I know what you’re saying…“Yup, you’re running out of gas, Elizabeth. Missed a big chunk of last week, and now you’ve missed an entire five days.”

You’ll be pleased to know that you are wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong. I was unavoidably detoured to Tampa, Florida and was not able to post, what with the meetings and the presentations and restaurants and bowling and whatnot.

I was thinking about you the entire time. So here goes:

Monday, April 21: I fly for four hours but what seems to be all day. I spend the entire flight avoiding conversation with my seatmate (thank you, Santa, for the noise-canceling headphones that help me ignore chatty people, she said without a trace of chatty irony) and working on an analysis.

I arrive in a beautiful city with a very pretty airport and our hotel is conveniently situated in the airport. Since I’m not there for tourism, this is awesome. It took me about twenty minutes to get off the plane and get to a place where I could lie down. World record.

Having planned ahead, I dash down to be picked up by the Amazing Rhoda, an old friend whom I have never met in person. She graciously entertains me, taking me to the very charming Ybor City and we wind up having a beautiful, leisurely-paced dinner at Columbia Restaurant, which is wonderful Cuban food. They even had flamenco dancing. (Later, I will describe this event to my coworkers who misunderstand and spend more time than is appropriate wondering how I could eat flamingo.)

Amazing Rhoda gets me back to the hotel with time for a celebratory selfie:

Tuesday, April 22: Presentations are made; conversations are had. We wind up in a place where I, for the first time in thirty years, strap on bowling shoes and make with the kegler activity. While bowling does not sound to me like a fun activity, I respond to my own pressure to be a mensch and to subtle peer pressure and find me an eight pound ball.

Amazingly (and the besst part of the day), I do not do what I did the last time I bowled, which was swing my arm back and drop the ball behind me. Rather, I managed to finagle a strike and three spares out of two games. My teammates are very proud of me.

Wednesday, April 23: More presentations, more conversations. More dinner. I speculate that if I did this a lot I would weigh 500 pounds. If I did, I would not fit in the chairs at the beautiful waterside dining, where the Besst part was the view:

Thursday, April 24: Even more presentations and conversations. You won’t believe it, but at this point I’m finally sick of my own voice. No one cares, and I have to keep talking.

I’ll have to fly home at the end of the day, and as I review my itinerary I realize upon awakening that once I land in Phoenix and get home, I will have been awake for twenty-four hours. That was not the Besst moment of the day. It was also not a Besst when I realized that somehow I had lost my beloved TSA Precheck status. The Besst moments were:

– giving what sounded like a fairly well-received presentation to my peers

– having a lovely airport dinner with a colleague

– lying down in my very own bed.

Zzzzzzzzz.

Friday, April 25: Working from home, I stay in my bathrobe most of the day. For what I was hoping to be a lighter work day, it turned out to be not so much with the light thing.

Besst part: watching Son, Interrupted’s school play. It was delightful.

What is the Besst project? 

And why is it called Besst?

© E. Stocking Evans 2014