Lobby floor at the Encore in Las Vegas

I am sitting here in a Caribou Coffee near Plain City, Ohio, watching with no small amount of dread all of my work email downloading to my machine. I am supposed to be on vacation, but I can't connect to my work email from my sister in law's place, so I thought I would check it out...oy, what a mistake--I have over 130 emails so far, and it's still sucking them in. Totally frustrating.

When I was at Razorfish, I went on this rather awesome leadership training program (I know how it sounds, but hey, I got to to Sweden!) during which we took a ton of courses, one of which was effective communications. I'll spare you the details, but the most effective was face to face...the least was email. I get over 1400 emails a month from work.

Anyway, I'm having a pretty good trip so far if I choose to ignore how long it took to get here (17 hours). We had two cancelled flights, so I ended up going from LA to Phoenix to Las Vegas to Charlotte to Columbus. We got to spend 6 hours in Vegas, so we went to a few hotels (Whit wanted to check out the Encore, which was pretty nice) and ate and walked around.


and time passes.

Well, now I am in the air heading to Tokyo. It's been frustrating, I have to say---I just have had zero time to update this particular blog. I need to figure out how to channel my myspace updates to this page--I was uploading a lot of photos throughout my visit to Ohio and it was, honestly, just easier to share what was going on that way (damn you, Facebook! You and your convenience.) And then, with the weekly iFanboy article, ongoing Norton blogs, and more work for murmur.com...I'm just writing everywhere but here.

So far, the Tokyo trip is smooth, but sadly I am on United. While they didn't charge me for checking a bag, the food is awful--no surprise there, just disappointment--and now they charge for drinks! Not to sound like an alcoholic, but, I mean, wasn't that one of the fun things about flying international? So weak. Flying a US airline just sucks now and it will probably never get better.

I was in Tokyo two years ago to talk to various Mac press and, like I promised, I am back to talk about our latest offering. Unlike last last time, however, Whit's not coming, which makes it not as fun--- we travel really well together and she has a knack for finding fun activities and neighborhoods. We went through the guidebooks last night so I have a good idea of where I am going to be (this super, super hip hotel in Shibuya, the Cerulean Tower, a few blocks away from my office). I get in Tuesday afternoon, so, I hope to get some sleep here so I can out at night around the hood.

Pete, Whitney, Kim, Cindy...and Walter

Our visit to Ohio was a lot of fun, if shorter than we wanted thanks to US Airways canceling our flights--we were about 17 hours late. It was crazy--every other carrier was flying into Columbus, so we think they cancelled the flights so there would be no chance of their planes being snowed in the day after. So, instead of flying to Phoenix and then continuing on the same plane to Columbus, we waited four hours to fly to Vegas, where we found that they cancelled our second flight, so we were in Vegas for 7 hours and then went to Charlotte, then to Columbus that next morning. We made a night of it, though; I put our bags in a locker and we took a trip to the Encore hotel and proceeded to make our way to the Mirage. It was actually a lot of fun, so it wasn't a total waste of time. Still, though--I can't see myself paying for another US Airways flight in this lifetime.

Seeing Whit's family was a blast, though. I am very much myself with them and everyone gets along quite well. I met my nephew Walter (almost two years old), which was fun. Where we were in Ohio (outside of Columbus much of the time) could not be more different than LA, which was refreshing, for the most part (though I think we drove more there than I do in LA, since everything is spaced so far apart). We had our "second Xmas," complete with tree and turkey dinner, and as I looked outside at the snow, I felt very fortunate.

The rundown:

- My brother Chris leaves Wednesday morning to start bootcamp for the US Navy. He will be gone for two months, basically unreachable, as, as he puts it, "has every shred of individuality stripped away" and turned into a sailor. He was pretty nervous about it, but he's more excited now. It should be crazy interesting to hear his stories--we are not a military family by any stretch so it's all new to us.

- Acting has been slow, thanks in part to my having to be away from LA for two weeks. Basically, if I am gone for two weeks I am out of commission for three or even four (doesn't do me any good to audition for a part that I am not going to be around to film). I had a really solid audition for a great part on a Nickelodeon show, but I have not heard back yet, so I assume I did not get a callback.

- Work is good, but I am still overwhelmed with emails, as I mentioned above. It's super frustrating,and since I can't connect to anything while I am in the air (a good thing, for the most part), I am sure I will be flooded when I get back. Still, going to Tokyo is a huge perk and I am not complaining, just whining.

- Writing has been capsized by the traveling and online writing commitments, but I added two characters to a show that I am writing that really round the whole thing out. I have this idea that I honestly think could really be successful on commercial television. I am excited about it because the set up itself is a platform on which one can just write story after story. I just need to get the pilot written and sketch out the first part of the season. Then...well, I am not sure; I guess I send it to my agent and shop it around. But now that I have the cast rounded out, I feel like all I gotta do is lock myself away for a week and bang out the script. (And yes, I realized that I am actively not doing that now.)

Okay--let's get this posted. I’ll try to do daily Tokyo updates.

Tags: ohio, tokyo, travel, life