While I'm good at travelling (possibly because I expect the worst and am sometimes happily surprised), I am perfectly happy staying at home as much as possible. But being that I live in Flagstaff (the opposite point from the center of the tech universe), I have to go out and see what's happening in the world and remind my boss that I exist so that he doesn't forget about me.

Going out the Bay Area means either travelling on the last flight out and arriving in the middle of the night (in SF), and waiting an hour an a half for the car rental because there's only one guy working and he has to do everything (and for some reason, he has to do it really slowly); or get up at an ungodly time of the morning and catch the first flight of the day. Someday, maybe, I'll learn how to fly my own plane; but for now I'm stuck with the two evils.

Besides the actual horror of getting up early (I'm not a morning person), I have to deal with the anxiety of oversleeping. Since normally I don't use an alarm, they're not very effective when I do use them. Even worse, my back brain can function enough to disable the alarm and go back to sleep without waking me up. Several witnesses have even testified that it can carry on half a conversation on the phone for a few minutes without disturbing me. So, knowing that the back brain is just waiting to thwart my plans, another part of my brain is laying in wait trying to wake me up before the alarm goes off.

So for a 7am flight (which would require me to be out of bed at around 6:10, as thankfully the airport is literally next door), I instead find myself hunting for the clock and discovering that I have been woken up at 4:10am. I can go back to sleep, but usually what will seem like 2 hours later will only be 10 minutes later, and so it goes for a while until I convince myself to get up and wander around downstairs like a zombie until its time to leave.

Even though I'm not travelling for two weeks, my brain has already started pysching itself up. Last night it did some warmups, running me through a couple of doomsday scenarios while I slept. Like its 8am, and my return flight (in the city now) leaves at 8:30am and the airport is 20 miles away, and there's no hope that I'm going to make it. My brain is just so helpfull.