By the way, we participated in Earth Hour yesterday by turning off everything except the fridge and taking a walk. It didn't seem like many in the City were following suit, though.

Resting at home this weekend. It's nice to be stationary for a bit. All this moving across the country (while fighting a gnarly cold, no less) is exhausting. In the past three weeks, I've flown about 15,000 miles. San Francisco to D.C. San Francisco to New York. San Francisco to Atlanta to Chicago to San Francisco to my bed.

I like traveling. Working from home, while providing me lots of flexibility and control over my day, can get monotonous. Sometimes I feel like I've been sequestered in my little pale green cave for decades. The only things I talk to are Corinne, the cat, and Outlook, when it's not cooperating yet again. (It's email -- how hard is it to manage that, Microsoft??) Traveling breaks up the routine, gets me moving, shows me different places, invites tiny adventures. Yes, I like traveling ... when it goes well.

Friday's travels did not go well. I was exhausted from two days of meetings and just wanted to be home. But in front of me an hour of Atlanta traffic, a death march through airport security (ATL is my new least favorite airport), a flight to Chicago, and finally a flight home. It's partly my fault this went so poorly. I had insisted on flying United because I'm obsessed with absorbing as many frequent flier miles on United as possible, and the only flight home was a 1-stop through O'Hare.

O'Hare isn't on the top of my airport list, either, because it is always creating delays that ripple through the system. I can't think of a time I fly into or out of ORD and wasn't delayed in some fashion. The airport is nice once you're inside, but the actual effectiveness of moving planes into and out of its airspace is not good.

As I should have expected, my flight out of Atlanta was delayed 45 minutes ... no wait, an hour ... make that 90 minutes. So I left at 8:30p ET and my connecting flight left at 8:50 CT. The flight time was a little under two hours. Let's see, 8:30p eastern time is 7:30p central time plus two hours, carry the one ... yeah, there was no way I was making that connection.

The gate agent had foreseen this problem and put me on standby on the next (and last!) flight to San Francisco. (He hadn't foreseen enough of a problem to put me on a flight through Denver which wasn't delayed and would have arrived an hour earlier.) Even so, that flight left at 9:40p CT, and in an entirely different terminal. I landed at 9:20p without a seat on the next flight and had to sprint a mile or so to gate B5 to catch my connection or sleep in O'Hare for the night.

I made it. I even had an entire exit row to myself. The sprinting did wonders for my cough but at least I finally was under the covers with my girl in our house at around 2:00a.

And, so, that is why I'm quite happy in my pale green cave today. I plan on moving very slowly, if at all, for the rest of the weekend. Gotta save up my energy for my next trip: Miami for the week of April 7th. Yay.

Off to D.C. bright and early tomorrow morning. Going to my nephew's christening at the Navy chapel in Annapolis.

It's strange to think I am to this kid, like Uncle Fuzzy Beard is to me. My beard's a little fuzzy but wow. Mom says I need to learn to wiggle my ears and build a wagon out of scrap lumber.

I've changed the way my photos are displayed on this site. Rather than pulling from my own database, it's now pulling from Google's Picasa. This means it'll be much easier for me to publish photos to the site which, in turn, means I'll actually publish photos to the site.

I'm still tinkering with it, so let me know if you see any problems. It's been a bit slow at times and super speedy at others. Your mileage may vary.