Last Thursday I went to Chicago for four glorious days of friends, fun and not-giving-a-damn. The punishment for taking a few vacation days of course is now I’m really under the gun at work, which is why I haven’t written this post till now. That’s also why it’ll be pretty short.  But here’s the highlights!

• Hung out with my childhood friend and good buddy Evan of The Sapiens Thursday night. Had an awesome German dinner where we each drank two liters of beer out of a glass boot so large that we had to put a deposit down on it.
• Reaffirmed that Mexican bakeries are the greatest thing ever, by getting some seriously tasty pastries at roughly 3:30 AM for dirt cheap.
• Got over my first hangover by staring at aquatic life at the Shed. I love that place. It was kind of nice to go by myself for once and just stare at whatever I wanted.
• Rested my legs after the aquarium by taking in a couple shows at the Adler planetarium. I hadn’t been there since I was a little kid, so it was pretty cool to go back and take it easy.
• Met some great people my college buddy Chris works with at Sears. They do some surprisingly cool work over there. It may be fairly different industries, but it was amusing to see how similar my job is to some of the people that I met there.
• Epic Saturday involving car shuffling, relaxing, meeting more new people, lots of beer to celebrate the unofficially-official St. Patty’s Day, cab rides to Wrigley and clubbing.
• Meeting up with my old coworkers from Crowe. In some ways this was the highlight of the trip and it made me realize that if there was anything at all I missed about that life it was that handful of people that I met up with in Chicago.
• Sunday spent recuperating, more car shuffling and one of the best gyros I’ve ever had (outside of Detroit’s Greektown that is).

Chicago is a fantastic city with tons of stuff going on. In many ways it’s my favorite city in the US. But despite that, it isn’t home. I seem to be one of the lucky (unlucky?) ones who can appreciate Detroit for what it is, and am comfortable and happy here. Still, I love visiting Chicago and there’s no question I’ll be back in a few months.

Time is really something. Primarily because it gets away from me so damn fast. September and October so far have been a complete blur. I mean, like really. I just realized today that it is already OCTOBER 24. Next week the month is going to be completely over! It’s one of my favorite times of the year and I’ve hardly had a chance to enjoy it. Pretty disappointing.

But not all is woe! Since my last post the Tigers have swept the A’s to go into the world series and it currently stands 1-1. It would have been nice if we could have won both of our first home games, but I’m not worried. With the whole week of down time they had I’m not too surprised things were a little rusty on Saturday. I’m not going to jinx them, but I feel pretty good about games 3 and 4. Even if we only win one then it’s back to Detroit where the crowd will be really, really into it. You can’t discount that.

As for everything else, there’s plenty going on. But most notibly I can say that I’m back on the road to Ohio again. Akron this time around, though I’m still staying at the nice hotel in Cleveland that I like. It’s a bit of a drive, but not too bad. So far work here has been going really well, but I have to say traveling isn’t as much fun as staying at home. With the drastic weather shift we got here and being crammed into planes, I think I’ve caught a little something. It’s not too bad, but I’m going to get over it as quick as possible, since I’ve got something of a big date this Friday that I’m really looking forward to.

You think getting on a plane and going somewhere would be a good time, but you’d be wrong. After the novelty factor wears off - and it wears off pretty quick - it’s much more of a pain than anything else.

Take this past Monday for example. I had to get up far too early to get to downtown Chicago for an all day meeting. That actually went pretty smoothly. But after the meeting I had to head back to the airport to come to my typical stomping grounds of Cleveland. This was not fun for a couple reasons: 1) I didn’t get to hang out in the city at all really (and it’s my favorite city too) and 2) O’Hare is the worst. To make matters worse I was flying out on United and it seems whenever I fly on United from O’Hare there are problems.

This time was no exception. The flight is delayed initially because it arrived late. Then they board us. Planes are hot and awful typically while you’re boarding. So, we’re sitting there. And sitting there… And sitting there… And the air isn’t coming on, and it’s unpleasant. Eventually we find out that the plane is for lack of a better term broken and that they can’t get the engines started. But sit tight! They ordered a part and we should be on our way in 30 minutes and also they were going to hook up the aux AC unit at the gate to cool us off.

10 minutes later we find that the aux AC unit at the gate is also broken. At this point it must be about 95 degrees in there. 20 minutes after that they tell us that the problem is more severe than they thought. We sit there some more, then they make us get off the plane. We stand around for 45 minutes, then they say “Hooray it’s fixed!” and they reboard us. Then they can’t get a crew to push the plane back from the gate. By the time I got to my hotel in Cleveland it was 1:30 in the morning. Nothing like a 20 hour work day…

The trip to San Francisco is over! Quite the whirlwind… A small stain of unpleasantness, but all in all it turned out really well. Sandra said to me on Thursday, “You’ll think it was just a dream when you get back and wonder if it really happened.” At the time I said no, of course not, but now I have to say it does feel a bit like that. It’s a bit sad.

Many thanks to Herbert for making the trip up to visit. It was great to see you again.

We did a lot. I’m swamped already trying to catch up on work, but I guess I can give a quick list of some highlights. When I get back to EL this Friday I’ll put pictures up on Flickr. So, the highlights: Dinner at a fantastic Persian place, walking to Pier 39 at 6:00 AM and watching the sea lions wake up, hiking up Lombard to Coit Tower to take in the view, the Japanese tea garden in golden gate park, ramen in Japantown, Korean with Herb and his family, missing the last train back to Embarcadero, the Exploritorium, walking to the Golden Gate bridge to take in another great view, the silence of the last day.

There’s a place in Cleveland here that we go to sometimes called Sushi Rock (in the warehouse district) that actually has some pretty solid sushi. Of course, the prices are kind of on the unreasonable side of the scale, but I suppose I’m spoiled by the price war we have between all the sushi places in East Lansing. That said it’s good to go out to something nice once in a while. Believe it or not hotel room service got old really, really quick. I’m talking about 2 weeks or so. Typically I just walk to Subway or Quiznos or something, so a nice dinner out is a good change of pace.

I’ve found that I’ve become fussy. I thought originally travelling would be nothing. Now I realize I’m in hotels so much I like certain things certain ways. Non-smoking room for sure, king bed, bottles of water at the ready, extra blankets, WSJ waiting for me in the morning, etc. Flying is similar. I fight tooth and nail to try and get the exit row (the only thing I could begin to consider first class on the small commuter jet I take between Grand Rapids and Cleveland) and need my squishy neck pillow and iPod so I can try to get some rest.

Well, at least I’m alive. This is a big week, something we developer types call “go live”, except this is worse, it’s a big bang go live (database and application have to upgrade simultaneously), so tomorrow night I’ll be at work for a good 15-16 hours to get the roll out complete and do some testing and what not. Could be a late night…

At least my four day travel week is half over!

So since Thursday evening I’ve been back in Houston hanging out with Andy for the weekend. Many beers were consumed at many different times of the day. But that comes to an end now, as I’m flying back to Cleveland for yet another fun week of work. Thursday I’m going back home to Michigan.

Definitely a good time though, even if the warm weather made me feel like I was melting most of the time. I’m used to the freezing sub-zero wind chills of Michigan and Ohio. All this steamy heat took a little getting used to. Weather aside it was a lot of fun hanging out and watching the NCAA tournament. Shame MSU was knocked out of the first round by George Mason of all people, but they beat UNC today so that makes me feel a little better at least.

Tangent… I’ve never seen a people so pretentious and full of where they’re from as Texans. Not even Californians or New Yorkers can top this. It’s not entirely a bad thing, just sort of amusing to watch. Everything has to be tailored to the sensibilities of a Texan, advertising especially.

Well, that’s the update for now. Time to get back on a plane for yet another flight.

Well, that was quite the trip. Definitely a great time, but I’ll be honest: I’m dead tired today. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t really get much downtime and you’re always on the go during the week.

So what can I say? Houston was interesting, but didn’t really feel that strange. I suppose I’m getting to be pretty well travelled now, so it’s just another big city with it’s own little differences. Once you’ve been to nearly all of the major cities in the US like I have, you start to see some similarities and put them into a few different groups. For instance, like I mentioned already, LA and Houston go together. New York is kind of on its own page to some extent. San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago, Seattle can group fairly well. Cleveland and Detroit feel very similar. And so on.

So I should start going other places. I’d say my top cities abroad I’d like to visit for the first time are Tokyo, Barcelona, Prague, Hong Kong, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Seoul, and Moscow. There are many others, but that’s a good start. Perhaps I should try to set a goal to go abroad at least once a year. Might be hard though. A year sounds like a long time, but it definitely flies. It will require planning. Traveling the world is something I’ve always been interested in though, and I don’t think enough Americans really travel widely. I’ve got to do my part.

But for now I’m back in Cleveland. It’d be pretty cool if I wasn’t so damn tired after work, I might actually feel like going out and exploring the city a little more than just the warehouse district.

This weekend Matt and I decided to head down to Houston to visit Andy’s new digs. So far it’s been a great trip, though the weather is a bit tough for me to get used to. Back in Michigan (and Cleveland for that matter) it’s quite cold, but here? 75 and humid.

Houston is pretty cool. For some reason it reminds me quite a bit of Detroit, perhaps just because it’s so sprawled out (somewhat like the Detroit metro area) or perhaps because it has no mass transit. Either way, the main “downtown” area of Houston is pretty nice, and had a fairly good skyline.

Anyway, there are things to do. I’m taking some pictures and I’ll make sure they’re on Flickr as soon as possible.