I love this laptop computer. I can sit here on this airplane — Southwest Airlines, Greyhound of the Skies — running my laptop on its battery, and write this journal entry. And I love flying, still; especially now that the summer travel season is over and the plane isn’t as insanely crowded as it has been. There is actually an extra seat empty between myself and my co-worker who is flying back to Sacramento with me; it’s almost luxurious, actually, and for the first time since I started this weekly trip to Portland, I feel like I have the room I need to open up my laptop and get some work done while flying.

Not, of course, that what I’m doing at the moment even remotely counts as work.

Traveling is a lot of fun; I really enjoy being up in the air, staying in hotels, "living out of a suitcase"; but I’m certainly glad that I’m only doing this four days a week. There’s nothing in the world to me like the feeling that when this plane lands in just over twenty minutes, Jennifer will be waiting at the airport to pick me up and take me home. There’s a lot of anxiousness — not bad anxiousness, but I’m really excited to see her again, even though I saw her just four days ago.

So I’m enjoying this lifestyle, and this job. It’s frustrating much of the time, and the amount of time I spend working on a daily basis can be annoying — but, all in all, I feel good about this, and about the decision I’ve made.

In a way, I’m facing quite a quandary. I’d like to have a job which involves even more travel; but, at the same time, I want to stay at home with Jennifer. She and I have joked that the two of us could form our own consulting firm so that we could travel together — she could do the back end development, and I could do middleware and UI — but that doesn’t necessarily seem like the wisest plan. I’m not certain how to go about pursuing a career that would increase my travel time without driving me insane, but I’m pretty sure that if I set my mind to it, I could find it. In a sense, I sort of missed the window of opportunity; if I really wanted that kind of job, I should have done it years ago when I was single and not engaged to be married to an incredibly wonderful woman. That, in essence, is my quandary.

The plane is reaching final descent, and it’s time to shut off all electronic devices, so this journal entry is necessarily shorter. I won’t get to upload it until I’m at home and hooked up, and I won’t make any changes to this page (except the necessary linking). This page is entirely on the air. When I fly out to Boston next month, I’m sure the journal entries that are on the air will be much longer.

Until next time.