The glamour of business travel

Please use care when opening the overhead bins as items may have shifted allegiance during flight.
So, here’s what a fabulous day of biz travel is like. I can never sleep well in a strange place the first night, so my sleep is lousy. I wake up and fight with myself over whether to run or not (answer: not). Fall asleep and sleep well for an hour. Get up, fight with the cheap clock radio so I can get Howard Stern, but there’s nothing on today anyway. Review junk for the meeting, meet up with a colleague for breakfast, then off to a day of writing a statement of principles by a committee of 30 or so. It was productive, in a way, but not overly so. At some point after lunch the fire alarm went off, filling me with concern the thing is going to malfunction tonight, and I know from too much experience that being awakened by hotel fire alarms is not the path to enlightenment. Upside to alarms: snuck across the street to Hecht’s and picked up a couple of shirts and ties, much-needed. Lovely old Greek glamourpuss helped me go daring with the tie. Let’s see if I can pull it off. Go back, finish off the meeting, say goodbye to about 30 people, which takes a good hour, get cornered by a lobbyist for a company we’re suing, and finally escape. Check e-mail (working now, with the keyboard seemingly repaired), happily learn that today’s crisis is merely a spill, not a fire, and that not much else is going on. Hydrate, change, and go for a run. My first good run in many months, up to the Lincoln Memorial and back, only about 40 minutes — I wisely resisted going on until I got injured. It was sunny but breezy, only about 40 degrees but pleasant enough once I got warmed up. By the way, the tourist action is all at the Lincoln — hardly a soul at the Washington. Note to memorial designers: big and accessible works; tiny elevator to the top doesn’t. Came back to find bus loads of foreign military officers descending on the hotel. I can’t say I would ever have predicted I’d share an elevator with a Rumanian colonel (or Ice T, for that matter — different trip, in every sense).
Then, long dinner alone while reading Entertainment Weekly, back up here to digest and watch a repeat of Buffy (Xander: “When our friends go crazy and start killing people, we HELP them!” Willow: “Sitting right here!”). (By the way, the real cutie is Anya, vengeance demon or not.)
Buffy ends this year, no surprise. Probably a good thing. It’s been stunningly good this season, but I don’t agree with people who thought it wasn’t true to itself last season. It was the darkest thing ever on television, but it was also real. Hey, if you’re yanked out of heaven, you’re probably going to be a little pissed off for a while. And let us note that last season DID bring us Buffy: The Musical, which would have jumped the shark in the hands of any other creative team.
Enough!