Areas of Unrest

19 February 2000 - Planning Ahead Is the Secret

QOTD: "Furby has four times the technology of the Apollo lunar lander." - Michael Hawley

Reading: Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse

Listening to: nothing

This is a quick entry before I head to the airport for a weekend excursion. Work has been fairly stressful this week, between a deadline on some work I was doing for an upcoming conference, assorted administrative annoyances, and the grand inquisitors on Wednesday. The inquisitors didn't even talk to half the people they'd originally asked to, but they grilled me for 40 minutes, largely because I'm the technical point of contact for something our contractor is touting as the solution to all of their problems. They also asked me such amusing questions as "do you spend a lot of time in Boulder?"

I was also pretty busy at home, being in the midst of a massive decluttering effort. My big accomplishment in that arena was putting a lot of photos in albums. I've probably misidentified half of the Cambridge ones - after a year and a half, all of the colleges blend together, though I'm pretty sure I'm correct on Queens because the mathematical bridge is unique. Oxford was a bit easier. I've finished all of the photos from my leave of absence and from Nashville in March, so all that's left is Alaska. And some from Las Vegas last month, assuming I finish the roll this weekend.

The other big thing is that I've now put down money for the Mongolia trip. I still have details to work out but there's plenty of time for that. I'm essentially deciding between just flying to Moscow for the start of the tour, flying into Helsinki and traveling by train to Moscow via St. Petersburg, flying into St. Petersburg, or flying to Beijing and taking the trans-Manchurian train to meet the tour in Irkutsk (which means missing the first 2 days of the tour, but I can go to Moscow another time). And then I have to decide whether to go to Xian from Beijing at the end of the tour or stopover in Japan on the way back to L.A. (not very likely because I'd want more time there), or whether to leave the tour in Ulan Baatar and go to the South Gobi and then take the trans-Mongolian train the rest of the way to Beijing. Lots of options, all of them appealing in some way or another.

But what I really meant to write about was how I would stay home like a lump if I hadn't made plans for this weekend over a month ago. It's not that it's unreasonable to lounge around for a weekend, given all the stress. But if I didn't plan ahead, I'd never do anything fun. I remember a guy I knew in college who told me that was why he bought series tickets for the symphony. If you already have the ticket, you have to make the time to go.