Sunday Morning by the Seaside

Lisa complained at me this morning that I had spent all of last night trying to push her out of bed by rolling over and over, which is quite a trick when you're using a CPAP machine.

As we had no particular reason to go back to the convention other than to see if any of our door-prize tickets were drawn, I set the alarm for relatively late. However, check-out time here is 11 AM, so I need to get cracking.

Incidentally Sea-Pac uses the same style of badges every year -- a cardboard cut-out that fits into a clear plastic pin-back holder. They encourage people to leave the holders behind in boxes provided for this purpose, to save Sea-Pac money. They can get away with this because admission is only $10, so there's no margin in counterfeiting badges. If it cost $200 to get in the door, I expect you'd see lots of fake badges.

First the Good News...

After a very leisurely breakfast, Lisa and I ambled over to the convention center for the final round of prize drawings, which include the drawings for the big-ticket items. Many of these were "must be present to win." They hold hourly drawings throughout the weekend, but we don't know if we missed our tickets being drawn then. Anyway, we made a final pass through the dealers who were mostly shutting down. Lisa bagged a bunch of connectors and we picked up a few bits and pieces that may be useful someday. One dealer who was still doing a booming business even though convention operations were pressuring him to hurry up and strike his booth looked at first to have the right sized foam screens for my ECM-51 microphone, but when he actually dug them out, it turned out he had only screens that were too large or too small. That is, he didn't carry replacement screens for microphones that he was selling, as it was one of the mics on his table (with the correctly sized screen) that made us think he might be able to help us.

( And the winner is... )

Oh, and the bad news? I'll put that in the next entry.

...Now the Bad News

Our drive back from Seaside was uneventful, although after we got past Kelso/Longview, it started getting pretty warm, and by the time we got to Portland, Lisa was starting to get cranky about the heat. Her temper was not helped by the van starting to produce a new squeak. She doesn't like squeaks. Anyway, she let me off at the Parkrose/Sumner light rail station and I rode into the airport.

Checking in for my flight to Oakland, I found that my 8:06 flight had been delayed until about 10:30 or so. That meant that I'd probably get back to OAK too late to catch the last BART train to Fremont. I'd certainly miss the last AirBART bus connection between the airport and the BART station.

"Any alternatives?" I asked. "Maybe to San Francisco, or bump me up to Seattle and on to either SFO or Oakland?" They said no, and that there weren't really any alternatives to me just waiting it out. They gave me a $6 food voucher and 1000-mile "sorry about that" certificate for my frequent-flyer account (I'll use that, all right).

After enduring mercifully quick Security Theatre, I noticed that the flight had been delayed even more, and as I compose this, it's showing an 11:25 ETD and a 1:02 AM arrival at OAK. Bleah. I'm glad I'm working from home on Monday, and I'm really glad that a meeting in Phoenix that my company was talking about having for my industry group this coming week was canceled.

There are some lucky things in this delay, however. First, I'm very lucky that Cheryl is still in California. She, bless her, is willing to drive up to Oakland after midnight and collect me, which will save me a >$50 shuttle bus or taxi ride. Second, if one is forced to spend four-plus hours hanging around an airport, PDX is one of the better places to do it. There are lots of food choices, and several "service centers" with mini-cubicles and power outlets, and the hotel has free wireless internet service. I'd much prefer being stuck here than, say, OAK, whose terminal is too small and has few amenities, and charges for wi-fi.

So I'm more or less settled in here typing away and catching up on the accumulated weekend of e-mail. I had dinner and even got some exercise, in the form of a lap-and-a-half around the ABC concourse, good for around 2 km by my reckoning, and my blood sugar responded accordingly. Things could definitely be worse.