back home and (slightly) broken

I’m back home today, after spending a few days in Redmond, WA for a two-day workshop on the Microsoft Partner Center SDK. This particular API/SDK is esoteric enough that it’s not worth blogging about much, though it’s been taking up a lot of my time over the last year or so. And the actual workshop contents are under NDA anyway. For what it’s worth, it was a good workshop and I learned some new stuff. I also got clarification that something I’ve been trying to do for the last month or two, and completely failing at, is indeed currently impossible. So that, on its own, made the trip worthwhile. It turns out I’m not an idiot who can’t program his way out of a paper bag. (Rather, I’m an idiot who couldn’t realize that he’s inside a concrete bunker and not a paper bag. Maybe I’m stretching that metaphor a little too far…)

I wanted to mention the trip partly to give me an opportunity to mention that I completely missed Free Comic Book Day, since I spent nearly the entire day yesterday traveling. The Beat has a lot of coverage of FCBD; there were some some interesting books available. Maybe I could go over to my local store today, and see if they’ve got anything good left.

I also wanted to mention that I’m not missing the pre-sale for NYCC 2019, since that’s happening today at 10 AM. I had a good time at last year’s con, so I’d like to go again. A four-day pass is almost $200, so it’s not cheap, but heck, if I don’t spend my money on comic conventions, what am I going to spend it on? (Food? Rent? Nah.)

And I also wanted to check in on the subject of how broken I am after traveling to the west coast and back. I started thinking about this stuff after last year’s workshop, and tweaked some stuff in my routine when I went to WonderCon last month. I think I probably need to tweak some more stuff for the next time I have a long trip, but maybe I’m on the right path. One thing I learned after last year’s workshop is that, if I’m traveling to Redmond in the spring, I need to bring my allergy medicine. So I did that this year. I’ve also figured out that my body doesn’t adjust to time zone changes as easily as it used to. So I’m taking melatonin gummies when I travel now. (That helps a bit, but not as much as I’d like.) And I also figured out, after my WonderCon trip, that it was really time for me to give up on the L.L. Bean duffel bag that I’ve been using for luggage the past few years and get one of those ubiquitous carry-on bags with wheels and a telescoping handle. (I definitely pulled/strained/broke something from carrying that duffel around, coming home from WonderCon.) I think I’ve also broken my long aversion to taking a bag on the airplane with me, rather than checking it. Bag check now costs $30 each way, and it seems like everyone else brings a bag on the plane, so I guess I can too. And if that bag has wheels and a handle on it, it’s less of a pain to carry it through the terminal (and on the monorail, etc).

I have a bit of a residual headache this morning, and I didn’t sleep well last night, so the answer to “how broken am I?” is: Not as broken as I could be, but still more broken that I’d like.

I have enough stuff to do today that I should probably stop blogging and start doing stuff. In addition to the NYCC pre-sale, I also need to do grocery shopping, pay some bills, and scan in the receipts from my trip. So that’s it for now.