Traveling for work on my own terms, balanced against a rich home life, is what I want every week to look like.

Shipped

Last week I signed off saying I’d booked a focused few days in Austin, and this week I went. With a relative lull in deliverables, and my team starting to map out our next major initiative, it was a good time to be in the room with everyone face to face. Austin is an easy flight from Atlanta. Door to office runs about six or seven hours, which is a hell of a commute but not a stressful one.

I usually drive to the airport and leave my car in one of the nearby lots, but with a single bag this time I tried MARTA instead. I got up early, drove a little over an hour to the closest station, which has long-term parking and caters to airport travelers, and took the train in from there. It didn’t really save me any time, but it was cheaper, and there’s something nice about not having to drive through the heart of the city to reach the airport. I expect I’ll be doing this more often.

The view from an airplane window seat. A wing with an upturned blue-and-white winglet reaches over a thick floor of clouds, a band of pale gold light along the horizon beneath a clear blue sky. The dark rounded edge of the window frames the lower corners.
This was somewhere over the Southeast, early enough that I'd already put an hour of driving and a train ride behind me before I ever reached the gate.

Since this was a solo trip rather than a team gathering, I booked a hotel essentially across the street from the office. It was really half a mile down the road, but there are sidewalks the whole way, so it came to a fifteen-minute walk, which for Texas counts as close. I’d booked it deliberately for having nothing around it, the way I mentioned last week, so I’d have no reason to do anything but focus on why I came. That worked exactly as intended this trip. It won’t be my regular place, though. Normally I want somewhere I can walk around in the mornings and evenings, even if getting to the office then means an Uber, and there was nothing within walking distance of this one, no restaurants or shops at all.

The days themselves were fantastic. I got to brainstorm in person with people up and down the org chart, tour some of the labs I’ll be writing software for, wander the building, and get to know the folks who have that office as their home base. Spending the time immersed in the company’s culture did more for me than weeks of video calls could. I want to make these visits a regular thing.

Read

I read more documentation this week, a lot of which I wrote myself. Going back over it again and again is how it all settles into my head, so I don’t mind the repetition. I also read a bit more of Starter Villain, though I’m having a strange time concentrating on fiction lately, and the stack of books I want to get to keeps growing taller behind it.

Played

Saturday I spent the whole day with friends from Atlanta and some mutual Athens friends at our favorite brewery, doing nothing but catching up. Nearly all of them are bioscience professionals, some of them at the CDC, and nearly all of them are feeling the current political climate in a direct way, so a good part of the day went to commiserating. I’m a bioscience professional myself now, and I found I could join that conversation in ways I couldn’t have before. We finished the night at a newish Czech restaurant I’d been meaning to try, which more than lived up to the wait. I’m already looking forward to the next time.

Against my better judgment I also started into Mass Effect. I said up in Read that I’m struggling with fiction, which apparently isn’t quite true, because I stop to read every scrap of lore the game hands me, and there’s already been a novel’s worth of it. The depth of the world-building is genuinely impressive, especially for the first game in a franchise, though I suppose that’s what you expect from BioWare. Their stories have always had a grip on me.

Friday evening, to close out the week, I packed up my paints and the figures for my retired and upcoming Gloomhaven characters and drove over to a new game store on my side of town, The Painted Heretic. They’re a home for tabletop battle games like Warhammer, RPGs like D&D, and weekly nights for things like Magic: The Gathering, and they kindly gave me some table space to sit and paint. I have a ridiculous number of little bottles of paint at home, but they were fully stocked with my favorite brand, and being able to walk over to the display and pull the exact shades I wanted was both lovely and a little dangerous. Fifteen dollars for five new bottles and an evening in a great room was well worth it. I’ll be back.

A painting table at a game store, seen from the painter’s seat. An iPad propped on a keyboard case shows reference art for the Gloomhaven mercenary Hail. Tiered wooden racks hold dozens of small paint bottles, a can of Citadel spray primer, and rows of red-handled brushes. A primed miniature on a holder and a character card sit nearby, and a hand holds a fine brush in the foreground. Behind the table, other people paint and play beside tall windows with red curtains, dusk outside.
My own paint racks travel well, so I packed them up off my workbench and set up shop at The Painted Heretic for the evening.

A small plastic tabletop miniature held between finger and thumb. The figure is a robed woman with long blond hair and one hand raised, holding open a large book wreathed in orange and yellow flames. Her robes are painted deep purple over a pale green underskirt. A blue blur fills the out-of-focus background.
Hail, maybe eighty percent of the way there. She reads from a burning book, which feels about right for a character who wants to know everything and quietly resents what it costs her to find out.

Cooked

Wings were on sale, so Monday I cooked up a big pile of them and put a second batch of raw ones in the freezer for another day.

A sheet pan crowded with roasted chicken wings, browned and crisping at the edges, coated in dark herbs and spice and sitting in a shallow pool of their own rendered juices. A metal pan handle shows at the top of the frame.
These are my standby whenever wings drop to a good price. This panful was for eating now, with a second batch of raw ones tucked into the freezer for another day.

Noticed

I’ve never had to travel often for work, and I could never afford to do much of it for fun, so this is fairly new territory for me. I like seeing new places quite a lot, even when the act of traveling is a pain. One of the quieter hopes I have for this job is that it gets me genuinely comfortable with travel, and that it eventually lets me take the people I love somewhere new, in a calm and comfortable way.

Thinking About

I’m chewing on how to absorb everything I’m learning right now as efficiently as I can, and, more to the point, how to get it back out again. Learning it for my own sake isn’t enough. I need to be able to talk about these topics intelligently with other people, and especially with the actual experts in them, and to have those experts walk away from the conversation with full confidence in me. I haven’t had to operate at that level since my last years of college, and the prospect is honestly a little daunting.

What’s Next

Gloomhaven next weekend, with my new mercenary Hail. We’re closing in on the endgame fast, so I may only get a session or two with her before the whole campaign wraps.

My youngest, Juniper, has been invited out to Charlotte next weekend for HeroesCon, one of the bigger comics conventions. Last year, as a high school freshman, she won a scholarship for her comics through the Comics Appreciation Society, and now she gets passes to the show and spends some time working the society’s booth. I’d assumed I would have to miss it for a work trip, but that trip got postponed, so it looks like I can go up for at least a day and let her show me around.