Sausalito and Paris

This week, I traveled up to Sausalito for my company’s retreat.  Sausalito is a charming village across the Golden Gate bridge and a really nice place to spend a couple of days.

Unfortunately, my trip didn’t get off to a very peaceful start.  Because I am a procrastinator, I put off completing some mandatory training for, oh, months.  The day before we were all meant to take off for the Bay, all of my coworkers and I received an email threatening “public humiliation” at our retreat if we did not finish the training by the next day.  Obviously, I was nowhere close to finishing.  Therefore, I ended up spending most of the evening before leaving hunched over my computer scrambling to finish  with technical problems making the task take about four times longer than it should have.  (Avoiding public humiliation is a pretty good incentive.)  While I was able to finish the training, there were two highly negative consequences of my cram session:

1. I went to bed way too late, knowing that I’d only be able to get four hours of sleep that night.

2. I slept through my alarm. (But I got more than four hours of sleep, which is good … sort of.)

I jolted awake the morning of our flight an hour and a half after I’d planned, missing my airport carpool.  I panicked, scrambled around, shoving items in my suitcase, managed to throw on some jeans, and sped to the airport.  I parked … somewhere, found out what airline we were taking at the last possible second (I was so prepared), and made my way to the gate.  Luckily, I made it there with time to spare.  But I had to spend the entire day looking like hell (and had to give a presentation in front of everyone that was videotaped).

Also, finding my car when I returned to LA was sort of an adventure.

Despite the rocky start, the retreat was lovely and I learned a lot.  This weekend, I was happy to spend some time relaxing, and I saw the new Woody Allen flick, Midnight in Paris, which was romantic and lovely and made me want to take off for Paris immediately to wander the streets with Owen Wilson, who was really delightful in this movie.

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