Corporate Hippy

The Kansas City (MO) International airport feels like a big airport when you’re driving to it and when you enter the airport campus. Inside the terminal though, its a whole different story.

There are 8 gates inside the security checkpoint – but I can’t figure out why they bother with all 8 numbers since, gates 61 and 62 use the same door, 63 and 64 use the same door, and 65-69 use the same door. Inside the security checkpoint, there are no restrooms, no restaurants, and only one small food kiosk with water, premade sandwiches, etc..

I love these small airports. The TSA guys are low-key and friendly – this is a big deal for me when I’m traveling with 2 laptops in my bag. I always feel rushed and somewhat uneasy going through those checkpoints and I almost considered checking one of my laptops in my luggage to avoid the ordeal of pulling them both out at security. I decided this wasn’t a good idea and instead planned to pack my carry on bag as lightly as possible to make things easier. For the record – I’ve never had an issue with TSA in Detroit, they’re generally very pleasant there, even when the lines are long. All in all, traveling with 2 laptops hasn’t been as bad as I’d imagined.

Why 2 laptops? Well, aside from the fact that I’m a big nerd, there is a reason. Nick and I wanted to be able to use skype or ichat to have some video convo’s this week. I have a camera built into the macbook which makes things much much easier. Also, my itunes library is on my macbook and .. well .. its kind of my baby .. but, I still wanted to bring my work laptop with me since I knew I was leaving some things hanging open at work and I wanted to be able to respond if needed. My work laptop has some tools that won’t run on the Mac and our SSL VPN software doesn’t yet support the new Leopard OS – so I couldn’t have done much with my macbook for work. When I get a bigger hard drive, I want to run parallels or VM so that I can have a windows install with my work tools on it. That will be ideal. Traveling with 2 laptops isn’t terrible, but its still heavy and space consuming. And kind of ridiculous

So here I am, at MCI (or is it KCI? road signs say one thing, while everything online says something else .. weird). This nice small airport even has free wi-fi – slow, but free. My flight was delayed by 20 minutes due to pilot restrictions, but I’m still expected to land in detroit before 1.

Its been a good week, but I’m ready to be home. I hope that my week away from normal life is what I needed to reset my brain and knock me out of the frantic mode I’ve been running in for the past month. February was a nightmare that I hardly remember. Our trip to Vegas seems so long ago and I have mixed guilt about my trip to Rays (as wonderful of a trip that it was, I missed my last opportunity to say goodbye to my friend before he passed away – I really thought I had more time. More on this in another post someday). John’s passing created chaos at work with hospital visits, funeral and added workload in between – not to mention, trying to plan this trip which was originally supposed to be to San Francisco and changed to KC just last week. Mix in the MMBA annual meeting, a Poto chapter event in Ypsi, a women’s night at MBF followed by a planning meeting with the ED and President and the membership suddenly interested in all things merchandise.

I was just hanging on by a thread and reached the absolute end of my patience with my 20 yr old stepson last week. We had it out over email and he’s been at is grandparents’ place ever since.

So, I think, having a week to myself with no place to go (no car to get me anywhere) was what I needed.

life hippy

Why do I feel better about throwing away food that’s been cooked/prepared than about throwing away food that was never opened?

I’ve been in Kansas City, MO this week for Checkpoint Firewall training (woo hoo!). I decided to stay at a Residence Inn for 2 reasons: 1- they have shuttle service to/from my training location so I didn’t have to rent a car and 2- I wanted a kitchen so that I didn’t have to eat out all week. On Tuesday after class, I went grocery shopping and came back with 2 bags of food. Really, it wasn’t too much food, but I’ve also been sick this week and not eating nearly as much as I normally would.

Well, I’m leaving tomorrow and I decided that I really should cook up some of the 1/2 dozen eggs that I bought and finish up the breakfast sausage. I just hated the thought of leaving that stuff in the fridge to be thrown away. I wasn’t in the mood for eggs, haven’t been all week. I definitely wasn’t in the mood for sausage as its really just something I like once in awhile, and after eating it for 3 days, I’ve really had enough. But alas, I cooked it up anyway. I only cooked 3 eggs, and mixed in the sausage and white cheddar cheese that I had. I was pretty sure that once it was cooked, I’d really want to eat it.

I tried, I really did. The toast was great. I drank my full glass of milk. But the eggs .. blah.. I had a few bites, but I just can’t eat the rest. So, those eggs are going to get thrown away anyway.

The full bottle of wine that I never opened (again, I was sick all week and just never in the mood for wine like I thought I would be) will probably go to someone at the front desk. In the good old days, I could have carried the wine on the plane in my backpack. Not so much anymore. *sigh* Not sure what to do with my leftover bread, butter and cheese. I think I’ll be able to finish the milk and orange juice though.

There’s a group of IRS “auditors in training” staying here and I know one of them is sticking around through the weekend (they are in training the whole month, but most are going home for the weekend). I was hoping to bump into her again to give her my food, but I haven’t seen her.

I always feel guilty about throwing away food, but I just don’t know what else to do.

On a positive note, I bet I lost some weight this week since I really haven’t been eating much

life hippy