The Trip Continues On (Days 4-6)
Monday, December 31st, 2007
New Year's Eve had arrived. I was in my room the previous night alone, and set my alarm for 7:50 to be sure I would wake up on time for the meeting at 9. I took my shower and got dressed and then headed down to get my breakfast, a bowl of corn flakes. When I got there I saw Oldiesmann. When I sat down, juggling my laptop in its case and my bowl of cereal and cup of orange juice, I spilled some of the milk from my cereal on my pants! I went upstairs to get a change of pants and stayed up there for a little while as there weren't many people in the conference room yet due to me being early. As was becoming common, some team members stopped by my room, my room had become a little bit of a hangout area for me, JayBachatero, rickC, and jerm and others.
We had another meeting that was again, I felt, rather productive. Following the meeting the team went to the Kartchner Caverns and I was really excited! I don't really recall going to any real cave in my life. The drive to there wasn't too short and it was fun talking with some of the members up there. I progressively was getting much and much more comfortable with the team members. I exchanged some stupid jokes with pmp6nl during the ride. When we arrived to the state park of Kartchner Caverns, we first had a brown bag lunch of tamales. It was the first time I've had them and I didn't think they were all that bad. We waited around a bit and then split up into two separate tours, we would be going on two tours of the caverns during the trip, one called the Rotunda, and the other called the Big Room. The first one my group went through was the Rotunda. We traveled up in a long cart, and even that was pretty neat because of the beautiful view of the mountains and other sights around us. As we entered the caverns, it was, as we were warned, extremely humid. We had a really good tour guide, and immediately when I started to see what was inside I became rather excited.
What sights there were! It really is an amazing sight to see all the things the inner depths of a cave have to offer, it just has a magical little touch that nothing outside of it seems all that similar to.
Monday, January 1st, 2008
So the first day of a new year had begun, a new year of my life had just arrived, and it was exciting to be where I was to start off a fresh year. I grew more homesick around this time however, and started to miss my family more and more. When I woke up, it was around 10, as we were allowed to sleep in later than usual. I took my shower and shortly later, rickC came with a breakfast from Carl's Jr for me, which was rather nice of him I thought. Although later we ended up going to a breakfast restaurant, but because of the time it served more as brunch for most of the members anyway. I got an all you can eat buffet and took quite a lot of food. Bacon, scrambled eggs, a croissant, you name it. I sat next to Gazmanafc and we talked for awhile. While in the restaurant jerm talked about the support on SMF, and what direction he would like that to head.
Later on as we got back to our hotel and we did our TalkShoe show. We immediately ran into problems connecting our computers from the same place all at once and eventually just ended up passing a phone around to most of the members who talked on the show. The show admittedly did not go as well as we would have liked and I couldn't really hear what people on the other end were saying when they called in. I participated once in the discussion talking about some of the new things I liked in SMF 2.0 but I wasn't really prepared and was confused and distracted about what was going on around me so I stumbled a bit and stated only a few "big" features that are going to be in the software like post moderation, and the moderation center.
Sometime after our TalkShow meeting, we held a regular meeting, our last real official one and it was my turn to talk, being the representative for documentation and with a small team I was expected to talk and didn't want to disappoint the team, so I tried to bring up important issues and thoughts. I had my agenda for my little speech prepared on a little piece of paper and I think I did an okay job presenting it, I didn't really get nervous at all, and probably just a year ago I would have broken down in sweats doing something similar to what I just did. The team brought up some important things as well and one thing was brought up that I had forgotten to mention but was a rather important topic.
Later on that night we went out to get Italian for dinner. What I got was quite good! I ordered a plate of ziti. I often cook homemade ziti back at home, so I rather liked it. Again we had some nice communication at the table, throwing in some laughs along the way. When we got back to the hotel, several of us hung out in the same room again and we set up one of our team member's Wii gaming console and had a lot of fun playing Wii Sports. I did horrible in the bowling game, won in the baseball game 1-0 and didn't do too great on the golf one but didn't end up doing so bad in ranking.
Later that night I switched rooms with another team member so that two of our members who had to fly out early the next morning would be able to share the same room. I got to room with jerm. I thought jerm was cool though and we talked about some random stuff and joked around a bit before we both went to bed. On the TV was some show about some man who weighed more than 1000 lbs, but I wasn't really watching it myself. Right before I went to bed I thought about my family and how much I missed them. While I was having a great time, I was definitely looking forward to seeing them again.
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2008
Today was the day we had to leave our hotel. We were heading out to the Grand Canyon, a long 6 hour drive would await us. When I woke up I took my shower and finished packing my luggage. It took us awhile for the rest of the team to all get together, but eventually we did and we all left. Part of the time waiting, jerm turned on the TV and we watched some of an episode of Saved by the Bell, those who watched some of it laughed at all the stupid stuff that was on the show. When it was finally time to leave, somehow we managed to squeeze our luggage into the back of our van, and of course there was quite a lot!
We went out to a place to eat that served breakfast and lunch and it kind of reminded me of the place we went to yesterday. I ordered a plate that had a mix of scrambled eggs, home fries, cheese, and some other ingredients. It was rather good, and I was fairly hungry at the time. Not unlike the other times we ate, we had some nice discussion about various things. At one point we stopped by a small gas station store and a few of our team members decided to buy themselves 52 oz drinks that had all kinds of weird smoothie flavors. I wasn't very interested in having one at the moment, but I admit with all the colorful flavors it had to offer, it did seem fairly appealing!
I don't know how they did it, but appeared that most of them managed to drink all of the drink too!The drive felt rather, and I was fairly tired through much of it. The AC sort of blew into my eyes and made me really want to close them. I did every so often, as did some other members. JayBachatero was sitting in front of me, and when he looked back we both kept making funny looks at each other (think of winks and nods and you get a good idea of what it was like). Closer to the Grand Canyons, JayBachatero pulled out his PSP, and he, jerm, pmp6nl and I played some home run derby on a baseball video game he brought. Eventually we reached our hotel, it had become too dark to view the Grand Canyon at the time. We entered the hotel and I was roomed with JayBachatero. We had some nachos and tacos for dinner in one of the rooms and the rest of the time we sort of did our own things, either alone by ourself, or with a group of some of us. I spent some time in a few various rooms of team members, but then did get to my own room, where I wrote much of this blog right here. Not too much else happened, JayBachatero came to the room, and we talked for a little while. The internet was working really poorly and it was real hard to access any page online. I was really excited about going down to see the Grand Canyon in person. The experience I am sure will be simply amazing and naturally I have heard good things about the Grand Canyon from various people. For the first time in the whole trip, I went to bed at a fairly reasonable hour to help catch up on sleep that I really needed.
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