Traveling by Train

Even with delays it is pretty antithetical to air travel. Relaxed, quiet, calm.

Found a seat in the quiet car. But person in seat behind me seems to be pounding away on a RTKelly mechanical keyboard. SMACKY SMACKY SMACKY arhythmic, loud, inconsistent. But there's some wifi so i'm trying to listen to music, because I don't have any DLd and don't want to stream (data boned).

It has been insanse lately. Even for me. But not bad, and as overwhelmed as I was I still hit the marks and got done what I needed to and when. There's still a weeks+ worth of stuff I'm going to have to add to an already full schedule over the next 2-6 weeks or how ever long it takes to catch back up.

This week? Sun-Today certainly feels like a week, packed full of stuff, was a good test, I guess I passed it? Copious and unending free beer and wine every day and almost every night. receptions, happy hours, tutorials, loose cannon, dogfish, all the local good stuff pouring freely. Finally figured out the safest way to order water that isn't flat is just to do club soda, asking for sparkling water often gets you sprite from a hot over worked bartender at a big event. Oh and decaf coffee that they had sunday night that I had so I could have something to drink besides lemonade and beer/wine probably wasn't decaf (wired for too long). Not a big deal though right? Actually kind of a big deal. Downside, no sidekick, no social extrovert friend to hang out with and help me engage in social situations, not drinking didn't change my social awkwardness, still didn't really talk to anyone I didn't already know, but it was surprisingly pretty okay being there just me, probably mostly because I was clear headed and sober and rational about it all and able to recognize that i was being me and I was happy and comfortable in my skin just being, not forcing, not feeling drunk and lonely and stupidly wanting to not be (the latter while the former).

The train was late, got some iced coffee, got a massive pile of cash on the credit card to hopefully get covered by the expense 'report' soon, but even then something like this before would have sent me over the freakout anxiety edge, I'm calm and clear about it. Kind of like a normal person. Although I'm not. Normal.

Before getting to the rest of the shit rolling around in my head I guess I'm fortunately it was beer and wine, if there was vodka sodas, I might have slipped, but there wasn't, easy.

The lead up to Baltimore was crazy, I manged to pack in a smackdown, not my fastest but not my slowest, but the one with the highest HR in a while and it didn't feel like it took much. Followed up that with the last TT on thursday. Posted up my best time of the summer, still not as fast as my fast years but still, something to go on and it felt much easier to go that hard, still hurt but I recovered much more quickly and the ride home wasn't as bad as it was the past couple times. So that built up, then I haven't touched the bike since Friday.  Last week, the day after the TT.

This week I did bring running shoes, but didn't use them. I just walked everywhere. miles and miles. First miles from the station to the hotel, in the heat. Ouch, but not bad. Each day seemed to add more walking in the evening on top of all the walking up and down the massive floors at the convention center. No elevators, no escalators, stairs only this week. A hell of a lot of stairs. And lots of walking. Ready to get back on the bike though.

And about that bike, well I registered for G-ster. After some internal back and forth, and then discussing with E, well I signed up for one day, just saturday. And despite all my gut feelings I went with the 40+ field instead of the Cat 3s. Why? I dunno. Okay well the run down, time of the day, earlier is better, if I wind up being asked to work the pits well that doesn't put me racing the race before the elites, and I know most of the names on the back half of the race, actually in both of the races but somehow, felt despite being a lot closer to 50 than 40, well that's the place to sign up. I didn't sign up on Tuesday. I waited until Wed. There were 5 spots left in the 40+ race both days, and the cat 3s were maybe half full. Sign up for one, if needed I could probably get the race organizers to switch me out of the 40+ to get someone off the waitlist.

BUT HOLYSHIT I SIGNED UP FOR A CX RACE.

Kind of still thinking about racing Gary's new race, up there just past Bolton Orchards, a family outing before taking the oldest off to College.

I don't feel as old as I seem to indicate here in the last little bit. Feel younger than I have in a while, mostly due to not drinking I think. Maybe something else, either way, it feels good to not feel shitty.

Don't worry it still sucks to wake up and takes a good bit of time before I'm fully functional after getting out of bed.

One of the extra bit of crazy last week getting ready for the conference was getting some images ready for the Micrograph Competition. I picked what I felt were awesome images that had demonstrated some really slick and unique and challenging techniques and looked good. But it is a popularity contest a bit and well, the local folks won. Home field advantage in a popular vote contest is hard to overcome, no matter how much better your offering is.

So that was a bummer yesterday at the end of the day. But it was, and it is and well, maybe next year. But it was a good excuse to go through the process of printing and to validate the output process for color images. Maybe though I need to go back to the roots and the black and white if I go back to this one, or at least one of each. I do have the Thermo calendar contest coming up, and more importantly the Wheeler gallery show opening up in January. Maybe I can focus a bit more on getting into a few more galleries or work on a few more collections or the web page or there's plenty to do.

I've been pretty consistently posting on the Nanoscape instagram, it is growing, and it is me. My aesthetic is different than most of the other SEM artists, and yeah I'm not the only one. But I do it all differently.

Like most everything. There's the 'normal' way to do something and there is the 'GeWilli' way to do it.

So I guess I have to figure out how to get some CX back into the legs, and start figuring out what to do. Oh and back to the Gloucester, I only signed up for one day. I know I'm not anywhere in shape to be racing that race back to back days. One day, just pour everything into it, head home and then get ready for the week. Racing one day per weekend certainly seems to make more sense for now. Maybe I'll get back to a full schedule, maybe next year, but not now.

Riding the train is pretty awesome. Visual progress, but relaxed, stuff is happening as you roll past, miles rolling away, greener, waste lands, razor wire, crumbling old stuff, new skylines in the distance, something different about the train.

Maybe it is a reminder of college, taking the N.E. Regional back and forth from New London CT to DC.

Maybe I'll write more later, I did manage to swap sides of the train so crazy keyboard smashing lady isn't directly behind me, maybe it'll be quieter here on this side.

and at least now I'll be on the water side through CT. Very important part of the trip.

But we just pulled out of Philadelphia, there's a long way to go before that, and I didn't bring food with me, wondering if i can make it on black coffee alone today. So far so good but it is only 11:40am.

I wonder if we'll pass the same rail car that was at one point full of Modelo cans, cases and cases spilled out, open, consumed, and all just sitting there on the tracks hobo dream. If you're a hobo that likes 90 degree beer. And just so much trash everywhere and awesome graffiti.

Well, once/if the WiFi comes back on I'll post, at the moment there's nothing. Comes and goes, but Google play is doing a nice job of building a dropout tolerant stream of music.

Hope y'all are well, I'll try and not be so infrequent between postings, but not so frequent that I'll load up a bunch today on the train, (but no promises)

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