Powells and Projects
Started: 2005-12-01 19:15:27
Submitted: 2005-12-01 19:59:51
Visibility: World-readable
Sunday morning Kiesa and her mother headed out to get a solstice tree. They ended up wandering through five acres of growing trees and located one to chainsaw (the guy from the tree lot did the actual deed) while I finished reading Something Rotten. (Kiesa and I got it signed by the author last summer and I read the first three books in the series but forgot to read the last one.) After trimming the tree, and trying to figure out how to carry as many decorations we could back to Longmont (they ended up in our carry-on luggage, which was interesting, although not nearly as interesting as my carry-on fiasco), we headed to Powells and wandered around the multi-story city of books. I walked a few blocks down to the technical book store. Imagine a bookstore a third the size of your neighborhood Barnes & Nobel and fill it entirely with technical books. Everything from calculus textbooks to civil engineering books to comprehensive references on any programming language one can imagine. (It's a very good thing I don't live near Powells, or I'd spend entirely too much money there.) I walked out with a new copy of Joel on Software, which I planned on expensing. (Or, if all else fails, write it off as an unreimbursed business expense.)
We headed to PDX, checked in, and learned that our flight back to Denver was delayed half an hour with something vague about flights delayed out of Denver. When I headed through the security checkpoint the TSA guy running the x-ray machine pulled my pocket-sized weapon of mass destruction out of the tray. He pointed me to the USPS kiosk outside the secured area and walked with me to outside security. I mailed my multitool to myself, returned through security, and made it to my gate. The flight was about an hour late; we didn't make it until Denver until 0030, and didn't make it to bed until a bit before 0230. I had the foresight to take the morning off, which meant I actually got a reasonable amount of sleep, but as a result I screwed up my sleep schedule.
(Today while mucking around the Drop Watcher I ran into some code I wrote while in Cambridge. I used the spelling "centre", which seemed appropriate at the time.)
