Tra-cation Part 2

OK, nearly a week later and I need to finish my last saga... which will be short and to the point, I hope. :) Oh, by the way, pictures are online. Click the album link on the right side. -->

The conference I went to was actually far better than I expected. On Tuesday was an all-day tutorial on model-based testing. It was fascinating and actually very entertaining. My only complaint turned out to be a common trend among the entire week: the meeting rooms were a frigid 60 degrees most of the time. I must say, it's rare that I'm looking forward to the breaks so I can go outside and warm up in the sunshine. Regardless, after the day was over, I high-tailed it back to the room, to dump stuff off and headed to the park. Why not, eh?! Spent a fine couple of hours in the undercrowded park and then meandered back to the room for the evening. Slept much better the second night than the first... maybe I was more tired, or maybe it just wasn't a strange new place anymore.

Wednesday began the actual conference, which was basically a whole lot of 1-hour track sessions of which we usually had about 5 different sessions to choose from in any time slot. Various keynote sessions for the entire conference were at the beginning and end of the days, which usually ran from about 8:30am to 5:00pm. This proceeded most of Wednesday, Thursday and until Friday at noon. Some sessions were good, some were less good, some were worse.

That was the conference, or at least enough of it to care. On Friday I packed up and spent the afternoon and evening at the park, until I headed up to the airport to pick up Jonell who came down to spend the weekend with Heather. We went over to Heather's and spent the weekend hanging out with her. It was fun, we did a lot of driving around the LA area, getting lost and seeing where we ended up. Most of the time I didn't have my camera with me though, so no big picture festivity. But on Sunday we went to the Getty Museum in LA, which happens to be about 10 minutes from Heather's place. It was an amazing museum of lots of random artistic stuff. Pictures provided. Want to know more: www.getty.edu.

Sunday evening provided the setting for the celebrity sighting of the trip... we were at a burger place in Encino, and had just finished out dinner when who walks in to the restaurant? None other than American Idol celebrity judge Randy Jackson, along with his wife and son (we presume). And that's the best celebrity sighting I could come up with.

Sunday night came home, the plane touched down at midnight on Monday morning... and I came home and slept and did laundry to celebrate my birthday. Wahoo?

That's the story I've got for now. I'm sure there were things I was going to mention but forgot to... but oh well. You probably didn't care anyway. :)