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Monthly Archives: February 2008
Thanks, Amtrak
You know something? I like the idea of trains. I think mass-transit in general is fantastic.
So when I decided that after the business portion of my trip this week is over I would head down to just outside of Jacksonville to visit my parents and grandfather, I figured I would just take the train there from Savannah. That way I didn’t have to rent a car and pay a ludicrous amount of money for the option of dropping the car off in a different city than I picked it up in. (It’s actually easier to fly in and out of Jacksonville than Savannah, so I’ll go home via Jacksonville.)
In my fevered imagination, I pictured getting a train sometime after breakfast, or even early afternoon. Simple, right? Well, actually there are only two trains that go from Savannah to Jacksonville, even though it’s a main line that connects the two. And the later of the two trains leaves Savannah at 6:50am.
In order to take the train to Jacksonville, this would mean taking the rental car back to the airport the night before, then taking a cab back to my hotel, then another one to the train station at the crack of dawn. And if I missed the train, I would be out of luck because the next train wouldn’t come through until the next day.
And Amtrak wonders why no one wants to use them. I guess I’m spoiled by there being regular trains up the northeast corridor from DC to NYC and beyond. But it seems like a nasty little Catch-22, where Amtrak says, “No one’s riding us! We better cut back!” when the solution seems to be to not cut back and bite the bullet for a while until people catch on that heyyyy, there are more trains running, we don’t have to set our alarms for 4:45am in order to take the train somewhere.
Oh well. Guess I better remember to bring some driving music with me.
(In a tangental annoyance, the charger for my Nintendo DS seems to have vanished, and I found some comments that seems to indicate that the DS Lite charger does not work with the original DS. So, it seems my plans to play some Phoenix Wright on this trip are all for naught since everywhere locally seems to just have extra chargers for the DS Lite in stock. I did order an original DS charger online, though, so hopefully it will arrive here by next Tuesday before I head back out of town again. Yay.)
It’s Already February?
Yeah, I know. Time flies and such similar phrases. But I can honestly say that I feel like I haven’t come up for air all year, and I don’t have much to show for it. Sure, earlier in January was when we saw Tamburlaine, and my friend Rob had hosted the videogame bonanza a few weekends ago, which was a lot of fun.
But since then? It’s funny because it’s hard to articulate what I’ve done but every day has just felt really busy. Some time was spent getting the reviews up and running again, and a bunch of time was spent working on different projects for the day job. (Plus one Sunday working at Big Planet, which was enjoyable but busy busy busy in terms of selling things all day long.)
This afternoon my plan was to go running, but after errands were finally finished, I had about enough energy left to… well, not run. (Stomach problems finally sealed the day on not going running after all. Bah.) So instead it was more sorting through things, some writing, more errands, getting ready for a business trip that I leave for shortly, plus knowing as soon as I get back from that trip I’ll be turning back around and heading out on another trip two days later.
On the bright side, at least one thing is in order—reviews are now “banked” all the way through February 18th, when I get back. So that’s a nice feeling to have all of that taken care of in advance, and looking at the display in WordPress actually let me give off a little sigh of relief. But while my boss very kindly gave us all Monday off as a “mental health day” (I think she knows how much we all need it!), I’m going to probably end up going in for at least part of the day so I can box up all the materials for the pilot test that I have to go run elsewhere in the country, and get that sent off. I don’t want to leave it until Tuesday because I suspect it’s going to be a busy day as is.
(Really, I wanted to get that trip to the office taken care of today… but it’s now 9:40pm and I’m just now coming up for air. Yeesh.)
Once all of this is over, hopefully a social life will start getting rebuilt. I had dinner with Butch on Thursday night and the last time I actually saw him was in November. And sadly I think that’s not even the worst “how long has it been since you’ve seen…?” but I shudder to think what the longest time gap is. Clearly, I need to win that lottery soon so I can finally get that life of leisure.
On the bright side, at least I’ve never been a football fan, so that means I didn’t have to worry about missing the Superbowl. (I’m ambivalent about it, but glad that it wasn’t a priority because it certainly wouldn’t have happened at this end today.)
Ok! A tiny bit of cleaning, maybe a tiny bit of television, but I think the real order of business right now? Just go to bed, and deal with everything else that needs to be taken care of tomorrow.