Heading West

It's Tuesday evening and I'm cooling my heels in the oversized Waiting Room of the refurbished Union Depot in St Paul MN, awaiting the on-time arrival of train #27, the westbound Empire Builder, for Portland OR and my facilitation training gig there this weekend.

On my way to the pick-up spot for the Duluth Skyline Shuttle this evening (about four hours ago) I stopped by Downtown Computer and plucked my ailing laptop from sick bay so that I'd have it on this trip. But I'm flying with two engines down. I have neither email capacity nor Microsoft Office, which means no Word and no Excel. As I conduct 98% of my business in those three programs, I'm pretty crippled.

I had dropped my laptop off with the good folks at Downtown Computer last Thursday afternoon, asking them to clean up my laptop in general and to remove the Trovi virus in particular. In the process they installed the Avast antivirus program, and wound up rebooting an updated operating system (I'm now running El Capitan) and reinstalling all of my programs. Unfortunately, the technie (George) needed my email server to complete the re-installation of Apple Mail and I wasn't able to track down the FIC web team quickly enough to get that into George's hands. 

I also just discovered that my copy of iCal has been stripped clean. Ugh. That was the calendar I've been relying on for the last eight years and it hurts to lose the data, both what's ahead and what I'd done. I'm hoping that the old data can yet be recovered. We'll see.

With only 15 minutes left to catch my van south to St Paul, I had to choose between taking my laptop as is (hoping to get Mail installed in Portland), or leaving it in Duluth and reuniting with it next Wed. Uffda. Ultimately, as you can tell from reading this, I took my laptop with me (at least Firefox is working).

Even if I'm unable to get Mail working in the coming days, I'll be able to work on my reports from the facilitation training before returning home and that will give me a leg up. Sometimes you have to settle for what you can get, and even a tenth of a loaf is better than none.

Yesterday I was thinking (wistfully it turns out) how I could devote most of tomorrow (as the choo choo rumbles across North Dakota and Montana) to catching up on my email. Oh well. More time for reading, I reckon, and contemplating how best to introduce this weekend's teaching theme—Conflict—to the class. Fortunately, since discovering my cancer four months ago, I've been working to make friends with it and I've come to enjoy the pleasures of a reduced workload quite a bit. So I don't anticipate any trouble making the adjustment. My email will simply have to wait.

I'm feeling good physically at the outset of this trip—in fact, it's the best I've felt since November. It will be interesting to see how well I hold up to 38 hours of travel in coach. With Susan's help I was able to pare down my travel luggage to the 25 lbs I loaded into my medium-sized roller suitcase. So I think I'll be OK on schlepping. With respect to the cumulative fatigue of travel, I'll have better than 22 hours to rest and recover once I arrive in Portland before the training begins in earnest at 9 am Friday morning, so I have some cushion there.

I'll let you all know how I'm faring once I get the Rose City Thursday morning. Hopefully I will not arrive in a bed of thorns.