Celticangel.org

Well, I’m doing it again. Heading to L.A. for the Doctor Who Convention known as Gallifrey One. I’m fixing to leave tomorrow after work. But fear not, you may yet live vicariously through my geeky field trip.

I have a blog set up for adventures I may have. You can find it at: http://wherescalliope.wordpress.com/

You may also follow my trip on twitter here: http://twitter.com/wherescalliope. (Or…just watch the Twitter feed in the sidebar of the blog)

Wish me luck!

Ok. From the videos above you can determine which of the following:

a) It rained a lot while we were in Kauai
b) I need a cell phone with better video capabilities
c) I have finally posted something to Youtube, and have thus caught up with my father
d) All of the above

If you answered D, you’re correct!

If you want a better idea of the weather during our trip, check out this news article and the accompanying video.

And for the record? I’ve never had thunder make me feel like I was inside of a drum before. (*boom* *house shakes*)

The Spouting Horn, Kauai

Hello again, all. Yep. I’m in Kauai with my tiny laptop in tow. You can follow me on Twitter for slightly more rapid updates while I’m here.

So, to give y’all a quick update:

Monday and Tuesday I called in sick to work. Apparently, apart from the itching and the pain, Shingles will also make you frickin tired. …Or that part might be the drugs they gave me. Not sure. (Two more pills left to take and I’m done. yay!)

Early Wednesday morning, we managed to find our flight out of SFO to Honolulu, but only had time for a quick snack rather than breakfast. I say “managed to find” because they were not listing the gate to go with our flight number on the departures display. When I asked at the gate that turned out to be the correct one, the lady there informed me that when you check in they tell you the gate…but that isn’t the case when you check in online apparently. At least, the gate wasn’t on the stuff I’d printed out. Argh.

The flight was quite turbulent and we ended up at our destination forty minutes late, and with no idea where we were supposed to go to catch the connecting puddlejumper for the flight to Kauai. Luckily, I found someone to ask and when we eventually found a departures board it actually held gate numbers! Huzzah. And very luckily for us, the flight wasn’t boarding until twently minutes later than stated on the boarding pass.

And now my impression of that flight:
Takeoff
Climbing
“Would you like some juice?”
5 minutes later
“Okay. Trash pick up.”
Descending
Excellent landing

Yep. Island hopping doesn’t take very long.

Our friends came to pick us up at the airport and took us to lunch at the Market Street Diner. Can you say nummy comfort food? It was quite the nice relaxing follow up to a stressful journey. Purr… (Did i mention that they patted me down at SFO? That hurt.)

After stopping by our friends’ place to leave our stuff (and have the grand tour…pictures to follow) we took the obligatory trip to Walmart to grab a few things that we didn’t want to lug on the plane. (Yes. I refused to check a bag.) Okay. So I did buy a couple of things that I didn’t already own…like a pretty pink “rash guard” for swimming.

Dinner was at Sushi Bushido, which meant that I had sushi for breakfast (on the plane) and dinner in one day. I’m not complaining. The place was really busy, but the food and the conversation made it all worthwhile…even if I never did get my hot tea.

And that was pretty much the sum total of Day one here on the island. I’ll tell you all more later, but it’s time to leave for the day. TTFN!

Thursday 13: #1

Okay. I’m going to start trying to do T13s again with the new version of the site, and my first topic will be places I’d like to visit. Upon reflection, I’m thinking that I’d better get to work on this list if I’m going to cover all my bases. Perhaps I can find a job as a travel writer to pay for all of this…

13 Places I’d Like to Visit:
1. Machu Picchu
2. New Zealand
3. The Shetlands
4. Glen Coe, Scotland
5. The Louvre
6. Dartmoor
7. Cornwall
8. The Isle of Man
9. All the 50 states
10. All of the Canadian provinces
11. Ireland
12. Luxembourg
13. Australia

A week ago Friday I got off of work an hour early, gassed up the car, and zoomed on home. Not long after, the car was packed and we headed out on our way to Disneyland. And we made it. Albeit at 3am or so. It was great seeing our friends (those we were staying with and those who stopped by) but it was all kinds of humid there at the Mouse House.

We nearly melted. No lie. And I’m from Sacramento, for heaven’s sake. But one thing I can’t stand is humidity. We went to DisneyLAND, not DisneyWORLD. Get it right El Niño! Sigh. At least there was my beloved Dole Whip to keep me among the living.

On Tuesday we all ventured home. After that I pretty much slept a bunch and did very little in the way of useful…which chapped my Type A hide quite a bit, really. On the bright side, I now own a new toaster oven…which is just not as cool as my old one, but then again, what is? I may now toast my crumpets once more. Also, I gave in a bought a new shredder, but I didn’t buy the ruddy maintenance plan. The shredder itself was expensive enough thankyouverymuch. It may be small, but I’ll bet it’s mighty, and it has an actual handle on the drawer. A handle! You don’t have to go removing lids that can drop on your feet, or dealing with how the heck you’re going to get the shredded bits out of it. You just pull out the drawer and dump the contents into a bag. Amazing.

I went back to work this past Saturday. Or rather, I tried to. I only managed to be there for a couple of hours before I received a rather stressful phone call that led to myself and Koshvader traveling up a mountain and returning with my Mother in Law in tow. (She hasn’t been feeling well. We’re looking into it.) My cats seem rather pleased to have her back, honestly. And so am I.

The view of the Grapvine on the way down. I imagine it’s much snowier now.

…But it tried. Yep. On Monday the 5 was closed at the Grapevine due to snow. So…I had to take the 101 home and it took a little over 9.5 hours, during which I stopped a whole two times. Once, in Santa Barbara where I ate at Subway, and once in Atascadero for In N Out and a refueling stop. Most of the time it was raining. Sometimes it was raining very hard. I had cause to be thankful for my top of the line all weather tires and brand new brakes, let me tell you. I was also thankful for the book on CD of A Little Princess. I love Frances Hodgson Burnett.

By the time I made it home, and Koshvader came to help me out of the car, my right leg refused to move. He had to help me move it out of the car so I could stretch it. Ugh. I’ll not be doing a drive of that length alone again any time soon.

Today I had to get up early for my Doctor’s appointment. I’m sure that I was quite a sight. Oh well. At least I wasn’t moaning like a zombie, even if I looked like one. Come to find out that for once, I actually ovulated before day 14. I think it was actually late yesterday during the drive, if the random uncomfortableness was anything to go by. So, no IUI this month. And what does this mean, boys and girls? That’s right! I get to sleep in tomorrow! Thank heavens. I’m still exhausted. The next vacation that I take will not be a working one.

(Photos by me)

On Saturday we went up the eerie mountain to pick up my Mother in Law and bring her back to our place for the holidays. There was much in the way of traffic, so…we went the back way, as you can see above.

Eventually (as in a couple of hours later) we reached our turn-off. Yes, you read the sign correctly. It’s Hells Hollow Road.

And here, for those of you that have asked, is the front of Koshvader’s childhood home.

Did I mention that I got up early to get brand new, extremely good tires put on my Subaru? Well, I did. See the snow in the picture above? Well, the main roads get plowed, but the road up to the house looks like this:

Have I mentioned that I love my car? She handled the entire trip like a pro (as did my hubby who was driving.) We made it home fine, if quite late. (In the interest of avoiding the rain/snow on Sunday we made the whole trip in one day. Ugh.)

Hells Hollow Road

So, 2009 will be a big deal in Scotland. It’s Robert Burn’s 250th birthday, among other things, so they’re declaring the year as an official homecoming for the Scottish diaspora (and the World). In this video they’ve got various stars singing Dougie MacLean’s Caledonia as part of the advertising efforts. …And I just don’t think it’s fair of them to do that to me. I’ve adored that song for a while now, you see. So, the video literally gave me goosebumps. If only I could win the lottery (which admittedly involves playing said lottery) then I could go…

Sigh.

My lovely hotel room where I lurk.

I’ve survived the first day of Internet Librarian 2008! (And now I’m hiding in my room like the hermit I am. Did you know that channel 14 is the all jellyfish channel here? Well, it is. There’s a loop of footage from the Aquarium that you may watch endlessly if you wish. It’s quite soothing, really.)

It should be noted, however, that my brain is now full. Obviously I need to dump some of that information into a post for you all. You’re so very shocked by this aren’t you?

This is my first time attending Internet Librarian, and so far I’ve been doing pretty well. Mostly. This morning I actually heard my alarm go off! Mind you, I then had to pick up the alarm clock and stare at it for a minute to figure out how to shut the thing off. I managed to get ready and out of my room even faster than anticipated…then, not knowing that the conference offers a free continental breakfast, I proceeded to eat what is probably the most expensive breakfast of my life to this point.

Also? The strawberries were terrible. Bleh. Seriously. Someone out there is likely to be haunted by the shade of my strawberry-loving grandfather for this one.

I registered, got my bag o’ stuff (another tote bag. yay!), and made it to the spot for the opening keynote speech in plenty of time. (Apparently there are folks here from 48 states, The District of Columbia, and 13 countries. At least that’s what we were told.) The keynote speech really fired me up for this conference. Howard Rheingold certainly knows his stuff. (Psst! Em, he teaches at Stanford.) He’s recently been interested in the concept of “collective action” and has written a book on Smart Mobs. Other topics in that vein that he touched on were: distributed computing (as seen with my favorite SETI@home), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (a marketplace for Human Intelligence Tasks that is new to me), and Social Media Classroom (which I need to spend more time looking at.) And just to prove Mr. Rheingold’s coolness factor I offer you the fact that he paints his shoes.

Right now I’m hoping that he posts the slides from his presentation somewhere so that I can check out the stuff I missed. I’ve already gone and “followed” him on Twitter. I’m all Web 2.0 like that.

I noticed one other thing once the coffee finally kicked in this morning. There were so many people with laptops in the room for the keynote speech that it occasionally sounded like it was raining outside. Sadly, my laptop lurked alone in my room in all of its pink and occasionally freezing up splendor. I wasn’t missing out on too much, though, as there wasn’t a proper internet connection in the room. That’s right. No WiFi at the Internet Librarian keynote. (I hear that the situation got better in some of the other meeting rooms…but not in that one.)

After the keynote I wandered off to a presentation that bored me silly. Bad choice on my part. Suffice to say that it turns out I can stay awake for forty-five minutes at a stretch, even if my brain resolutely refuses to absorb any of a lecture, as long as I have a pen and paper with which to amuse myself.

Things got better after that…

Internet Librarian 2008, Howard Rheingold

Hello all. As you can hear in the audio file embedded above I have made it to Monterey for the Internet Librarian Conference. I have my laptop with me, and currently it seems to be behaving (*fingers crossed*). I’m trying a different browser and I’m also attempting not to stress out the computer too much.

I’ll just have to wait and see how that works. Anyway, how could I come to an Internet Librarian conference sans laptop? That would be too shocking by half.

Now that I know that my connection, etc. is working I’m going to go back to working on my pictures from today’s trip to the aquarium. Stand by for pics!