First "vacation" of 2024

Between all the excitement of Neuralink's big news, I nearly failed to mention I was up to some other things last weekend as well. In between doing my part to ensure Neuralink's first human surgery went off without a hitch, and while subsisting on far less than an appropriate amount of sleep, I was also traversing the state! Months prior, I'd thought it sounded like a great idea to rebook the LA trip we'd originally planned with our foster kid to a completely inoffensive time of the year, just long enough after the holidays to not get a side eye for taking a long weekend, but not soon enough into the new year for anything too important to be happening. Famous last words.

We had an interesting sort of remote work day.

I spent our train ride down to Los Angeles furiously tethering myself to my personal hotspot and hammering out down-to-the-wire code changes, all while frantically dreading the inevitable dead zones on the journey. I sent screenshots and software instructions well past midnight from our hotel room. I tracked the final day's countdown while creeping through the mazes in The Last Bookstore. We toasted to a Chi Connection while crossing my fingers there'd be no last minute software requests pinging me between sips of wine. And we both quietly celebrated while reflecting on art in The Broad, aching that we couldn't share our biggest news of the day while catching up with family. We breathed easier over Sunday night dinner in an English pub in Santa Monica (quite the destination) when I got a proper shout-out in Slack for my software's seamless operation.

A trip to LA isn't complete without a stop by The Last Bookstore.

We visited The Broad (free modern art museum) for the first time on this trip.

We couldn't call this a relaxing weekend, but it was an excellent way to spend those precious moments while holding onto such big news, waiting for the rest of the world to find out.

All too soon, we were back to the grindstone on a Monday morning train, still dizzy from the excitement and the sleep deprivation, with incoming software requests piling up as I fought with my hotspot en route back home.