Some more thoughts on the trip

553d0f_80d94846fdff426f85ed2a6551229b72~mv2.png_256.pngI promise I’ll stop talking about this soon, if only so that I can start griping about how bad Iron Fist is, but since the last couple of days have been one-sentence posts and at least part of the reason for this blog is so that I can remember my own life I’m gonna write about it a bit more.

  • There may or may not be a post coming about institutional sexism in the furniture business, mostly depending on what kind of a mood I’m in tomorrow.  Because… man.  Wow.
  • I got horrifyingly sick Thursday morning and had to be carted back to the hotel from the vendor meetings; I threw up a few times as well as a few other digestive horrors and spent the rest of the day in bed.  A few hours later, my roommate was also brought back to the room sick as hell, but with entirely different symptoms.  Trying to navigate around eating enough that I wasn’t passing out with the mix of diarrhea and painful gas that I was experiencing on Friday while navigating through airports and riding on planes is not an experience I care to ever repeat.
  • About 10% of the people on the trip went down on Thursday; my roommate and I were far from the only ones.  Curiously, fully half of the ones I know about were also from Indiana.  Which is weird.
  • But back to the plane thing: I didn’t mind finding out that my last flight of the trip was delayed by half an hour, because we had a 40-minute layover and that seemed a bit tight.  An hour and ten minutes, I figured, gave me enough time to grab something to eat so that I had a meal between noon and getting back home at eleven.  So you can imagine how pissed and horrified I was when I checked my phone while I was eating and discovered that my flight wasn’t fucking delayed any more.  As in they moved the departure time back and then moved it back forward again.  I was in the B terminal when I discovered this.  My gate was C24.  They counted up.  I was sweaty, completely out of breath, and violently pissed off by the time I got to my gate, and they were paging me over the intercom.
  • The fact that a sweaty, pissed-off fat man who didn’t have time to go to the bathroom after a meal and has been fighting digestive problems all day is literally the last person on earth you want to be sitting next to on a plane is not going to stop me from bitching about my seatmate tomorrow.
  • In general I didn’t like Denver very much– no one should live in a place where the air gives you diarrhea– but at this time I’m going to do the reasonable thing and not blame the city for it.  I was on the north side and pretty much confined to the hotel, the store, and the highway between.  That part of town is full of factories, warehouses and weed dispensaries with varying degrees of unclever names and it’s filthy and brown.  I’m sure there are parts of Denver that are cool and fun.  I didn’t see any of them.  But I’m sure they’re there somewhere.
  • For the record, I support marijuana legalization but generally marijuana culture annoys the piss out of me.
  • The conference itself was well worth the time, though.  As a teacher I’m not used to that, which I’ve said before– professional development is supposed to be either insulting or worthless or both.  This was a good use of both my time and the company’s money, which I find amazing.  I didn’t like the crippling illness part or being away from my family for a week but other than that it was all good.  I even met some nice people!  That doesn’t happen often.

More tomorrow.  Can’t bitch about Iron Fist if I haven’t watched it.

A thought

DENVER: WHERE THE AIR GIVES YOU DIARRHEA is not the greatest tourism slogan.

Definitely dead

Always wanted to be Patient Zero of an epidemic.  Let’s get on a plane!

I might be dead

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This came up when I Googled “dado joint.”  I have no idea.

Sitting very near to me is a pile of paper, about an inch high, that I will need to absorb to some as-yet unclear degree in order to pass an examination on Friday.  The test is going to take two fucking hours, and right now I have not the slightest idea what they think is going to take that long.  I am and always have been a fast test-taker, so I expect this to take no more than twenty minutes.  In theory, I ought to be studying at the moment.

I’m going to save it for tomorrow.  I haven’t had a good old-fashioned cramming session in a few years.  We’ll see if I’m still any good at it.

A shocking admission: despite my exhaustion, this has been a worthwhile trip, and there is nothing happening tomorrow that makes me think it’s likely that I’ll change my mind.  As a lifelong educator the notion that professional development and/or training might not be personally insulting, much less actually useful, is almost unprecedented.  Meeting with vendors is great.  Granted, they’re all salesmen too and thus hucksters to some degree or another, but I’m actually learning shit.

Oh, and there’s HGTV on the hotel room TV, so you know how I’m really spending my evenings, right?


Also, people who live nearby are posting on Facebook that the local weather services are muttering about a foot of snow on Friday.  If the world suddenly ends you know why.  Good luck, thanks for all the fish, and all that.

I’m not dead yet

Jesus, I thought doing cons led to long days.  I’m dead exhausted right now.  The good news is that the company is not wasting their money or my time, and we are being well fed.  I have no real complaints other than I’m not at home and not asleep.

Also, Denver is very flat, which surprised me, and seems to consist entirely of warehouses and factories.  It may be that I’m in the wrong part of town but there are a lot of goddamn warehouses and factories.  We’re pretty much confined to the hotel at all times so there’s been no real opportunity to sightsee and that’s unlikely to change.

“Why are there no pictures of the mountains, Luther?” you might be thinking.  Well, it’s because so far the only time I’ve seen them has been while I’ve been in a van with ten other people and that does not lead to prime photography opportunities.

Sleep now.