Final '94 Road Tour

December 6, 1994

I'm writing this aboard Delta flight 279, enroute from New York to Mexico City on my last whirlwind tour of the year: Mexico City for two days; San Francisco for a day and a half (probably); Sao Paulo for a day (maybe); Rio for a day (definitely); back home for a day; Roseland, New Jersey for a morning (assuming that I can even find out where it is!); back to San Francisco for another day; and then to celebrate finishing the last assignment of the year, a daytime flight home rather than the normal overnight redeye ...

NAFTA must be having some impact, or maybe the economies of Latin American countries are going crazy on their own, but this is the 4th trip I've made to Mexico City in the last 12 months, and the flights have been completely full each time. Everyone seems to have gone on a shopping spree in New York, and they all carry on boxes and bags, several jackets and coats, VCRs and boom boxes, screaming babies and sullen teenagers -- it's just like the buses in Mexico City, but without the chickens and goats. The woman sitting behind me had a 2 year old child on her lap who howled so loudly she made the airplane windows rattle, but for some reason, she decided to move to the back of the plane (with the child, thank goodness) and annoy someone else. I've got an empty middle seat next to me (only one on the plane, from what I can see), and even though the flight was 30 minutes late taking off, it looks like it's going to be a smooth flight.

Once I get to Mexico City, the rest of the trip will gradually fall into place ... the company that organized my lecture tour in Brazil sent me a fax yesterday afternoon telling me they may have to cancel the seminar I'm giving in Sao Paulo -- which may affect my decision to fly up to San Francisco for a research visit that I was trying to squeeze in between Mexico and Brazil. Most of the trips I've taken this year have gone relatively smoothly, but every once in a while I have one of these "up-in-the-air" situations where I've got three backup reservations and don't know until the last moment which flight I'll be taking.

In any case, I'll be back home on the 17th, all done for the year, with a couple of weeks to celebrate Christmas and New Year's at home. Unlike the last few years, we've decided to celebrate the holidays in New York rather than sitting on a beach at Club Med; Jamie is looking forward to his first "real" New Year's Eve party as he works on the last batch of college applications. And Toni will be doing something else that we hope will be fun: a company reunion celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of our old consulting firm (it was actually begun on April Fools' Day, but we didn't think anyone would show up to celebrate that!). All of the old corporate records disappeared to the company that bought us out, so we had to do it from memory, but we managed to come up with the names of some 350 people who had worked for us at one time or another during the 70s or 80s. Looks like we'll get about 75-100 of them, and it should be kinda interesting -- much like a high-school or college reunion -- to see what they've all done with their lives.

Jamie is up to his ears in college applications, though he seems to have the process pretty well in hand. He's applied to one school on an "early-decision" basis, and he should hear in another two weeks whether he's been accepted, deferred, or rejected outright. Meanwhile, I managed to get all 1,000+ of the photos of his senior-year soccer season sorted, organized, and priotized; the best 200 have now gone off to the photo shiop to be put onto CD. A new Apple CD-ROM player arrived in the mail just before I left for the airport -- so I'll plug it in when I get back from this trip, and fire up Jamie's pictures to look at, and hopefully have a chance to mimic a little of Grandpa Art's magic with Adobe Photoshop on the best few pictures.

Along with the CD-ROM, a new ZEOS Windows-based machine arrived, complete with dozens of floppy disks and manuals, a PCMCIA fax-card, and lots of other stuff. Looks very impressive, with a 486 DX4-100 processor, 20 mega bytes of RAM, and a 350 megabyte hard disk -- but it sure ain't a Macintosh! I've brought it along on this trip, and I feel like I've got an entire electronics store: the Macintosh Duo 280C as my primary machine; a backup Duo 270C in case something goes wrong; and the Windows machine, too -- plus an InFocus LCD display panel, five spare batteries, mouse, cables to connect all the machines together in case I need to transfer files back and forth, manuals, and God knows what else.... maybe even a clean shirt or two, and a pair of socks and stuff that normal people bring on their trips. Eventually, the ZEOS machine will be the backup, as well as providing the ability to use a lot of computer tools that my clients insist on running in an (ugh) Windows environment -- and then I'll only be bringing two computers with me, and feel only slightly absurd.

Ah, well, such is the life of a Road Warrior ...