Words are inadequate

Crap crap crap. Had a post about two-thirds written about the tail end of the Los Cabos trip and the computer crashed on me, and now it's gone and I can't find it in me to rewrite it.

It was a good trip. Restful. Maybe the first trip I've taken where I wasn't ready to just be home at the end of it. I can't claim my brain has fully regrown but it may be getting there.

( Bullet points! )

And then work got very very stupid last week. On occasion they need to light a fire under the developers, so they pretend they're going to be shipping software to customers in a week. This is obviously false but it's from higher-ups so it has just enough plausibility that we have to get everything ready to go out. Then it doesn't ship for two more weeks anyway. Oh well.

This week hasn't been so bad; mostly it's been reorienting to being home and to a normal schedule. Yay.

So we're going out of town this afternoon, off to San Jose del Cabo at the tip of Baja California. The theory was that having some sun in the middle of the grey winter would do us some good. I think the week-long Vacation has turned out to be more important, though.

Hoping to get some actual writing in, as well as wading through my backlog of email. And, you know, wandering around the town or whatever it is that people do on vacations.

(If you're interested in a literal reenactment of a Girlyman song, email your address to this account name at warpmail dot net and I'll see what I can do.)

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( 101 )

I've packed writing implements both electronic and manual, and I've acquired Official Canadian Bribery for my post-VP host, and the house is clean-ish for uilos's return on Monday. I think I'm ready to go. Anything I've forgotten will doubtless occur to me once I'm out the door.

Not that I've been all that great about keeping in touch with anyone recently, but it's going to be worse for the next week and a half.

Massive flooding in North Dakota caused our train to be rerouted south and delayed by about seven hours. (This is better than the train that left Sunday, which was caught in the flooding and delayed by a whopping NINETEEN hours.) Or, as noted elseweb:

Tucker: FLASH FLOODS in North Dakota! All trains lose 1 turn and 1 load.
John K--: Lose the luggage and keep Emily. Or did you pick up a cheese to throw away in wisconsin?
Jerry H--: If you didn't pick up a cheese I'm okay with retroactively assuming you picked up a cheese.

We were so late that they offloaded us in Everett WA and put us on a commuter train that runs twice a day from Vancouver to Seattle and back. Said train has wireless, so for the first time in several days I have internet with a keyboard and a large screen. (The Device is a wonderful thing but it's no replacement for a full-sized computer. I very slightly regret not getting either an iPad or a tethering plan for the Device; then again, we were without signal often enough that it wouldn't have made that much difference.)

The trip itself was a lot of fun, despite the ongoing and repeated delays. We stayed in a "Superliner roomette," which... the line drawing on the Amtrak website doesn't do it justice. It's two extra-wide seats that face each other, with a decent bit of legroom. At night the seats collapse into a twin bed. Another twin bed folds down from above, with some heavy-duty cargo straps you can hook to the ceiling so you don't get jostled out of bed during the night. There's a very narrow closet, and room under the seats to slide small luggage, and... that's about it, really. From an efficiency standpoint it's quite impressive. I think two days is about all I could stand.

The roomette had an electric outlet, but it's positioned so that I couldn't plug in my laptop charger, so I spent some amount of time in the "observation car." Bigger windows, including ones that run up and over part of the ceiling, and seats that face the windows, and usable outlets. Good light, during the day.

The food was decent, and provided free with the room. As you might guess I'm not a huge fan of the "seat four people to a table" idea; we had some good conversations, and some sort of strained ones, and some awkward silences.

Much of the midwest looked about like Tennessee, only with more standing water and happy ducks. Then when I woke up this morning we were passing through Libby, MT, and the terrain turned from 'generic farmland' to 'the Rockies.' Enormous hills and obligatory snow-capped peaks and scrub sage yielding to evergreen forests and rushing waterfalls. Nice countryside. I'm glad we got to see it in the daytime, though I would have liked to get a glimpse of Glacier National Park as well. No pictures, at least not from me; the camera is among the things that got inadvertently packed, along with the crepe makers and all my jacket-like objects.

We passed by the Peace Arch about thirty minutes ago, which I guess means we're officially unofficially in Canada. uilos is dozing next to me. In another half hour or so I'll wake her up and we'll go tell the Canadian border folks that we're here to apply for work permits, and we'll see how that goes.

Then tomorrow morning we go to take possession of the apartment, and tomorrow afternoon we open new bank accounts, and sometime after that our stuff shows up, and I start work on Monday.

This feels more unreal than anything I've done in a very, very long time, possibly as far back as "going to college." It still hasn't sunk in yet. I don't know when it will.

I don't want to go home.

I miss the cats. I miss the shower that gives me plenty of water at temperatures other than "scalding" or "tiny ice cubes." I miss making breakfast while uilos is asleep. (Pop-tarts and bag tea don't cut it.) I miss my people, my friends. I think that's about it.

We've been outdoors most of the week, I haven't got a good winter coat here, and daily highs have ranged from fortyish to thirty. In these situations one learns to appreciate the north side of the street where the sun isn't blocked by buildings, and the intermittent patches of no wind. Also, I have got to find a better solution for my heels than 'lots of lotion' if I'm planning on being outside for hours at a time in the wind and the chill.

There have been crepes and black squirrels and miniature brown squirrels and leaves covered in frost or maybe light snow and a vanishing teahouse and two-dollar coins and ravens chasing a hawk and warm buses that mostly go where one needs them to. And that was just Sunday.

I love how the mountains sneak out from behind tall buildings when I come to a cross street. I love having the water right there, even if it's not for swimming. I love the leaf imprints on the sidewalks, and the superabundance of creperies, and the Chinese tea shop where a guy made us tea out of a tiny yixing pot for no reason other than that we happened to walk in and look interested.

I don't want to go home.

On a more pleasant note, Key West.
( A good trip. )

So I went to Key West with uilos last weekend, and had a really good time. I also got a reasonably bad sunburn on my nose and scalp despite slathering the former in sunblock and buying a hat for the latter. Too little too late, but at least I have a hat. I did not see any tiny purple octopi (octopodes, whatever), sadly.

I am also drowning in work and will provide an actual trip report later. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow. Worst case, sometime the week after Labor Day. (Well, worst case is I never get around to it, but then you'd never get to hear about the stingrays who wanted to come to dinner.)

Mostly this is in the nature of I ATEN'T DEAD. So, yeah.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Facebook: wonderful. (Kirstein is also the author of the unutterably amazing and tragically so-far-incomplete Steerswoman series, making stanza VII all the more sad.)

Democracy: "It's fairly clear that Republicans don't understand how democracy works."

But we get up again: "We did what we could, and he died warm." Sniffly.

Your homework done for free! A brief synopsis of The Lord Of The Rings: "If you simply don't like to read, however, I'm sure the following synopsis and suggestions will help you make the grades you obviously deserve." Contains such memorable bits as "They make their escape [from Lothlorien] when Beruthiel's good sister, Galadriel, frees them from their prison-cell and floats them down the river in barrels," which is wrong in so many not-right ways. (I'm pretty sure I've linked to this before, but what the hey. It's amusing.)

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About a month ago I finally got a good raincoat (Gore-tex, long, lightweight, and green; I'm reliably informed that I look like a park ranger when I'm wearing it). A little while after that I acquired a good bag: a Timbuk2 Blogger bag, which is basically a vertical messenger bag with a laptop pocket on the back. (Poking around online reveals that there seem to be two versions: mine has two water bottle pockets on the sides but no external pocket. I would have liked the external pocket but the water bottle pockets are handy, too.) So I figured I'd put them to the test and lit out for a week in Vancouver.

Dulles has finally opened its subway thing and retired the godawful people-movers, so I've upgraded it from "horrid" to merely "bad." It's still too narrow and too decentralized for me to want to use it.

On the way out I caught up with babushek for dinner, since I had this three-hour layover in San Francisco. She seems to be adapting well to West Coast life.

The city was beautiful and compelling and wide-open and exciting, and I got to ride the bus or SkyTrain almost everywhere I couldn't walk to. I saw the Capilano Suspension Bridge (Vancouver's oldest tourist trap) and rode the Aquabus and found a lot of tea and some oeufs fondant. I caught an OmniMax (like IMAX, only projected on a curved screen using a fisheye lens) movie about beavers and ate dim sum in Chinatown. I also found a bunch more bookstores this time, which is a Good Thing. I still had the slightly embarrassing response of humming "Nova Scotia's dumb 'cos it's the name of a bank" every time I passed a ScotiaBank sign.

Mostly I wandered around and enjoyed the rain, the crepes, the lack of rain (on Tuesday and Wednesday), and the presence of mountains and water and city-ness. I'd originally planned to look at apartments but Vancouver seems to lack any sort of centralized "we have apartments for rent" like DC's Apartment Guide, and writing down a bunch of places to go to seemed like more effort than it was worth. So there was wandering, alone and later with nixve. I got to places outside the downtown peninsula this time, Kitsilano and North Vancouver and even a little of Burnaby. Mostly this reinforced my desire to live in downtown, near the water and the high-rises and all the bus lines.

And then I came home and went to work and haven't quite recovered yet. I'm pretty sure I needed that time away. I just also need a weekend of Not Going Anywhere.

Maybe at some point I'll even get around to talking about my very cool weekend, featuring belly-dancing, aerial antics, lots of books, and new Girlyman songs. (Plus "Superior," which I don't think I'd ever heard live. Good stuff.)

( meanwhile, have some more northwest )