in the morning to monitor the servers while some work on the A/C units there is done, and I also have to find out when I need to go to Perryton. (I’m hoping it’s sooner rather than later.) Otherwise, it’ll probably just be the same old same old. Here’s hoping, anyway…