The Best Laid Plans

Yeah, I know, it's an awesome book, but this post isn't about the novel The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis (which, if you haven't read yet, you should go out and do)

This post is, instead, about my own best laid plans for this morning.

I'm at The Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise in the Alberta mountains for a two day business meeting with other retail campus colleagues. Always very productive, inspiring and beneficial meetings.


After a four hour flight then a two and a half hour drive through complete darkness to get here last night, I set my alarm for 5:30 AM so I could get up, deal with some work-related emails and then pop down to the exercise room and work-out.

Of course, when I got to the fitness room (all dressed up nice in the workout clothes I packed and with an mp3 player in hand with a cool audio book from Podiobooks.com ready to listen to while working out) I discovered it didn't open until 6:30.

I'd planned on working out from 6:00 AM until 6:30 AM -- then heading back to my room, showering and getting dressed for the 7:00 AM breakfast. We roll right from the 7 AM breakfast and into an 8 AM business meeting in a jam-packed day that will end some time after 6 PM this evening.

"No worries," I thought. I had packed winter running clothes figuring I should be able to go run outside if the indoor facilities weren't that good. (And when I say "I packed" what I really mean is that Francine packed -- I'm just an idiot with concepts and ideas -- Francine is the real "doer" in our household; if it weren't for her, I would have arrived here perhaps with the clothes on my back, a laptop and a chocolate bar and maybe a pack of gum. But because of her, I have matching clothes to wear at my meetings -- perfectly labeled so I don't combine the wrong shirt and pants together, along with a set of indoor and outdoor workout clothes -- gotta love her!)

The only problem is that it's still pitch black outside and I have no real idea of the surroundings. Since we got here in the thick dark blackness of night and it's still completely dark out there (my window faces directly onto the mountain and either we had 100 feet of snow while I was sleeping which is now covering my window, or it's still really really dark out there) -- so while there are likely a ton of great jogging and hiking trails here, I'm not quite ready to go get lost in the rocky mountains in the dark with nobody knowing where I farted off to, only to get captured by some forest creature like Bigfoot. (Yes, it's true, I'm not afraid of bears, wolves or other predatory creatures, but rather mythical ones like Bigfoot)

So I came back to my room, figured I'd blog for a few minutes, then shower and get ready for my day.

Perhaps I'll have time to workout this evening after all the work is done.

Of course, I had some writing work I'd been planning on getting to since I'm securely locked in a hotel room with very few distractions . . .

We'll see how that goes. As we all know, my "best laid plans" don't always roll out the way I intend.