I Waited a Year to Take This Picture

Isn't this cute? Do you get it? OK here, maybe this helps:

I saw these beer bottles (separately) in Croatia and thought, "What a great picture that would be. I need to get some of those bottles." Only the opportunity didn't present itself to buy both of them and we came back from Croatia with just one - the "Karlo" one. How sad and lonely. But last week in Atlanta I happened to notice the "Paula" beer on the menu. I had to have it. Truth be told, the beer was terrible. It is wheat based and tasted awful. I had to throw half of it out. But that was OK. I really only wanted the bottle. I smuggled it out of the restaurant and now I'm happy. I have my Croatian Karlo beer finally joined with the German Paula beer on one of our "shelves of the world." Yes, technically the Paula beer came from Atlanta, but let's pretend I actually brought it back from Croatia or Germany, shall we?

iLove iTouch, iThink

My genius husband won himself a new iTouch. It’s even engraved on the back. Take a look:

He used his freakish talents in the multiaxis world to score this new little gadget. Who knew that his multiaxis knowledge would ever be useful in this way? When Karlo called me to tell me about his big score all I could picture was this:

I spent some time last night playing with it. I loaded some songs, pictures and contacts (MY contacts of course). I marveled at how cool this little gadget is. I dazzled Karlo by showing him the maps and how you can watch YouTube videos in a flash. I can definitely see where this thing rocks when you’re stuck at an airport (that has free wifi) and you’re bored out of your mind. But on the other hand, it wasn’t all that intuitive to load the info on it, it forces you to use iTunes, and without free wifi it’s really nothing more than an mp3 player, picture viewer, address book and calendar. My Palm LifeDrive does all those things and in addition it has games and useful apps on it. I’m betting I can buy some apps for this iTouch. I can’t imagine that Apple wouldn’t love to sell you more stuff. It will be interesting to see how much we use this shiny new toy. I think maybe Apple made these things just to get you hooked on the coolness so you have no choice but to buy the real thing . . . the iPhone.

Happy to Be Home

I rolled into town a little after 8:00 last night. Not the best way to spend nearly the last weekend of the summer, but at least my travel day was stress free. I had two uneventful flights and a long enough layover to avoid the sprinting.

As I sat on the Roncari shuttle bus, anxious to get home, my mind suddenly went from walking in my front door to greet Karlo and the dogs to . . . my car. I thought, “Holy cow, I can’t wait to drive my car home!” My heart actually fluttered as we drove into the Roncari parking lot and I craned my neck trying to catch a glimpse of my beautiful car. I peered and peered for it, but finally resolved myself to the fact that it must be too small to be seen and was hiding behind some SUV. Oh well, within minutes I’ll be sitting behind the wheel. But after I paid for the week of parking and ran out to greet my car I realized that everybody else drove off and Coop was nowhere to be found. I stood there on the curb, all alone —just me and my hot pink suitcase, wondering where Coop was. Did some young car attendant fall in love with it and steal it?

Eventually the friendly attendant felt sorry for me and went to hunt down my car. I big smile came across my face as I saw it pull up. I just couldn’t wait to jump in. The commute from the airport is now at least an hour and I loved every second of it. It’s so good to be back!

One More Day To Endure

I survived my trip so far. It's been long days and nights, but that comes with the territory of working shows. I almost still have a voice left for this last day of the show. After the 10 hour work day I get to stay in the hall and work four more hours tearing our rather large booth down. I know I won't get it all done tonight so at least I'm not setting myself up for disappointment. I'll have to go back tomorrow morning to finish up. I already changed my flight later in the day on Sunday to relieve some of the stress. Hopefully all will go well and I'll have a non-rushed, easy, dry, and eventful flight home.

I think I'll spend most of my show time today dreaming up things I'll make with our new router at home. After all, this is the biggest woodworking show in the country. It should inspire me with some creative ideas.

I Don't Like Cities

Did I ever mention that before? For the most part cities are loud, dirty, and over crowded with strange people who are mostly in my way and for some strange reason are compelled to talk to me. I just don't like it. But I tried to make the most of my stay in Atlanta today. I started out with a lovely little breakfast at the Corner Bakery (one of the few benefits of the city - cool places to eat everywhere). I went back to the hall and got my work done much sooner than I expected. This left me plenty of time to relax. Since I missed "Gup" so much I decided to go to the relatively new Atlanta Aquarium and get my fish fix.





And in the spirit of the Olympics, I took a few strolls through the Olympic Park.



I even had time to go back to my hotel and lounge by the pool. Hey, maybe this day wasn't so bad after all. I lounged and read my water-logged book. After glancing at my watch I realized that Oprah was on and I haven't taken the time to watch Oprah in ages. Yipppe. I ran back to my room, turned on the TV, got settled on the bed and got the dreaded phone call that I was needed back at the show floor. uuuugh. There went Oprah and here comes a 20 minute (one way) walk in the afternoon city heat. Nothing is worse than city heat. The heat coming off the asphalt is only half of it. In addition to that you have the exhausts of all the traffic zipping by mere inches from your legs and random huge exhaust vents pumping hot air onto the sidewalk (as if all the other hot humid air wasn't enough). Did I mention that I don't like cities?

If I ever complain about my 15 mile drive to go buy a loaf of bread please remind me how much I love living in the middle of the woods.

And the Complaining Begins

I warned you . . . any posts this week will probably include whining and complaining. You may want to navigate away from my blog while you can.

So here’s the story of my travel day. I got to the airport nice and early – no stress there. The plane boarded and took off on time. That was too good to be true. Then we got to my connection city, Philly, and the notoriously congested airport was chaotic. We circled in the air for a good 25 minutes until we finally got clearance to land. Yeah. We’re already 25 minutes late and I only have a one hour layover. At this point I might be in danger of not having time to grab some dinner. And by the way, I didn’t get so much as one peanut or one pretzel on the plane. I had to pay $2 for my ginger ale and I really thought that purchase might score me a small bag of peanuts, but no such luck.

We are now on the ground, but there seemed to be a problem finding an available gate. So we sit there and wait. And wait some more. OK, now this is starting to get stressful. Nearly 30 minutes later the pilot announces that a gate just opened. This would literally leave me five minutes to make my connection. Luckily the plane was tiny and I was in the 10th row. I made it out with less than two minutes to spare. I made a mad dash sprint to my connecting gate, which thank God, was only five gates down from where we landed. I made it. No dinner, but all was well.

That plane was now delayed as we waited for baggage to get loaded. Cool, that MUST be MY bag we are all waiting for. Come to find out later that was wishful thinking. I sat down and settled in to what I hoped would be a relaxing flight. I opened my backpack, reached in for my book and found a soaking wet book. Oh my Lord, what happened? In my mad dash sprint to the gate, my water bottle popped open and 15 ounces of water poured into my backpack. Not only did I have a brand new book, but a journal that contained the first couple chapters of MY book . . . . and my beloved new MacBook Pro. I pulled the laptop out and water poured out of it. My heart sank into my toes. But there was nothing I could do for the next few hours.

I got to my room after 10PM, hungry, tired and with no luggage. All I could do was immediately turn on my computer and see what happens. The first thing I notice is the screen is pretty much destroyed. But it fired up so it wasn’t a total loss. However, none of the applications would start. My next course of action: call Karlo and cry.

After tossing and turning all night, worrying about my computer and how I would explain this accident, I had to get up early and run down to the convention center to bust my butt for 9 straight hours. I won’t even bore you with those details. On the brighter note, after taking a hairdryer to my computer for 15 minutes last night, it did fire up and the apps work today. I’m thanking my lucky stars for that. Perhaps I can just get away with a new screen. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Off to Hotlanta

The depression is starting to sink in. I hate this feeling of knowing that impending travel is coming up all too soon. Given the fact that I only have half the weekend you would think I would really enjoy the time I do have at home. But I can't get my mind off the dread of driving to the airport tomorrow. This stinks.

Because I'm getting ripped off this weekend I decided to take Friday off. It was great. I did nothing productive at all. I expected rain, but was thrilled when the sun was out for most of the day. I hung out on the deck, read magazines, played with my dogs, just simply relaxed. I so needed that mental vacation. It was nice to spend some good quality time with myself.

Today I tried to spend some good quality time with Karlo. We started off the morning talking to the wood stove salesman that was nice enough to come out to our house. We wanted to order the biggest stove we could possibly fit to keep this house as toasty as possible without oil this winter. The stove is now ordered and we can finally rest knowing that it will be installed before the cold weather starts. After that it was time to test out our new bike route. The weather stayed perfect for our entire three hour ride and it was awesome. I would SWEAR that we rode all the way to Vermont or New Hampshire. I still can't get over how spectacularly beautiful it is out here. Love it. Actually, we loved it so much we went out for more after lunch, only this time with the help of a motor.

And now I'm all packed up and getting sadder by the minute. Tomorrow afternoon I take off (all alone) for Atlanta. Not the most ideal destination for mid-August. Drat. Not that it matters much because I'll be working 10 hour days, in the air conditioning. I'm bringing Mac and hopefully I'll find some time to blog so that I can complain publicly about my crappy week. I bet you can't wait for that . . .