Plane Rides and Productivity

My trip to Tahoe took nine hours total.  Then I got here and realized that I didn’t pack any t-shirts.  I packed a ton of workout shirts, the shirt I’m wearing (my competitor shirt from the Marine Corps Marathon) and a long-sleeved collared shirt.  So I have two shirts for four days.  Not a killer problem, but really that annoyed me.  I also forgot my bathing suit, and there’s a nice spa here in the hotel (and apparently a pool party planned for Sunday night).  So I may go and buy one.  Oi.

After I realized that, I realized that I left the Team in Training packet, with my emergency nametag and tickets to our pre-race spaghetti feast and post-race victory part, in the pooka of our shelf at home.  ARRGGGHHH!!!  I”M SO STUPID!  Fortunately, the Team coordinators have extras of all those things.

That’s not even the worst part: I FORGOT CIGARS!  We’re staying in a freaking Casino (oh hell yeah!) and I forgot to bring cigars.  Man, I suck!

Now really, none of these things are the end of the world.  But man, talk about a bunch of scatter-brained mistakes to make.

On the bright side, I got some writing done on the plane, and in the airport.

I sat down and cranked out about 3000 words, finishing a short story I started a couple months ago that I’m calling Making Camp.  It follows young Larian, the main character in How NOT To Rescue A Damsel In Distress on the next step of his adventures: checking into his army unit.  You could almost say it’s a story about nothing, because really it just talks about what happens to him on his first day.  There’s no grand event, just him getting settled and getting put through his paces a bit.  But I like it.

After that, I got a little bit done on a heist story I started a little while back.  But I stopped after a little while, because I wanted a break.  So I put on the latest I Should Be Writing podcast and stared out the plane window for 45 minutes or so.  It was a good episode: all about ebooks.  My favorite thing.  🙂

When that was done, I recalled that I’d offered to read a Twitter friend’s first few chapters, and provide comments.  I’d read it through a day or two ago, but hadn’t gotten around to the comments part.  So I took some time and “jotted” my comments down.

The really awesome part is we’re staying in a Casino.  Did I mention that yet?  The crappy part about that is they want to charge $11.99/day for wifi!  Well, hell no.  I’m sticking it to the man.  I called AT&T and activated the personal hotspot functionality on my iphone, and it’s working like a champ.  Now, that costs $20/month.  But when I get back Monday night, I’ll just go online and turn it off.  I think the pro-rated cost will be something like $5.  MUCH better.

So that’s about it.  Good day, so far.

Just to make all you internet people jealous, here’s my first view of Lake Tahoe, from earlier this afternoon.