January 20, 2005

It was nice waking up in such a nice hotel in Pittsburgh. We got up in time to be able to just squeeze in some breakfast before I have to go off to my one meeting. So we went down to the buffet and got a quick breakfast. The hospital called just as I was about to leave and rescheduled the meeting for tomorrow because the guy that I am meeting with had a chance to have a teleconference with his son who was serving in Iraq. So Min and I got the chance to spend the day relaxing together.

I had a phone conference at 10:00 and I had to spend a bit of the day working in the hotel. We were stuck in there until almost 4:00 between phone calls and emails that had to be taken care of. So Min watched television while I worked.

After I was able to leave the hotel, we went out for some lunch. We just wanted to walk and not go anyplace far so we went to the “saloon” that was right across the street and got some really good fish sandwiches. The food was really good even if the service wasn’t. It was just a bar anyway. But it was handy. After our late lunch, we drove out to Squirrel Hill so that Min could do some shopping. There is a yarn store out there that she wanted to go to so we headed out there. Traffic was awful, as always in Pittsburgh. I found a Starbucks that I was able to park and and could see the yarn shop from there so I got a hot chocolate and Min walked over to the yarn store. She decided that she was going to be there for a while so she found a Barnes and Nobles and sent me over there to hang out for an hour or so while she kept shopping.

After shopping, I drove Min around to show her where I used to live in Pittsburgh. It is almost exactly five years ago that Andy and I moved down there to work on the Waste Watcher. Boy does time fly.

We decided to make it a quiet night and just hung out in the hotel and watched DVDs on my laptop. Since we were out of town, I thought that I would take advantage of the quiet to catch up on some sleep.

The hotel room was super dry and I had a terrible time sleeping last night because when I get dry I start choking on the CPAP machine. Min has a really bad cold (we hope that it is just a cold) and really needed some humidity too. So we ran a hot shower with the bathroom door open to get some steam into the room. I didn’t realize that it was getting very steamy but Min did but didn’t think anything of it. The hotel room had really high ceilings so most of the steam was really high up and we couldn’t tell how much there was. Well, the smoke alarm went off from all of the particles in the air. Oh boy. Luckily it was only our room that went off. The alarm was about 10-11 feet off of the ground, though, so that there was no way to get to it to do anything. We tried fanning it but that didn’t help. Eventually, they sent up maintenance and had them bring a ladder and try to disconnect it. But the ladder was too short so they had to get a taller one. Then they returned and disconnected it. Oops. They left us the ladder so that it could be attached again later. They returned around 1:30 in the morning and tried to hook it up again but it went off because the system wouldn’t reset. So they took it and the ladder away.

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