Where Is Hawkins?Where travel is cheaper than psychotherapy.

I managed to save $68 per ticket on the trip to London and $58 per ticket on the trip to Rome. Word. Someone owes me dinner.

So today I celebrated my 6th anniversary today at the office, and it was pretty much a day of no event, but it was a microcosm of my life at work. Boredom, being lied to, not told of things and the simplest things being made into complete productions. But that’s ok.

I’m watching Daredevil from Netflix and it’s a complete piece of shit movie. Seriously.

Next weekend I get to go out of dodge for a quick overnighter in Tampa, Florida. What I’ll do there – I have no idea. But of course, I took the long way down and back: Chicago-Miami-Tampa-New York (LGA)-Chicago.

Over Valentine’s Day weekend is a trip to London with my mom. It’ll be interesting. I did save her $125 on the tickets, so I think she can pick up taxi to/from the airport.

So I’m going to transfer all my Africa planning/travel log into a new blog, appropriately entitled The Fat Kid and Kilimanjaro. Where Is Hawkins? will remain your daily/weekly/sporadic dose of all things Hawkins.

1) I suppose at some point in the future I should finalize the second week of the trip. I’d like to go to Serengeti National Park and go parade around and hang out with the wildlife. But my allergies are always a worry because I’m a pansy.

2) I still need to get boots, a sleeping bag and other smaller stuff for the trip.

3) Since I lost my camera, I bought a replacement today, the Sony DSC-W1 from Newegg. I will probably need to load up on more memory sticks for the trip and invest in some sort of solution where I don’t have to cart the laptop around. If one of my coworkers took 35GB of shots on his trip to Antarctica, then I’d probably need to start stocking up now.

4) That whole inoculation thing needs to happen sometime in June. Yellow Fevah!

5) I didn’t realize how expensive this endeavor would be, and my credit card debt is getting aggravating.

6) If anyone else wants to tag along, drop me an email. The date of the climb is August 14-21. I leave the US on August 10th.

7) So I rented Kilimanjaro: To The Roof of Africa from Netflix and thought this would get me super pumped up but it didn’t. Then I watched the “Making of…” on the DVD and that drove me nuts and put me to sleep. It’s an IMAX movie not a documentary, unfortuantely.

So I’m back from Honolulu after a bizarre trip. I also managed to lose my camera somewhere between the gate in HNL and arrival at O’Hare, so I called lost and found at both airports. So there are no trip photos, damnit.

I’m tired and will probably wuss out of working out tonight.

1) I’ve been in a super shitty mood as of late. This last week has been draining, emotionally and physically. Burn out? I’ve got it by the gross. Work is pissing me off, mainly because I feel that my workload is severely disproportionate when compared to others, and that when I work with dumbasses, it just reinforces all the wrong things.

2) Started working out at Holmes Place. It’s ok – it’s what I expected. Lots of fancy equipment, little substance.

3) I’ve come to the conclusion that I basically survive on a daily basis at work because my Google skills are superior to others, and that if I don’t know the answer, I can look it up. This accounts for most of my working day.

4) Upgraded all the way for the Honolulu mile run. 8900 miles in First Class for ~$400. Not a bad little run, but I figure that I’m going to be screwed by the Renaissance Ilikai because the woman on the phone was super snarky when I asked for a non-smoking room (damn Priceline!).

5) I bought myself this coffee mug. Milkman Dan is my hero.

6) The Africa thing is shaping up better than I thought. Loughmiller is starting to look more in than I had expected. I figure I’m going to put Craigslist to use to see if anyone else wants to go and tag along on the Asshats to Africa trip. Perhaps there’s a blogging opportunity from Kili itself, provided I don’t get screwed on roaming charges on my mobile.

7) The Asshats to Rome trip is going along well. Tickets are booked, I still have to plan it out, with a possible trip to San Marino to go check out the world’s third smallest country and get an unusual passport stamp. I’ll dig into it, but if it’s going to be a fucking long haul just to be stupid, then I don’t know. But technically, I could claim I visited 4 countries on that trip (Belgium, Italy, Vatican City and San Marino). Woo.

A good article in the FT about flying Economy class. It makes perfect sense. However, if there was an Economy class with larger seats and none of the food of Business or First, then I’d be happy to have that. But having said that, I’m going to Honolulu this weekend via DFW on the outbound leg. ORD-DFW is in First, DFW-HNL is still in coach but I think the flight will be oversold so there’s bumpage opportunities. I’ll gladly take free vouchers/cash.

And on another note, I’ve become increasingly withdrawn as of late, and will be reducing the frequency of posting to perhaps twice a week. It’s just a function of closing up.

Except for the fact that no one is truly impressed about my AA thing. Neither am I, but it got a laffo from friends.

Well, don’t get sick there anyway…