burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

I didn't end up renting a bike at SANS, which was fine, but doing the walk back and forth from the conference center to the house (or the pizza place) in the limited time we had for lunch breaks, I grew sympathetic to Marla's assertion that walking places felt so inefficiently slow in comparison to biking (she bikes everywhere, so that's her norm, whereas walking is mine).

And after the conference I was thinking about going rock wall climbing again and how the bus stops running mid-evening and I'm not gonna walk 7.2 miles home [from here] and so I need to pay for a taxi or phone-a-friend but hey, if I had a bicycle...

I am also telling myself to refuse to be one of those people who rides their bicycle on the sidewalk (even though riding in Boston traffic scares me -- maybe this'll help me be less frightened when I finally learn to drive?).

[Edit in case context is necessary: I know how to ride a bicycle, and even bought a helmet before SANS, but I haven't owned one in about a decade.]

Wednesday (Aug. 24) I read Molly's post: "Acrophobia" and wanted to go rock wall climbing again. ("Belay on!")

Friday (Aug. 26), I forget how I came across "Do Things That Scare The Sh*t Out Of You" -- excerpt:

as adults, we have the ability to stay in our comfort zone. We don't even have to push ourselves to do little brave things, like going dancing. We can easily surrender to inertia, not leave the house, not leave the couch, not leave our job, not change our lives. We're not forced to try new things, and when we stop being brave, we forget how to do it. When we stop being brave we forget that the fear of trying something new is almost always worse than actually doing something new. When we stop practicing pushing through the fear, we forget that the fear is a lie, not the truth.

Sunday (Aug. 28), Robbie and Laci and I went to Soak City at Cedar Point. I have nearly no memory of my 8th grade trip to Canobie Lake Park (my one and only trip to a water park). This time: Open-top slides that you zoom down ... yeah, I was having some nervousness. I did basically all of the rides, though. I wouldn't really say that I actively enjoyed any of them (until the second-to-last one of our first round), but I wouldn't also say that I had actively negative experiences. One of them (near the end of our second/last round) I felt like "oh god oh god i'm gonna die" (though not in a genuinely frightened way) and afterwards I was like, "That adrenaline ... could feel like excitement." We ended in Breakers Bay, and I realized I'd forgotten that one of the things I loved about New Hampshire was being in an inner tube on the lake, enjoying the waves from the boats going by.

(On the ~eventual to-do list: learn to drive and learn to swim.)

Yesterday I accomplished everything on my to-do list except the Payless return. Well, and I couldn't do ALL the packing on account of needing some of it before I left -- but I did force myself to do all the packing I could do. I am significantly less over-packed -- though I am still bringing more books than I'll read, of course.

Today, I skipped Molly's office hours, mostly because the timing was such that I would have needed to bring my luggage to Diesel and I wasn't excited about that. Also, I was somewhat tired (I may or may not have perked up what with the interaction and all -- sometimes I am an Introvert, sometimes I am a secret Extrovert).

After I'd finished packing this morning, it occured to me that with some forethought re: liquids and etc. I probably could have fit everything in a carry-on (my bicycle helmet being my Personal Item), saving myself the $25 checked bag fee (though after 12 days in California, the relative cost of that is so small...). *shrug*

I do kinda wish I had a smaller suitcase -- since I really don't need such a big one for trips like this. After gate check it occurred to me that oh yeah, there are those regulation size rolling bags. (I have a mental block against bags I can't fit under the seat in front of me.)

Tiny regional plane again on my flight to Cleveland. (SBA apparently only has 2 jets a day. Checking in so early flying out of SBA, I ended up in the front row -- so I actually had to shove my backpack into an overhead compartment since the bulkhead was in front of me -- so I heard the flight attendant chatting with someone. She's based out of LAX and enjoyed the "arrive 30 minutes beforehand" of SBA versus the 2.5 hours of big airports.)

As we started to depart Boston on the plane, I had a moment of forgetting where I was. In that moment I thought of folks who travel extensively for business and feel like airports are "home." In SFO during my layover, I was definitely feeling a bit like I was home, since all airports look so similar; the See's Candies store reminded me that I was in Cali. (Which reminds me, when I arrived in SF, I saw teddy bears with handcuffs and totally misparsed it until I saw the "Alcatraz" t-shirts on them.)

Cleveland Airport has (past security) a massage station and a gelateria. And apparently no hot food outside security? (And, like every airport I've encountered this trip -- except Boston? -- has some construction going on. I forgot to mention LAX's cute signs when I was writing up the trip to SB, didn't I?)

When we were putting our bags in the trunk of the car of the woman picking us up, I saw Dominion and thought, "Oh, I could have brought Apples to Apples: Bible Edition." I plead 24 hours at home after a redeye, or something. After arriving at the house, I also feel a bit foolish for not having thought to bring e.g. Tupperware -- since my shared assumption was that we were gonna make food at the house and bring it with us to the site for conference days. Yeah, I basically let Marla do all the organizing for this trip and gave myself permission to not have to worry about any of this. Edit: I did think to bring a power strip (hi, 16 people in this house) -- though apparently there's an abundance of outlets in the house.

In case there are DDOS attacks again, I'm crossposting this.

( travel plans for my three weeks of vacation )