Ordinary Extraordinary

And, we're back

I survived ten days in Las Vegas without losing my money, my undergarments, or my sanity and upon my return to Los Angeles immediately lost my wallet.

The wallet containing my driver's license, my ATM and credit cards, and all of that cash I didn't lose in Vegas.

Thanks, Murphy.

Asshole.

The Guy gets huge points for keeping me calm and helping me search; he even walked back to the restaurant where I last remember having it and helped me dig through the dumpster to make sure I hadn't accidentally swept my wallet into the trash - now that's devotion. When it was nowhere to be found, he bought me dinner and took me to a movie. He gets a shiny gold star for Achievement in Awesomeness.

I'm annoyed that I was careless and now have to go through the trouble of replacing all my cards and identification, but I'm really more frustrated that every single business card I collected while I was in Vegas was ALSO in that wallet. I'd only transferred about half of the information into my BlackBerry and the cards are completely irreplaceable.

Sigh.

As you can imagine, I spent Monday morning at the DMV, at the bank, and on the phone. Those are several hours of my life that I will never get back, but at least now that part of my life is mostly back to normal. Aside from the fact that I have no way to identify myself or spend money for another week or so, that is.

Now if I could just get the rest of my life back to normal that would be swell; at the moment there's a pile of laundry threatening to lay siege to the hallway, the cats are still not speaking to me, and I haven't been to the gym in almost two weeks.

Yikes!

A Vegas Story

I woke up this morning in Las Vegas.

That was to be expected, though, since I flew out here yesterday in the 737-of-doom.

Though I'm only doing it a couple of times a year now, I used to fly a LOT. I know from flights. So please believe me when I say that this was one of the WORST flights I have ever taken. Not only was the plane crammed to the brim with obnoxious girls (Karen's 21! WOOHOO! We're gonna party!) and screaming children, it was also stuffy as hell and holy CRAP was the flight choppy. I've never seen flight attendants kneel in the aisles before so the first time it happened yesterday, after a particularly stomach-rolling nose-dive, I swear I thought they were praying. Needless to say that by the time the pilot slammed the plane onto the ground at McCarran, I was barely holding on to my breakfast and I could not get out into the terminal fast enough.

Woo, Vegas.

I'm here for ten days, which sounds awesome at the outset, but being here for work is not at all the same as being here for play. The first thing I did when I arrived yesterday was go to meetings and last night, while the casino in the lobby was full of loud, drunk people lighting money on fire and loving it, I stretched out on my bed to watch a Discovery Channel documentary about India and talk to The Guy on the phone. Party!

Fortunately, the advance work is going really smoothly so far (*knock wood*) and it looks like I'll have a little time to myself today before the rest of the crew arrives. I'll probably use that time to do something really shocking like... nap.

Viva Las Vegas!

Resumation

Did I really say that regular posting would resume on Monday two days ago? Surely I meant that it would resume on Wednessday.

My sense of time is a little off lately - I simply cannot believe that we're already four days into June. This year feels as though it is absolutely flying by! My blog header still says 2007; how can 2008 be half gone already?

Time, she marches on. So here we are in June and I'm back on the blogging bus.

You would think that I would return from a hiatus annoyingly chipper from all that resting that I did, but the truth is that I did what we all tend to do and filled up all of that "extra" time with other things. Other work, other projects, other small, random, time consuming things. I'm still tired, but at least I'm also inches away from a deadline that I should have met for Keith weeks ago. Woo!

Have you ever woken up with a headache?

It's been happening to me a lot lately. A product, I discovered, of clenching my teeth in my sleep. Not grinding, clenching. I've started to do it during the day too, especially when I'm trying to sort through a particularly nasty logistical problem, or a gruesome budget. I never notice until my head is throbbing and I have to force myself to relax my jaw.

This is not a way to go through life.

I'm wound up about a lot of things lately, too many (and too boring) to detail here, but they are all part of the reason that I'm inching my way, slowly but surely, towards a different kind of life.

I predict that the last six months of 2008 are going to be very interesting indeed.