Left to My Own Devices

I have spent the last two nights away from my family. Yesterday and today I've been at a Kentucky Society for Technology in Education meeting, and tomorrow I'll be at the Kentucky Student Technology Leadership Program annual conference. Both the meeting and the STLP convention are in Lexington, so after I drove down midday yesterday I just stayed here.

But I'm not writing this to give you a punch by punch of the last two days of my little life. What I wanted to write about is how different an animal I become when I'm away from my family. Because I end up staying in a hotel due to conferences or meetings not that often, but maybe five or six times a year, and what I find during those times is that, left to my own devices:
1) I don't watch much TV. I've been checked into this hotel room since yesterday afternoon, and I haven't had the TV on at all. The last conference I attended, back in January, was three days long, and I never turned the TV on then, either. Before I thought it was maybe that hotel rooms don't lend themselves to watching TV, especially since I'm not much of a horizontal TV watcher, and I don't like watching TV on little 19 inch screens. But this hotel room that I'm in tonight is a nice little suite with a 32 inch LCD TV and a nice little couch with an ottoman. But I'm using the couch to hold my ironed pants and the ottoman to hold my suitcase.
2) I burn the midnight oil when I'm alone. I learned this a long time ago. It's not that I need less sleep when I'm alone, but instead of going to bed at my usual 9:30 or so I seldom go to bed when I'm alone before midnight.

So there's no point to this post, really. Just something I noticed.