Roads

We're back from our short trip to New Mexico. I'm not going to write much about it now. Instead, I'll savor the experience for a day or a few days and then will write about it.

I want to compare the way I am thinking about our little trip now with the way I will write about it later. I've always been one to try hard to avoid embellishing my writing, especially the descriptions of places I've been...unless, of course, I'm doing it deliberately and unabashedly and reporting it all the while. If I were to write it now, though, I think it would read like I embellished.

Four days is too few to allow me to fully decompress from the ravages of running our business. I tried to leave the office in the office, but I just had to take my Blackberry with me and found myself responding to email far too much. That's the sign of an idiot. I knew I should have simply turned off the email capability and used it as a phone in a pinch, but I behaved differently. I let my office intrude too much. I took one very long phone call from a website broker who tried for 20 minutes to convince me to negotiate a purchase of a hijacked website URL instead of pursuing trademark infringement against its publisher. I finally told her that my decision was final, the owner could expect to hear from someone besides me on trademark infringement, and goodbye, I am hanging up now to enjoy my 4-day vacation. I bet I spent 24 of 48 hours thinking about work. I need a lobotomy.

When I write about the real trip, the real experience, time that cleared my head--albeit briefly--my thoughts will be very different. My record will be about people I saw, places I experienced, thoughts that may have shaped my way of thinking for some time to come.

If anyone here who reads What Do I Know?, and does not know it already, I'll share the sad news that Kathy's mother, Patricia Anne Varnell Archibald, died on May 5.