Hooray for Google and their maps!

Planning for the anniversary vacation is not exactly moving along, but the research sure is. I found the Asheville B&B Association's website, and I added some cool-looking ones to my delicious.com page. But there wasn't any convenient mapping feature that had all of them on it at once, so I fired up GMaps and made my own. I added some restaurants, spas, and shopping (Chocolate Fetish, oh yes), and now it's pretty sweet. I wonder if I ought to add all the B&Bs or just leave it as is, with the ones I'm considering.

There are more nice-looking B&Bs than we can stay in at once, so I'm envisioning future weekend trips. I also think it would be cool to bug off to the mountains for a weekend and stay in a B&B or cabin or something and write, without distractions like the internet or what have you. A bit pricey, but sometimes you just need a change of venue. (My main venue is the living room couch, and I have the awful problem of going to look something up, like a list of major events in 1986, then getting sucked into wikipedia diving. 1986 was a big major-event year: Chernobyl and the Challenger both. I was 10 that year.)

Then after I made my Asheville map, I made a southern Appalachian ski resort map. Probably a duplication of effort, since I found an all-US ski resort map, but it suits my purposes. Which are primarily having it all collected in one convenient place and being able to share it with, say, the in-laws, who like family togetherness time and would probably come to the East Coast for skiing, though they're West Coast types, and our mountains are apparently inferior.

Mostly I do it to combat boredom and mental blahs, because I like looking things up and organizing things into a fashion that suits my needs. No, really, I like doing research into random shit, like restaurants in Asheville, Prussian military history, Victorian fashion, historical train routes, Turkish names, and whatever's got my interest for the moment. I've been known to look up air fares for people who expressed a mild interest in coming to visit.

Pharmacists, after all, are kind of like the reference librarians of the medical world. If we don't know the answer to a drug-related question off the top of our heads (and depending on the drug and the question, sometimes we do), we know where to go to look it up, look it up, and summarize it for you. There's a theory going around that pharmacists on average are better at translating med speak into plain English than other health professionals. Whether it's a result of our training or because of some trait that pushes us into pharmacy rather than medicine or nursing is likely to be a chicken vs egg question.

Right. That wandered all over the place.