The whole point of this vacation was to visit with A and E. The last time we hung out was June of 2024 when I spent a week in Dallas and a week in Vegas. But that was me hanging out with A and his family and then later me hanging out with E. Not A, E, and me hanging out together. For that we'd have to go back several years to our trip to San Francisco.
The initial planning for this vacation came from a phone call between E and I. I had a migraine at the time, so I don't remember a lot of the specifics. I do remember that he was going to be working a last weekend in San Francisco and would return to his new Austin apartment on June 5th or 6th. So we set up that instead of going to Austin, he'd fly into Dallas. I'd drive down a few days before, hang out with A and his family, then we could pick up E from his flight and drive straight down to his place in Austin. We'd have a long weekend together (A confirmed that he'd get that Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off), and then I could hang out further with E.
Several things worked to screw up that timeline.
First, E isn't the best on giving out details of his life. For instance, we knew he was leaving his job in San Francisco, and that he'd be working in Austin... but we later found out that he was actually quitting that job. So... why was he even in Austin then? And how long would he be there? He said he had space for us to stay with him... but then he didn't say if that meant he had three beds or a couch or just floor space.
The other thing to screw up the timeline was me. My plan was to leave on Monday the 2nd, and get to A's house on Wednesday the 4th. We'd hang out Wednesday and Thursday, then pick up E on Friday and head to Austin. I could stay with E through that next weekend and then head back home on the 16th. And yes, if you're reading the dates here and the date that I'm writing this (Friday the 13th) it's clear that that plan didn't work out.
The change agent was my brother R. He loves to go 'up north' to a cabin that our neighbor has in the upper peninsula of Michigan. They both go up, fish, hang out, smoke weed, and just enjoy nature. Well it seems our neighbor's timeline for the first trip up this season (you have to wait until like June for the snow to all melt and the ground to get anywhere near solid again), was during MY vacation. We're find having one of us leave as the other will stay with Mom. Sure, we go out and stuff, but Mom had someone in the house every day with her. It's reassuring that she's safely looked after. But if both of us are gone... well, Mom hasn't been on her own for years now. With her not being able to go upstairs, downstairs, or get around the main level of the house all that well... without her being able to drive herself or go get the mail or do her laundry... yeah, we can NOT leave her alone.
I'd normally change my plans to accommodate R's as his are dependent on our neighbor getting time off of work. BUT, I'd already convinced both A and E to work their schedules around to get the weekend of the 6th through the 9th off. In the end, I compromised. I'd leave earlier, hang out with A and his family a little longer, still hang out with A and E, and then hang out with E for only a day or so alone before driving back home and being back here on the 13th. R could then leave for up north on the 14th.
A and his family were cool with it so I left home on the 29th of May and got to A's on the 30th. I'd already purchased some gifts for A and his family and they wouldn't arrive until I was on the road, but I just left R some cash and told him to ship it to A's house once it arrived. I'd also ordered some meds as I'd run out as soon as I got back, but it was fine as I'd now get back before they ran out and I'd have the meds waiting for me at home.
I got on the road early at quarter to eight in the morning. The first thirty minutes are down a state highway where the lane centering works but the Blue Cruise self driving feature doesn't kick in. It was relaxing and nice but normal. Once I hit the interstate though, Blue Cruise kicked in and Tatiana was driving herself!
The seats in Tatiana are comfy. I mean, with the 'Perfect Position' 22 way adjustable seats, they SHOULD be comfy. There's enough room that I don't have the seat all the way back. And with the thigh extenders on the seat, I'm able to really sit back and relax. The only thing that's uncomfortable is... well... between how upright I'm sitting and the firmness of the thigh bolsters, Tatiana tends to make me sit on my balls. I know, I know... TMI. It's probably something I wouldn't have noticed as a younger man, but it's true when they say that older men's balls hang down lower. It wasn't specifically UNcomfortable, it just wasn't fully comfortable. Everything else... feet, calves, thighs, hips, lower back, upper back, neck, head, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, and hands, were all perfectly comfortable. More so even than Tiffany. Add in that I am literally just looking forward while Tatiana does the majority of the driving (my arms can literally be crossed over my chest and nowhere near the steering wheel!), and add in that when I feel I need to get out and move I can put on the massage to refresh my back and butt and legs... well, I needed to stop to pee and get cold beverages and that's it. I didn't even need to stop for gas half as much as I normally did.
I'd normally fill up the gas tank half way between home and Indianapolis. I wouldn't NEED to fill up then, but if I didn't I'd run out of gas right near Indianapolis. And the highways around there are just crazy and I'd rather drive through it without stopping. But in the area that I'd normally stop, I had 3/4 of a tank left. I was able to drive through Indianapolis and over a hundred miles PAST it before I needed to get gas. Tiffany could get a little over 300 miles on a tank before she warned about being 50 miles shy of empty (and she was probably closer than 50 miles shy). Tatiana can go almost 600 miles before she puts up that 50 mile warning and I'd guess that she's closer to 75 miles from empty when she does.
So, between less stops and far more relaxing 'driving' I was able to go MUCH further. I normally stop around Rolla or Lebanon Missouri. That's about an hour east of Springfield. On this trip I went past Rolla, past Lebanon, past Springfield, past Joplin, and a couple hours into Oklahoma! I ended up in Muskogee Oklahoma around 11 PM. And I could have driven longer, but I was only 3 or 4 hours from A's and I didn't want to get there in the middle of the night.
Getting to A's was cool and very relaxing. For a solid week I just hung out. We had some good meals, I napped a lot, I even caught up on some reading. I'd love to give a more detailed retelling of those days but honestly, it was just hanging out with A, his wife, and his two kids.
Speaking of reading, I want to mention a few things about that. I use Kindle to read books now a days. Most of my reading is done on a specific device at home (it's been a Kindle for the longest time but is an Android tablet with an epaper screen for now). For driving though, I use Google Play Books where I buy the Audio book version of whatever I'm currently reading. Right now I'm reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series and was at the end of the second to last book, Song of Susannah. Knowing that I love listening to the books, I bought both that book and the finale, The Dark Tower. The Dark Tower is huge, even for a Stephen King book. The hardcover edition I have has 845 pages. It has a word count of about 275,000. It's audio book version is about 28 hours in length.
I don't know exactly how far I got listening to it on the trip to A's, but during the week I read some of it on my phone every day. By the time I was driving back home, I was over half finished with the book and I'm now three quarters finished.
Lemme tell you, it has been a long LONG time since I've been able to sit back and just read. I almost wish I'd brought my hardcover edition as the smell and feel of the paper makes it even more special as opposed to digital letters on a screen. But it was SO relaxing to just read.
The only thing that happened during that week of relaxation that's worth noting is that I passed my migraine milestone. As a reminder, my migraines have been improving for months now and I'd set a rubicon of sorts to see if I could return to work. I figured I earn a full eight hours of sick time per four weeks of working as a state employee. So if I could go through April and May with only one day per month experiencing a migraine that would prevent work, I could then call my migraine crisis over and actually return to work. I could return to normal. In April I'd had exactly one migraine day that was bad enough to prevent working. And as I left home on May 29th, I hadn't had a single migraine day that month at all.
As I laid my head down to sleep on the night of May 30th, I'd passed my test. Even if I had a migraine bad enough to prevent work the next day, May 31st, it would be the only day left in the month and therefore still pass the test. I ended up not having ANY migraine days in May.
That's where the anticipation began. I guess I have therapy to thank for that. You see, I tend to worry about things. A 'problem' gets in my head and I start to chew on it until I have either a solution or the problem is solved. That's bad when the worry is suicide, as it was late last year so my therapist and I worked on several techniques to help out with that. The biggest one in this instance is to NOT worry all the time but instead worry at a specific time of day. So for the past few months when I started to worry about what returning to work would look like, I'd push those thoughts off until 12:30 the next day. At 12:30, I'd think about it and realize that I didn't need to think or worry about it as I had no urgent need to solve this non problem at that time. I first had to overcome my migraine test and anything else was just vanity. So I pushed it off until the migraine test was done.
Well.... now it was done! And I was on vacation where I couldn't do much about it. So the anticipation began.
Anyway, we learned that E was returning to Austin late on the 5th. Neither he nor A moved forward on plans, so I went ahead and said that A and I would drive down to meet him at his place on the 6th. The day before, E confirmed that he had space for us. A bed, a couch, and room for more. I thought he meant he was going to sleep in his bed, he had a spare bed, and a comfortable sleeping couch. Nope. He had one bed, one lumpy couch, and floor space.
Uh... no. We're all older adults now (I'm over 50, they're both quickly approaching 50) and none of us have any strong desire to spend several nights on an uncomfortable couch, let alone finding a solution for sleeping on the floor. It didn't matter that E was granting us the use of his bed while he took the floor, I made the managerial decision that that wasn't going to work out for anybody. Thankfully E lives right in downtown Austin and is therefore very close to several nice hotels. But booking the hotel, A dropped his bomb. He was happy to stay Friday night and Saturday night, but he wanted to be home Sunday night so that he could have a relaxing day Monday before returning to work.
Sigh.
Our first impression of Austin is that it's very VERY hot. I'm used to Michigan's late May high temps being between the upper 60s and the lower 80s. Dallas was between the upper 70s and the upper 80s. Austin was hovering between the upper 90s and triple digits. And for being so far away from the gulf or any other large body of water, it was annoyingly humid. That was a constant theme all weekend... avoiding outside.
E had some ideas on things we could do, but my hope of him being the tour guide was kind of dashed when I realized he'd only really been there for a few weeks. I mean, his apartment consisted of a desk, a bed, a TV (with no stand), a couch, and a single side table for the couch. He didn't even have seats for his breakfast nook. When he offered us something to drink he had to limit it to water... and then he had to pour it into the filter pitcher before giving us a glass of the room temperature water.
Naturally, a lot of what E had to offer of Austin consisted of food and beverages. Restaurants, bars, clubs, coffee houses. And you know, that's fine. I'd wanted to hit another big steak house since we did that in Vegas so that was planned for Saturday night. Friday we went to a 'Bangers' place.... that's sausages to you and me... that has over 200 different beers on tap. That's where I was introduced to Austin's method of payment. I didn't see a single normal credit card transaction. If you didn't order in an online manner, like we did while sitting in the 'Bangers' restaurant, you paid with a tap of your credit card. No swipes, no chips, just taps. And I rarely saw cash. In fact, when I offered cash for a bottle of water at a convenience store, the cashier looked taken aback.
Anyway, they had a great variety of beer and I ended up with a really great fruity sour. For the sausage, E suggested that since we were all from Michigan and Chicago we should avoid the Kielbasa and Polish sausage and Italian sausage. They were all very good there, but Michigan and Chicago had better. So while perusing the menu I saw a 'Salsa Very Verde' sausage. They mixed in salsa and enough green tomatillos to actually color the sausage green. It was perfectly delicious, even if it was horrendous to look at!
That night we went to... an arcade? It was a weird adult arcade (no, not THAT kind of adult arcade!). You paid a twelve dollar entrance fee that got you free gaming on any games. They sold locally brewed hard ciders and fresh made pizzas for their real profits. The games were classic arcade games like Gauntlet, TNMT Turtles in Time, many varieties of Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Killer Instinct, and Tekken, and all manner of pinball games. It was fun, but it was also very loud.
When we initially got to the hotel I had Tatiana valet parked. I of course used the valet parking feature to lock her out since she's just a big android tablet and the map function alone would have access to ALL of my google map destinations, let alone my raw google accounts. After the Cidercade (seriously, it's the name of the arcade that sold the hard cider!) E mentioned that he had rented an extra parking spot at his apartment building for the month when his parents visited earlier. I could park there for 'free' instead of paying the $55 a night fee at the hotel. So we made plans the next day to take Tatiana out and about and then return her to E's apartment parking instead of the hotel. A and I would just walk the couple blocks back to the hotel without issue.
Our first stop of the day was going to be a great spot for lunch. It was all locally sourced food stuffs. The big problem was that I had a migraine crop up. It wasn't bad, but driving in a big city is a little stressful. A new big city even more stressful. Add in the light sensitivity and headache and yeah... I gave E the keys to Tatiana.
First, it should go without saying that he was very impressed when he saw her. He LOVED the big pilar to pilar screen. He was even more impressed when he sat in the comfy seat and I turned the massage on for him. After a weekend of driving, he admitted she was a great ride and drive with good power and cushy suspension and amazing tech. BUT, a problem cropped up immediately.
One of Tatiana's best features is that she logs into Google maps herself. I don't have to use my phone for navigation. So while we're sitting around and talking about lunch spots, I just hit up the location on my phone and save the location. When we get into Tatiana, I start typing the name of the place on her dash and it automatically comes up as the spot I saved on my phone is automatically in the car. That part worked. What didn't work that day was Tatiana knowing where she was. Her GPS failed. So it had turn by turn directions, but it wasn't following along with where we were on the trip. Two turns into the trip I had to turn Android Auto on just to get the same thing through my phone which was working fine.
I chalked up the issue to the fact that all of our phones were getting spotty coverage. I don't know what cellular network Lincoln uses, but if A's, E's, and my phone were all having trouble, maybe Lincoln was too. Anyway, we got to Lunch which was fine and then went to watch Dogma since it was celebrating it's 25th anniversary with a return to theaters and we are all fans of Kevin Smith.
Afterward we ended up back at the hotel where it was obvious to both A and E that my migraine was getting the worse of me. E suggested I take a nap. I tried to talk them out of it, saying that lately my naps go for three or four hours and we still wanted to hit up the steak house, but he still figured it would be better if I slept and recovered a bit of my mojo.
Yeah, I slept through the night. They tried to wake me up, but they didn't try hard.
The thing that actually pulled me out of sleep in the morning was my glucose alarm. Unsurprisingly after having a full dose of insulin and then missing two meals and not even drinking anything for twelve hours, my glucose was low. I ate some gummy bears, took my morning pills and skipped my insulin for the day and was fine. But Saturday ended up being just the lunch place and Dogma for me while A and E had fun at a Japanese steak house.
Sunday the Migraine was thankfully gone. I still mark it as a migraine day as I had the post migraine headache, but neither Saturday nor Sunday would have been bad enough to prevent work. We started the day with some good diner brunch and then moved on to a hip section of Austin so that A could look at some cowboy boots.
It should be obvious that in Texas they take their cowboy boots seriously. Oh sure, you can get normal run of the mill cow hide leather cowboy boots and nice ones will cost you upwards of $500 to $1000. But when I say they take them seriously, I mean SERIOUSLY seriously. We visited both Tecovas and Allens boots. Both of these locations had rare animal hide boots ranging from snake to crocodile to fish to shark to Ostridge. I saw boots there on the shelf that went for $7000. These aren't custom boots, they're off the shelf pre made boots for seven grand! If you want custom boots where you choose the specific area on the hide, the specific stitching and the specific coloring.... yeah, evidently Tecovas can make you a pair that will EASILY cost upwards of $20,000. FOR BOOTS!
I did see a nice leather duffel bag that I wanted, but it would be replacing the alligator hide bag that E got me years and years ago. The outside of my bag is fine with only normal wear on it. The inside is pretty beat up. This possible leather replacement would be nice, but it wouldn't last like the alligator hide and it probably cost upwards of $750. Nah, I skipped it.
After the boots we went looking for lunch (no, A didn't buy any boots!). A had been looking for Austin specific gifts for his kids, so when I saw a paper and gift shop called Paper Work I stopped us and got us all in there. It ended up being a GREAT find.
First, its all local Austin artists works. From tshirts to posters to post cards to candles to everything under the sun. While A looked around and ended up finding like ten tshirts for his kids, I found a poster that just cracked me up and that I just HAD to have. If I found this at Hot Topic or Spencers Gifts I probably wouldn't have given a second thought, but knowing that it was a local artist and that the proceeds would get to him, I thought it worth the price of the poster and framing:
I just kept cracking up when thinking about it. The artist is DoomsdayLLC and I'd highly suggest you checking out their Etsy store (which I just found when looking for an image of this to share here).
While waiting to get this framed, A and E both kept pointing out great art. And I mean just GREAT art. When E pointed out this Cowboy Beebop poster by Half Human Heart, I couldn't help it and had to add it to my list. I particularly love the fact that Ed just has finger guns as he never used a gun in the show!
The two prints together, framed? $180. Far too expensive, especially since I don't even really have the wall space for them, but I found room on my bedroom walls and love that I supported local Austin artists.
After our great finds at PaperWorks, we had some Korean Texas BBQ (it was meh) and then some coffee and beer and Brew and Brew (that specializes in home brewed beer and coffee).
Sometime between breakfast and buying the art, I decided that I was going to bail on E. The anticipation of getting back to work was beyond maddening. I wanted to get home and to start that process (I'll post the specifics about it later in its own post as it doesn't have anything directly to do with the vacation). So after our coffee/beers A and I set off back to Dallas.
And do you want to know how good my friends are? I haven't seen E for a year. He's going to move to Thailand soon and I might not see him for another two or three years. We had plans to hang out for a few more days and when I told him I was anxious about getting home a few days early, about getting ready to return to work... he not only understood, he was happy for me.
It seriously brings a tear to my eye just typing that. How awesome of a friend is that? To recognize that I need this. I NEED to get back to work and as much as I want to spend time with him, this is one of the only things that I have to sacrifice that time for. He's HAPPY to see me HAPPY.
Anyway, A and I drop E off an his place, we hug it out, and then hit the highway. But Tatiana isn't happy. She still isn't getting a signal for her GPS which makes me use Android Auto and my phone. The highways around Austin are busy, even on a Sunday evening, so it took us a good 45 minutes to get 'outside' of the greater Austin area and it's associated traffic. While driving through that hellscape it occured to me that Blue Cruise wasn't kicking in. And then it hit me that if the GPS wasn't working for Google maps, it wouldn't work for Blue Cruise either, meaning it wouldn't know when it could engage.
DAMN IT!
So I pulled off when it was convenient so that I could so a soft reboot of Tatiana's software. The soft reboot didn't do anything other than show that there was NO data getting in or out of Tatiana. Resetting Google maps that way made it so that it had no idea where it was. It just showed the map of the entire united states and didn't even know we were in Texas.
So fine. No Blue Cruise. But it got worse when we got back on the highway. I noticed that the lane centering wasn't kicking in either. Now, I've had lane centering for years now and driving without it is comparatively tedious. I know, I know, first world problems, but lets not forget that I'm paying a damned fine pretty penny for these features. And then as a last slap to the face, the adaptive cruise (which was thankfully at least handling the gas and braking) wasn't catching the speed limit signs and adjusting to them. Again, it's a first world problem but still a problem.
We got back a little after 11 PM and I was in no mood to work on Tatiana but I had every intent to start my trip home on Monday morning. I figured I'd call up my Lincoln Concierge and see if there was a solution first thing in the morning.
Morning comes and I pack everything up then head out to Tatiana. Before calling the Concierge I decide to look through the settings and notice that there are NO network settings. That's BAD as there should be an entire section of network settings. I couldn't even see if the Wifi was on or off, let alone her cellular modem and/or GPS. Figuring it was a deeper problem than sifting through the menus, I decided to do a reset. First, I did just a network reset as a full factory reset takes 45 minutes to go through all the settings again. The network reset failed and couldn't complete. Not a big surprise there as I couldn't even see the network settings. So, as much as I hated wasting the 45 minutes, my next step was to do a factory reset.
It failed too.
This is bad. It's now not feeling like a software glitch and feeling more and more like a hardware problem. And I'm about to drive 1100 miles home. No no no no no.
The call to the Lincoln Concierge was useless. She said that she couldn't see my car so it had a real network problem and that I'd need to take it in for service. I reminded her that I was on a road trip and nowhere near my dealership. She said that I could use the Lincoln Way app and it would find the nearest Lincoln dealership to me. And that's it. That's all the help I got from the "Lincoln Concierge". And do you know what happened when I used the Lincoln Way app? Surprise surprise, it had no idea where my Lincoln was, so it used its last known location to pull the nearest dealership. Austin.
Thankfully A's wife J works in the insurance industry and is very familiar with the local car dealerships. She not only knows of four local Lincoln dealerships, she knows that the best one to hit is in Frisco which is in the wrong direction for me, but the nearest one in the correct direction has a bad service department. It'd have been nice if say a Concierge could have given me such advice.
Anyway, I got Tatiana into the dealership and they looked at it briefly before noon. The call from the service manager wasn't promising. She said they didn't have their software tech in that day and they wouldn't be able to look at it fully until Tuesday or even Wednesday. She also hinted that it didn't affect the drivability of the car so I could take it back home and have it looked at there. I wasn't too angry as I honestly didn't feel like she was trying to shoo me out of her department, rather she was acknowledging that I was on a road trip and nowhere near home.
I told her that I had some leeway and could delay my departure until Thursday morning at the latest. That if they were unable to get the car fixed by Wednesday afternoon, I'd have to pick it up and just get it looked at when I got home. She got how disappointed I was.
I was pissed the rest of the day.
Tuesday morning came and I got me a cup of coffee, set up my laptop for some email and New York Times games, and said goodbye to A as he went off to work. About an hour later my phone beeped at me. The Lincoln Way app was letting me know that I no longer had access to Tatiana as she was just factory reset. YAY!!!! I saw this as only good news. First, it means that the dealership was working on my car first thing Tuesday morning. Second, it meant they got further than I was able to get. Third, my car was able to send the message to the Lincoln Way app that it had been reset, meaning that its communication was working.
I sent off a quick text to the service manager letting her know what the app told me and asking if that meant good news. I knew it would take her time to get up to speed on what's happening, so I took the chance to jump in the shower and get packed up again. Low and behold a couple hours later and I got a text from the service manager.
It seems that they couldn't get the system to do anything Monday evening while they were working on it (so they WERE able to work on it Monday after all!). So they decided to disconnect the batteries and let it sit overnight. When they got in that morning and hooked it back up, it came up just fine and they were able to do a factory reset to get all the network settings back. After an extensive test, all the features were working and she was ready to be picked up.
I got J to drive me to the dealership and picked Tatiana up. The service manager (I'm sure it's just her title since she looks like she might still be in high school!) and I chatted a bit, wondering just how much of a computer the car now is. I mean... basically she just needed to be hard reset. Like unplugging a computer or pulling the battery from an older phone. Except... it's a car. How often might this happen? Sure, now I have another tool in my belt that I can try before bringing it in for service... but then again, I might NOT have that particular tool.
You see, if Tatiana was a normal SUV I could pop the hood, unhook the terminals from the battery and do a hard reset. But Tatiana isn't a normal SUV. She's a hybrid with a huge hybrid battery that would also need to be disconnected. I know the Lincoln dealership did that as everything had been taken out and put back into the back of Tatiana. I'm going to have to look into exactly what all that entails but just from what I've heard on the Lincoln owners forum, where I was discussing all of this in real time, it evidently includes emptying the back area, pulling the carpet and trays out, pulling the spare tire and it's tray out, pulling out the metal floor and it's six or nine bolts, pulling back an underlayment that protects the battery connections from shorting out, and then pulling back several pieces of trim to get the wrench room to disconnect the battery. And I'm not sure if this is a high voltage connection which would require special tools and gloves to be 100% safe. All just to do a fancy 'Control Alt Delete' on my car.
Anyway, the dealership experience was fine. I'm glad she forewarned me that it could have taken longer as I was prepared to get her Wednesday in an unfixed state, so picking her up Tuesday morning in perfect working order was pleasant as opposed as a day's wait. They even washed and vacuumed Tatiana while she was in the shop! She wasn't all that dirty at that point as I'd washed her when I got to A's, but she'd still sat all week and driven to and from Austin and now looked all sparkly and clean.
I took the 45 minutes to go through all the settings. The only things I haven't set up are my local wifi network (I need to do that now that I'm home) and set up my FM favorite stations. And to be honest, that's more for someone else's use as I rarely use the radio myself.
Once Tatiana was ready, I texted out my goodbyes and got on the road at 1:00 PM. It was a much later start to the day than I wanted, but I knew it would still be a relaxing drive as the Blue Cruise would take care of most of it. By the time 10 PM rolled around I was an hour west of St. Louis. A normal driving day in this direction would get me mid way into Illinois, but I'd just started too late. BUT, I was also still fully relaxed. I wasn't hungry or fatigued or tired in any way. So I sent out the texts to everyone, letting them know I was going to stay on the road until I got tired and then drove on.
At 3:00 AM I finally felt my eyes droop. I pulled off at the next hotel sign, a Drurry Inn in Terre Haute Indiana. I was only 5 hours from home and closer than I'd ever gotten, even with the late start. I learned my lesson the next day, however, when I woke up at 7:00 AM. Yeah, 4 hours of sleep makes the next day SUCK. It was a sleepy five hour drive home. An easy five hours, but still a sleepy five hours. In the future I'll have to remember that even though I'm still relaxed, I'll need to pull off the road at a reasonable time to get good sleep. Say 11 PM or midnight. Not 3 AM!
Anyway, that was my vacation. Tatiana is great. Better than I had hoped for (and I had high hopes for her!). Seeing A and his family for a week was incredibly relaxing and a great change of pace. Seeing A and E together was great even if it was cut short. And even the problem that came up with Tatiana was easily fixed and ended up costing me just over a day (that's WAY better than the two days I was stranded on the side of the road in Memphis!).
I'll go ahead and post this, take a break, and then write up how my Job search is going. I guess that'd be the Anti-Vacation post!
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