Tag: travel

The itinerary, now that the trip’s almost over

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

It has been a Most Satisfying Vacation, y’all, and it ends tomorrow.  I just realized I never actually said where we were or where we were going.  There are lots of words in my head but lots of exhaustion in my body, so just look at this and imagine all the driving:

  • MONDAY: Drive from South Bend, IN to Bloomington, IN.  Tour Indiana University’s campus.  Drive to Bedford, IN.  Locate family ancestral home; photograph it.   Drive from Bedford to Louisville, KY to visit one of my best friends and her family.
  • TUESDAY: Not a travel day.  Hang out in Louisville.  Visit the zoo, which somehow manages to be uphill no matter where you are or where you’re going.
  • WEDNESDAY:  Travel from Louisville, KY to Shawnee, KS, which is just immediately to the west of Kansas City, to visit wife’s oldest friend and her family.  Pass through, in the process, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky.
  • THURSDAY:  Not a travel day; hang out in KC/Shawnee.  Get a driving tour of Kansas City, including the very cool spot where Lewis and Clark looked out over the entire valley and went “Yep, America’s big.”  Note to boy that you can see rivers, an airport, a highway, a train station, and a highway from this spot now, which is kinda interesting.  Eat delicious barbecue.  Yes, burnt ends.  Go to a really cool independent bookstore and spend money despite not intending to.
  • FRIDAY: Drive from Shawnee to Chicago IL, or at least the North Northytown suburbs of Chicago, via Iowa, mostly just so that you can add one more state to the list of states you visited while on the trip.  Stop at a McDonald’s in a small town to feed and drain the boy and discover that every fucker in town has lunch at that McDonald’s on Friday.  Damn hear have a panic attack at being crowded into such a small building with SO MANY WHITE PEOPLE.  Assume that they can smell blood.  Wait nervously for someone to notice the Elvish tattoo on my left leg, assume it is Arabic, and start some shit.  Demand that we take the food to go and flee as quickly as possible.  Discover that Iowa has a chain of gas stations called “Kum and Go,” which is as gross as it sounds.  Resolve to avoid the state in the future.  Have dinner with brother and sister-in-law upon arrival in Chicago.
  • SATURDAY: Eat breakfast with brother and sister-in-law.  Lounge about in hotel in Chicago.  Hit the pool a couple of times.  Go to Rainforest Café for dinner, which is both more delicious and WAY less campy than you had been led to believe in the past.  Consider going to Ikea; change that plan upon remembering that it is Saturday.
  • SUNDAY: Meet friends in Evanston for breakfast,  Drive home.  Return rental car, collect cat from parents (assuming cat is still alive,) go to grocery, sleep, somehow be ready to return to work Monday morning, sell enormous amounts of furniture to compensate for the week you just had where you sold none.

Yay vacation!

Okay so maybe I had nothing all week long too

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

9db7a17d7c5f000f1a980dc6329a9a0a

The story of the last two days has been racing my wife to see which of us can fall asleep quicker after putting the boy to bed when I get home from work.  There has been no time for bloggery.  There has barely been time for conversation.  It’s 7:36 as I write these words; I got home with the boy at around 4:30, she was home minutes afterwards, and I think I’ve been asleep in my recliner for the entire intervening period of time.

This weekend, I shall finish the final story in Tales from the Benevolence Archives, which is still Coming Very Soon.  Then I shall work for Saturday and Sunday, as is my recent tradition, and then– wait for it– I’m on vacation for a week, marking the first time in my adult life where I’ve chosen when a vacation was going to take place, which is kind of fascinating.  We’re visiting friends in Louisville and Kansas City and are probably swinging by my brother’s place in Chicago on the way back home.  There will be a lot of driving, but I’m excited about it, although I’m sure I’ll get cold feet and try to cancel the whole thing at least once between now and then.

I am seeking guest bloggers for that week, by the way, so if you have had a piece in mind that you’d like to share, feel free to hit me up in comments and let me know about it.  There are at least five days available– Monday to Friday of next week– and in the unlikely event that I get more people interested than that, I’ll either double some days up or fill a weekend day or two.

In which I drive

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

My wife is out of town for the next… God… eight days, meaning that not only am I on solo Daddy duty all week, but that I had to drive to Chicago and back today to get her to the train station.  That’s only about a total of four hours of driving, especially if you discount all of the driving around in the city itself.  That said, I rarely really drive longer distances at all any more, and I’ve been 75% asleep the whole time I’ve been home.  There are tons of things that need to be done before I head off to work tomorrow, and instead I’m sitting in front of the TV with my laptop in its accustomed place, doing nothing in particular.

19983612_10155470147278926_8570603837941311806_o

While we were in town we tooled around in Hyde Park a bit, since my wife had never seen the University of Chicago’s campus before.  This particular spot in front of Swift Hall, which is where 90% of my classes were, holds a bit of personal importance to me, but it became real clear as we were walking around campus that between seventeen years of development and the fact that I was in grad school and really never entered the vast majority of the buildings on campus.  Basically, my “tour” was “parking was bad but I don’t remember it being THIS bad… uh, this used to be a road… that building wasn’t here before… most of my classes were in this building… OH HERE’S THE BAR I LIVED IN FOR TWO YEARS!”

Which, really, is pretty much my grad school experience anyway.

Posting may be a bit light this week due to parental responsibilities.  Feel free to buy a book if you miss me!

Some more thoughts on the trip

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

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

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work1 Comment

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

I might be dead

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments
mlhkirw.jpg
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

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

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.

The View from my Hotel Window: Denver edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Work1 Comment

IMG_5332.JPG

Well, la-di-fuckin’-da, Denver.  I’m not even convinced you exist yet.  On the plus side I’m apparently already The Guy Who Brought Painkillers, so everyone is coming to me for help since the air here isn’t fit for humans to breathe.

Dinner had better be delicious.  I have been up since 5 am and it’s 7:48 my body’s time.  I require something heavily potato- and beef-based, dammit.