As I arrived at the hotel last night/tonight (it's 1AM), I spent a few moments trying to unload my two bags I had in the seat with me. My backpack caught on the seatbelt connector, making the easy exit from the shuttle van much more of an ordeal than it needed to be.

Fortunately, my bag struggle gave the driver enough time to walk around the van and open the door for me.

After exiting the van, I walked to the back of the van for my other bag. To my surprise, the driver walked back around to the front of the van. I thought this odd, but went ahead and opened the back of the van to get my other bag.

I had my hand on my bag just as the driver put the van into gear and started driving away.

I quickly clenched and held it still as the van pulled away out from under the bag. The other passengers in the van, the ones with three other bags in the back of the van, the van with the back door wide open, started hollering at the driver to stop. Two car lengths later, he stopped the van.

In a daze, he hopped out of the van and walked around to the back. I'm not sure what he was thinking when I tipped him anyway.

Somehow I feel this is going to signal how this trip is going to go: not the way I want or expect it to go, but everything will work out just fine.

I'm on my way to Austin tonight. Seems odd to be heading off on a trip without Kris. I'm not sure why, it just does.

I managed to find my Southwest Rapid Rewards ticket and book a fairly good flight from San Jose to Austin. The total flight time is around five hours (figuring-out only mid-flight there were two stops, one in Los Angeles and one in El Paso, neither of which I realized when I booked the flight). The departure and arrival times are fantastic, fitting in with my class schedule and most of my weekend plans and event schedule, so I'm pleased with my $7.50 roundtrip ticket.

What I am surprised about, however, is what I'm doing with the dead time on the way to Austin.

I have a five hour flight (well, three one and a half hour flights, but who's counting?), in which I can ben remarkably productive. I have my laptop, my list of projects (somewhere here...), my list of cards, and two laptop batteries that should together last me about seven hours.

Yet, I slept during one flight. And not just slept, but gone to the world, close my eyes, open them an hour and a half later, only to realize we're on our initial descent. Kris is the one who can sleep like that, not me.

Though, my having the entire row to myself helped, I'd guess.

I want to be productive. I need to be productive. Yet, I feel disjoint, unconnected.

Maybe I just need some down time. A moment to be alone. Alone in a crowd of a thousand people.

Each week, on the way to our Master Gardener class, my carpool buddy Janis plays a song for us. When she heard about my periodic table obsession, she played Tom Lehrer's Periodic Table song (which doesn't have all the elements in the order of the periodic table, so I've continued writing my own). When her mother was particularly nostalgic one week, she played her mother's favorite song for us.

This week, she had a garden song. The CD was in the door next to my leg, so she asked me to hand her the CD. As I reached down for the CD, I saw another CD with "Johnny Horton" on the edge. I squealed with delight! "You have Johnny Horton! You have Horton! Do you have the Battle of New Orleans?"

When I was young, maybe eight through ten years old, we kids had a series of old records, the thick hard plastic ones, that belonged to our parents. We played these records on the record player, singing to the various tunes. One of my favorite songs was the Battle of New Orleans. Only when I started listening through iTunes, these decades later, did I call Dad and sing part of the song to him, asking him who sang the song. Apparently he recognized enough of the song (through my bad singing, no less) to tell me Johnny Horton sang it. I bought the song on iTunes as one of my first purchases.

Even Kris sings it now.

So, Jan and I sang the song driving to class down the 101 this morning, both of us belting out the song. It reminded me of the last time I heard the song on record.

Just before Chris broke the record by smashing it over my head.

The old hard plastic 78 records made a spectacular shower of chips when broken that way.

I'm not sure why, but, once again, I find myself gardening after dark.

I'm heading to Austin tomorrow for the SxSW Interactive conference (read: full-on web geek mode). I have a list around 25 items long of tasks I want to finish before I leave, and one of those is plant the blueberries I bought last week with Mom. We bought them, but I haven't planted them yet. We didn't plan them as

So, the first hour was spent building the new compost pile so that I could get to the good compost so that I could plant my blueberries. Always with the cascading list of tasks, never just do X and be done.

You know when you've eaten too many peanut butter cookies when your poo starts smelling like peanut butter.

Yeah, yeah, another poop post. Deal with it.