Midterm

This past week has been all about ramping up for our team’s midterm briefing where the customer will be coming out to basically see what it is we have done with their money.  We have a lot of information, but the rules they have put on us have kept us from getting farther than just some preliminary stuff.  We’re hoping once we talk to them, we can convince them they need to allow us to delve in a little farther.  In the end, we’re all on the same team and letting us in a little more simply gives us more ammunition to create a better final report for them.  Hopefully we can convey that in our presentation.

I decided to join some of my friends here and start the South Beach Diet.  We started on Friday and then I promptly scheduled a pancake party at my house for that very evening.  If you don’t know what South Beach is, it’s basically a low-carb diet which means you can’t eat things like … oh, I don’t know … pancakes.  We still have a lot of pancake mix left over from our ski trip a while back (thank you Krusteaz for making such a huge amount of pancake mix available at Sam’s) and we’ve been trying to use it up.  Friday night we had twelve people over for pancakes, bacon and eggs.  It turns out twelve people can certainly eat their way through a lot of eggs and bacon.

We got quite a few comments on the variety of certain items we had for people to enjoy.  Because (when I can eat them) I like pancakes with peanut butter on them, we had a few things for people to put on their flapjacks.  In addition to the simple butter approach, we had Nutella, Natural Almond Butter, Natural Peanut Butter and Skippy Peanut Butter.  That in addition to the numerous types of bacon made people wonder if we had planned it for this party or if those were just items we kept in stock.  For the butters, those are things we keep on hand.  One of the roommates likes Skippy, another likes Nutella Natural Peanut Butter and I like Nutella and Almond Butter so when we went to Walmart for the essentials, those are the items we picked up.  The next logical question was about the bacons.  I’m partial to turkey bacon or Canadian bacon (which is simply glorified ham) and one of the roommates refuses to eat anything but “the real thing” when it comes to bacon so we have to keep regular bacon on hand.  I think he should just be able to tough it out and conform, but he’s not having that.

Nursing

I got asked by a nursing student that I know here to give a quote answering the question “What is your view of nurses?” I wrote an answer and then decided I liked it so much that I would put it here for everyone to read.

It’s the nurse’s ability to provide extraordinary care to each and every patient that comes under their care while short on time, sleep and money that sets them in a league of their own. In the hustle and bustle of a hospital that is busy offering critical care to people running the gamut from neonates to geriatrics, the nurses are the ones who are juggling multiple patients and keeping tabs on medications and treatment options. They offer a hug to a grief stricken family or a wave of welcome relief to a worrying parent. The public have ranked nurses as the most honest and ethical profession in the Gallup polls for nine years running and I don’t see any reason they don’t deserve every bit of that honor. RNs are underpaid and overworked yet still can spare a smile for their patients. This makes sense; nurses are just angels in comfortable shoes.

This weekend we kind of have just been hanging out and having a good time. Work has died down enough that we don’t go to the office on Saturdays until we have our customer briefing next week and we start pulling full weeks again. We found out two of the guys from the other project may be moving to another building which is something we’re not all really okay with. We’ve gotten used to walking down the hall to say hello and getting distracted into a big conversation down there. If they move buildings, we’re going to accomplish so much more work on our day to day assignments that it’s just not going to be funny.

I let one of the guys borrow my PS3 because I’m not really playing it and the Internet speeds here aren’t really quick enough to play the online games with my buddies around the country. The next day, I restarted my Netflix subscription and changed the address to this house so we can get the movies. It was then that I realized my Blu-Ray player (the PS3) was no longer in the same house. Thankfully my computer has a Blu-Ray drive, so I should be covered. We’ll have to make sure we get the movies on DVD though for the other people in the house so they can all see them on the tiny TV we have in the living room. I do not like technological regression though, so the Blu-Ray to DVD switch may do me in.

Ballooning

Happy Valentine’s Day/Single’s Awareness Day, everybody!

After I got back to work on Wednesday, the work week progressed pretty regularly and without incident.

For the weekend, one of the guys we work with had a buddy passing through town on the way to his new job and it was great to have a larger group of people to hang out with.  We went to a movie and a club downtown while he was there.  All of us that work in my building were really tired because we wake up at five in the morning if not earlier.  The guy who was driving through town got up each day whenever his body got him up which means he was sleeping until eleven or noon each day.  At the club (it was a dance hall, really) we were all starting to yawn and get sleepy around ten and he was ready to party it up all night long.

On Saturday morning, we woke up ridiculously early to go and fly in a hot air balloon.  One of the guys on the team is a hot air balloon pilot and his dad has a few balloons that we used.  It was a lot of fun and despite the strong winds we came in for a smooth and easy landing.  We sat there with the basket on the ground and the balloon in the air for about twenty minutes while we waited for his sister to get there in a chase vehicle (to her credit, we were in a terribly difficult area to reach by vehicle).  She finally came on the radio and asked if we could jump the arroyo.  As we lifted off again, the winds went from approximately 1 knot to 14 knots.  The second landing was less than graceful with the basket on its side and us all laughing hysterically as we rolled out of the basket and off of one another.  We finally got things taken care of and our chase vehicle eventually showed up.

On the way back to the launch field, we found an old abandoned boat shell.  The festival we were participating in had a contest that involves cleaning up the town that was hosting the festival.  Basically you get points per pound for trash found out on the mesa and bonus points for unusual or interesting items.  A fridge is 1000 points, a couch is 300 points and general trash is 10 points per pound.  It was kind of interesting to see people’s reactions when a boat pulled in on the back of our truck and it was even more fun to see the look on the team’s face that brought in a car when they realized they had been upstaged.

We also played three games of volleyball, three games of basketball and then one more game of volleyball at the gym that evening.  We had a small group of people and were wondering what a good way to get some exercise as a group was.  It turned out to be a lot of fun even though neither sport was our best sport because we were all laughing at each other and having a good time.  Any time you can make exercise hilarious is a good time.

Rusty

* This post was constructed and posted on Tuesday, 9 Feb 2010 for reason that will become self-evident as you read.  I posted it with a date of 7 Feb 2010 simply to remain consistent with the fact that these events unfolded over the weekend and that every other post goes up on a Sunday.*

This weekend I took a little trip for work and because of the location, I decided to stay the whole weekend with some friends I knew in the area.  We had a great time and I left earlier than anticipated on Sunday morning to beat the weather home.  There was supposed to be a storm coming in and I didn’t want to drive too much in that storm if I could avoid it.

Things were going really well until I hit a patch of ice.  It was on a corner and the back end of my car slid out to the side.  It tapped the guard rail and put me in the ditch.  Basically, it was the best situation because there was a cement wall that was about 25 to 50 feet back on the road that if I had hit would have caused some serious damage to the front end of my vehicle.

This started the experience of trying to get home.

I had the car towed to a repair shop and attempted some really minor things that might get Rusty to start.  None of them worked so I went and checked into what was an absolute dump of a hotel.  The room was quite literally just a bed and a foldable table and chair.  The table had an old 12 inch tube TV on it and a rotary phone.  Everyone was super pleasant, but you got what you paid for there.  The bed was about as firm as a marshmallow, but it was a bed in a heated room, so I couldn’t complain too much.

The following morning I started my insurance claim and attempted to find a way home.  Because my car was not drivable, I was going to get a rental car.  Those plans were brought to an abrupt end when we realized (my Dad, the insurance agent and myself) there wasn’t a rental car company anywhere near the tiny town I was in.  I ended up purchasing a Greyhound Bus ticket and getting a ride from the hotel attendant to the local bus station.

The bus station (which was also a gas station) had a small table that I camped out at for nearly eight hours while I waited for the one bus that leaves the town.  It took me to a town to the North (I am trying to get South at this point) where I found out the one bus going South from there was cancelled.  I was told to try going farther North in order to increase my chances of getting on a bus that night.  I went to the next town to the North and the same story was repeated.  I went to the farthest North station this bus operates and found that the South-facing buses were all cancelled until the next morning.

I spent a chilly night sleeping on the metal mesh benches in the bus terminal.  The security officer seemed to be okay with an indoor temperature of 50 degrees, so I woke up from a few fitful and uncomfortable hours of sleep shivering violently.  Usually you can concentrate and get a couple seconds reprieve from the shivers, but these were the full body shakes that wouldn’t go away.  I walked about 20 laps of the inside of the terminal to get the blood pumping which brought the muscle convulsions to a bearable level (they didn’t go away completely for another two hours).

We found out the bus that was going to take me home was leaving that morning and I got a ticket issued to me.  It was operated by an alliance bus group that doesn’t speak English, so loading was a bit of a fiasco with people not knowing where to go or what to give to whom.  After we were all seated, we began the reverse journey I had taken the night before.

In the first town, we picked up a few more people and a guy got on who decided the seat next to me would be the most comfortable.  That’s fine; I have nothing wrong with sharing space with another person.  He promptly told me he had just been released from a federal prison the day before and he was headed to a halfway house to get things back in order before he went back out to society.  This piqued my curiosity.

It turns out he was in prison for drug trafficking, small arms dealings, stabbing a K-9 unit and putting a human cop in the hospital.  I’m starting to get uncomfortable as he begins to outline how he hates the government and thinks the current political situation is ‘sh*t’.  When asked what I do, I simply said I work with computer security.  I figured that would alleviate any problems we might have had.

On the eight hour drive home, he talked about how he hated snow and the current weather and wouldn’t hear that there was somewhere outside of LA that was capable of supporting human life.  He came up with such gems as:

“Here parents punish their children by sending them outside.”

or

“Those aren’t real cows.  They are either plastic or frozen solid.”

and

“F*ck this town; the only kind of people that live here are uni-bombers.”

I thought that last one was especially classy.

I finally got home safe and sound with all my belongings and got picked up by a friend.  When I went to eat dinner at another friend’s house, I was told that I was never to do that again.  If I am in a 500 mile radius of one of the guys, I am to call him and he will leave right then to pick me up.

If only I had thought of that before I got on the bus.