I spent more or less all week in Salt Lake City at a conference. The conference was okay, but there was nothing earth-shattering. Mostly, the presentations reaffirmed what I referred to as "Miriam's first law of software." Namely, if you have software, you have a software problem.
I got in early enough on Sunday afternoon that I had time to do the 10 kilometer capitol Volksmarch. The weather was gorgeous - sunny but reasonably cool - and the walk was a pleasant one, winding through downtown, up a steep hill, past the east side of the Capitol (which is so covered in scaffolding that I assumed that it isn't actually in use) and returning through City Creek Park. I had been to Salt Lake City once before and it looks like the downtown area has been revitalized quite a bit since 1998. By the way, it's a good thing I did the walk then and didn't wait until Thursday afternoon after the conference, since it rained quite a lot on Thursday.
I also managed to check off another life list item. Namely, I've finally gone to a minor league baseball game. This was something of a spur of the moment thing, but I noticed a sign for the Salt Lake Bees home stand and decided that I didn't really have anything better to do Tuesday night. Well, I had some work to do, but it wasn't really urgent. The ballpark was easily reached on the light rail system and the ticket was a bargain at 10 bucks for a seat on the 3rd base line. The game was enjoyable enough, though I didn't see anything that persuaded me that any of the players (for either the Bees or the Las Vegas 51s) were the stars of tomorrow. The ballpark was maybe 2/3 full if that, which is reasonable for a weekday evening, I suppose. All in all, it was worth going, even if it meant staying up a bit too late that night since I did decide to finish some work after I got back to the hotel.
I should also mention that, while there are plenty of adequate restaurants in downtown Salt Lake City, I didn't eat anything worth going out of the way for. The best meal I had was a Penang curry at a Thai restaurant called Lemongrass. The least impressive meal was bland Caribbean mahi mahi at a fish place called McGrath's. I could see the pineapple salsa on the fish, but it didn't add any significant flavor.
Finally, the travel itself went smoothly, though the first leg of my trip home had been moved up by 25 minutes without any notice to me from either the airline or the travel agent. So it's a good thing that I always get to airports very early, particularly since there was also a fairly long security line. United's baggage handlers at Dulles were inefficient, also, and it was over an hour after my flight home landed before any of the luggage came out. (Why did I check a bag? Because I didn't feel like having to deal with it during my layover in Denver.) Between that and the usual chaos of Dulles parking, I got home quite a bit later than I'd hoped to on Friday night.
As for the weekend, I was pretty much wiped out from the week, so i didn't do much. It was beautiful out, but I didn't take advantage of it beyond a short walk in between errand running. Oh, well, maybe we'll have some decent weather during the week.
Copyright 2006 Miriam H. Nadel