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I stepped onto Market Street at 11:30 with the intent of buying shoes and packing.  I somehow completed both in under two hours.  Two spare lenses, two pieces of bedding, two sets of spare clothing, and two toothbrushes, proving that I had made a poor inventory.  Two bags, two light sources and too much time that had passed since I had experienced “elsewhere”.  My inventory for the trip was simple but the inventory for myself was less obvious.   My physical abilities were a shadow.   This time last year I was prepping for a half marathon.  This year I was struggling to finish a 5k.  The shoes on my feet felt beyond me being “Moab Desert Hikers”.  I was maybe worth Crocs.  My emotional state wasn’t what I wished it had been.  “Micro USB cable” never made it onto my check list leaving me stuck for charge until I touched down in Vegas and I was sweating the whole time.  The cabin of the airplane seemed cramped and I started softly sobbing when two kids started crying after we had taken off.

Then I looked around the cabin at the sacred cattle of humanity and started to calm down.  Nothing from Philadelphia could bother me here; I could edit photos, and I did; I could nod off, and I did; and I could chew on things.  The fellow next to me saw me editing photos and struck up a conversation.  He said “within 10 years the photographer will be dead”.  By the time I landed I had myself an enemy and couldn’t have been happier.  We traded numbers and I wandered to my hotel, hoping to never see him again.  The night was bring with opportunity, appropriate for Vegas.

The Excalibur was the cheapest place to stay so there I did.  I laid out my things on the other twin bed for no reason, I was leaving the next morning.

 

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An assumption I make is that repetition will bring simplicity to doing Scout events.  It used to take me five hours to make two cheese cakes and it now runs me about 3.5 or so.  I used to take a day to set up a new computer but I can now do it in an afternoon.  Planning a Scout event used to take me about two weeks of evenings and four days but now I can do one in two weeks of evenings and four days.

I don’t feel like there’s any sort of feature creep in that I’m adding program to fill the available time and I should have theoretical time savings from already having most of the documents I need.  The weeks leading up to an event cause a well-documented cycle of anxiety where I feel bad for not doing anything which destroys my inertia to do anything.  This could sound like a bad thing but my inner humunculus enjoys watching what I’ll do to avoid making progress on my intended event.  I’ve replaced my bed, planned out 10 months of Roundtable meetings, updated every part of the district web page I could get my hands on and made my first to dip back into the world of selling on eBay.

I think at some basal level there’s such thing as ‘conservation of anxiety’ which is both terrifying… and probably bull crap.  I guess the give away will be if I start painting Gundam figurines this time next year or some other time sink.