Sorry for the interruption

I can’t believe it’s been almost two months since my last post on Krik’s Picks. There’s a paradox about my motivation for writing this blog. Because I travel for work, I get to try restaurants in different cities. So the more I travel, the more variety I find in the places where I eat. But, the more I travel, the less time I have to write about the places I’ve been eating. (Or to be more precise, the more I travel for work, the less I feel like using my down time writing.)

The first three months of 2013 have been particularly busy with travel. It may have been the busiest period of travel in my career. Since January 1, I have been to Washington DC four times, Topeka KS three times, and one time each to Key Largo, Phoenix, San Diego, Madison WI, Sioux Falls SD, and Austin TX. Delta tells me I’ve already logged 22,702 miles, and I’m only 2300 miles from reaching Silver status. There have been years when I’ve barely reached silver by December.

I have to admit, it’s been somewhat stressful travel. On two of the three trips to Topeka, flying in and out of Kansas City, I barely got out of town before they shut the airport due to blizzards. On one trip to DC, I did get stuck because of a storm.

(Actually, there’s a story to this. It was the first week in March. When I arrived in DC on a Tuesday night, the weather service was predicting 4-8 inches of snow. Before a single flake fell, the federal government announced that it would be closed the next day. To be fair, when I work up the next morning, it was snowing pretty hard. But while the federal government was closed, Congress was still in session. I was working at the desk in my hotel before heading to the Hill when I got a message from Delta – my return flight to MSP for Thursday morning was cancelled. They cancelled the flight a full 24 hours ahead of time. I eventually got rebooked for the last flight on Thursday, so I didn’t have to spend an extra night in DC. But on Thursday morning, at the time when my original flight was scheduled to leave, it was bright and sunny and 40 degrees with not a flake of snow on the ground.)

But I know the stress was getting to me. While I was working in my hotel room, my computer was running very slow. I was getting more and more frustrated. Finally, I shouted a very unkind comment at the computer and slammed my fist down on the keyboard. Oops. Everything really froze up then. Fortunately I was able to get it to reboot and continue working. I suppose someday in the future, it will be considered abusive to swear at a computer or hit it.

So anyway, that’s my excuse for not writing in two months. I’ll try to catch up over the next couple weeks … before my next round of travel begins.