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Planning Travel

I haven't had much professional travel since August. It is tiring, more so with each passing year, but still quite an enjoyable change in my routine.

I often have more travel in the Spring and a regular August conference.  This coming Spring term (starting in February) I have three trips planned. 

The first one is for my regional association, the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America. I've been a member for 37 years and led it for a couple of years, so this is a meeting with lots of friends and acquaintances. This time the meeting is less than an hour from work and I expect that we will also have a number of departmental faculty and students; this is not always true when we meet in other states in the five-state association (AL-GA-NC-SC-TN). I will give a talk and may attend the Executive Committee meeting depending on a couple of things.

The second one (giving a talk at the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics) is to San Diego, so travel will take a day each way. That is quite taxing for me now in my sixties but it is a good conference and a beautiful city so it is also quite appealing. I've been to San Diego for work four or five times, the last time in 2018. When I think of the Pacific Ocean I think of visiting San Diego.  The talk is an extension (to thirty minutes) of a shorter talk I have given before.

The third is to Miami, my first visit there, for a refresher on foundations for being an Ombudsperson. I attend a local Ombuds association once or twice a year but this course is more intensive; I particularly value the role-playing we do, working with pretend visitors on their issues with constructive feedback from the organizers who supervise.

I will fly for the last two, for a long time for the trip to San Diego. I do not live in fear of airplane crashes (although I have been in car crashes and think them not unlikely) but I do expect the airlines regularly to have delays and cancellations because of the delays and cancellations I have frequently experienced in my life. The lack of reliability is so frustrating; I do not trust them with my luggage after all the times it has not appeared at the luggage carousel at the end of my flight (sometimes delayed because of being loaded on the wrong flight, sometimes just lost). I am also claustrophobic and nowhere am I crammed so tightly as on an airplane. I have paid for TSA-precheck and so the process of moving through security is less of a terrorist-until-proven-innocent treatment. I can not express how offensive I find this form of security theater.

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