Easter

The house is dauntingly messy and tomorrow afternoon we are having 15 to 20 people over for an Easter feast. This means today is going to be only the most fun cleaning and cooking you have ever seen!

Last night, one of my friends had her mom and sister come into town so we threw together a last minute meal and had everyone over for that. We made what I affectionately call a Peep Cake because it was a four layer chocolate cake with rainbow chip icing between the layers and chocolate icing on top with a ring of Peeps around a ring of Hershey kisses around a ring of chocolate chips around a ring of mini chocolate chips. if you look from the top down, it looks like a very calorie-laden sunflower!

Good luck to everyone hosting a meal tomorrow and happy Easter!

BACK IN BLACK

Alright, folks!  I’m back and my weekly posts will begin again this weekend!

Sorry for the unexplained absence, work got crazy for a while but things are settling down now so I will resume normal programming!

Working

There were a few big things that happened at work this past week.

First, there was the opportunity to run in a race that was a lot of fun.  There have been a few marathons that I missed due to work, but I got to run one last weekend and then go immediately back to work.  It was essentially the worst idea ever and nearly impossible to stay awake during one of our briefings halfway through the day, but it was completely worth it to get to run another marathon with some people out here!

Second, we had what we thought was an enormous breakthrough.  There was much rejoicing and we managed to feel elated for three full days.  It wasn’t until we were starting to wrap up one of our programs that someone tossed a wrench in the plans and basically tossed us back to the beginning.  We weren’t frustrated (that has happened before, we have kind of come to expect it) we were mostly just disappointed that we had used all our confetti and streamers for the first celebration when we’ll definitely need some for the next time we are partying upon completion.

Third, it has been determined that the single most used item of technology in our group is a Kindle.  Every single one of us has one and we all use it more here than we have any other time.  We trade books so each of us can get exposure to types of books we may not have seen, we trade reviews of books to buy and we trade Kindles if we two people have books the others want to read.  The only bad thing about having that much literature at your fingertips is the insatiable need to purchase more books.  My brain thanks me, my bank account does not.

Quotes

As an update, the meeting requests at work have not slowed. This coming week has 18 meetings from one person.

Here are a few quotes from this past week that really made us laugh.

(Sitting in a room giving a presentation that the head guy is giving in a few days to some very important people. I finish the presentation and click to the “End of Slide Show” screen.)
Head guy: That’s it?
Me: Yep.
(Silence)
Head guy: Hmm.

(Driving while the rest of the passengers look out the window.)
Passenger 1: (Looking wistfully out the window) This is my life.

(Giving a presentation where we had a placeholder slide we had copied and pasted from an earlier slide and colored the text red.)
Me: This is a placeholder slide.
Unaware guy: That’s the same text, it’s just red.
Me: Yes, it’s just a placeholder until we have the information to fill the chart.
UG: But it says the same thing!

And the one that takes the cake:
Anyone who is completely unaware of what they are asking us to do: Make it happen.

If you tell me to make it happen, I will.  The product might not be what you wanted, it may have been procured illegally or immorally and it might actually hinder progress in the long run, but I WILL make it happen.  Be very careful if you tell me to “make it happen”.