Well, the trip to Saskatoon proved incredibly costly in many ways. I had to work like mad to get all the slides in place, helped greatly by a junior who was able to stay home. I took the lead during the presentation, probably talking for close to 4 hours. It is exhausting, particularly when one is out of practice. But overall, it was a successful meeting, and it looks like the project is coming to a relatively good outcome.
I was not thrilled at the lunch that was catered in, only getting half of an egg salad sandwich. So I was famished by the time the meeting ended and just wanted to get to the airport and get some food. Well, no luck. The Saskatoon airport is perhaps the worst I have ever seen in terms of food options. Even the Island Airport has a somewhat better selection of sandwiches and vending machines. Anyway, there was a Tim Hortons that didn't have any sandwiches with no meat and a small cafe next door that was even worse. The cafe had omelets on the menu but said that they were not serving the breakfast menu (as if it really would have been so hard to make an omelet on their grill). After security, things were even bleaker. An uninspiring Starbucks and another Tim Hortons. This one had yogurt parfaits, so I bought one. I noticed it was pretty watery, but didn't think that much of it. Well, the next day, I started feeling a bit woozy. I (fortunately) turned down a burrito at lunch and went home. Within about an hour, everything in my stomach, including the fateful parfait, had come up. I suppose it is possible it is just bad luck and that I happened to catch the flu at the tail end of the season, but I basically never get the flu anymore. I'm pretty sure it was food poisoning.
What made this so frustrating and terrible is that I was supposed to fly off to New York the next day (Friday). If I had had one more day to recover, I might have made the flight, but I knew around noon that there was no way I could make it. I canceled what I could, but there are very little credits and refunds left when you have to cancel on such short notice. And before people pop up and say what about travel cancellation insurance, if you actually look at the policies, most of them do not allow you to just claim you were sick and have the money refunded. It generally applies to a huge weather system interfering with traffic control or a death in the family or something a lot more significant than just being under the weather.
I haven't been this sick in quite a long time, and I can only recall one other instance of having to cancel a flight due to sickness (I think I was planning on visiting my father). While I don't believe in karma with a big K, it is true that I was feeling guilty about leaving my family while going off on this jaunt. Of course, I would have been even more upset had a vacation for all 4 of us been scrapped!
It is also true that my idea of a holiday is not remotely restful. I basically view it as an opportunity to do a forced march through the museums, eat as quickly as possible and take in some other culture. It will be very hard to square this with the kids' idea of a good time now that they are starting to be old enough to travel and have some say in the matter. If we all go to Montreal, that will be an interesting experiment.
I knew that I was not up for 5 or 6 hours of wandering through MOMA and the Met, but even the main reason I was going -- to see The Iceman Cometh at BAM was appealing less and less to me. I was expecting 3 or 3.5 hours of greatness, but they announced that this was 4.75 hours (with 3 intermissions) and that just seems wildly indulgent. I cannot see the point in letting the play stretch out to that length or not negotiating any cuts at all. So while I am sure my mind did not secretly conspire with my body to get sick to spare myself that much time in the theatre, missing Iceman is probably the lowest on my list of regrets. At this point, I don't know that I will ever go see the full play. But for certain I will check the running time before I ever commit in the future. I can't even tell where the line falls for me. Maybe if they had kept it to 4 hours, I wouldn't have been quite so put out, but really the story that O'Neill is telling is so simple that 2 hours should be plenty. Long Day's Journey into Night reveals itself in a far more interesting way that justifies 4 acts, but even so I've seen it in productions that couldn't have lasted more than a bit over 3 hours. That's about right.
Anyway, I am slowly working my way up to more complex foods. I took a short walk around the neighborhood today. There is a small chance I will be willing to travel further tomorrow, maybe even to see Blood Wedding at Buddies, but I don't feel like committing until I know how I feel in the morning. I was going to work on another post, but really I think it makes more sense to go lay down and get a bit more rest. More than anything though, this experience is showing me that it is time to change my life, though perhaps not as profoundly as Rilke would have it. Probably best just to leave it at that for the moment.
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