October 24, 2006
Mid week last week, I received a request from one of the sales people to go down to Los Angeles for a meeting on Monday (yesterday). The meeting was with San Diego Gas and Electric, but was held in Los Angeles - go figure. This unexpected little trip was a bit of a mixed blessing - I like LA, and my friend Graham lives there, the customer in question is a great one to meet with, but at the same time I have way too much on the go, and I'm already way behind on a number of projects. But since it would only be one work day, it made a lot of sense to go.
I flew down on Sunday morning - I figured if I was going to go, I might as well get a day in of personal time as well. My friend Graham had moved down to LA about a year ago, so it also gave me a good opportunity to meet up with him. The flight down was easy - the other benefit of this being a pure west coast trip - and I was in my rental car at LAX by 10:00. I headed up to Santa Monica where Graham was staying, and we went and grabbed breakfast. After breakfast we headed down to the Santa Monica pier, and wandered around. It's pretty cool - there's a small amusement park on the pier, and a bunch of the usual tourist trap stuff. It did have some great views up and down the coast, although it was very hazy that day. After checking out the pier, we hopped in the car and drove a little stretch down the highway to Venice Beach. Classic LA - you've seen it in all the movies about LA - roller-bladers, guys on roller skates, big time street basketball, hand ball courts, the big boardwalk with all the stores selling t-shirts and cheap sun glasses and the works. It was a beautiful day, and so we just hung out on the beach for a while. After that we drove out to Beverley Hills and drove around the monster homes, then cruised down Rodeo Drive. Quite the place really - I'm sure it would have been more of a big deal if I was a shopper...
Mid afternoon came, and I decided to head to my hotel to get checked in a settled. i dropped Graham off at his hotel, and we agreed to meet up for dinner at my hotel. I headed downtown, and checked in. I did some work, checked my e-mail and basically got preped for my meeting the next day. Around 7:30 Graham showed up, and we headed up to the steakhouse on the 35th floor of the hotel. Sadly, it was completely booked for the evening, so we settled for the lounge on the 34th floor. Same great view, and it was a rotating restaurant. The food was good, we got a chance to catch up some more, and had a great view of downtown LA. About 9:30 Graham took off to head for home. I had originally planned to get to bed early, but I was restless. So I decided to head down to one of the big LA casinos - the Commerce Casino.
What a great night! I'm not sure if it was just the table I was at, or if that night was indicative of every night at Commerce, but it was easily the softest poker game I'd ever played in. I was there for maybe three hours, and left up over $800. I need more nights like that. And the wild thing was I wasn't even getting very good cards. I was playing well, and the other players at the table were just really bad. It was a fun night!
I capped off my little trip to LA as we were heading out of the hotel Monday morning. There, sitting in the lobby, signing head shots, was Mr. Hockey himself, Gordie Howe. As I understand it, they're planning on a movie about him in 2008, which explains him being in LA. Funny thing about that - he's probably in the one place where nobody knows who he is!
New York Awaits... As Does Africa...
Update: I found this short video on the NYC Marathon home page. It's short, and the video quality isn't great, but it gives a good idea about the scale of the event. The shots of the start are unreal...
Well, this page was long over due for an edit - and it seems that i finally have some things to update it with! First off, you'll notice a little fall cleaning. A lot of the old posts have been archived. They're still there; I've just moved them to separate pages. Hopefully the clean up will mean that this page loads a little quicker. Until I go and add a bunch more pictures again.
I'm now 17 days and counting from the New York City Marathon. Exciting. Scary. Mostly exciting I guess. I did my last big training run this past Sunday. 35 kms in the rain. That's right, the longest training run I had to do, and after months of amazing weather, it has to rain all weekend. And not the normal light Vancouver drizzle. No, this was full on rain - big drops, coming down hard. So for 3:22:11 I sucked it up and got the training done. From here on in it's all tapering - basically the training eases off, and I spend the next couple of weeks doing "active recovery". Shorter, slower runs, and less of them. After finishing that last run I'm feeling reasonably confident about my chances of finishing. I figure I can gut out 7 more kms come race day, with 2 1/2 million people cheering me on. :-)
It's been crazy-busy with traveling lately as well. Last week I was in Charlotte NC for three days, then in to Philadelphia for a couple of days for client meetings. The meetings went very well, and since Philly is only an hour's drive from Atlantic City, I booked my flight for Saturday morning rather than Friday night. Yep, the Borgata poker room was calling...
But before I get into that story, the other nice thing about Philadelphia was that I had a chance to catch up with my friend Scott and his wife Jay. Scott and I went to high school together, and he swings by Vancouver every once in a while to visit. So it was nice to catch up with him on his own turf. We had dinner at a pretty cool brew pub, in what seemed to be a nice area of Philadelphia. It was a fun night.
So after work on Friday afternoon, I headed down the highway to AC. Since my flight was at 9:30 Saturday morning I had pretty much decided that I was just going to play straight through the night, drive to the airport in the morning and sleep on the plane. The Borgata poker room is huge - 100 tables if I read it right, and one of the softer games I've played. There were a couple of decent players at the table, but for the most part, most were not all that good. I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say, I left at 6:00 Saturday morning with about $550 more than I started with. Not a huge win, but a good night. I had a lot of fun, played very well, and won some money. Hopefully I'll need to go back to Philly to see that customer again...
So I'm home for a week, and now I have to fly to LA on Sunday for a one day meeting with another customer. That's not so bad - it's close. But the big news is that I've confirmed my trip to South Africa for the end of November. And much like last time, it's going to be coupled with a brief stop in the UK - so I get a weekend in London out of it. This I'm looking forward to! Much like last time I'm going to take a few days at the end to go back to Kruger Park and go on safari again. I love Kruger - I could happily spend the rest of my life there. So I fly to the UK on November 20th, and I'm coming home on the 6th of December. The timing probably isn't great - I've got a ton on the go at work right now, but these are customer-driven meetings. I'm definitely getting my travel in right now!