Teleidoscope

I will also be notifying the [name]-Federal Credit Union that they are a party to
a fraudulent transaction.

The credit union is in Florida, RCI is headquartered in Indiana, the corporate headquarters of VRG, the brokerage that sold me the timeshare, is in Illinois, and I am in Colorado. Even if the bank transaction wouldn't qualify as interstate wire fraud (which I suspect it might) the diversity of jurisdictions should qualify this as a federal case.

I just received a call from the corporate office promising to straighten out the problem and offering compensation for the delay. It remains to be seen whether they actually get it fixed, but the woman I spoke to seemed quite motivated to avoid involvement by attorneys. So I am cautiously optimistic.

I suspect the response might have been less prompt if I had only talked about small claims court... and if the Indiana Attorney General weren't on a crusade against timeshare scams.

I still need to set up an appointment with a lawyer: my will is outdated, and these aren't the only bozos I've had to deal with recently.

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Thu, Jan 31, 2008

Restaurants

Posted at 6:47 pm MST to Travel

I don't eat take-out food when I'm at home, and I rarely eat at restaurants. I think that in the past year, other than when I have been travelling, I have eaten take-out 4 or 5 times at user group meetings and other meetings at the office, and probaby about the same in sit-down restaurants: just a few special occasions. Let's see, there was a dinner with Nanette at an Indian place before a concert, and my birthday dinner, a dinner with my friend David at a German restaurant, and a couple of lunches with Nanette, one at a Mexivan place near her office and one at Casa Alvarez. I may be forgetting one meal, but probably not two.

The Farmers' Market is a special case: the food from the food court there is not standard restaurant food, and it mostly comes in reasonable portions. And I think spending hours on my feet and working (especially during squash season) pretty well balances those calories.

When I'm travelling and living in hotels, my eating patterns are very different from when I am at home. Living in corporate housing in 2005 was another pattern: I ate lunches from my customer's cafeteria (mmm, noodle bowls on Tuesdays and Thursdays) and cooked my own dinners. This actually worked out pretty well: my weight stayed pretty stable. I think the lunches I had been packing in previous corp housing episodes contributed to the weight gain in those years.

I have two or three problems with restaurant food. One big problem is portion size: I was raised strictly to clean my plate, and that is a habit which is very had to break. Restaurant portions in this country are not human-sized. Village-sized, maybe.

Aside from the calories involved, I've noticed that one of the times I'm at risk for swallowing problems is at the end of a meal, when I am getting full, which gives me some incentive for portion control.

Subway sandwich places are good: their food is in reasonable portions and not all fried, and you can control the ingredients. Applebee's WeightWatcher's menu also has human-sized portions and at least a little variety.

Another minor problem with restaurants is that they are really not intended for solitary eaters. Restaurant meals are really very boring when you are alone. And my budget (and expense accounts) don't usually run to the kind of restaurants where the food can be the total focus of attention. Subway and Applebee's both have take-out options so I can eat in my hotel room with the TV on. Wrap-and-smoothie places are good for that, too.

But one of my biggest problems with restaurants is finding things to eat. That sounds weird, but I have a strange mix of food sensitivities, even aside from the swallowing problems that make me a little paranoid about eating in public. (Big chunks of red meat, like steaks, are pretty hopeless unless I want to spend my meal time in the ladies' room trying to unlock my esophagus).

I don't drink milk by itself, and I need to watch my total dairy intake or pay the price, but except for selecting desserts -- and avoiding really rich cream sauces -- the dairy thing isn't a big problem in restaurants.

My youngest brother wasn't so lucky. He had duodenal ulcers as a child and learned to live on huge amounts of dairy (which is what they prescribed in those days). Then in college he ended up in the emergency room because his ability to process lactose shut down. He thought the initial discomfort was the ulcer kicking up and increased his dairy intake, which turned out to be the wrong thing to do.

So... limited dairy other than aged cheese and yogurt, and, for most purposes, no French cheeses. French cuisine is pretty much out for me.

I suspect I'm actually sensitive to a break-down product, which why the fresh peanuts used to be less of a problem. I've avoided even the fresh peanuts for the past 10 years or so: I started getting the tongue-swelling thing from some of them. I eat cashews and pistachios instead (very reasonably priced at Costco).

The peanut problem is one reason I avoid fried fast food: I once got the tongue-swelling thing from some fried food at a mall food-court, and I suspect it was due to breakdown products in the peanut oil they were using for frying. Either that or they were being all trendy and using cold-pressed oil or something.

So: paranoid about restaurant fried foods and I've never acquired a taste for Vietnamese cuisine (the rule of thumb for Vietnamese dishes seems to be: when in doubt, add peanuts). I'm carefull about Chinese food too: I've never challenged the allergy enough for the small amounts of peanut oil used in stir-frying to be really dangerous, but I don't order anything where the menu mentions peanuts.

Then, on a business trip, I got hot sandwich with some lettuce in it at a Subway and then got stuck on a phone call in my hotel room so the sandwich got cold before I could eat it. I nuked the sandwich in the room's microwave, cooking the lettuce. That was the first sandwich I'd had in years that didn't give me heartburn.

Since then, I have been avoiding lettuce. I've been doing it much more carefully as my swallowing problems progressed: the irritation of lettuce in my esophageal lining seems to make swallowing problems more likely later in the meal.

I haven't quite figured out whether it is a sensitivity to raw lettuce, or to raw greens in general. Lettuce is about the only green where raw is usually the only option. I don't eat raw greens. And even cooked, I prefer chard to spinach, but I think that is a different problem (see below).

It's a little ironic that lettuce is one of our major products at the farmers' market.m People ask me how the lettuce is, and I can't answer.

Eating at Mexican restaurants (especially cheaper meals) without eating lettuce can be ... odd. But both Mexican and Greek places will leave out the lettuce they use as filler if you ask.

Bitter anything mostly sends me in the opposite direction. And I have to admit, even after all of my years in Colorado and selling chillies at the farmer's market, I still lean to the gringo end of the Mexican food spectrum.

I also seem to be one of the people who genetically find cilantro to taste like soap

In any case, when I eat out, even aside from finding food in sane quantities, it can be a challenge to find food that tastes good and is safe for me to eat. On the other hand, aside from the fact that I tend to live on bread, fruit and cheese, my preferred diet is fairly healthy.

Actually, based on my experience with the lettuce, I should probably get tested for food sensitivities. There may be something else unexpected that is setting off some of the swallowing problems. I have some suspicions about wheat bran... or maybe it's a breakdown product in the whole wheat flour. I should try keeping it in the fridge as is often recommended.

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Wed, Dec 19, 2007

Good News, Bad News

Posted at 7:28 pm MST to Travel

The bad news is that my client will not be sending me all over the world. (I suspect somebody calculated what the travel expenses would add up to.)

The good news is that they have signed up for a 6-month contract beginning mid-January, and I will mostly be working from my living room couch again.

International travel would have been nice, but I wasn't looking forward to spending a ot of time in airports and on airplanes.

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Tue, Oct 30, 2007

World Business

Posted at 9:55 pm MDT to Travel

My current customer is talking about a follow-on project to integrate a lot of their subsidiaries into their standard methods and procedures. This will involve analyzing and mentoring their remote sites in Europe and the Pacific Rim, and may include putting me on-site for a week or two in various places.

Places on the Pacific Rim like Australia, Hong Kong, Bei Jing. Possibly Japan.

Places in Europe like London and Moscow and Ireland. And Belgium... or is it France.

This could be an exciting year. Much better than getting stuck in Boston or wherever for 6 months.

I'll need to shop for new business clothes. Yuck. And shoes.

And probably immunizations. (That reminds me, I haven't had my flu shot yet this year.)

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Sun, Oct 28, 2007

MileHiCon 39

Posted at 7:56 pm MDT to Travel

The convention was a lot of fun. I spent two days away from computers, ate some very good food, and saw people I hadn't seen in years (because I only ever saw them at cons).

I bought some books, all by authors who were at the convention, so they are autographed. I got a free book too: A hard-cover copy of Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber (the guest of honor) was given to each attendee... but I didn't get that one autographed because it was too big and clunky to carry around.

Some of the books I bought were from very small presses/POD publishers. There was a meet-and-greet Friday evening with about 30 writers, some of whom were selling their books directly. I bought a few books then, and others in the dealers' room. I will review the small press books here as I read them, to put more mentions of them onto the internet.

Besides the books, I bought a couple of T-shirts by artists I like, and two sessions of chair-massage. My left arm and shoulder feel better than they have in ages. I really need to schedule a session with my regular massage therapist. I need to start doing yoga stretches again, too, to help keep things unlocked. My range of motion sucks, these days.

I spent a lot of time in the anime room, with Mike Odell and Barb Edmunds, one of the people who first got me hooked on anime in the old days. The other person who did most to get me hooked and was a good friend of Barb, was Patricia Munson-Siter. Neither of us has heard from Pat for years: she moved to New Jersey after her husband retired from the Air Force back around the turn of the millennium and dropped out of touch. She seems not to be on-line, when I've googled, which is worrying: she had been active in fandom for years, though generally in print fandom, not on-line. (I just tried googling once more: no sign of a web-site, but she seems to be currently active in the New Jersey DAR.)

Panels I attended included:

"Memories of DonnerCon": DonnerCon is the nickname of the 1997 MileHiCon, when the blizzard happened (more than a foot of snow on the Friday and Saturday) and people were snowed into the con, or snowed away from the con, and by Sunday the hotel was serving strange buffets made of leftovers. Ten years ago already. Wow.

"Greek Mythology and the Constellations" I could probably give this one myself. I was mostly waiting for:

"The Anthropology of Lord of the Rings": but the scheduled speaker did not appear (possibly stuck in California: flights from SanDiego are iffy due to the wildfires) so there was a general discussion led by a few longtime Denver-area fans.

"Role of the Modern Day Vampire" This was excellent. A review of the changing portrayal of the vampire in books and films since 1643, by an author, Tony Ruggiero, who did his masters thesis on Frankenstein and Dracula. A version of the talk was previously given at the Library of Congress. I later bought all three of his books that were available in the dealers' room, just as he happened to be at the booth, so I got them autographed. I'm about halfway through Operation: Immortal Servitude, about vampires and Navy SEALs. (Mr. Ruggiero is an ex-SEAL.)

"Kitty Carrie and the Midnight Hour" this was also wonderful: live improv theater. Carrie Vaughn is the author of a series about a werewolf radio talk-show host beginning with Kitty and the Midnight Hour. She played the role of the talk-show host and took 'calls' about the supernatural from various people. It was very, very well done and funny.

And a panel on "Tech and other Geeky Delights" (what can I say...)

The convention was in the Tech Center Hyatt-Regency: fancier than the places I stay when travelling on business and with the food -- while excellent -- priced accordingly. Though they could do with a few more items on their dinner menu without chile peppers in them. Note to self: ask about lettuce in things -- people don't bother mentioning it on menus.

The bed was amazing: nearly as tall as my waterbed with the double underdresser, but just all mattress. I suspect it was a Tempurpedic or something similar. It was a kingsize, with 6 bed pillows and a couple of big, square occasional pillows, and a sort of long cylindrical pillow.

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Sun, Aug 26, 2007

Atlanta Lightning

Posted at 9:26 pm MDT to Travel

I got up Friday morning at 6am Boston time, which is 4 am Colorado time. I collapsed into bed at 4am Saturday morning when I finally arrived home. I'm glad I had a couple of the Larabars left: they were all I had to eat (except a few airline pretzels) after I left Boston.

My flight from Boston left on time, but then we spent an hour in a holding pattern because of a spectacular storm over Atlanta that had shut down the airport. The pilot landed us, more or less between the storm clouds, just before lack of fuel would have forced us to divert to Charlotte.

By the time I got into the terminal, my connecting flight to Denver should have already been in the air. I was relieved to see that it had been delayed a bit because of the storm. But it kept being pushed back and pushed back. The flight that was originally supposed to leave at 8:15pm did not leave until 1:15am.

I've spent the rest of the weekend relaxing.

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Thu, Aug 23, 2007

My Own Bed

Posted at 7:05 pm MDT to Travel

I have woken up at about 2 hour intervals every night on this trip. One way and another, hotels are too noisy... or the wrong kind of noisy. And I'm a light sleeper and prone to insomnia at the best of times. I'm looking forward to sleeping in my own bed.

But before that happens, I have a half day of work tomorrow, and a long day of travel. Assuming my connections work and there are no delays, I should be landing in Denver at about 9:30pm Colorado time, which is 11:30pm Boston time. If I'm lucky I should be home by 10:30 or 11:00.

In the mean time, I think I'll leave the airconditioner on tonight: it's noisy, but it blocks out other noises.

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Mon, Aug 20, 2007

Adams Inn

Posted at 5:21 pm MDT to Travel

It was a long day of travel, yesterday, but fortunately uneventful.

The hotel is not quite as close to my worksite as advertised, but it is quite nice: one side is on the water. They are just coming to the end of some major renovations so most of the hotel is freshly painted and clean.

They have a free continental breakfast in a little pub/restaurant that serves real food for lunch and dinner. I had a cup of excellent clam chowder and 1/2 of a seafood salad sandwich for dinner, and I am contemplating lobster for later in the week. (I won't expense it if I decide to splurge.)

The walk is not bad (and I can use the exercise) but I hope it doesn't decide to rain hard tomorrow. The sky looks a bit threatening at the moment.

I wonder if I should have packed an umbrella and checked my bag through...the no-umbrellas-in-carry-on rule is a pain.

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Sat, Aug 18, 2007

Zombie Day

Posted at 9:22 pm MDT to Travel

My brain turned off sometime yesterday evening. I spent most of today relaxing and reading, and now I'm about to tidy the house and pack (and possibly eat some supper).

I have an 11:20am flight tomorrow (which means leaving the house before 9:00), and a four hour layover in Atlanta before continuing to Boston. I think I'm tired just thinking about it. I've been stockpiling paperbacks to read in the airports.

The flight home has only an hour layover. I think I'm going to check some baggage for that one, and let the airline worry about getting my suitcase moved between the planes. The long layover on the trip out is less of a problem even if the planes end up being at opposite ends of the airport and the shuttles trains are out (which I have known to happen. It can be a long walk).

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Thu, Aug 16, 2007

Time Share

Posted at 8:22 am MDT to Travel

Because I have been on cruises and have hotel and airline frequent flyer miles, I get lots of brochures for vacation stuff. Last December I filled out a survey that was supposed to put me in a drawing for a prize. Tuesday I got a call that I had won a prize provided I would listen to a pitch for timeshares. The list of possible prizes included $2400 cash, a wide screen TV, a vacation based in Florida or Las Vegas and a Cadillac, and I was guaranteed to win one of them.

I'd been thinking that I might like to own a vacation timeshare (that autonomy thing), but wasn't sure where in particular I would want one. It turns out they have a solution for that.

I have bought a Time Share that had been foreclosed on and was being resold by the homeowners association. It isn't the traditional kind of timeshare where you are prescheduled for one week per year in a particular location, but a newer 'Points' timeshare.

It is theoretically still based on partial ownership of a piece of real estate somewhere, but the actual times and locations of the vacations I take are fungible. Sort of vacations backed by real estate like paper money is notionally backed by gold. In practice, it amounts to a prepaid vacation with some potential resale value.

The points can be used at resorts all over the world and for things like cruises. They don't necessarily need to be for a week at a time unless I want to use them for a 'week' style timeshare. I can use them at 'Points' resorts for long weekends or on weekly schedules that are not Friday to Firday. And they can be carried over for one year (but not two) if I want to save up for something big.

They said the timeshare still qualifies as a second home for tax purposes, so the interest may be deductible. I will look into that.

And I can rent (more or less) my points to other people who want a vacation somewhere. Anywhere. So its a little like when my grandparents were part owners of their beach cottage, but without the maintenance work.

They gave me so many points as a signing bonus (more than half a year's worth) that I am looking at spending some time in Japan in the next year or so. Or maybe some time in England. Foreign sites are more expensive, naturally, but I have a lot of points to use.

Oh, and the prize I won was a cruise through the Bahamas. I need to schedule it some time in the next 30 days and take it some time in the next year. I'm thinking that January might be nice. Things at the company are often slow in the beginning of January. And that's about as far from hurricane season as you can get. It's a trip for two, so maybe I'll see if Nanette or one of my other friend's can come. Or I'll get the luxury of a cabin all to myself.

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Fri, Aug 03, 2007

Delays

Posted at 10:36 pm MDT to Travel

I was expectng to fly to Boston this coming Sunday. But my customer is still getting their red tape sorted out. It will probably happen the following week.

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Tue, Jul 03, 2007

Dead Truck

Posted at 10:20 pm MDT to Travel

I have Nanette's youngest daughter's car sitting in my driveway at the moment. Elsbeth is away for a 'semester at sea', and my truck is sitting in the parking lot of a Midas Auto Service place in central Denver, waiting to be looked at after the holiday.

This is really annoying.

I drove in to Denver to visit the Denver Art Museum, and when I got off the highway and stopped at the first light, the truck overheated again. I nursed it across downtown to the museum parking garage and left it to cool for several hours while I went through the museum.

I hadn't been to the DAM since before they built their new addition. It's an interesting space, with no perpendicular walls. I got a bit dizzy at one point in a narrow space -- the diagonals were disorienting -- but the large display areas were fine.

I had a wonderful late lunch in one of the museum restaurants. This was my second great restaurant meal in two days: Nanette took me out to the Brasserie Ten-Ten, a French restaurant in Boulder with great food and equally great service, for my birthday last night.

When I went back to the truck, it seemed OK, but it overheated again after only a few blocks. I found a parking place and called AAA (again) and Nanette. AAA recommended the Midas place as an AAA approved mechanic reasonably close to where I was stuck.

Nanette's husband Chuck, who was at work at their warehouse on the outskirts of Denver, picked me up at the Midas parking lot and took me back with him to the Mile High Comics warehouse, where some of his acquaintances from the New Mexico pueblos had come to sell him some new pieces for his huge and wonderful collection of pottery.

Some of the collection (only 4327 of the pieces) can be seen online at www.pueblotreasures.com. I tagged along as Chuck gave his guests a guided tour of the many display cases at the warehouse. It's been about 9 months since I visited the collection, and there were many new pieces.

I ended up buying a wonderful pottery bear, directly from the artist, Gilbert Sanchez. I don't think I can put up pictures that will do it justice: there are glazed medallions on the sides (most of the bear is unglazed clay ranging from gray to reddish) with images incised with very fine lines: heaven on one side (sun, stars and a comet) and earth on the other (a landscape including Black Mesa, which is near the pueblo where Gilbert lives).

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Sat, Jun 30, 2007

Summer Clothes (written 6/14/2007 and misposted)

Posted at 9:43 pm MDT to Travel

I'm traveling to Silicon Valley next week, and I may need to visit the mall on Saturday and invest in some more seasonal Left Coast office clothes. Weather.com is predicting highs in the 80s Fahrenheit all week.

I've gotten spoiled, working at home where I don't need to dress up. The clothes I wore in Boston were all right in California during the cooler weather (maybe a touch more formal than they needed to be)

My usual office wear is dress slacks and a colored Oxford cloth shirt with open collar over a t-shirt in a coordinating color. I don't usually wear short sleeves in office buildings because I freeze if I do. But I should probably look for some summer weight T-shirts in my current size. And weather in the 80s calls for khakis, not wool blend slacks.

I hate buying clothes. I have a petite body with tall arms and legs, so nothing ever fits. The weight I've put on since 2001 (when I was reasonably fit and regularly walking, lifting weights and doing yoga) doesn't help. Nor does the fact that my extra weight seems to be organized in ways the clothing designers and manufacturers don't expect or cater for. It would be nice to find some clothes that are made for adults, not adolescents.

At least, since I got the doctor to raise my thyroid medicine dosage last summer, I've stopped gaining weight. But I'm well over the weight range at which I exercise. (I've never heard of people having exercise setpoint weights, but I seem to: below a certain weight I feel like exercising, above it, I don't.) I think part of me doesn't believe that exercise will do any good: I kept exercising every weekday through the first 20 or 25 pounds of the weight gain, and it never seemed to make a difference and the exercising just got more and more awkward and uncomfortable until it sort of gradually faded out of my routine.

When I was young, I was always underweight, so being overweight seems weird to me, even though I've probably been overweight more than half my life at this point, and I tend not to see myself as fat. I suppose it is the same kind of body-image delusion that anorexics get caught in, but in the opposite direction.

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