mamamusings: travel

best family vacation ever

I now understand why so many people are cruise addicts. We had an absolutely wonderful time on our cruise, and I can hardly wait until we can afford to take another.

I put a full trip report up on the Cruise Critic website, but short version is that Norwegian Cruise Line’s “freestyle cruising,” which allows you to eat whenever you’d like, was absolutely perfect for our family. The kids had a degree of freedom on the ship that we simply couldn’t give them on most land-based vacations, and we not only survived but thrived on a week of no Internet and almost no TV.

Coming back was not particularly fun, since most of the Rochester flights out of JFK were canceled on Saturday due to weather. We managed to get flights on JetBlue’s last flight out, which was delayed until 1:30am, and didn’t get back to our house until 5am on Sunday morning. Still, even with that, we’re all still in excellent post-holiday spirits.

gone cruisin'

We leave well before the crack of dawn tomorrow morning for NYC, where we’ll board our cruise ship at lunchtime and set sail at 4pm.

I will not have internet or phone access while away. (w00t)

See you in a week…

wishing for ruby slippers

I want to go home. I really, really want to go home. But it’s taking a whole lot longer than I’d like.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given how this trip has progressed thus far. But still, it’s no fun to be sitting under a sign proclaiming JetBlue’s superb customer service when I’m facing up to another five hours sitting in JFK.

I was supposed to be home last night, but when I woke up at Elizabeth’s house on Saturday morning it was to a text message from Gerald telling me my noon flight from SFO to JFK was delayed. When I checked with JetBlue, they said it was going to get in too late for me to catch the last connecting flight to Rochester, so they offered to rebook me on Sunday. (Thank goodness I was staying with a close friend and didn’t have to deal with paying for another night in a hotel…) Then they hung up on me. (Accidentally, but still…) I called back, and spent over 30 minutes on the phone with them while the agent tried to get a supervisor to override whatever was keeping her from getting me on the only non-redeye flight out of the SF area on Sunday with seats available—a 9am Oakland departure, arriving at JFK at 5:25. Too late to catch the 5:35 Rochester flight, but plenty of time for the 8:25. The only problem was the 8:25 was already full, and they don’t do standby over the phone…only at the customer service desk (more on that in a minute). So they booked me on the 10:55pm flight, which meant a 5.5 hour layover in JFK (not as bad as the 10 hours on the way out, of course, but bad enough).

Amazingly, my flight out of Oakland left on time, and arrived early. Early enough, in fact, for me to make the 5:35 flight. So I called JetBlue from the plane, explained the situation, and they told me there were still plenty of seats on the flight, and to just run to the gate as soon as I arrived. I ran (and it was a long trip, including YET ANOTHER shuttle bus), and got to the gate before they closed. I was exultant! Until the gate agent said he had five seats and twelve people on standby and that if I wanted to get on the standby list I’d have to go BACK to the customer service center at the other end of the terminal and then come back. W. T. F. ?!

Since it was clear he wasn’t going to help me at all, I went back to the service center, where they put me on the standby list for the 8:25 flight. I’m #4 on the standby list right now, so the odds seem good (though not guaranteed by any means). Given my luck thus far on this trip, I’m pretty much assuming that the best I can hope for is the 10:55 flight, which gets me in after midnight.

(Did I mention that I finally broke down in tears at the service center desk? Probably had something to do with not having had food in eight hours. Time to eat now, I think.)

I really, really, want to go home.

worst trip ever

I’m in San Francisco right now, wide awake because I itch all over. What I thought yesterday was an allergic reaction to something now appears to be bedbug bites, courtesy of the Stanford-recommended Hotel California in Palo Alto. I have bites on my scalp, my face, my arms, my legs, and even my back. Even taking an oatmeal bath and 3 benadryl last night wasn’t enough to stop the insane itching.

On top of that, my head cold is turning into a chest cold.

And I left my computer power adapter at Stanford, so I’m typing this on the last of my battery power.

That means this morning will require going to the Apple store for a power adapter and finding an urgent care doctor to look at these welts and help me find a way to get rid of them.

My only hope at this point is that I’m getting every bit of bad travel karma out this week so that the cruise will go off without a hitch. :(

—
Update, 4:06pm PT

So I went to the urgent care doctor this morning (a place called Downtown Medical, aka “Fast Doc San Francisco”). After a very cursory exam, the doctor told me I had scabies, and gave me three prescriptions—the prednisone dose-pack I’d been hoping for, a stronger antihistamine, and a scabie-specific lotion. I did some quick research on scabies and was totally unconvinced that was what I had, so I filled the first two and not the third, and left a message for my wonderful primary care doctor in Rochester.

I started the prednisone and the antihistamine right away, and crashed in my hotel room with my newly-purchased MacBook Pro power adapter and my drugs.

A few minutes ago, my doctor called me back, and I gave her the full story. When I got to the part about the doctor here diagnosing scabies she actually shrieked in outrage. The symptoms I’d described to her didn’t match scabies at all, and on top of that it takes 4-6 weeks to develop scabies, and scabies basically never occurs in places as cold as Rochester in the winter.

Her suspicion is that this is actually a reaction to the penicillin I took for my strep throat, not an insect issue at all. She’s not ruling out the bedbug possibility, but given how many welts I have, she thinks it’s extremely unlikely that’s what caused the problem. Her advice was to stay the course with the prednisone and antihistamine, and come see her Monday if I haven’t improved.

It doesn’t make me itch any less to hear her assessment, of course, but it still makes me feel a whole helluva lot better. The psychological ickiness of either bedbugs or scabies was really awful on top of the overall miserable symptoms.

Tonight I’ll treat myself to a room service dinner, and try to get caught up on the sleep I didn’t get last night due to the itchiness. Tomorrow maybe things will return to some semblance of normalcy…

Many thanks to all the folks who sent encouraging wishes via email and private tweets. They were very much appreciated. It’s hard to be sick when you’re away from home, and having so many people offer assistance if needed really made me feel less alone.

a long long day at jfk

Today’s plan? Wake at 3:45am (ouch), fly from ROC to JFK at 6am, fly from JFK to SFO at 8am, be in the hotel in Palo Alto a little after lunch California time.

Today’s reality? Flight sits on runway until 6:30am. Woman in exit row passes out, requiring return to gate and paramedics. Flight leaves ROC at 7:15, arrives at JFK gate at 8:20, flight to SFO long gone. Next flight to SFO? 6:25pm. What about SJC, I ask? 5:35pm. I took the SJC flight, which arrives at 9:25pm, and now have 8 more hours to kill at JFK.

On the plus side, there’s free wifi and available outlets. On the downside? My head is already killing me from the boarding announcements, screaming kids, and squabbling spouses.

loving las vegas

Gerald and I got back yesterday from our three-day trip to Vegas, and we had a fabulous time. We saw two Cirque du Soleil shows (Love, which was the reason we went, and Zumanity, which I enjoyed but not as much as Love). We also did lots of sightseeing, and played a lot of penny slots. I didn’t use my computer for most of the trip, except to download photos from my camera. Still recovering from jetlag, but remembered I’d promised to post more this year :)

Photos on Flickr.

my year in cities

Steven Johnson has picked up on Jason Kottke’s theme of listing all the cities visited in the previous year. Here’s mine:

Colorado Springs, CO
Washington, DC*
Buffalo, NY*
Winnipeg, MB
Montreal, QB
Seattle, WA
Irvine, CA
San Francisco, CA
Madison, WI
Chicago, IL
Monterey, CA

Not as much travel as many years, but more than I realized until I compiled the list. :)

This year will start out with pleasure travel instead of business, since my Christmas gift to Gerald was tickets to see the Cirque du Soleil Love show in Vegas. We leave here on the 10th, get back on the 14th. We’ll be staying at the MIrage, which is where the show is performed. I’m looking forward to the show, to the nickel slots, and to the opportunities to take photographs.

sleeping in sunnyvale

I made a last-minute change in my plans tonight, and decided to spend tonight and tomorrow night at a hotel near Google, instead of driving from Palo Alto (where I was today) up to San Francisco, then back down tomorrow morning, and back up to SF tomorrow night and to the San Jose airport on Saturday morning. I’m sad not to be spending the two nights I have left here in California with my dear friend Elizabeth, but I’m incredibly relieved not to be doing an extra 150 miles of California rush hour highway driving. :)

I spent today not at Yahoo! Research, where I’d expected to be, but instead at a mobile/social mashup event sponsored by Nokia and held in Palo Alto. One panel at the event was particularly outstanding—it included Andrew Fiore from UC Berkeley, Scott Golder from HP Labs, Marc Davis from Yahoo! Research, and Eric Paulos from Intel Research. Those are all people for whom I have enormous professional respect, and it was a delight to hear them all together talking about the value of science and research in this space. The panel was put together by the wonderful Joe McCarthy, who was responsible for inviting both me and Elizabeth Churchill to the event. Not only was content great, the food was wonderful, and—as an added bonus—I was one of the many lucky people whose names were drawn to receive a free Nokia N95 phone!! w00t! It’s quite lovely, and it will be interesting to compare it to the Blackjack I have now in terms of functionality and UI.

Tonight I”m staying in a reasonably priced and pleasant hotel room (with a full kitchen and free internet access), and I’m only about 15 minutes away from Google’s headquarters, so I can work on my presentation tonight, and have a relaxed morning tomorrow. Yay! Wish me luck…I don’t feel sufficiently prepared to give the talk—I’m thinking it would have been wise to pick a topic that I’ve presented on before, but it’s a little late now to do that. I’ll just have to hope for the best. :)

shaken, not stirred

I was online tonight, joining my guildmates for a run through the WoW Karazhan instance, when it felt as though something had slammed—hard—into the wall of my 9th floor hotel room in Monterey. It took about 15 seconds for me to realize that the repeated shakes and shudders weren’t from a rude neighbor, or a construction crew working late…they were from an earthquake.

According to the USGS, it was a magnitude 5.6 earthquake, in fact, which is non-trivial, but also typically not enough to result in major damage. The hotel swayed like crazy, which it’s supposed to do, but nothing broke, and the front desk said there was no need to leave the building.

The whole thing was over in 30 seconds, but it’s taken a couple of hours for my adrenaline levels to subside, and I’m still a little on edge. It doesn’t help to read the news coverage, which indicates that there’s a chance that this could lead to a larger earthquake before I leave for the relative safety of the east coast. I’ll happily take an ice storm or a blizzard over a wildfire or an earthquake any day.

my talk at google

I mentioned in a previous post that I’m going to be giving a talk at Google next week. For the Googlers among my readers, here are the details:

Title: The Evolution of Expertise (or, “The reports of authority’s death have
been greatly exaggerated”)

When and Where: Friday, November 02, 2007 at 11:00 AM (60 min) in Seville, Mountain View

Abstract: Does Web 2.0 represent a triumph of the wisdom of crowds, or the
tyranny of mediocrity? The truth—as truths often do—may fall
somewhere in the middle. New tools have indeed allowed access to new
ideas, voices, and expertise. But at the same time, it has become
increasingly difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. In education,
the shift from “the sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side” has
been underway for quite some time. The same shift is happening on the
web. Experts aren’t disappearing, but their roles are changing. How
can tools and infrastructure best support this shift in the role of
expertise and authority?

—

My understanding is that the talk will also be made available via Google Video, so you can watch it later even you’re not at the Googleplex that day.

on my way to san jose...and beyond

On Sunday morning I leave Rochester for San Jose, where I’ll pick up a rental car and drive to Monterey for the 2008 Internet Librarian conference. When I agreed to give the closing keynote, which falls on Halloween, I jokingly said to the conference organizer that I should give the talk in costume…and then promptly forgot about it. Not long ago the printed conference pre-program/advertisment arrived in my mailbox, and I found that my talk was being prominently advertised as being given in costume. Ack!

So, last week I rummaged through my World of Warcraft characters’ wardrobes, and visited local costume shops, and came up with a way to make myself look as much as possible like one of my characters. I’m quite sure there will be Flickr photos to commemorate it. I’m less sure that’s something I pleased about!

After the conference, I head to Berkeley to meet with folks at Yahoo! Research on Thursday, and the following day I’ll go to Mountain View where I’ll be giving a Tech Talk at Google. Then Saturday I fly back home.

I’m looking forward to the trip, a lot. But for the first time in a long time I’m actually a little nervous about preparing my presentations, so I expect there will be a good bit of time spent obsessing over the next week.

try, try again

We’ve booked a cruise from New York City to Florida and the Bahamas, March 1-8. Norwegian Cruise Lines again, on their newest (just out of the docks) ship the Gem. Gerald and I will have a mini-suite with balcony, Erin and the boys will have a cabin with a nice window. They are much nicer rooms than what we would have had on the Alaska cruise, because we booked that one so late.

I feel better now that we have a concrete plan for a replacement vacation—the self-pity kind of caught up with me this week, and the reality of being back home and trying to deal with office politics, cluttered bedrooms, looming course prep, and miserably muggy weather. And I suspect that a cruise to a warm climate in early March will be a welcome respite from the Rochester winter.

Now I need to turn my attention towards course prep, since it’s two weeks ‘til the start of classes. I’m teaching two sections of my favorite course (the freshman intro to multimedia and the internet), which means it won’t be a huge hassle to prep, but there’s still time and energy that has to go into that process. And it’s harder because my MacBook Pro went in for minor repairs (including that pesky wifi problem) and a hard drive upgrade, so I’m using a Windows machine that doesn’t have all my application settings (like ftp passwords).

I did manage to get my office cleaned up on Friday, so Monday I’ll go in and try to make forward progress on my myriad projects—course prep, symposium planning, grant report, long-overdue posts for Terra Nova, etc etc.

Tonight and tomorrow, however, still count as vacation. So I’m going to bed.

disaster

Well, the cruise may be is off.

Lane fell off his bike today and broke both of his arms wrists. I hate that I’m 2500 miles away from him right now. Erin’s with him at the hospital, and will take great care of him, but I want to be there.

It’s not clear if he’ll really be able to travel this week, or if he’d even want to go on the cruise with two broken arms. The good news is that we have travel insurance for the trip, so we can cancel and get a full refund if it looks like traveling is a bad idea. I don’t have many details at the moment, but will update when I have more information.

—

We don’t know a lot more just yet. The right arm break is apparently pretty bad, and they’re not yet sure if it will set properly. If not, the trip is definitely off, as they’ll need to do surgery. Even if it’s iffy, the trip is off, since they’ll need to check it soon and possibly reset, so being gone for ten days will be hugely problematic. Only if it turns out being a clean set will we get the okay to travel. They have to sedate him to set the arms and put on the casts, so until that’s done, and the follow-up x-rays are complete, we won’t know much more. Friends and neighbors are already stopping by the hospital to make sure Erin’s holding up okay, too. I’m grateful for both the trip insurance and the health insurance, not to mention our wonderful family and friends. But I wish I were there.

—

Spoke to the orthopedic resident after they set his arms. The left wrist fracture was stable, but the right was is not. As a result, they want to check in a week—if it hasn’t stabilized they may need to do surgery at that point. So, no cruise. Thank goodness Gerald got the trip insurance! Microsoft will change our flights so that we can fly home this weekend to be with him. The whale watching tour company refunded our deposit. And we’ll rebook and take a different cruise over the winter when he’s fully recovered. It sucks, but it could have been much, much worse.

summer's end approaches

I can’t believe how fast this summer has gone. It’s slipped through my fingers, leaving me feeling a bit at a loss. I had hoped to have accomplished more…certainly to have written more. But for some reason, this summer I’ve found myself not at my most articulate. Words haven’t come easily…and thus the relative lack of blogging.

Last week I had occasion to go back through some of my older posts, looking for something I wanted to send to a colleague, and I was disheartened by how much more interesting my writing used to be, compared to what I’ve generated recently.

I think the biggest problem this summer has been the limited amount of interaction I’ve had with others at MSR. With Lili away for the past month, I’ve spent too much time sitting by myself in my office, writing code (which, I must admit, has been fun—it’s been a while since I’ve actually built something, even if it’s just an internal site for tracking all the information associated with the social computing symposium) and dealing with email. The real work of putting on a good event is inviting the right mix of people—it’s like holding a dinner party, but exponentially harder. So that’s taken up more time than I really had intended.

There are a lot of things bubbling around in my head, though—having to do with two main themes. The first is the kind of semi-synchronous presence that tools like Twitter and Facebook have made so prevalent. The other is the extent to which work and play are (or could be, or should be) intertwingled.

In a week, I’ll be aboard the Norwegian Pearl cruise ship, en route to Alaska. I’ll be cut off from email and Internet and phone calls…and I can hardly wait. I’m hoping that the break with communication technology, combined with the grandeur of the Alaskan landscape, will help me focus my mind a bit, and knock loose whatever it is that’s gumming up the works in my head.

After that, it’s back to Rochester—we arrive home on August 27th, whereupon I’ll be immediately caught up in start-of-year meetings (ack) and course prep. I’m teaching a course I love this fall—two sections of the introduction to multimedia and the web course—so prep won’t be onerous and neither will teaching.

So there won’t be much blogging ‘til then…and after that, my hope is that quality and quantity of writing output will increase significantly.

why you shouldn't let your kids fly delta as "unaccompanied minors"

This was a busy travel week for the Lawley family; Alex arrived solo from Rochester (via United) on Monday afternoon, 45 minutes before I got on a flight to Chicago. Then Lane left solo for Rochester (via Delta) on Tuesday morning, 15 hours before I flew back to Seattle.

This was the first time the boys had traveled by themselves, and I wasn’t too terribly worried about it. All the airlines now charge a hefty “unaccompanied minor” fee for kids alone ($99 for United, $75 for Delta), and in return they promise to keep track of your kids and their tickets, get them to their connecting flights, etc. Since they’re both seasoned travelers, I figured there’d be no problem.

With Alex, there wasn’t. My mom put him on the first flight in Rochester, he connected without incident at Dulles, and Gerald and I met him in Seattle. United handled everything perfectly, and he was in good spirits when he arrived. (Although a little cross about the garish red and white striped button they’d made him wear, which he felt looked quite awful with his camo-print t-shirt.)

With Lane, however, Delta screwed up royally, and the more I think about it the angrier I get.

He made it home safely, and my mom picked him up at the airport as scheduled. But he nearly ended up in Albany rather than Rochester. Why? Because some idiot Delta employee in Atlanta PUT HIM ON THE WRONG PLANE. WTF? How the hell does that happen? How do you put someone on the wrong plane? Thank goodness someone on the flight realized it before they took off, and they relocated him to the correct plane for Rochester—moments before it was supposed to leave.

Yes, all’s well that ends well. But it was a pretty upsetting experience for all of us, including Lane. And it has seriously shaken my trust in Delta airlines. There are few responsibilities as important as taking care of a child’s well being, and they dropped the ball on this in a very big way. So today I’m dealing with Delta’s “customer care”—at a minimum, I want the unaccompanied minor feel waived. But I would expect that they’d do more than that if they want our business in the future, including giving us an explanation of how they intend to improve their procedures so that this doesn’t continue to happen.

—-

Update, 7/26: After I provided them with the receipt number by phone today, customer care did refund the $75 (or so they say; I’ll believe it when I see the reversed charges on our Amex bill). But when I asked them to please provide me with information on how this was followed up, and what changes (if any) were instituted to prevent it from happening again, they said I’d have to go onto the website and write a complaint, because they weren’t empowered to follow-up with me directly. Ridiculous. I’ve updated the title of this entry so that it can leverage my Google page rank to bring the post up when someone searches for Delta and “unaccompanied minor.” Here are some other key phrases that should help: “children traveling alone” “kids traveling alone” “children flying alone” “kids flying alone” “unaccompanied child” “child flying alone” “child flying solo” . Any others that should be added? Put ‘em in the comments. I’m already the #2 site for “delta unaccompanied.” :)

the nightmare of air travel today

Argh.

I got to the airport 8 hours before my scheduled flight, and put myself on the standby list for a 5:10 flight instead of my originally scheduled 9:30pm flight. When I showed up at the gate at 4:40, I found that the flight had been delayed until 7:10—still better than 9:30, so I went back to the Delta club lounge to relax and wait.

At 6:45pm I got cleared from the standby list, and at 6:58pm we pulled away from the gate. But…twenty minutes later, after touring the runways of O’Hare, the captain announced that we had an electrical problem and that maintenance had been called. So it’s now 7:35 and we’re back at the gate, trapped on the airplane, with no informaiton on how long this might take. Welcome to the wonderful world of today’s air travel, eh?

I foolishly chose not to eat before I got on the plane, since I’d had a snack and some drinks in the lounge, and I figured I could buy a snack box on the plane. Bad move on my part…I’m starting to get hungry now, and there’s no telling when food or beverages will be accessible.

It doesn’t help that I’m seated in a middle seat, next to a woman who’s extremely cross about the delay. Yelling into her phone won’t help much. :)

airport club lounge observations

Nobody, but nobody, in these clubs has a mac. There are laptops everywhere, but they’re all running windows.

Many people seem incapable of reading or heeding signs that say “quiet zone: no cell phones in this room.” Even when there are plenty of seats in the other rooms where they could talk.

Readily available wifi, wine, and cheese and crackers make this lengthy wait at O’Hare much more bearable. Still, I’m hoping I get onto the 5:10pm flight that I’m on standby for, rather than waiting until 9:10pm (arriving in Seattle at 11:40pm pacific time :P ).

a perfect weekend

On Saturday morning, Gerald and I dropped Lane off at Lili’s house, and headed north to Anacortes, where we caught the 11am ferry to Friday Harbor. On our past trips, we’ve always parked and walked on to the ferry, but this time we decided to take our car—and I’m so glad we did.

After we checked in to our very nice room at Elements (an old motel that’s been renovated into quite chic rooms, with lovely lighting, bedding, and shower fixtures) and took a nap, we got back in the car and did a full circuit of the island. We drove through Roche Harbor (which looked like your typical touristy town), and then stopped at English Camp National Historical Site, San Juan County Park (omg, so beautiful, I’m actually thinking that I might be willing to camp there, and I’m not really a camping out kind of a girl), Lime Kiln Point State Park, and then American Camp National Historical Site.

We ended the day with a lovely dinner at a restaurant by the marina, and a good night’s sleep. In the morning, we had a leisurely breakfast at a local eatery, parked our car in the line for the 1pm ferry, and then went to my favorite bookstore in the whole world, Serendipity Books, where I got three novels I’ve been wanting to read, Gerald got a great bok on birding in the San Juan islands, and we found a gorgeous book of photos of Alaska, to whet our appetite for the cruise we’re taking in August.

I took photos all along the way, including up-close-and-personal shots of a fox and some young bucks who allowed us to pull up next to them on the road. I pined for a telephoto lens, though, for shots of the further-off wildlife. That will definitely be my next big-ticket purchase.

All in all, it was perfect weekend…capped off by my WoW guild finally downing all of the bosses in Shadow Labyrinth, something we’ve been trying to do for month.

Tonight I’ll go to bed tired and happy.

southward ho!

I woke up this morning dreading the day. Tomorrow I leave for six days in California (two in Irvine, four in San Francisco), and I desperately needed a haircut and a new wardrobe before I left. It seemed unlikely that either of those goals were achievable in the one day available to me, but I finally dragged myself out of bed a little after 9 and made what I figured would be the first in a series of futile calls to get an appointment with a stylist. To my amazement, the Pro Club said they could get me in with a stylist at 10:30! So I headed over there, got my ID card taken care of, and had my hair cut by Kelly, who did a wonderful job!

Buoyed, I then went to Crossroads Mall, where I struck out on clothes, but did find some attractive and comfortable sandals and shoes. Still needing presentable clothes for the trip, I decided to give Bellevue Square Mall a try, even though in the past I’ve found that the clothes there have been too expensive for my tastes, and designed mostly for supermodel-sized women.

What I found, however, was an abundance of beautiful petite-sized clothes (Banana Republic has an entire petite store! And J.Jill has almost as many petites as regular sized clothes), along with incredible sale prices. I ended getting four pairs of beautiful pants, and seven assorted tops—all petite-sized and nicely cut. So I won’t be bringing my schlumpy, baggy wardrobe of jeans and fleece tops with me this week.

All in all, it was an excellent day. Very seldom do I do this kind of self-indulgent shopping, and it was miraculous that I found so many beautiful and well-fitting clothes at reasonable prices. Let’s hope this is a good omen for the trip!

oh no! not my phone!

Our flights arrived safely in Seattle today (Gerald and I took different flights, since having him travel on the same flight as me was ridiculously expensive), but as we were leaving the airport my phone fell out of my bag and landed directly under the wheel of our heavily laden luggage cart.

Crunch.

Ouch.

The SIM doesn’t appear to have been damaged, but the phone is mutilated beyond repair. So, I’ve got to decide what to do about replacing it. We’re not due for a phone upgrade from Cingular for quite a while, so I’ll have to buy one outright. Not sure yet what route to take…buying online (eBay or a discount retailer) makes the most sense financially, but it would mean a delay before I have a working phone. Buying it locally would be fast, but expensive.

Rats, rats, rats. Such awful timing!

eek!

I leave in less than 24 hours, and I’ve only begun to pack. Ack!

More from the left coast once I settle in a bit…

interstices

I stopped by campus this morning to move a monitor from my office to Weez’s, and as I left the building I was struck by how empty the atrium was. The balloons were still attached to the ficus trees, the “congratulations” banner was still strung across the wall, but the building was close to deserted. Staff were working quietly inside their offices, but the bustle of students and faculty—which reaches near fever-pitch during the last weeks of the quarter—was absent.

It reminded me of how it used to feel when I was an undergraduate student in Ann Arbor, where I often chose to spend the summers working and playing with friends. There’s something almost magical about what happens in the spring when the swarm of students leaves for the summer. The strikingly quiet buildings and walkways invite you to slow down, to look around at how beautiful a campus can be, and to notice that while you were cloistered in classrooms and offices spring had arrived in all its glory.

For professors who are also parents, late May and June are particularly precious—because the kids are still in school, but we aren’t. So today I’m soaking up this brief, peaceful interlude between the just-finished chaos of exams and paper grading, and the impending excitement of heading to Seattle on Saturday.

summer plans

Because I’m tired of explaining this to people. Now I can just point them here. :)

This summer, our family’s travel schedule is pretty complex. Here’s what we’re going to do.

June 2, I fly to Seattle, and Gerald will come with me for just the weekend. He’ll head back home to be with the boys on the 5th, and will stay in Rochester with both of them until school ends on June 22nd.

When school is out, Gerald and Lane will fly to Seattle to join me, and Alex will stay in Rochester, splitting his time between my mom and Erin (who’ll stay in the house all summer).

In late July, Gerald will fly home with Lane, pick up Alex, and fly back to Seattle. Alex will stay with us there ‘til I finish up at Microsoft Research on August 17th.

Then we’re planning to head out on an Alaska cruise for a week before returning home.

That means the boys each get four weeks with me and Gerald in Seattle, and four weeks in Rochester without us (but with Grandma and Erin). They’ll each get a chance to be an only child for a while, and everyone gets spared the sibling rivalry for eight weeks.

The down side is that I won’t see Alex for nearly two months—so I may have to take a quick trip back to Rochester somewhere in there to get my fix. :)

time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping...

Holy moly, how did it get to be mid-May already??

My older son turned thirteen yesterday, which means I’m now the parent of a teenager. Wow.

Only 2.5 weeks ‘til I head back to Seattle for the summer.

The day after I arrive in Seattle, Gerald and I celebrate our fourteenth anniversary. We rock!

But between now and then there’s grading, grading, and more grading. And packing. And time with the kids, who’ll be in Rochester for most of June to finish school. (Then they’ll each split the summer between Rochester and Seattle—first Lane for four weeks in Seattle, then Alex.)

I’m feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. But in a mostly good way.

o canada

This week I’m off to give keynotes at two different Canadian conferences—the Manitoba Library Association meeting in Winnipeg on Wednesday, and Webcom Montreal on Thursday. I leave Tuesday morning, and come home Friday evening.

I’ve never been to either Winnipeg or Montreal, so it’s a bit of an adventure. I’m a bit sad to leave behind the fabulous weather Rochester is having right now (no, I’m not being sarcastic), but looking forward to the talks and to seeing some new cities.

If you’re in either city, and want to get together, drop me a note…I should have some free time available.

lightweight and ubiquitous

No, not me. (I wish.)

My travel computing solution, which I’m thoroughly appreciating during this delay-ridden trip to Colorado Springs.

My lightweight (< 4 pounds) Vaio, plus a Verizon broadband access card, equals easy online access from anywhere…including this table at the Chili’s Too restaurant in O’Hare. Lovely.

kicking off the spring travel season

I leave Rochester this afternoon for Colorado Springs, where I’ll be giving a talk at the SirsiDynix Executive Conference on “Social Computing and the New Community Environment.” On the roster with me tomorrow is Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life project, someone whose talks are always interesting and informative, Gary Price, one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on search engine topics, and Helene Blowers, whose work with her staff on “Library 2.0” blew me away at Internet Librarian (alas, I think that post got lost when the servers hosting mamamusings died). So I expect to be a doing a lot of live blogging while I’m there.

I’ve never been to Colorado Springs, and I’m seriously considering taking the cog railway up to the top of Pikes Peak on Monday. I’m not afraid of heights, but I am a little worried about altitude sickness.

I haven’t traveled to a conference since early November, which is a pretty long stretch for me. But the spring is going to be busy in terms of travel. After this trip I’m only home for a week before going to DC to serve on an NSF review panel. March is surprisingly quiet (I’m not going to either ETech or SXSW this year, alas), but in April I’ve got back-to-back keynotes at WebCom Toronto and Computers in Libraries, and in May I’ve got back-to-back keynotes at the Manitoba Library Association and WebCom Montreal.

The at the end of May I’m heading back to Seattle to start my ten-week stint as a visiting researcher at MSR. Yay! The boys are still in school during June, but will be heading out with me for July and August. Gerald will be there for all of July and August, and it looks the boys may alternate between Rochester and Seattle so that they spend some time with their friends this summer while still getting a chance to visit friends in Seattle. It’s nice that they’re old enough to be able to have some voice in their summer plans.

I suspect that the increased travel will lead to increased blogging, as well, since the three months here at home were wonderful for me, but not particularly filled with bloggable events!

alaska cruise advice?

(Yes, I’m still here, still healthy, but still buried under both snow and work. Thus the sporadic blogging.)

This summer I’ll be headed back to Seattle for ten weeks, working with Lili Cheng’s group at Microsoft Research (assuming she doesn’t leave MSR again right before I arrive!). That means I won’t get much of a vacation, so we wanted to make the most of the time we will have.

What we’re hoping to do is take a cruise from Seattle up to Alaska, right after I finish up at MSR (my last day is 8/17). I’m guessing this is probably the time to start planning for it, so I thought I’d ask my readers whether anyone has had particularly positive or negative cruise line experiences, with an emphasis on the Alaska route. Keep in mind that the kids (Alex, age 10, and Lane, age 13) will be with us.

pre-trip frenzy

I’ve been running around all day like a chicken with my head cut off, but have still managed to:

1. Finish the slides for the CSCW tutorial, identify some good articles to include, turn everything into PDFs and use the wonderful little free OS X utility “Combine PDFs” to turn them into a single document that I could print on our copiers.
2. Hand-staple the color covers onto the 25 packets generated by the above process.
3. Grade 32 student websites, then take advantage of the wonderful integration between Excel (where I do the grading), Word (where I create the nicely formatted gradesheet to give students based on the Excel fields), and Entourage (which, it turns out, Word can “merge print” to, making it possible to send each student his or her own gradesheet with a single click! w00t!)
4. Spend far too much time in an email exchange with a student who refused to accept that he could lose a point for not including a link to his assignment in the place I expected it to be.
5. Made a reservation for the shuttle from Calgaray to Banff tomorrow (thanks to a reminder from my co-presenter).
6. Attended a two-hour training session on diversity that’s mandatory for people serving on search committees
7. Wrote two practical exams for my two sections of intro to multimedia, printed them out, and got them to the office for my TA to pick up Monday.
8. Met with four students who wanted help prepping for the practical exam.
9. Bought the rest of the yarn I need for a gift afghan I’m about to start on.
10. Found out a paper deadline that I thought was this Monday has been extended to the 12th! Yes!!

All that’s left for me to do now is pack, which is pretty manageable. My flight leaves tomorrow at 8:10am, and I get back to Rochester on Wednesday at 8:15am (redeye flight…ugh). Since I’ll be in Canada, my Verizon broadband card isn’t coming with me…I’d have to pay roaming data charges. I’m expecting the hotel (which looks incredibly beautiful!) will have high speed access. If not, you’ll have to wait ‘til next week to see the pictures, and hear about the event.

(And yes, I plan to post the handouts from the tutorial, but probably not until after the conference is over.)

a day to play in monterey!

This was my third trip to Monterey for Internet Librarian, and usually I have barely enough time to wander down to the wharf, let alone to explore the area. This year, however, since I’m traveling to Seattle rather than Rochester, I have a late afternoon flight out of Monterey—which leaves me enough time to do a little sightseeing.

Last night I had dinner at a lovely waterfront Mexican restaurant, with a former student of mine (Katie Giebel, who I wrote about last spring). She’s in graduate school here in Monterey now, and thriving. When I mentioned that I had the morning free, she offered to come pick me up and take me for a drive along the coast…how could I possibly say no?

So this morning we’ll take a scenic drive, and she’ll leave me at the Monterey aquarium, which I’ve always wanted to visit, before her midday class. From there I can walk back to the hotel, and catch a cab to the airport.

(I’ve started recreating the missing entries from the blog; two down, several more to go. The sad thing is that I apparently lost a really lovely comment on the entry about my ex-husband’s death—written by an old friend of his who shared memories about things they’d done together.)

october travel plans

I haven’t done much traveling since I’ve been back in Rochester, but the fall conference season is heating up, and I’m headed out of town on Sunday (which also happens to be my 4-year blogiversary!).

First stop is Monterey, one of my favorite places, where I’ll be doing the closing keynote at Internet Librarian—a conference where I always end up learning a ton of new stuff, and seeing a lot of old friends.

From there I head to Seattle, where I’m on a panel at the Blog Business Summit—unfortunately I’ll only be in Seattle for a scant day and a half, arriving Thursday evening and leaving again on Saturday morning. But it will give me a quick fix for my reverse homesickness, and whet my appetite for a return trip in early December. Part of me would love to stay longer, but I’ll have been away for a week at that point, and I know I’ll be missing my family (and they’ll be missing me).

As usual, I expect my blogging output will increase temporarily—travel and conferences both tend to give me a lot to write about.

cross-country trip day 11: home at last!

We pulled into our driveway a little after 1pm, and found a neighbor and two of Lane’s friends waiting for us on the front porch.

It’s good to be home!

Time Warner says it could be ten days before our local phone, cable, and broadband are installed…eek! The phone’s not a big deal, since they seem to have put in a new tower near here—we’re finally getting decent signals on our cell phones. And while Gerald and the boys will miss the TV, I never watch, so that’s not an issue. But ten days without network access? Eeek!

Happily, I’ve got the EVDO card. And it appears that we’re picking up a faint but usable open wifi network from one of our neighbors. Hurrah for ubiquitous wireless!

Now the unpacking and settling in begins. A lot of work, but more fun (and rewarding) than the packing and moving out. :)

cross-country trip day 10: madison, wi to willoughby, oh

We made it past Toledo today and were still feeling fine, so we decided to push on past Cleveland…meaning we’ll be home early tomorrow! (Gerald and I were considering just heading all the way home tonight, but Lane vetoed that idea.)

So we’re spending the night in a Fairfield Inn just east of Cleveland, and we’ll try to get an early start tomorrow morning. Woohoo! Almost home!

cross-country trip day 9: house on the rock!

This was, without a doubt, the strangest place I have ever been. I’m glad I went, but I don’t think I want to go back.

It took nearly four hours to tour the whole thing, which included going through twisted passageways and up and down spiraling ramps, all in dim lighting, often with strangely discordant music emanating from the self-operating musical instrument displays.

I took a few photos, all up at Flickr, but there’s really no way to capture the utter bizarreness of the place.

In other news, Lane and I had an enjoyable breakfast with a number of folks from my WoW guild this morning, at the Original Pancake House—which was one of the best breakfast spots I can remember eating at. Highly recommended if you ever find yourself in Madison.

cross-country trip day 8: eagan, mn to madison, wi

We’re in Madison tonight, after a few hours of parental suffering in the Mall of America, and a relatively uneventful drive down I-94. Dinner plans fell through, so I took the kids out for dinner while Gerald relaxed, and I’m now drinking a glass of chardonnay in the “Highland Club” that our “premium room” gives us access to. A nice perk, but they’ll be kicking me out in 4 minutes (we’re on central time now, so it’s 8:56), which means I have to type fast.

Tomorrow, breakfast at 7:30am at the Original Pancake House here in Madison, with a bunch of games & learning friends (well, actually, they’re really WoW friends. but it’s the same thing). Then we head to the House on the Rock, and back here for another night in Madison—I expect there will be some interesting photos from the day’s adventures.. Friday morning we’ll start back on the road home.

cross-country trip day 7: mitchell, sd to eagan, mn

(The boys have taken over the PC laptops for gaming, so I’m using my Powerbook tonight…thus no Streets & Trips image. Happily, it was a route simple enough for even Google Maps to display.)

Today’s drive was boring, the only decent hotel near the Mall of America that wasn’t fully booked up only had a smoking room (ick), and I just spent four hours in a mall/amusement park with two kids. Not my favorite day of the trip, but the kids loved it.

Tomorrow we’ll go back to the mall for more rides, and the kids will get to spend a little money now that they’ve window-shopped. (The extended visit is for them, since this is the only place they’ve actually asked to stay longer at.) Then we’ll get back on the road and see how far into Wisconsin we can get before Gerald and I get worn out…which means tomorrow’s entry will be equally boring. However, Thursday morning we plan to hit the House on the Rock, and Thursday evening I hope to spend visiting with friends in Madison.

Friday we’ll shoot for Toledo, which means we’ll get back to Rochester on Saturday, assuming no other delays or distractions. (My original prediction of Friday was based on a futile hope that I could convince the boys that they really weren’t that interested in the Mall of America. Silly me.)

cross-country trip day 6: rapid city, sd to mitchell, sd

Alex was greatly recovered this morning, so we got on the road at around 9:30 and headed east. It was a busy day, which started with the famous Wall Drug Store in Wall, SD, where we drank deeply of their famous ice water, bought a few souvenirs, and gazed upon the jackelope and T-Rex in the backyard.

It was a good thing we drank plenty of ice water—and carried cold drinks in our cooler—because it was HOT HOT HOT in the Badlands. I took a picture when my car’s outside temperature gauge showed 106 degrees, thinking that was as hot as it would get. I was wrong. At one point it actually went as high as 109. As a result, we kept our stops very short, took some photos, and got back into the air conditioned comfort of our cars. Still, it was spectacular.

We arrived in Mitchell, SD, at about 7pm (local time; we crossed from Mountain to Central time along the way). After settling into a lovely suite at the Hampton Inn, we headed out to see the Corn Palace, which was everything I expected. The boys were only able to tolerate about 30 minutes of it, after which we grabbed KFC for dinner and headed back here to relax.

Oh…and we got great news today. It seems our tenants decided to leave a week early, which means we’ll be able to move right back into our house as soon as we arrive. So we could arrive back in our house as early as this Friday, if all goes as planned. Yay!

tips for the techno-savvy traveller

I’ve learned a few things this week about using my computer for travel planning. A few sites that have become indispensable for us as we do our day-to-day reservations (we didn’t want to book too far in advance because we weren’t sure how far we’d get each day):

• TripAdvisor, which has the greatest number of consumer reviews of hotels, and has helped us avoid hotels that people said were particularly dirty or unpleasant. As a result, we’ve had no terrible experiences with hotels.
• Orbitz, which let us see at a glance which hotels have free wifi, free breakfast, and a pool—three things we like on road trips.
• Priceline, which let us book a hotel even when all the other sites (Expedia, Orbitz, and the hotel chain sites themselves) said there weren’t any rooms available.
• America’s Byways, which provides photos and maps of the scenic byways if you want to avoid the boring interstates.

For offline computer-based planning, I’ve found that Microsoft Streets & Trips is significantly more useful than any of the online mapping tools. It allows you to specify your typical driving speeds and frequency of rest stops, your daily start and stop times, and waypoints—including the length of time (in hours or days) that you plan to stay. This has made it possible for us to reroute along the way, and get accurate, detailed estimates of time for each leg of the trip. I have the GPS unit that’s supposed to work with it, but after a few months of flawless operation it stopped working. :(

Our Garmin GPS, however, came back to life—just in time for us to embark on this trip. Hallelujah! It really is useful to have, especially when you take a wrong turn, or decide to leave your original route for a scenic byway. Another nice feature is that it provides your elevation, which was fun to track as we made our way across the Rockies. (I think the highest point for us was leaving Yellowstone, where our elevation was over 9,000 feet.) The unit we have was the most economical one we could find, and except for the unexpected refusal to work for the first two weeks of July, it’s been a great investment.

And while it’s not computer-related, our AAA membership continues to be a good investment. The guidebooks and maps are great, and if we’d stuck with our original routing, the TripTik would have been useful as well.

cross-country trip day 5: rushmore, bison, and searing heat

Lane’s first reaction upon seeing Mount Rushmore from the road? “I didn’t expect it to be so small.” To be honest, from far away it did look a lot smaller than the postcard photos make it seem. When we got closer, however, we were properly impressed by its grandeur. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of taking the .6 mile path around the base of the monument, and while Gerald and Lane and