Home Sweet Home!

This is becoming a recurring theme in this blog. I'm home!!!

Yesterday was a long one! The foundations started Thursday after work. One of my students took me out onto the town after our day of teaching. I had just wrapped up the last formal day of training, and within ten minutes of the intended time. So a weight felt as though it had been lifted. I'd delivered all the training material, and while there were glitches and bugs and flaws and problems throughout, it was done.

So when offered a third and final look at Stockholm (the centre of) I simply said," I'm buying the first round!"

And thus we ended up sharing 4 rounds in four different (and all excellent) places in the city. From a crowded cafe bathed in warm sun and cold breezes, to an incredible lookout over the city from an ancient fortified hill, on to places with the most trendy and beautiful; it was a great tour!

But it left me back at the hotel in the mood to blog and email, but not pack. This meant that Friday morning started with a slightly dry mouth and a hotel room full of stuff to pack. I raced around, skipped breakfast, checked out, and made it to the office only a bit late.

Our Friday went well. We had a list of problems from the previous days, and on Friday we played with updates, configurations, etc. and got all three students' computers working to the same standards. A series of successes all day long. Engineering, rather than teaching.

There wasn't a rush to the airport. I had plenty of time and took the train. Nice. Alas, I got there and checked my ticket. I wasn't leaving at 8pm. I was leaving at 8:40. Even after a rather long wait in the check-in I still had two hours and it turns out Gate 11 was the first gate on the other side of security. Dinner, a beer, a lot of reading. The bar tenders at the airport kept practicing their bottle throwing techniques. One was learning, the other a zen glass-throwing master. He would do things like grab a glass with his right hand, throw it in the air behind his back, catch it with the left hand then pour from a bottle which has just done a triple back-flip on it's way into his free hand.

All airport "excitement" aside, flights are never exciting. Mine started with a 20 minute delay (while we sat in the plane) and a cabin seemingly filled with infants. But the flight went quickly, the children didn't scream, and in spite of the fact that the guy beside me was Dutch, he didn't keep fighting to control the armrest.

So it was not so bad. I entered Schiphol like a zombie, but it already felt good to be "home". A train and cab from there got me in late... around 1am. But I was home, and slept like a rock. Nice nice nice!

I'm sorry I don't really have an end to this story. I woke up and started blogging right away. And that brings me to here. No ending at all, but a pretty decent present.