Celebrate the Cicadas! with the American Dime Museum June 11, 2004 7:30-9:30 pm. Make cicada eye googlers! Join our cicada band! Sing cicada songs! Draw cicada pictures! Enjoy cicada cacophony! Come dressed as a cicada and win prizes! Celebrate the nymph within! Enjoy the wonder of nature! Enjoy exchanging bug stories with your friends while touring one of America's most unusual museums! Admission to this once-every-seventeen year event is absolutely free for all!

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Colocation site tours are probably the coolest non-programming job responsibility that I've had in the last few months. So it figures that in spite of all my best efforts, fate conspired to keep me from them and on the road as long as possible.

I left Suzy's place at 7:20 to make it in plenty of time to meet up with my boss in Hunt Valley and then carpool with him to the Coloco facility in Laurel, MD. The weather was icky but not really that bad. Around 7:30 the traffic reports and SHA signs start to get a little more ominous.

Around 7:40 I finally hear the report on WYPR that all lanes between Greenspring Avenue and I-83 Southbound are closed due to a serious cascaded accident. I call my boss and tell him that I'm seriously stuck in traffic and I might not be able to make it to Hunt Valley on time.

How are you stuck in traffic, he asks, the accidents are all on the west side. I am on the west side, I tell him. He says to just keep driving.

Around 7:50 I call again and tell him things are really bad, I'm probably just going to continue on to Hunt Valley and then meet everyone at the second location in downtown later in the day. No, come down to Laurel, just drive yourself there instead of meeting me, he says.

I hang up the cell phone and reset my trip mileage at Greenspring Avenue so I can start billing for work mileage. The next time I look down at the odometer it reads 0.2. The time at this point is 8:25. I pass the Overnight Transportation Company trucks in smoking piles by the shoulder a few minutes later and wing down I-83 South to catch I-95 down to Laurel.

After fighting downtown traffic, around 9:25 I call my boss and tell him I'm at I-195 and I-95. The meeting in Laurel started at 9:00. He says to just head straight to downtown instead because their tour and meeting is almost over there. I hang up the phone only to have it ring a minute later. The Intranet server is not responding.

I pull into UMBC and hang out with Rob Banz for a few minutes while fixing the server and calling another colocation provider downtown for another scheduled tour. Around 10:15 I finally leave for Lexington Market. I have no idea where this building is and my laptop is firmly packed in the backseat with the directions, so I circle Lexington Market for about half an hour before parking in a pay-lot and heading out on foot.

By this time the tour of the second facility (which I finally found in a spot I had passed at least three times) was halfway over and it was too late to admit me to this one too. So I just camp out and wait for everyone to finish and tour the UPS room with them.

It wasn't all bad, tho. As soon as that was done I drove six blocks to Charles Street and Baltimore Street to pick up Suzy and head over to Ding How in Fells Point for lunch. After dropping Suzy off on Gay Street to head up to the house on the bus, I made my way back up I-83 to finish up my workday.

A few minutes after I arrive, Suzy calls me on my cell phone. There's a note on the door from Baltimore County. It's a ticket, actually. Apparently its a serious misdemeanor to let your lawn grow more than 12 inches high or have weeds over three feet. Yes I know its pretty gross that I let it get that way at all, but it had to be fixed by June 17, 2004.

I've been totally deluged by all the things going on in my life and I've let a lot of the chores around my house go just a little too long. I knew that I needed to reset things back to a manageable (and not so intimidating) level of chores, so I fired off a call to Ginger Petunia and asked if she could provide her professional clutter management and home maintenance service while Suzy and I were in Ocean City. Much to my delight, she agreed.

Around 21:00 Suzy and I left for Ocean City.

The saga continues the next day.

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