Vacation Has Begun

What a nice way to leave work for a while. By spending about 20 minutes in the break room talking/gossiping with someone, and a lot of the last hour actually looking around for stuff to do. I can't impress enough on how weird and unusual that is for 0600-0715 in the lab. Either we'd done most of the am work, or a lot of it had yet to be dumped off. AND: all the instruments, every damn one of them was working without a hitch. The scope of that is just...mind boggling.

OK, so I have a day and a half to clean the place up and do the final packing for our Arizona trip. Can I make the most of all that time and not fritter it away foolishly?? We fly out Friday around noon. The plan is to meet Tim's brother and sister-in-law in Phoenix (they are driving up from Tucson) and we go to Flagstaff that night. Next day we drive up to Grand Canyon National Park, maybe do some hiking and exploring Saturday and Sunday, and then Monday through Saturday, we and a group of about 16 will be traveling nearly 200 miles down the Colorado River, either floating/motoring, or running rapids. After helicopter and small plane shuttles back to our starting point, we drive back down to Phoenix, spend the night there, and then come home Sunday. Hopefully with no injuries, losses, and hopefully with LOTS of pics and new experiences. I can't even remember the last time I saw the Grand Canyon. I'm pretty sure my age was in single digits. I certainly have never seen it from the bottom.

Yesterday morning was pretty much shot for getting anything useful done. I probably could have gotten this done at a local clinic or even right in the hospital ER, but logic at the time dictated I drive a half hour north to Saginaw to visit my own eye doctor and get some sort of foreign object removed from my left eye. Don't know what it was, and even he didn't see anything right away and wasn't really sure what he swabbed out of there. But whatever it was had been irritating as hell for 2 days/nights. My eye felt fine as long as I left my contact in. It must have been cushioning the eye surface from whatever was way back up in there. Unfortunately I don't have the kind I can constantly leave in, so something had to be done. Especially with a trip planned to places where we'll be hundreds of miles from the nearest health care facility.

3 hours up in smoke, but what a relief.