Speaking of travel, have we mentioned that we mostly just find the whole shebang to be one royal pain in the nether regions? "Broadens the mind; expands the horizons"-- yeah, right, whatever. All we know is that even leaving aside the newly-added complication of toting a baby along, getting from Point A to Point B frequently involves lack of legroom, long waits in depressing fluorescently-lit environments, "food" that only qualifies as such in the same way that ketchup qualifies as a vegetable, and various and sundry other indignities we could just as soon live without. Most of the time we'd much rather just keep hanging out at Point A. Point A's a pretty nice place, after all-- we know what's in the fridge, the grooves in the couch perfectly match those aforementioned nether regions, and really, just what's so special about Point B anyway?

The big exception for us in recent years has been when Point B is New York City, which even under normal circumstances is special enough unto itself, but gains about 150 extra cool points each summer ever since the mid-year Macworld Expo moved there four years ago. For three years in a row, we therefore deemed Point B to be absolutely worth visiting, the ickiness of travel notwithstanding. This year, however, we had to bail on the trip entirely, because even the prospect of seeing His Steveness live and in person wasn't enough to outweigh the sheer psychic one-two punch of traveling with a two-month-old and blowing all that bread on hotels, restaurants, and cab fare. (We have a college fund to think about now, you know.) If only last month's show were held here in Boston, we could have attended, and not missed our first summer Expo since 1994. Kinda makes you cry, doesn't it?

So you can imagine the giddiness that Mac-using Point A-ers like ourselves are feeling now that there's talk of moving the summer Expo back to Beantown. For the Angus-Come-Latelies out there, prior to 1998, Macworld Expo's mid-year show was always held in Boston, which was a sick horse of a completely different illness. Sure, the town didn't have a convention center big enough to contain the show, and thus Expo-goers were subjected to the decidedly surreal necessity of constantly hopping shuttle buses that plodded glacially through Big Dig spillover carnage between the World Trade Center (no, not that World Trade Center) and the Bayside Expo Center. On the plus side, however, it meant that your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff didn't have to venture far from Point A just to hang with fellow Macheads at a big trade show. No travel and no crippling expense (well, for us anyway), and at the end of the day we could look forward to raiding a familiar fridge and settling down into our own custom-molded couch grooves. Selfish? Heck yeah, we were selfish; when the show was moved to NYC, we didn't care one jot about the alleged good that would come of it. All it meant to us was that we'd have to start catapulting ourselves Point B-ward every year if we wanted to catch the festivities.

But soon we might have reason to smile again, because according to a Business Today article, now that Boston is planning to open a shiny new (and severely underbooked) convention center in 2004, IDG World Expo is seriously considering moving Macworld Expo back to within a dozen miles or so of the AtAT compound, with LinuxWorld tossed in as a happy bonus. If you're a Boston-area denizen, don't break out the bubbly just yet-- the idea's just in the tossing-around stage, and it's contingent on the city being able to strongarm hotel owners into cutting rates for showgoers. But hey, it gives us hope. And for those of you for whom NYC is Point A and who will suddenly have to figure your own expensive Point B trips if this move comes to pass, well, we'll feel sorry for you, because we'll know exactly how you'll feel. But that won't keep us from doing a little Happy Dance if 2004 brings the chickens home to roost.