Thoughts After A Week of Travel

Airline's exorbitant rates for checked baggage has awakened many people to the philosophy of minimalist traveling. I consider this to be a personal challenge: can I pack in 1-2 carry-ons? During my recent travels, I began at a business conference in California, then spent several days in Texas with my family, thus needed to pack for two different environments with the prospect of church, tennis, working out & relaxing. I did it! All hail the mighty mix-and-match wardrobe!

Also all-hail the fact that I was going to a computer programming conference, thus no one particularly cares what you're wearing, they only care what programming languages you know. Also all-hail the ability to do laundry halfway through the trip. Ok, so I kind of cheated at this.

But it worked out quite nicely. My monkey-decorated hotel room was more like a huge one-bedroom apartment (it had two toilets, see, one, two).

I was also blessed with the previous tenant's forgotten gym shorts, tucked away on a shelf hidden by a door.


I left them for the next tenant to enjoy, possibly irresponsible I know.

One thing about conferences I haven't understood is the need to create event-specific give-aways. Cups, mugs, shirts, bags, balls, picture holders, compasses, watches, etc. This time I got a notebook (can be useful), a pen (useful), a sticker (already put on file cabinet with all the other stickers), a bag (useful) and a Rubik's cube (not useful & quite annoying). I will be parting ways with the cube very soon. Also at conferences, I hate wearing event-specific name badges attached to event-specific lanyards that get in your way constantly & make completing simple tasks difficult, for example washing your hands. Event-specific is wasteful.

After the conference though, I got to spend a long weekend with my family & that was great, especially seeing my six-month old niece & getting to spend some time catching up with a good high school friend. Also, we have some great cooks in the family, so our food was amazing! Here's the grilled chicken with grilled veggies, seriously good.

But now it's back to normal life, and I am going to another conference tomorrow. Maybe I'll get another Rubik's cube?