mississippi masala

this post should have been there a week ago, if not for:
1. my decision to move out of california
2. all the long due shopping trips
one of the few benefits of consulting job is that you are not bound by a local office - either you work at the client site or from home. and the organization doesnt really care where your home is-till you are somewhere easily accessible. i have decided to move to san antonio, where abhinav is. actually i am moving to san antonio just for the fact that he is there, else it would have been houston, which has a bigger airport.
so, my first assignment with oracle started with a client in one of the small cities in mississippi. living in fremont/san francisco for all my time in US, i have practically forgotten that there are smaller cities and airports in US too. this one, to say, was like 70 miles from the nearest airport. and the "nearest airport" was also a small one, so the airlines only fly the 80-100 passenger smaller planes there with much less frequency.
the trip started with my missing the flight (not that i am proud of this, but now i have missed flights in all the countries i ever stayed :-) . actually i am a chronic latecomer, i have been late to all the possible occasions one can think of - dates, flights, tests, classes, matches, IIM-C interview, job interviews, meetings....the list is nearly endless. hopefully i would put this behind me someday). this time though the fault wasnt mine.
anyways, so i got another mid-night flight and that got stuck the next morning in houston rain. the saving grace was the pristine looking gulfport, MS airport in the morning. the GPS in the car refused to locate the hotel, so i used my iphone (bless apple!!!) to search for the place. anyways, i got to the hotel after driving for 1.5 hours, and then there were more troubles. the client office was a new one, located somewhere in the middle of nowhere - or so it seemed to me with my direction sense. i spend 30-50 minutes circling the same highways again and again, till i finally found the place. so by the time i got to the client location, it was end of the day.
the week was a saving grace though, with me picking up some of the stuff i didnt know. big issue was the lunch/dinner however, which was mostly in italian restaurants- i am so full of cheese even right now. i would be working on this project for some more time to come, switching WFH and client visits few weeks.
the shopping trips during the past few days were another story altogether. i think i was poorer by almost $1000 or more. formal shirts, casual shirts, pants, khakis, jackets, belts, sunglasses, messengers, shoes and to top the list, a pair of bose QC3. oh and in between two back-to-back movies (i did it only 3 or 4 times in my life i think, including this one). but those are for another post perhaps. right now, my apt looks like a battlefield, and needs cleaning badly.ta.