My Weird Weekend

I'm writing this from a hotel room high in the Ritz-Carlton Sarasota, a room that came complete with a balcony from which I can see the water (without even stretching around a corner). Yesterday I was running about with Thing 2 while The Wife and Thing 1 roughed it in the woods; it's been an eventful few days.

Perhaps I should back up and take this straight through.

Friday was an only slightly frenzied day at work, given that it was the last working day before Sales Meeting. (Which every other publisher calls Sales Conference; Wiley doesn't do anything just because everyone else does.) There are two possibilities for why I wasn't run ragged. Either, as I hope, I got what I needed to do early, and my line of books isn't big and flashy and trade-y to begin with. Or -- and this is what I'm pretty sure isn't the case, since I've rechecked the schedule of meetings a dozen times over the last week -- I've forgotten something of massive importance. Well, we'll see.

We also had a department lunch out for a colleague who's going to be going on maternity leave soon, which was the usual fun. (It's a nice group to begin with, and who doesn't like gala luncheons?) Partway through, I realized that I was the only one of the bunch who already has kids, which made me feel old.

Then I had to hit my comics shop, which is no longer "local" in any sense, but I can't quite give it up. (Midtown Comics by the Port Authority -- if there was a comparable store anywhere reasonable in Jersey, I'd switch in a minute, but there isn't.) And going to the comics shop generally means taking a bus back out into Jersey, and...I've been spoiled by trains now. I take the train every day, and it has absolutely spoiled me.

See, on a train you go smoothly, usually through interesting scenery (either through bits of nature or the backs of industrial areas, both of which have stuff to look at and think about if you feel like it), with a more comfortable ride, with more space, and all by yourself on the track. On a bus, you're stuck on the road with ten thousand idiots riding one to a SUV, in a herky-jerky stop-and-go motion, and crammed up against someone who doesn't like you either.

Once you go to a train, you just can't go back. It's like being cast out of Eden. I have the knowledge of good and evil now...

Eventually, I got home, grabbed dinner, and drove by the house -- I thought I was going to Thing 2's baseball game -- and stopped, because my mother-in-law's car was there. She was watching my younger son, and hadn't taken him to the game because my wife had been all morose about the weather and talked her out of it.

(The Wife had headed off, during the day, to a Cub Scout Weebelo campout for Thing 1, after waiting for the guys to deliver and install our new washing machine -- which I needed to do laundry so I could go on this trip. My family for the last three days has been like an intricate meshing of gears, where any misstep would cause calamity.)

So mother-in-law went home, and Thing 2 and I settled into our boy-dad time together. We stayed up late (late for him, at least) playing videogames, and then I put him to bed.

Yesterday, he slept late, so I did, too. (Until 8! That's late for me these days.) I let him have a lazy couple of videogame hours -- why not? -- and then set off on our errands. First was a birthday party at a horse ranch fifteen minutes up the road -- I never cease to be amazed at how rural it gets so quickly when I head north from where I live; it's rod-and-gun country almost immediately -- which was cold and damp and foggy but not actually raining. (And that was very good, since real rain would have sent us all to move the festivities into the barn. It's not a cute picturesque red barn, either, but a real, modern, concrete working barn full of horse stalls and other indications that horses frequent that vicinity.) The kids got to go on a hayride and ride ponies, but what they liked best, inevitably, was running up the hillside above the party area, where there was a huge exposed rock that they could play around on.

After that, Thing 2 and I went off for the possibly even more important festivities: Free Comic Book Day! (I've had to miss it once or twice in recent years, due to the Nebula Awards, so I guess there's one bright point to losing my skiffy job.) We went to Joker's Child in Fair Lawn, a decent (if very superhero-focused) shop that I only seem to make it to once a year for FCBD. But I actually spent some money, so that should be OK.

One of the things I bought -- Franklin Richards: Collected Chaos Digest -- was for the boys, and it was a great thing to get, since Thing 2 read it in the car during our next leg of the drive, read it while I was getting a haircut (I desperately needed one), and read it while I was buying some new clothes for Sales Meeting (yes, it's officially casual dress, but I'd prefer clothes that don't make me look like a bum while I'm trying to convince them of the merits of Wiley GAAP 2009). So I don't want to hear anybody complaining about how Franklin Richards is just a Calvin & Hobbes rip-off -- which, by the way, Thing 2 has been also reading a lot of lately, though he still likes Garfield best (what can you do? he's seven) -- when it can keep an antsy boy's attention like that for more than an hour. Sumerak and Eliopolus, I salute you.

Then we collapsed in exhaustion at my mother's house for our weekly dinner -- well, I wanted to collapse, but we ended up playing a complicated tag game with a Chinese Yo-yo, so we kept busy. Then we finally went home, and, as we were thinking about bed, The Wife and Thing 2 came home, having given up on a second night in the woods after the first one was just Too Damn Cold. So there was a flurry of laundry and showers -- me doing their laundry, to get the campfire smell and we-really-hope-not-bugs out of everything; them showering to warm up -- and then off to bed. Even The Wife collapsed early, since she hadn't slept the night before.

Then this morning was more laundry, more packing, trying to work on some ComicMix reviews (without much luck, though I hope there will be one tomorrow), and then running off to the airport. I have learned to park in the big structure right by the terminals instead of the "economy" lots out in Upper Lower Slobbovia, which made the whole process much nicer. I also managed to only have carry-ons this time, which somewhat mitigated the fact that I was in the back-row window seat, and hence almost precisely the last person off the plane.

I rode to the Ritz-Carlton in one of the designated Wiley cars with someone much more important in the company than I am, and made some light chatter on the way. Then I was overawed by the hotel, which is really too fancy for someone like me. But I'll take it.

Tomorrow is a light day, so I might get out into the city of Sarasota to poke around -- I've been in Florida many times, but never over on this coast. And then Tuesday is wall-to-wall meetings, with a somewhat saner schedule on Wednesday and Thursday.

So, if I'm posting long things this week, it's because I'm spending too damn much time up in my room, instead of enjoying a fancy hotel down in the sub-tropics. I hope not to.