On the road around 10am. Stopped for incredibly bad lunch at Jersey Turnpike rest stop. Into NYC around 3pm. Got sorted into the room, and then around 5pm headed out for some wandering around. We eventually figured out that TheWife and I had both eaten at an Irish bar just south of the park (Kennedy’s) on previous solo visits, and decided that we’d have dinner there together for once.

More walking around after that. Bought a mouse at CompUSA, because my trackpad was acting slightly flaky. Of course, once we got back to the room it was fine.

Down to the hotel bar for a drink while TheWife got TheChild down to sleep. Ended up dropping close to $25 for a Scotch — and just 18yo Glenmorangie, not anything particularly special. Long conversation with the bartender about the hotel owners jacking up prices and how stupid that was. Probably won’t be visiting the hotel bar any more this trip…

Back to the room to watch a couple DVDs on the laptop with TheWife, then bed.

Mad, mad day. Meeting with local Intel reps in the morning, big lunch outing for a co-worker who is leaving to go work for a startup (how 1999!), and a constant backdrop of trying to catchup on mail and fob work off on delegate things to other people, since I’m going to be done almost all of next week.

Met the family for dinner after work, then home for adventures in packing.

The Genehack Traveling Road Show and Menagerie of Delights is going to be in the Big Apple this weekend and early next week. Anybody interested in getting together for coffee, beer, and/or general conversation, drop me a line at one of the usual places and we’ll see if we can’t hook up.

Nice geek lunch today. Afterwards, on the walk back to work, I made peace with the reality that I’m not going to get done with the stuff I was trying to finish before my time off next week. In the long term, I’m probably going to end up regretting that, but in the short term, there’s just no way the stuff is going to be done.

On a totally different note, TheWife took the cats to the vet this morning; somebody has been throwing up rather a lot. The vet determined that it was TheBoyCat; he was apparently rather dehydrated, although they couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with him. He ended up spending the whole day at the vet’s, due to an unfortunately timed bout of throwing up (while in the carrier waiting to come back home). After seeing the blood work, the vet ruled “pancreatitis — maybe”, and dinged us for half a gigabuck. (yowza!) TheBoyKitty is now back home and acting like he can’t understand what all the fuss is about…

The Sisyphus imitation continues: lots of effort, little forward progress. But the hours mount up…

It has recently come to me attention that there are people in the world who have not yet seen the absolutely incredible PostSecret. If you are one of those poor souls, you should stop what you’re doing right away and go look at it.

Thank you, that is all.

Not a happy work day. I have some stuff I need to get done in the near-term, and I keep getting interrupted for one thing or another, preventing me from making any forward progress on it. whinge, whinge

In the positive news section, dropped off a homework set on the way home, which ends my teaching involvement for this semester, and arrived home to find the paycheck for last spring’s teaching. I think a chunk of that is going to morph into a Mini, which will replace the aging, wheezy, cast-off whitebox as the living room computer (aka, TheChild’s computer).

You know Charles Darwin has a posse, baby.

Until I saw this dKos entry, I hadn’t realized that there was an anti-gay marriage initiative coming up in Kansas in a few weeks. I’m not quite as surprised as the poster about the way the polling is going — there’s a pretty strong mind-your-own-business streak in most of the Kansans I’m familiar with.

Decided that the second day of spring was as good a time for the Spring Yak Shaving Day as any.

Ass-breaking day at work. Kept trying to dig myself out of the hole I was in, and kept pulling clods of dirt down onto head instead. Hopefully not a sign of how the week is going to go…