It's good to be home. I arrived in Oakland at midnight and was home before 1:00 AM. Only an hour-and-a-half behind schedule, which is amazing, since it was one of those flight-cancelling, massive-rerouting, lots of waiting around airport zoo days that makes cross-country trips especially fun. Seems Denver was closed for a storm, and Chicago was having 5- and 6-level thunderstorms, which were delaying the already-congested traffic. So, since I was on United, and didn't have a direct flight, it wasn't looking good. Isn't it funny how those days always seem to happen on the way home, as opposed to the getting there, when you're already exhausted and are losing three hours anyway? But for having my first flight cancelled and second one delayed, I really lucked out getting home in reasonable time. In fact, on the Chicago-Oakland flight (thank goodness I flew into OAK, instead of SFO, or I'd probably still be somewhere in the middle), I think there were two seats on the entire plane that were empty and they happened to be right beside me, so I was even able to stretch out (well, curl up) and take a nap. Nice.


Anyway, I generally like going on business trips, and this one was quite successful (you'll be hearing more soon), but it is good to be back in my cockpit, where I feel slightly more in control and less isolated. Although, looking at the status of my inbox, one my think isolation would be preferable:


502 messages unread


That's just since yesterday afternoon, when I last got my mail, and it doesn't count mailing lists or other filtered items. Of course, a hell of a lot of it is about a Blogger boo-boo that interrupted everyone's happy posting and coughed up an ugly error all this morning. I stupidly let the database log fill up again. We have scripts to prevent such things on other machines, but I forgot to schedule the script on Magicslim (on of the db servers), even after this happened last time at another inopportune moment. I was alerted to the problem, thankfully, by a phone call from Meg, which got me out of my catch-up-sleep slumber. Anyway, I've applied it now. As I believe someone once said, we are doomed to repeat life's lesson's until we learn them. And as someone else said, "Still digging..." Now, I get to dig through that inbox...