On Monday I catch a noonish flight to Denver and arrive after 4pm. By the time that we pick up a rental car and drive to the hotel, it is 5:30 pm and I tell my co-worker that I am going to go walk for an hour. When I've returned from the walk I call one of my co-workers and they are going to wait until 7pm to eat. So I tell them to go on ahead and I'll just catch something quick and simple. I walk over to someplace and sit down to eat. When I'm halfway through dinner a ChiChi and two of his friends walk into the restaurant. The ChiChi briefly catches me staring at him and I take notice to be more discreet. When the ChiChi and his friends take a table, I notice that I can stare at the ChiChi via the reflection off the restaraunt window without the ChiChi noticing me. Eventually the ChiChi and his friends leave and I leave a bit later. But the ChiChi and his friends are lingering in the parking lot. When I walk away towards the sidewalk I follow the first rule - don't stare directly into the eyes of a ChiChi. And I return to my hotel to watch television and get some sleep.
The meeting in Denver (actually outside of Denver) goes well and I call the American Express travel service for Northrop Grumman to see if some of us can leave early. The AmEx office says that they will charge us each $100 to change the flights and the airlines will charge us about $100 fare differential between the booked flight and the earlier one. I grab my co-worker, the one with the rental car, and say that we should go get an earlier flight. We get to the airport, perform the e-checkin to get seats on our regular (later) flight, and head towards the gate where the 3:30 (earlier) flight is to leave from. I see a 2:24 departure for Los Angeles and I grab my co-worker and say, "We can make this flight that is closing it's doors in 12 minutes. We have to almost run and it won't cost us a thing."
The co-worker comes along for the (almost) run but says, "We'll still have to pay."
But I'm leading the charge and saying, "It will be a free change. They're closing the doors. When we show up they won't have time to check our fares and/or charge us." My co-worker is trailing just the slightest bit and is entirely positive that we will have to pay. I get to the gate as the agent is performing a final passenger checklist and I say, "Can we get on this plane"?
The agent sees that the door is still open and goes ahead and starts getting our boarding passes. We're on the plane a minute later without having to pay Northrop Grumman's American Express travel people the $100 that they wanted and without having to pay United Airlines the fare differential. My co-worker looks at me in disbelief and then the realization hits him: "Why do we even deal with American Express?"
And my silent nod indicates that I had already come to that conclusion a long time ago.
On Friday I stop at the grocry store on the way home from work. When I exit the grocery store there is a guy and his son who can't get their car started. I try to give them a jump, but their car still doesn't start. There is nothing else that i can do. Whe I get home I get out for a run before the rain starts back up again. It is the first run that I've gone on since I hurt my hamstring a short while ago. The run goes fairly smoothly. As I'm cooling down I run into two neighbors who I sometimes cycle with - Al and Andrew. Al takes this opportunity to talk with me about his marriage possibly falling apart. And thanks me afterwards for listening when we finish 15 minutes later. And Andrew, the young kid who beats me up when we cycle, heads off on his skateboard with his dog towing him.
On Saturday I get out and do laundry before helping out the Long Beach Polytechnc high school robotics team. We manage to get the software talking with the controller and integrate the controller with the mechanical portion and run the robot up and down the street. A few neighbors stare at us, but we're making progress.
When I egt home after 6 pm I let people know that we might go out tonight if I can arrange thigns with Person D_SF and Person R_SF who are visiting from San Francisco. (Person D_SF is an ex from about 20 years ago. We have occasional phone and enail contact, but I don't think that we've seen each other in person for about 5 years or so.) Later I call Person D_SF and find that he already has scheduled a late dinner. So when I suggest we meet at a club after dinner, we talk about it for a while and Person D_SF decides that, "...since we're old guys now and we go to sleep at 11 pm everynight, staying out until 1 or 2 in the morning would not be good". So now I have to call back Person C_T (and Person L_M), Person J_VKPI, and Person T_U and say that I am going to stay in and go to bed early. None of the crowd seems too disappointed and we all agree to go out next weekend. I'm in bed right near 9pm and I read a bit of the latest Scientific American before nodding off to sleep.
Sunday is a slow day. I get up a bit late, do some grocery shopping for the week, lift weights, take a shower, and read the newspaper. Just after the sun is down I start out for a walk and it starts raining really hard. So I turn back for home, but my the time that I get close it has quit raining again. So I continue on for a good walk during which I just barely get more wet. And the conclusion of Sunday night is spent watching "Desperate Housewives" and "Boston Legal".