Right about now, I should be on an airplane on its way to Austin. But I’m not; I’m at home.

The first thing I heard this morning when the clock radio turned itself on was a sentence something like this: “and we’ll have more about the crash of American Flight 587 soon”. I’d already turned off the radio by the time my brain processed the sentence, and I didn’t want to turn it on again.

I had to be at home today; it was supposed to have been a vacation day, since Jeffrey didn’t have school, but that was before I got scheduled to travel. And before the skies opened, making it feel like a good day to stay home. So I spent the day looking at news web sites (I didn’t want to turn on the TV) and trying to decide whether or not to go on the trip.

I finally decided that, yes, I would go — all of the news reports indicated that the crash was “just” a mechanical, not terrorism, and so it shouldn’t affect me. So Diane took me to the airport, and ten minutes after arriving, I was through security and in the Admirals’ Club.

That was probably a mistake. They had CNN on the big-screen TVs, and, even though I wasn’t sitting at that end of the club, any time I went to get some water, I saw the screen, which, of course, was always showing footage from this morning’s crash. I started to feel uneasy again.

Then I tried to load the route from Austin Airport to the hotel from my computer into my GPS. But I couldn’t — the program complained that COM1 wasn’t working. So I decided to reboot the computer, and got a bluescreen early in the bootup process. A 100%-reproducable bluescreen. Trying to boot the “last known good” configuration didn’t help. I couldn’t even get into Safe Mode.

I didn’t think being without my computer for this trip was a good idea. Instead, I decided that this was A Sign, and walked over to the desk and had them cancel my tickets. Then I called the travel agent and cancelled my hotel room, just a couple of minutes before I would have had to pay for a night anyway.

And then I came home.

I feel a little guilty about not going to my meeting, and I’m not looking forward to doing two full-day conference calls. But I just didn’t feel comfortable getting on that plane, and when my computer died, I was glad to have a somewhat logical reason to stay home.

I’ll start with the bad parts, just to get them out of the way: I-880 was slow, we had a hard time finding a parking place, the weather was rainy, and the porta-potties were down to expectations.

But those were minor inconveniences. The actual competition was great — five hours filled with flying sparks, flying parts, flying bots, smoke, noise, cheers, jeers, and the odd camera in the way. We got free hammers, too. The food was better than I would have expected and reasonably priced (unlike, say, the SF Giants); the giftshop was loaded with fun toys, too. They even had a long-sleeve T-shirt which was perfect for Jeffrey!

Don’t believe me? Check out another unbiased observer, MootMom.
Like her, I am bound by the release I signed not to reveal any details, but I can say that Lexan is good stuff.

I’d be willing to go back if they hold another competition in this area; I don’t think any of us are likely to build our own bots, though.

Today, we went to see Monsters, Inc., which we all enjoyed greatly. I want to get it on DVD so I can look carefully for all of the little jokes hidden in the newspapers and signage throughout the movie.

And tomorrow, I’m off to Austin for a few days. Sadly, we’re probably going to be too busy for me to take advantage of Austin’s fine restaurants — there’s even a rumor we’re ordering in pizza so we can continue our meeting late into the night on Tuesday. *sigh*