Journey to Pax

Travel Day

Yesterday was a very long day, and by the time I reached the hotel room last night I was pretty out of it and ready to crash.  In theory I should have blogged then, because now I feel like I am running late by stopping to do it this morning.  The travel itself went really smoothly.  The most interesting part about it was just how the world gradually warmed as we went south.  It was in the mid to high 30s when we left Oklahoma, and by the time we hit Austin it was a balmy 60 degrees out in the evening.  The other big revelation is that how much faster it seemed when not driving in the pouring rain like we were last year.  Our trip to Pax 2015 was honestly pretty miserable, and we got caught up in a quagmire of construction between Waco and Temple that put a massive crimp in the entire trip.  This time around we were bracing ourselves for the same thing to happen, but honestly the only really bad traffic we encountered was when we finished eating dinner in Austin and were attempting to leave town at around 7:30 in the evening.  As we went through the downtown area it was this irrational bumper to bumper traffic where everyone alternated between riding the gas and brake.

As far as the trip itself we meandered our way down taking in a bunch of random stuff along the way.  We however made significantly better time than we did in 2015, and as a result we had quite a lot of time to kill when we finally got to Austin.  I think more than anything that is the point at which I started to slow down.  Up until that point I had been constantly in motion with a clear destination in mind, and without that driving me I lost steam quickly.  By the time we actually met some friends for dinner I was pretty out of it, and while I attempted to keep a robust conversation going…  inside the world had turned into the “wah wah, wah wah wah wah” of the adult characters on the peanuts cartoons.  So when we finally hit the hotel room, we shuffled everything up from the car and attempted to “set up base”.  I would not have even set up my laptop last night probably, but my wife needed to use it to remote into something in her school.  The problem is… in my rush to make that happen…  I kinda did a half assed job of getting everything hooked up.

The Mishap

In the process of hooking things up, I connected my USB hub up to the laptop, and into that I connected my phone and the powerbank.  When I got up this morning, raised the lid of the laptop… and expected to be able to wiggle the mouse and have the screen come to life.  The problem is… nothing happened.  I thought maybe there had been a critical update or something that came through…  so I attempted to power on the laptop…  nothing happened.  Then it dawned on me…. that I had hooked everything up… except the laptop power supply.  So that means as a result my phone is also now sitting at 15%.  So in theory…  I get to test my powerbank early in this process because there is no way I can handle existing with only 15% battery.  At the moment I have it hooked to a high powered ipad style wall charger, and a usb3 cable… so here is hoping that while I eat breakfast it will continue to charge and maybe be up to 50% or so.  However for most of the day I have this feeling that I will be leaving it hooked to the power bank.

The awesome thing is that last night the whole group text thing seems to have worked, because after I sent the initial test message I crashed and crashed hard.  Over the night there were seven messages in that thread and it seems as though everyone met up at the Hard Rock.  There is a bit of a feeling of “missing out” because I am staying nowhere near the convention.  That said… after the drive there is no way I could have functioned.  I realize that Thalen made a longer drive, and he apparently joined in the reindeer games…  but yeah…  I was personally toast.  So at this point I am going to wrap this thing up, head down and grab a quick breakfast and then finish packing my bag for the day.  The goal is to be parked at the convention center around 8 am, and hopefully meet up with folks then.  There are a bunch of anxieties that I am trying to keep pushed down so that I can function normally today.  However if it goes anything like last year I am going to have a really fun time.

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