Day 16–Travel Interruption

My company, Red Gate software, has given me a 6 week sabbatical. I’m documenting the time with all the posts under a tag if you want to follow along.

Today is another early day, but no sabbatical work (other than this post).

Tomorrow is SQL Saturday #286 in Louisville, KY. I’d committed to this before I had scheduled the sabbatical and since I’ve submitted, been accepted, and cancelled twice for Louisville, I’m finally going.

Up early, packing, which was simple given that my travel bag is pretty much packed all the time. Add some socks, contacts, shirts, and zip it up and I’m good. I grabbed my laptop bag, spent 15 minutes scurrying around looking for my cord bag before giving up. I was hurried the last trip in Orlando and I wonder if I left that bag in the hotel.

Annoying, but not a huge big deal. This was a kid’s zippered pencil bad that held a few charging cords, wall and car USB adapters, and my presenter remote. Maybe $50 worth of stuff, though the presenter remote is the one big thing I miss. I’ll try to replace them in Louisville.

I’m writing on an airplane, knocking out yesterday’s and today’s entries. I cleared out some email in the airport, mostly just deleting notifications of spam and other events from the box, skipping by emails I might care about later. I did go over the talks the other night, but I’m also double checking the demos and making sure things work today so I have smooth deliveries tomorrow.

I have two talks, The Encryption Primer and Branding Yourself for a Dream Job. The latter is also scheduled for SQL Bits in July, so I’m glad I get the chance to go over that now. The other talk for Bits is a related, but different encryption talk and I need to practice that today as well. As sabbatical ends, I’m flying to the UK, and I won’t have much of a chance to prep, so this sabbatical break is a good time to do so.

A strange day in the sabbatical. Most days have me moving, not sitting, and today is mostly a sitting day. Still, as much as I have been enjoying the time off, I also love my job and the chance to go see, meet, teach, and chat with people is something I’m looking forward to doing.