With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

March part 1

2015 April 06 07:23

Wow--March was quite a month. Even in January, March was already shaping up to be a busy month. I had significant trips/commitments early in the month and late in the month. Then I had the bright idea to stick a really busy work trip with personal travel on both ends in the middle. So March was very busy with travel; as I write this on April 6, it's just finally settling out and this week should be back to a normal-ish schedule.

The first journey was a trip up to Cincinattii to help my wife run a conference. This was an absolute committment on my part, and has been on my schedule for at least six months. The two weeks of snowmageddon at the end of February were not encouraging for this trip. The conference was Friday/Saturday. Earlier in the week, the state of Kentucky wasn't doing too badly, but it was looking a lot of the state would get snow dumped on it on Wednesday and Thursday, so us just getting to the conference was looking iffy.

Given the snow that was expected to land on Thursday, if we started heading north on Thursday morning, it was likely we wouldn't be able to get out of town. So we decided to outmaneuver the weather. Wednesday afternoon (in fine weather) we drove to Lexington and stayed in a hotel right on the north side, next to the interstate, so the roads we would be driving on would have the best snow removal possible.

That worked fine. But we did get the expected snow over night. When we got up, the car was caked with nigh on a foot of snow:

That morning, I did the first clear-start-scrape-defrost cycle I've done in many many years. I know people in Minnesota do that every day in parts of the winter, but it's been a while for me. I also backed it across the parking lot so that it was clear of the snow piles around it. The end result was pretty good:

While we were having breakfast I made some poor attempts at bird photography while we were having lunch.





Due to the higgledy-piggledy of the snow and its effect on the conference schedule, the conference days itself were super-busy, so I really don't have anything to show. One really nice thing: right across the street from the hotel was a Joe's Crab Shack:

I think if I were reviewing that as a design for an establishment in a game, I would perhaps ask them to pull back the character a bit.

And last thing: on the way home, I saw this advertisement in a truck stop bathroom. It got me thinking more about car (and also airplane) USB chargers, which is another topic that I've been working on this past month.

So the trip to Cincinatti was the opening salvo of the month. The big trip in the middle of the month was yet to come.