Yesterday in Boston I pulled a 38-hour shift, from the first gathering of our employees at the tradeshow to fixing bugs in our product late at night to fixing my own little laptop to spending all day in the hotel room yesterday quashing bugs and fixing code to a late dinner last night with company employees who had come in from all over the country for this trade show. When I finally crawled into bed last night at about 11:00 I found that I was too tired to sleep. A strange feeling; I’ve never been awake so long in my life that I can remember, although the feeling of being too tired to sleep is not foreign to me. So I turned on the television and discovered that Nickolodeon is running a Three’s Company marathon this week.

This is only the beginning of this week. Late tonight (my flight lands at 11:15) I return to California to spend the night in an empty house (Jennifer is in Washington this week); then I leave the house again at 6 to make sure I get back to the airport in time for my flight back up to Portland. And because I’m getting a late start in Portland, I won’t be returning to California until late Friday night (though I had thought of returning on Thursday just so that I could say that I’ve worked in three states this week on two separate coasts).

My question for you, faithful readers (all two or three of you) is whether you’ll lose respect for me if I say that I’ve changed my mind about wanting to travel a lot for work? This company has strict policies against paying for rental cars, so when I’m on the road I’m stuck to plodding about on foot. Thus, I haven’t seen anything of Boston except for the inside of my hotel room (and I’ve spent WAY too much time here) and the few blocks between the hotel and the other hotel where the trade show is. By 5:00 yesterday afternoon I realized that I was in one of the most historic and most beautiful cities in the country and that all I really wanted to do was lie in bed with my book (King Lear by Shakespeare this time). But, of course, I couldnt; there were still bugs to squash.

Today I have to check out of the hotel so I’ll at least be away from my room and away from my computer; though I imagine I’ll be at the computer a lot anyway fixing up some bugs and clearing some pages. I’m not looking forward to actually being at the trade show; I’m not very good at schmoozing and I have yet to figure out what they want me to do while I’m here.

And in two weeks I go to another one of these things in Atlanta. I’m not looking forward to it.