and things went downhill from there

The pace of things picked up a bit once we left the mountains and arrived in Vancouver, so I never got the chance to update here. Now, with 90 minutes to kill on a ferry crossing to Victoria, I can post one of those "so far, so good" updates.

We managed to hook up with most of the people on my list for Vancouver, and though most of the time was heavy on the "sit around and chat" while light on the "go do something", it was nice to catch up.

In spite of the fact that atara makes me slather on SPF 60 sunscreen every time we make any motion to head out the door, I managed to pick up a bit of a sunburn while we were up in the mountains. Fortunately it is a very minor burn, mostly cleared up already and unlikely even to peel.

I got us into a fancy hotel for our stay in Vancouver for very cheap using my work discount. While I was booking it, the agent asked if I wanted to upgrade to "Gold" status for only a few dollars more. That got us onto a special floor, where we had a private self-serve lounge that was stocked with hot and cold entrées and drinks for most of the day. It was like buying a sponsorship at a furry con, but much cheaper. We were out for most of the day, and only took advantage of the lounge in the mornings for the most part, but the free breakfasts and bottled waters more than made up the difference in the price of the room.

We never did order any of the complimentary pillows off of the pillow menu in our room, but some of them looked intriguing.

There were only two flies in our vacation ointment in Vancouver. The first is that my feet and ankles are covered in itchy little welts that look suspiciously like flea bites, and I picked up a few fresh ones each night in the hotel. At first I though they were residual bites from our stay at the cabin (I know we had mosquitoes and other biting insects in the cabin, and my feet were often exposed during the night), but yesterday and this morning I awoke to fresh bites.

atara was not bitten, and it was only my feet and ankles. I am 90% sure it was not bedbugs, because there was no evidence of them in the bed, and the little welts do not match the pattern of bedbugs. My suspicion is that I either had a reaction to something in the detergent they used on the sheets, or there were a couple of fleas in the room, because these look a lot like flea bites to me. And as I learned from having flea-bitten cats when I lived out on the coast, fleas love me. Also, the bites around the feet and ankles strongly resemble flea bites.

We are always careful to store our luggage and clothes off the floor, so I doubt any will be hitching a ride with us when we leave. Fleas are one of the things that I do not miss from living out here. That and the traffic.

The other downer was that I forgot to run a report for our accounting department before I left on vacation. I noticed that I had a missed call from my boss when we got into cell range on Friday, so I checked my work email when we got to the hotel and it confirmed my suspicion that he was calling me about it. Being the conscientious individual that I am, I remoted into my work computer and set up the jobs in our Business Objects. Two of them ran, and two of them failed after about 20 hours with puzzling errors. I tried running them a couple more times before emailing the office and letting them know that things were broken, and I was on vacation and did not care that much to try and fix them.

I left enough instructions for one of my co-workers to run most of the things for me if he can figure out what is breaking on our BO server. I let them know that I would remote in again this evening to finish things up if I could get a stable Internet connection. This is why they hate to let me go on vacation.