A different trip

Monday night good and late I took off for Portland: This is an "existing client" touchbase trip, not a hunting trip, so I left the fancy suits at home (went for the sportcoat look). The flight took off a little late - 9:45pm, and we got into Portland at midnight PST. I was in bed by 12:30, which was of course 2:30 by my body time, and I was feeling a little fragile.

Leaving wasn't easy - I had hoped Bella might already be in bed, but instead she was latched onto me pleading with me "don't go, Daddy, don't GO!!!!" This was after a nice dinner and 2 games of Go Fish where she smoked me fair and square... And Isaac was having mad brainstorms as well. I sensed that perhaps Pamela would have an evening of it.

On the plane, I was able to identify some people from our preferred software vendor by the wifi network their laptops broadcast (which popped up when I turned on my macbook). It was a very strange thing to realize the different ways we broadcast our identities to the world.

I had intended to have a wakeup call at 7am, but my darn body clock had me up before 6am with no hope of extra sleep, so it's just as well I had decided not to have breakfast sent up: I was already done with breakfast and back in the room before the time I would have had the food delivered.

It looked like a cloudy morning and the doorman gave me a garish red and white umbrella as I went out to my AM meeting... I went to one of the 100,000 coffee shops and got a bag of pastries and a tub of coffee for the team, and discovered upon arriving that my client had called in sick - so no meet and greet. I was able to connect with my person here, though, and that is an important function of these trips - to make people who are working alone at a client site feel somehow connected to the general team...

Meeting out of the way, I had a couple of hours to kill in Portland, so I ventured out to Powell's Books - the biggest best bookshop in the galaxy. Nothing got bought, however - all I could think about was "where will I put this - how far must I carry it today?". By 10:30 I realized my body clock was getting mad at me for not eating lunch... so I lurked at a deli's door while they took down their chairs and got the place ready for... me...

So now I'm cooling my jets in the PDX airport getting ready for the second leg of my trip - checking in with my team in Sacramento. I have an hour to burn, so time for some language learning... if I can ignore the man playing cheesy piano in the atrium here - with a synth for strings. Oh, it's glorious stuff.