Goodbye, 2004. It’s been a mixed bag, mostly good for me personally. Life doesn’t seem to get any easier, but it’s well worth the challenge.

Another day at the warehouse. It’s a quiet day, and I’m imagining thousands of people happily munching on their chocolates, the last thought on their minds calling the support line. I forgot to bring anything to drink and am terribly thirsty; when I’m working from home, the fridge is just a few steps away. At least there’s enough chocolate to eat.

This month has really flown by, and it’s hard to believe that 2005 is right around the corner. Once again I’m going to have to get used to writing the new year on my checks.

I’ve spent the day coding, periodically stopping to print orders and answer the phone. A few folks are understandably upset about the Fedex delivery delays caused by the bad weather before Christmas. I feel for them, but after my own personal delivery delays I’m finding it hard to be other than fatalistic about the whole thing. If the worst this country has is that sometimes massive snowstorms delay planes, making boxes of chocolates a few days late, then we’re doing pretty well as a society. Regardless, it’s my job to satisfy the customer, and satisfy I shall if it’s in my power. I love my customers!

I’m totally stealing this from Mark Bernstein.

This year there have been 374 posts. Last year there were 360 posts.

As Mark said,

All the anxieties and worries that I left behind when I went to Texas were so gracious as to patiently wait here for my return. I feel rather uncentered, mostly due to weariness and general seasonal effect, and I’m certain that it’s a great contributor to my outlook.

Tomorrow I’m going to be going into the office. This is worth mention as I’ve been employed by Dan’s for over a year and this will be my first visit.

The trip back to Boston was wonderfully uneventful, except for the point where I was mistaken for a woman and my feet were mistaken for my carry-on item.

While we were gone, a foot or so of snow fell, so we came back to snowdrifts galore. At any rate, it’s good to be home.

Boxing day in Houston. Dad took us out for breakfast of cheese enchiladas and Dr. Pepper at Taco Cabana, a favorite from my childhood. It’s so nice to be back in a place where tex-mex is everywhere.

Technology should ideally enhance life, not be a frustration, but it doesn’t always work that way. My parents asked us for tech help for their christmas gifts, and Varia and I were happy to oblige. Dad’s machine had a couple of insidious applications hiding in there, and it took me a while to root them out, but it seems to be relatively clean now, and is patched, firewalled, and appropriately paranoid for an XP machine connected to the internet. Varia spent time with mom building up her Apple mojo, and we set up a wireless network for them just for grins.

I read this morning that Comair had a rather spectacular computer crash, causing them to cancel all their flights for the next few days. This was the airline on which we were originally scheduled to fly out of Cincinnati, and more than a few of our cancelled flights were also via Comair. Between the snow and the shortage of supplies, they had a run of bad luck, but I can’t help but being simultaneously mortified as a traveller and fascinated as a programmer as to what happened with their system.

I personally wish every one of you an emotionally appropriate festive season. I’m hoping it’s a happy and joyous one, but if not, that’s okay too. I know that not everyone’s into joy right now, and I respect that.

We lightly slept at the gate under a television blaring CNN; my dreams were filled with suicide bombings and explosions. I awoke around 2:30 am to find that the flight we were confirmed on for this morning had ceased to exist, and once again had no idea when we had a chance of leaving. There was no one working and no one to call. In a very Kafka-esque moment I watched people wait in an hour-long line to get to a phone where they could call the Delta assistance number, which was busy 99 times of a 100.

Around 4 am we got back into the big line at the entrance to the terminal, which was only 2 hours long this time around. I’d felt like I’d become a seasoned queue-junkie by this point. We managed to get on a flight to Houston via Kansas City, and for a change this one took off late after a few hilarious hijinks involving snow and ice. At 1:38 pm we touched down in Houston two days late.

It could have been far worse; we ate well, laughed a lot, and were warm and dry for the duration.

This adventure has taught me that there are certain things out of my control, things that have no way of bettering or expediting, things that play out of their own accord leaving as the only controllable factor how I deal with them.

Hi there! Right now I’m sitting on the floor at the Cincinnati airport. I’ve been here since about 11 am yesterday, and it doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere soon. Four prospective flights have all been cancelled, and now we’re waiting on a flight to Houston tomorrow morning at 7. Right now I’m not sure if I’m ever going to make it.

It snowed a lot yesterday. Snow, ice, sleet, the works.

Varia and I are sharing our misery with a few thousand other people here, which is creating an environment both festive and incredibly tense. Everybody’s got somewhere to be, most are going nowhere. We did manage to get away to a hotel last night, arriving here at 6 am to find our flight cancelled and a nearly four hour line to rebook our tickets. Everyone was desperate for information. Rumors ran up and down the line; all flights were cancelled, no planes were arriving, the airport was out of fluid for the de-icing machines and the supply truck couldn’t make it in due to the snow. There aren’t enough planes and/or pilots. It turns out all of these are pretty much true, that the mythology of the stranded is accurate.

So what’s left to be done is to make the best of it. So far this has involved wandering around, a few beers served by the exhausted waiters at the airport restuarants, and people watching. I practically leapt with joy when I found a wifi hotspot; if nothing else I could write up my experience and share my misery with other people who are hopefully safe and warm at home.

I’d meant to write about this, but I forgot about it, so you get it now. I was coming back from downtown on Saturday afternoon on the red line, and right before we got into Harvard Square, we stopped. The car started filling up with smoke, and as I sat in the dark tunnel my thoughts turned from annoyance to fear. We eventually moved and slowly rolled into the station; people started pouring out.

If I were being sensible I really ought to have gone with them, but I wanted to get home and was sort of interested as to what was going on. I breathed through my knit hat and waited. We were finally told there was a trash fire, and it was under control, and not to worry. If it was a trash fire, it was a lot of trash — when I finally made it to Davis Square, two stops down the line, that station was also filled with smoke. People stood at the top of the escalators, waiting for the train to arrive so they could descend into the cloud of smoke, hop inside, and trust in faith to get them to where they were going. Will they ever return?

Fortunately no one, myself included, was burnt to a crisp, and accordingly V and I are headed of to Jolly Old Texas, where we will visit Buckingham Palace and have tea with the Queen. Alternately, we’ll have a few days in Houston with my parents for Festive Season. Barring internet access calamity I’ll be writing through the festiveness, but if I’m not, picture me happily entwined in high fest and expect me back soon.

The weekend was an interesting experience of decompressing after a demanding work schedule and recompressing for the holiday season. It’s naive to think that a festival comes without obligations, but it seems a shame that something as theoretically festive as this time of year should be accompanied with such anxiety.

Shop shop shopity shop.

Since I’ve lived in this apartment I’ve had a slow drain in the shower. I chalked it up to an old building with old pipes, and did my part to make sure it didn’t get any worse; hair trap, ritualistic drain-o treatments, plunger, the works. It got worse anyway.

This was a sad state of affairs. I wanted my shower drain to, well, drain, and wasn’t going to do anything to make it drain worse. It’s not like I was cramming bottles down it.

The previous tenant apparently felt otherwise. The plumber came this morning and managed to remove an amazing assortment of plastic bits from the drain today; knobs, caps, and an entire shampoo bottle, all of which have been annoyingly shifting listlessly in the pipes for over four years. Old pipes indeed.

But now I am in shower nirvana, and I can stand and shower and gaze out the window and behold the perfection of the world.

Chava sent me this image. It’s a maze of mirrors, that it is.