Irony can be a real jerk sometimes, and it seems Irony likes messing with my work travel since joining JPL.  My first trip for work was to go back to a Nadcap meeting back in February (see Nadcap – The Gravitation Hairball), and not only that to go to my crazy ex-girlfriend of vacation spots, New Orleans.  Yet, that is just a meeting.  My job is an auditor, not a meeting attender.  So as much as going back to my old career nemesis for a first trip is kinda not too ironic.  What would be ironic is if I would go on my first audit to some place familiar to me … like … maybe … I don’t know … possibly, Boston, where I lived the last two years.

Guess where I am going on my first audit?

Boston.

That’s right, the place I moved away from nearly five months ago will be my first major audit trip.  The place I battled to get free of.  The place I was ready to put behind me like a chapter that needed to be closed.  That’s exactly where I am going to.

If you can’t tell, I’m not exactly excited about it.  I mean, it is finally getting to be good weather out there and I wouldn’t mind stopping by some of the places I haunted while living that way, but if absence makes the heart grow fonder – my heart hasn’t grown all that fond.

Regardless, I am not there for long.  I get in Monday, do my audit Tuesday, fly back to California Wednesday.  I’m visiting a place north of town, staying in a hotel up that way, and there isn’t that much time to slip in much to do.  So don’t expect some grand story of the great return.  The return is really nothing more than ironic.