My Mountain Trail

Busy-ness

It’s been an interesting week so far, and it’s not even over yet:

1. Sunday I joined Facebook. Oh yeah, I ran a bunch of Mt. Tam to Stinson Beach on Sunday, met Lori and Cookie for a run on the beach, and then dropped them off at Pan Toll so they could run home. That was really cool.
2. Monday I got my last run in on the mountain for a few days.
3. Tuesday I had to travel to Louisianna for a meeting with a prospective client.
4. Wednesday I spent time workin’ in the ol’ salt mine.
5. Wednesday evening my bro’ called too. Scared me at first, because I figured something might be wrong. But it was all good, so that was super cool!

6. Thursday I drove by my childhood home (at about 12:30 a.m).
7. Thursday, day, I was Mr. HQ.
8. And now, Thursday night, I am enjoying my spin in the cattle-car called American Airlines.

That’s the rundown. Sunday and Monday were pretty regular. Well, Sunday was actually super fun. The way life should be.

Tuesday things got spicy. My trip was to New Iberia, LA, home of Tobasco Sauce. And then sweet — turns out there is a lot of sugar cane in that part of the world, and it was harvest season. Interesting. And then on Wednesday, I visited a salt mine 1500′+ underground; things went savory.

I’ve never been in a mining environment where it was kind of fun to lick my lips. Kind of my own built-in salt lick. The salt wasnt’ really food grade, but wadya gonna do? It was dust in the air, and it was mighty tasty.

This was my first salt mine, which was interesting. It’s not that different than mining coal — the salt bed is relatively pure, so it’s not like gold mining or diamond mining for ore. It’s blast it out, break it up, crush it some more, send it to the surface, and ship it to a customer.

From there it was off to Kansas to meet w/ some other managers. My path to the hotel took me within about 2.5 miles of my childhood home in Prairie Village. I figured I might not have time to drive by the old house after my meeting so I made the detour from the airport. It’s still a nice neighborhood with cozy little houses. The magnolia tree, which was pretty big when we lived there (to me as a 10-year-old) is giant (for a magnolia tree) now. And, the house is bigger than I remember (the Duck Shack changes one’s perspective on these things).

Ah, business travel. It can be so fun. Really. Not bad this time, just tiring.

For my trip home, American has served up a center seat on the flight from KC to Chicago. I always love flying east to go west… And now I sit here in an aisle seat on the trip back to SFO.

The reading lights don’t work in this entire section of the airplane. Great. I guess we paid for the travel, not the lights. Lights would have been nice though. At least it gives me a chance to ramble on here.

And what about Facebook? It’s safe to say that I don’t need more W2.0 in my life. Believe it or not, I joined FB for a business reason: I have a client that I lost touch with a few months ago. They just went silent. Attempts to contact them were not returned. I actually started to even get worried that something bad might have happened. So, I did a quick Google search on one of the contacts and found a Facebook link. Clicking through, there was my client’s smiling face. Nothing else had worked, so I joined Facebook and ‘friended’ my client w/ a little note asking if everything was okay. Guess what, I received an email the next day explaing the silence. All was fine, just busy, etc.

In this age of information, you can run but you can’t hide! I should probably delete my Facebook account now! What’s the point though? That would mean I should delete this blog (and all the other ones too). Naw, I don’t need to hide. Don’t spam me though. That makes me really grumpy.

Enough!