Home sweet home

It is evermore good to be home. My Las Vegas trip was a disaster for me. I had a combination sinus infection, common cold and bad attitude. Oh, how I didn't want to be there.

I thought at least the dry desert climate would make me feel better but alas it rained off and on and was in the 40's. Cold rain doesn't clear the head. An odd combination of ibuprofen and Day-Quil got me through, along with probably 500 pounds of Kleenex. Nothing much helped the bad attitude except coming home.

Sitting in meetings hour after hour is draining. The lack of activity and the buffet lunches disrupted my feeble attempt to eat well. The worst thing was an incredible lack of coffee.
The hotel didn't see wasting money on in-room coffee makers like most business-oriented hotels offer. Of course this was a resort with a casino, not a Holiday Inn Express. They had a Starbucks counter that opens at six, but I get up at five and like coffee first thing--not an elevator ride and long walk down the hall away. I am still trying to get back to normal.

And of course there is something ironic about listening to a briefing on master labor agreements for employees who haven't had a raise in five years while sitting in a meeting room of a hotel charging a hundred bucks a night to ninety or so people. I know the hundred large this event cost the company wouldn't fund much for hourly wage increases, but they could have bought every single employee a steak dinner or new winter jacket. That would have been money better spent in my humble opinion. Everything else could have been put in a letter.

The whole Vegas thing didn't make sense. They ran the meetings so late that the hotel shuttle over to the strip closed down before anyone could make good use of it and not that many gambled anyway. And for a lot of us, Las Vegas is a two-segment ride on an airplane which burns more time on either end than a meeting held in a hub like Dallas, Atlanta or Denver.

There is a lot I don't understand in life and they're coming out with more all the time so I can't dwell on this very long. But that was four days of my life I won't get back. Maybe that was what caused the bad attitude.