Traveling for work can sometimes be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you get to see other parts of the country that you might not always get the chance to, and the accommodations are almost always first class, but a curse because you’re away from home and usually stuck in some hotel conference room or ballroom all day watching presentations and listening to boring, uninspiring speakers, or you’re subjugated to some professional motivational speaker to rah-rah the ‘team’ by jacking them all up with clever buzzwords and an overdose of espresso, or Red Bull depending on your poison of choice.

I’m lucky in one regard in the way I’ve been able to structure my own employment deal. No longer am I chained to an office, a slave to a cubicle, or even at the mercy of an apathetic HR Department; I live in that luscious world of the independent contractor, a consultant, a mercenary of the workforce, a member of that virtual version of the French Foreign Legion, white cap and all. It’s what happens when you tell your boss that you’re tired of spending an hour on the freeway every day and fighting traffic just to come into a climate controlled office to do the same exact thing you could be doing from the comfort of your own home while still wearing your pajamas and pink fuzzy bunny slippers, and they agree with you.

Downsides? Sometimes, but the perks definitely outweigh them, but the trade off is the freedom to set your own hours and as long as you produce, they more or less leave you alone, until someone gets the bright idea to suggest, “Hey… shouldn’t Nina come to this meeting too?”, and you get an email saying something to the effect of;

“Hi! We’d really like you to come to this conference and even though you’re not in the office anymore you’re still technically an employee… it would be really great to see you there! Call the travel office to make arrangements. Thanks! See you in two days!”

Some travel… an overnighter in downtown Boston, oh joy. But the way the meetings were scheduled it just made sense to stay overnight in town rather than drive back and forth and get up before the crack of dawn and then spend an hour or so driving into Boston, finding a place to park my car, paying to park my car and then dealing with all of that crap, and since they were offering the hotel room, why the hell not? And besides, the Westin has the most delicious Oatmeal Cookies! For free even! Yay!

So, meetings and silly travel aside, March has been a tough month. It was kind of nice to see some people I hadn’t seen in a while. I suppose I should back up and mention that this one day conference/meeting involved flying people in from all around the country, so I did get to see some old friends and colleagues. I saw my friend Dieter who told me that he and his wife are moving back to Germany to work in our office in Berlin, and my friend Julie who used to work in Boston and now works in Chicago is pregnant with her first child; all little things, but sometimes things we take for granted. When you work in an office you do tend to form relationships with the people you work with, so when you move out of the office and start working from home, you become disconnected from the everyday banter and watercooler conversations with the people you work with and unless you’re really good about keeping in touch by email, you tend to lose touch with what’s going on in their lives, so it was kind of nice to catch up with everyone.

My next trip is scheduled for the end of April when I get to go to sunny Palo Alto, California for three days! Yay! Pass the tanning butter baby! Woo!

I missed my men tho. Even one night away in a luxurious hotel was tough for me. I missed my bed. I missed sleeping next to my husband. I missed seeing my son when he came home from school. So maybe you do trade some of that workplace camaraderie away when you work from home, but wow, what you gain is so much more special.

I got a nice surprise today from my husband. It seems as tho my brother found an old sketch of me in his attic that my parents had done when I was just a wee little thing. It’s matted and framed, but I wanted to scan it and post it so you could see what an ugly duckling I was as a child! Ugh, look at that nose! lol! Oh well, I’ll save those stories for another time maybe. Click the thumbnail to enlarge.

Blogging about the act of blogging is never terribly interesting, but blogging about the very often chaotic, sometimes psychotic personalities of bloggers is always something I have time for! Something I’ve come to accept as truth about doing this is that there are just some people who can’t handle the responsibility of an internet connection. I don’t mean to be cynical or even condescending, but let’s just say that some folks take this just a bit too seriously. What am I talking about? Well, without getting into the very confusing and complicated details, this post put up by my friend The Butterfly Temptress pretty much says it all. Good lord, are loyalty oaths next? I feel like I’ve got Karl Rove standing over my shoulder here.

It’s weird, but as I’ve often said, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to my blog stats. My site does very well in terms of traffic and all that, and my perspective has always been that the people who choose to read this site and my words do so because they want to. It’s no big deal, right? But occasionally I see something in my stats that just leaves me bewildered. Like, when I see strange hits from New York City from people who I know simply despise me and my site selectively reading certain posts or going thru specific categories, maybe hoping to glean some insight into the inner workings or mind of the lazy geisha or maybe looking to do some more fishing off my pier, but whatever, that kind of thing is more amusing now than annoying, but then it was all summed up for me by the lovely Lady Neaya.

Lady Neaya and her Daddy have a new website that they’ve started which you can find here. It lists lazy geisha as a friend, which of course I am. But, a single sentence summed everything up for me.

“Her in your face honesty and love of her own sexuality will amaze you…”

Wow. Wow. Wow.

I thought about this ‘in your face honesty’ which seems to have become part of my reputation, and in a comment I left on Butterfly’s site in response to her post I elaborated a bit more on this, but I’ll only add here that I think honesty is a good thing. Am I perfect? Certainly not. Is my life perfect? Well, it is for me, but that’s my business. I suppose this all speaks to the long history of this site and the long and sordid story of some of the problems I’ve had out here and to some of the things that have happened and continue to happen, but I can’t let that bother me or deter me anymore, so I don’t, but it seemed worth mentioning just the same.

So, tomorrow is Friday and I’m taking the day off! Yay! Well, it’s supposed to snow anyway, but I’m going to work on geishaland tomorrow, and hopefully catch up with my backlog of emails and maybe even chip away at some of my personal projects. If anything, the more I’m poked at, the more I want to do. Funny how that works. All it does is strengthen my resolve, and my desire for cake… mmmm… chocolate cake with chocolate frosting… yum!