Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Texas Trip log #4
Residence Inn · Wed, 12 Nov 2025. 5:10pm.

I've been in Austin all day, since late last night actually, and I'm not yet to the point where it even matters that I'm here in Austin. I spend the day today working remotely from my hotel room.



Yup, that desk by the window is where I've put in about 7 hours so far, including 4 customer-facing meetings.

Thankfully I haven't just been sitting here all day. I did go out for lunch. But after that it was back to work.

Now it's just after 5pm and I'm feeling cooked. That wouldn't be a problem if it were quitting time... but I've got a customer dinner to go to next! I'll need to wake up and be "on" for the next couple hours.

With plumbers expected to arrive today to fix our broken toilet— yes, that link is from almost 8 weeks ago; that's how long it's taken then to get around to the work 😡— I've moved my home office setup down to a folding table in the living room.



I do this temporary office relocation a few times a year. Most years I do it for a week or two in the summer when it gets really hot up on the third floor, where my real home office is located. This year the summer wasn't that hot, though I did choose to relocate briefly in May when the neighbors were having noisy renovations done. It's nice that modern technology— laptop computers and LED external monitors— makes it easy to grab and go. From the time I unplugged upstairs until I was set up and powered-on downstairs was 5 minutes.

It's not a bad setup, aside from the fact the folding card table is a bit wobbly. (A few years ago Hawk would let me borrow her craft desk when I needed a week's relocation, but now it's too full of... craft.) It's nice being able to open the curtains on the sliding glass door to enjoy the view of the garden outside. This morning a pair of humming birds are flitting around the trees. It's also nice to open the door for fresh air in the morning, though this morning it's just a tad too cool to enjoy it.

It's been getting warm this week. Not hot, per se, as this whole summer so far has been cool out here in the SF Bay Area, but comparatively it is. Today was 88°, which is a whole 7° above average! Wednesday was warm, too, though Thursday in between barely beat the average at 82. So Wednesday and today I took a break in the pool in the afternoon.



My work schedule tends to clear after 2:30pm most days. It's a combination of people in time zones to the east of us finishing their workdays and people in this timezone avoiding scheduling meetings because they have pick-up-the-kids-from-school type responsibilities. Some days I feel tired out and use this mid afternoon respite as a siesta. On warm days like Wednesday and today I decided instead to turn it into a pool fiesta!

Taking a break for the pool doesn't mean I'm slacking at work. It's been a busy week, starting with a bungee trip to Phoenix on Monday and days packed with meetings from my home office since then.

Moreover, just because I go for a dip in the pool doesn't even mean I'm done for the day. Both Wednesday and today I got back to my desk around 4pm and still had work to do. Today I even had a customer meeting at 4:30pm. It was the customer's idea. Who TF wants to have a meeting at the end of the day on a Friday? "Tell me," I wanted to ask at the start of the call, "How long have you hated your family?" 🤣

Last week our Nissan Xterra passed 130,000 miles. It was on the last of several days we spent in Oregon, just after we finished hiking at Smith Rock State Park.



Unlike some other times we've passed a big milestone with a car I didn't pull over to take pictures. On the narrow country lane we were driving at the time there wasn't room. Thus I settled for taking a few quick pictures from behind the wheel.



Speaking of other milestones, I don't think I've posted one of these "Milestone xxx,xxx" blog entries since we hit the 100,000 mile mark with this car. And that was nearly five years ago.

Part of the reason it's been five years between posting about milestones is that it took five years to add these 30,000 miles. We don't drive this car as much as we used to. I mean, not that this car really ever saw us packing the miles on, though there was a period of about a year when I used it for a 75 mile/day commute. That packed on the miles. But 30k in the past 5 years is an average of just 6,000 miles/year. That's less half the US average of 12-15k/year.

Why is our mileage so low? Well, it's not from avoiding long car trips. 😅 We drove 1,762 miles in 6 days on this Oregon trip. In fact big trips like this, plus medium trips where we drive 400-500 miles in a couple of days, like the Spring trip we did to the Sierra foothills in March, account for at least half of the mileage overall nowadays. Short trips around town most days of the week are the other half. What's not part of the mileage is commuting to work. That's because I've worked remotely for several years.

This car, a 2011 model, is now nearly 14 years old. We occasionally wish it had some more modern features, like Apple CarPlay, though we bought an inexpensive BlueTooth adapter for it that makes it only slightly fussy to play our tunes from our phones. We're in no rush to have a car payment again. We can imagine keeping this car for a few more years.... or until it requires a costly repair. Yes, sadly, this Nissan has needed a few $1,000+ repairs plus one $2k repair several years ago that actually cost more like $4k when including the towing costs (the car died in a remote small town) and travel costs (we were 1,000 miles from home). Thankfully our most recent spot of car trouble only cost us $150.

I had a 6:30am meeting today. For sure that's not my favorite time of day to meet, but it was with a major customer who we're trying to close a big deal with this year, and it was a compromise on time zones and availability. Especially after being up late last night it was rough getting up at 5:30am. Then I saw the meeting was canceled.

The "sorry, something came up" message was sent at 5:30am. I didn't see it until closer to 6, after I'd showered, dressed, and first took a peek at my email. By then it was too late to go back to bed in hopes of catching another 45 minutes of shut-eye. Even if I'd seen the message right when it was sent, it was already too late.

Needless to say, I hate it when before-normal-hours meetings get canceled at the last moment like this. I accept the need to handle occasional out-of-hours meetings as a necessary part of the 21st century work environment, where employers have hired staff scattered all over the world to save money. But I wish said staff would should more consideration for the situation we're in.

Yesterday the hammering and grinding started. Whump-whump-whump against the wall from next door. Then GrrrrRRRRrrrrrRRRRrrrRRRR. The both, with the grinding wailing away while the whump-ing kept the beat. Our neighbors are having their windows replaced, and workers were grinding through the stucco.

At first I just toughed through noise while working from home as it was mostly coming from the other side of the house. But then it moved to the side where my home-office is, echoing through a wall less than 10' from my desk. I grabbed my computer and moved to another room.

This morning the grinding and thumping started back up around 8:30am so I decided to move workstation temporarily. I moved to the corner of the living room, downstairs and to the other side of the house.



I've set up down here a few times in the past. It's kind of my "Summer Home... office" 😂, a place I retreat to occasionally when a summer heat wave makes the 3rd floor too hot during the day.. Last time I did it was a bit more fancy, with my spouse clearing off her crafting desk so I could set up my desk there. This time, because I only expect to be here for a day or two, I left her desk alone and simply set up my stuff atop a card table I hauled out of the garage.

One nice thing about this temporary setup is having the sliding glass door that opens onto our back patio there. I left the curtains closed this morning as the sun was shining in too strongly, but it's nice to open them for natural light after 11-noon or so when the sun rotates around the side of the house.

Speaking off 11-noon or so, when I went out for lunch today I spotted the workers climbing down off their ladders between tasks.



I chatted with them about the job being done. I mentioned the noise was disruptive but emphasized I wasn't asking them to stop; just to let me know what their schedule was. "Oh, we're done with the hammering," they assured me. "We just finished!'

So my temporary relocation may be very temporary. I could have moved back within an hour! 🤣 But I think I'll keep my temporary desk set up a bit longer, to enjoy the change of scenery. Already a few of my colleagues have remarked on seeing the different scene behind me on videoconferences. In addition to having the different scene myself, it's nice to be noticed.

Earlier this week I wrote Five Years of the Coronavirus Pandemic about what has and hasn't changed over the 5 years since Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic. I intended it to be a gentle reminiscing about how things have evolved. It turned, though, into a more strident criticism of the politically motivated denialism that reached fever pitch about the pandemic and then spread to other aspects of reality. So, how about those gentler musings? I'll cover there here in a part 2. Here are Five Things that have or haven't changed since the pandemic:

1. Remote Work. Working remotely was a reality for me for years before the pandemic. The crisis of the pandemic made it a reality for a lot more people. As business leaders praised how effective it was many of us thought it would become the new normal. Many leaders have subsequently yanked us back to the past with Return to Office (RTO) mandates. I've remarked before that there's absolutely value in teams being together in an office with low barriers to communication... but the reality of the business world independent of the pandemic is that companies have offshored or distributed so many jobs, especially in technology, that it makes only limited sense for people to sit in an office while still having to use phones, email, chat, and video to communicate with colleagues.

2. Prices. It didn't happen early in the pandemic, but at the impacts of supply chain disruptions, government stimulus, and changes in habits hit, inflation hit. Significant inflation hit. Monthly price changes came an annualized rates upwards of 10% at certain points. But while the overall full-year consumer price index never really rose about 5%, certain sectors saw way more inflation. For example, I've seen the prices of a wide variety of groceries increase by 50% - 100% over the past 5 years.

3. Eating at Home. Eating at home suddenly became a necessity when restaurants closed in March 2020. I'd made that shift a few days ahead of the shutdown. It was a big change for me as I was accustomed to eating nearly all lunches and dinners at restaurants. I made a knife edge transition from dining out 13 times a week to 0. As risks eased I added back dining out— or at least ordering take-out— at once a week, then twice, then more. I've gradually ramped up to dining out about 9 times a week now; but that's still down from 13 pre-pandemic.

4. Tipping is out of Control. Tipping standards increased during the pandemic. As people realized restaurants and take-out food were "essential infrastructure" even though food service workers are among the lowest paid people in our economy, people wanted a way to say, "Thank you for risking your life so I can buy this burrito." Tipping standards increased, and "Add a tip" interfaces appeared on payment kiosks where they hadn't been seen before. The sense of gratitude has lessened along with the risks of dying for a burrito, but the prompts on payment kiosks have not. In fact, kiosks prompting for tips have only continued to spread— including in silly places like self-service checkouts at grocery stores. There's now a widening backlash against expectations of tipping getting out of control.

5. Less Socializing. One of the most enduring social changes from the pandemic is that we all socialize less. Safety closures not only got us out of the habit of "third spaces"— places like coffee shops and bars where we can casually see & be seen outside of work/school and home— but also greatly reduced the second space, too, as work/school became remote much of the time. People got accustomed to living most of their lives from their bedrooms and sofas. Having gotten out of the habit of meeting people face to face— including spending the time and effort of going out to meet people face to face— it's hard to get back into it. And it's to our detriment as we humans are fundamentally social creatures. Depression is up, satisfaction with life is down, and record numbers of people report feeling isolated.

PA Anniversary Trip Journal #3
Camp Hill, PA - Fri, 8 Nov 2024, 9:30am

Finally we got to my inlaws' house last night. I say finally because here I am, at journal number three (maybe technically number 4) in this series, and this is the first one in which I'm actually here.

The drive up from Arlington, VA went smoothly. We hit the road in earnest after an unexpected anniversary dinner of our own. The upside of stopping for dinner when we did is that rush hour traffic cleared out. By 8pm there was one minor slowdown on the Capital Beltway. We covered about 120 miles in 2 hours of driving. With a stop along the way for drinks and snacks (as if dinner wasn't enough!) we got in around 10:20pm.

It's been nearly a year since we saw Hawk's parents so we had a lot to catch up on. We didn't get to bed until 1:30am! Staying up late was little problem for us as we started the day 3 time zones away. And it was little problem for the parents as they routinely stay up past midnight anyway. That's something that always surprises me because it's so different from my own parents years ago. When I was younger, it always took planning if I wanted to call them at 11pm, when long distance rates were cheaper. (That's another memory lane trip— who else remembers waiting until 11pm to call people when the rates dropped?) Now if Hawk and I are discussing something at 9:30pm in California and we agree, "Let's check with your parents," she just calls them, at 12:30am their time. They're still up.

Well, maybe Hawk's mom doesn't sleep much anymore, but I still need my rest. As a result of staying up past 1:30 I swatted off my 6:45am alarm and then slept in until 9:30. That was unfortunate as today's actually a work day for me. I'm working remotely from a desk upstairs in "our" bedroom. At least for the 9am hour here, 6am Pacific, I'd only planned to work on some reports that aren't due until next week. I can finish them up over the weekend. For the rest of today I've got several hours of meetings. At 6pm local I'll be done and I'll head downstairs to meet various other relatives are flying & driving in, some from overseas, to help my inlaws celebrate their 60th anniversary.

A few weeks ago Amazon changed the game in remote work. It announced that, effective 1 Jan 2025, all workers would have to report to the office 5 days a week. It's a major change from the company's previous 3-day-a-week RTO policy. Employees are unsurprisingly unhappy about it. Various surveys show they gave it a satisfaction rating of 1.3 on a 1-5 scale (1 being the lowest) and that 73% are considering quitting to work elsewhere.

Elsewhere may be a dwindling choice, though. When a major company with enormous cachet like Amazon makes a move like this, others will follow— others not just in the technology industry but across all industries. Indeed, Dell made a similar change for at least some of its employees already. After a 3-day-a-week policy announced months ago, Dell upped it to 5 days a week for its sales staff two weeks after Amazon's announcement.

Some leaders couch this change in terms of "Back to normal", like they're simply undoing the unique adaptions we were all forced to make during the urgent conditions of the Coronavirus pandemic. But the pandemic didn't create remote work; it merely increased the number of people who performed it. 5-day-a-week RTO is not just going back to how things were in 2019, it's actually a regression back many, many years.

It was fun last week going out to the pool every afternoon for several days in a row. We did it not just over the semi-4-day weekend for the Fourth but the few days before that as well. I even created a new tag, pool life, to mark it.

Well, I fell off the #PoolLife bandwagon on Monday. I didn't feel like going out, and the weather was kind of cool anyway. And by "cool" I mean that it was only 80° late afternoon. 🤣 But Tuesday I decided that merely warm weather instead of hot weather should not stop me from enjoying summer afternoons at the pool.



Thus on Tuesday I took advantage when I finished my work for the day a bit after 3:30pm. The heat of the day had already broken by then. It felt like the temperature had already dropped into the 70s. I was worried that pool would feel cold. It's heated to 83°, which can feel cold when the air isn't warm enough. When I walked into the pool, though, I found the water pleasantly warm. It took no longer than a few seconds to acclimate. Thanks to last week's heat wave, I presume, the water thermometer was still registering 85°. After exercising in the water for 15 minutes, floating around for another 15, then soaking in the hot tub for 15, I spent another 15-20 enjoying the shade poolside while reading news and catching up on late-day work email on my phone.

Today (Wednesday) was another point for my #PoolLife streak. I went out after tying up work around 4:15pm and stayed until almost 6. It was warmer today than yesterday, so it was even more fun being out. My work wasn't fully tied up before leaving, though, so I answered a couple of Slack messages while I was drying off after my swimming and soaking. It's one of the great parts of working remotely that it's not just a flexible schedule but also working from anywhere— including from a poolside lounge chair!