Reading (For Dummies)

Flinging out into the world, yet again

Work is kind of neat in that it sends me all over the place. It can be kind of a drag when it begins taxing friendships and budding relationships, but in all I'm having a good time with it.

I got sent to Cocoa Beach, Florida for my latest Temporary Duty, to attend a user's conference for some neat government software. The off-hours are all I'll mention, of course...

I got down on Saturday evening, was issued my first speeding ticket ever about an hour after my flight. Odd, I've never had any sort of criminal record (aside from parking tickets) until *after* I started working for the government. Now I've got this and a trespass violation to my name.

Checked in, unpacked, got ready for the next day: hiking up around Cape Canaveral, and maybe a little snorkeling up there, too. The snorkeling turned up as a bummer -- waterskiiers had been through the bay and churched things up too much to see more than a few feet. Hiking proved a little more fruitful.

For example, this little brown tortoise

After that, I met and went out to dinner with a bunch of coworkers...a crude bunch of government cronies that didn't get the Frasier-esque style to some of my jokes. I guess I just listen to NPR too much.

Weekdays were full of Conference. I've learned a lot, to say the least...at least I've learned a lot about the state of affairs now. In a dream world, I'd run a commission to design a secure partitioning microkernel and base all of our security products on it. In a less perfect world, I'd run a commission that defined an open API for said security kernel. Sadly, in the real world, we have a million companies doing things their own way, doing it wrong, and wasting a lot of money. But I digress...

Evenings were nice, at least. The whole gang jumped in the ocean on loaned boogie boards. My childhood experiences with my grandparents made me the best body surfer in the bunch, though everyone tried, to be fair.

Tuesday evening promised to be especially interesting, with the Mars Orbiter rescheduled to launch around dinnertime. So we swam a while, then set up on the beach and waited. There were a lot of us, given that we were all government, mostly Air Force. These people dig this stuff. So do I.

We waited. And waited. And waited. And the launch window closed...

After a bummer of a launch, I went out to dinner with a coworker who is a tad on the uber-religious-neo-conservative side. We were having a perfectly rational discussion on the tenets of national socialism until he brought god into the mix, and then it became a night of asking me why I won't accept some mexican named Jesús into my life. Pointing out biblical inconsistencies didn't matter much to this person, he was brainwashed. I don't often think about religion at all these days...it doesn't annoy me as much as it used to, and I've been happy to not be bothered by prosyltizers, so I grew to be passively accepting. That night kind of pushed me back into a rabid anti-religious frenzy. I bought another Vonnegut novel.

Ill will aside, I've had a blast in the southern regions. I could never live down here, that's for sure...any tourist town that has more churches than bars is hardly giving a second glance to. Still, the sun and the surf can be nice now and again. And it looks like again is going to come all too soon, but that will be a story for a different trip.

Me and a mullet and a hat on my head