Still Here

Jun 20, 2011 | Uncategorized

I received an email today which suggested that this blog might be drying up and, alas, I can see why that impression should be gained.  So this is by way of a trickle to keep the stream bed damp.

I am writing this from my room at the Creekside Inn in Palo Alto, California where I arrived today after a lengthy journey which went first to Boston and thence to San Francisco with a sleep in the middle.  This is my first time here and I am presently wilting in the heat and trying to cope with a -8 hour lag. It is claimed to be 29 degrees at the moment but it feels warmer than that.

For the first time I flew the Boston leg with Aer Lingus which was OK.  The food was dodgy but the seat wasn’t bad and I survived intact having had some interesting chats with the bloke in the seat next to me.  I’ll try and write more about this later but suffice to say that he is a researcher into HIV at Harvard.

The only disconcerting thing about Aer Lingus was when one of the cabin crew was walking down the aisle asking if we wanted a cup of tea: with your eyes closed you would have sworn that it was Mrs. Doyle.

The flight out to SF today was intensely frustrating.  I was in a middle seat and was struggling to see the magnificent Western landscapes unfold beneath me.  The guy who actually had the window seat had no interest at all and either slept or played computer games.  One thing which United do, though, is to feed the air traffic control chatter through one of the entertainment channels so it was interesting from time to time to dip in and out of that.

I’m going to be tied up with work for a few days but hopefully I’ll get the old blogging brain in gear again soon.

Who Knows Where The Time Goes?

Jun 9, 2011 | Uncategorized

Still here and happy to report that after my last somewhat down post things improved to take in a beer festival and a trip to the USS Constitution before I came home.  Admittedly I did arrive home 24 hours late because of the last ash cloud but hey!

I regret to admit that my silence since then has largely been both directly and indirectly due to working; directly because working takes up time and indirectly because I work from home on a laptop and there comes a point where you just want to turn it off, have a cup of tea and read the paper.

And I thought I’d get this posted now because in just over a week I’m away again for a week on a flying visit to Silicon Valley with a stop-over in Boston on the way back.  A week after that we’ll be away on our hols.

I have a load of photos that I must reduce in size and put here and I also have a gallery facility which I have been remiss in not using.  So watch this space.