May

A few thoughts:

1) I'm on my way to Portland, Oregon for some training at a customer in Beaverton. It's going to be three long days, starting at 8 and probably finishing close to 5, but I like the people there and it's an interesting topic that I enjoy training on. The only drawbacks are that I'll probably be too mentally fatigued to be of much use any day after work and will probably just go back to my room and watch TV or read, and that I'll be flying back on Saturday. Won't get home until around suppertime.

2) However, at least I'm doing something. It's been a weird last few weeks... a lot of training engagements have fallen through, for all sorts of weird reasons, just sort of a 'perfect storm' of stuff. At one point it looked like I'd be training every week in April and May. Now it's less than half that. There's work to do if I'm not training, but I'm happiest when I'm working with customers.

3) I'll be onsite in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia the last week of May and all of June and the first week of July unless something changes. I'll be flying down every Sunday and coming back every Friday night. Not much of a weekend for five or six weeks, not to mention flying on Memorial Day and having to cut the July 4th holiday short. Beats not having a job, though. The major impact will be that I won't be able to coordinate a lot of training walks for the local Vermonters who are taking part in the Breast Cancer 3-Day in Boston in late July. With severely truncated weekends, I'll have to do mowing and yardwork and so forth, and when I'm not doing that I'll want to be spending some quality time with Carole. Hopefully some hiking, some kayaking.

Not being able to do a lot of training walks won't kill us, personally -- we're not walking ourselves until October when we do the Philadelphia Breast Cancer 3-Day. We're crewing Boston in July, not walking, but I still wanted to do what we could to help with other walkers' preparation and to stay involved. Now, if I was going to be out of town all of September and part of October, that'd be bad. We definitely need to do a lot of training walks in that time frame. You've got to get your feet toughened up and calloused and get your muscles and joints ready for twenty miles of steady plodding. (Very different from running that distance, or so a lot of people have told me.)

4) Our lawn looks like hell right now, and oddly, I'm fretting about that. A spring broke in our riding lawn mower, causing our mower belt to break, and a Sears guy came out to do the warranty repair on it, and wouldn't you know, he doesn't come equipped with said spring. He told Carole how to install it and said he'd have it shipped directly to the house and said it was up to her, she could install it or she could call when it arrived and schedule another appointment with him... her pick. The spring hasn't arrived yet, but Spring sure has -- it rained like crazy all this weekend and our lawn is about to go into serious jungle mode. I did what I could with our gas-powered push mower last night after work but with the time I had before I had to get to bed for my early morning flight, I probably only did 1/5 of the lawn, if that. Assuming the spring comes this week I've got one hell of a lot of mowing to do on Saturday, and it's not going to be fast: when the grass is as high as it's going to be, you have to take it slow if you want to do a decent job. Argh.

5) Carole is still unemployed. She's been doing part-time work for the US Census as they assemble their address database in our area, but that work is almost done and she's finishing her last canvassing area today. She's starting to go kinda stir crazy, spending hours doing crossword puzzles and online games and then looking up going "where'd the day go?" As far as I can tell, she has applied for every accounting position that would reasonably fit her skills, but sometimes she doesn't get around to applying as fast as she could. She doesn't get called for a lot of interviews... but then, there aren't a lot of positions right now either. My main wish is that if she's done all the applying she can do and she doesn't have any census work to do, she could at least be more active around the house rather than leaving a lot of the household chores for me to do. I know she's depressed, but...

Yes, I'm glossing over a lot here. The sooner she gets back to work and can have a regular routine to her life, the happier I'll be.

6) I like bulldogs. I walking up to the door of our local independent pet food store the other day and as the door opened a young bulldog, barely old enough that you might think twice about saying "he's a puppy", came trotting happily out with his people bringing up the rear. Without thinking I knelt down and cried out happily, "BULLDOG BULLDOG BULLDOG". The pup apparently knew just what to do because he came romping right up to me and let me pat his head and tell him what a good boy he was. Carole gets like that with corgis, but the only dogs that make me go "OOOH DOGGY" are bulldogs.

His name was Ollie, an English bulldog, same breed as the University of Georgia's mascot, only spotted where UGA VII is all white. Nice dog. Nice owners. Wish I had a dog, but with my travel, it's just not going to happen.

I also met a Bulldog the other day -- I walked into our local movie theater to pick up our Internet-ordered tickets and a retired gentleman, wearing a Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap, was coming out as I went in. I cheerfully cried out "Go Dawgs!" and he blinked at this unexpected greeting and then replied with a hearty "All right!"

We don't get a lot of SEC fans in Vermont and it's probably not real often that he gets that sort of greeting. I didn't stop to ask if he was a local resident or visiting from out of town, but from his accent, I think it's safe to say that he wasn't a Vermont native. :)

May

A few thoughts:

1) I'm on my way to Portland, Oregon for some training at a customer in Beaverton. It's going to be three long days, starting at 8 and probably finishing close to 5, but I like the people there and it's an interesting topic that I enjoy training on. The only drawbacks are that I'll probably be too mentally fatigued to be of much use any day after work and will probably just go back to my room and watch TV or read, and that I'll be flying back on Saturday. Won't get home until around suppertime.

2) However, at least I'm doing something. It's been a weird last few weeks... a lot of training engagements have fallen through, for all sorts of weird reasons, just sort of a 'perfect storm' of stuff. At one point it looked like I'd be training every week in April and May. Now it's less than half that. There's work to do if I'm not training, but I'm happiest when I'm working with customers.

3) I'll be onsite in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia the last week of May and all of June and the first week of July unless something changes. I'll be flying down every Sunday and coming back every Friday night. Not much of a weekend for five or six weeks, not to mention flying on Memorial Day and having to cut the July 4th holiday short. Beats not having a job, though. The major impact will be that I won't be able to coordinate a lot of training walks for the local Vermonters who are taking part in the Breast Cancer 3-Day in Boston in late July. With severely truncated weekends, I'll have to do mowing and yardwork and so forth, and when I'm not doing that I'll want to be spending some quality time with Carole. Hopefully some hiking, some kayaking.

Not being able to do a lot of training walks won't kill us, personally -- we're not walking ourselves until October when we do the Philadelphia Breast Cancer 3-Day. We're crewing Boston in July, not walking, but I still wanted to do what we could to help with other walkers' preparation and to stay involved. Now, if I was going to be out of town all of September and part of October, that'd be bad. We definitely need to do a lot of training walks in that time frame. You've got to get your feet toughened up and calloused and get your muscles and joints ready for twenty miles of steady plodding. (Very different from running that distance, or so a lot of people have told me.)

4) Our lawn looks like hell right now, and oddly, I'm fretting about that. A spring broke in our riding lawn mower, causing our mower belt to break, and a Sears guy came out to do the warranty repair on it, and wouldn't you know, he doesn't come equipped with said spring. He told Carole how to install it and said he'd have it shipped directly to the house and said it was up to her, she could install it or she could call when it arrived and schedule another appointment with him... her pick. The spring hasn't arrived yet, but Spring sure has -- it rained like crazy all this weekend and our lawn is about to go into serious jungle mode. I did what I could with our gas-powered push mower last night after work but with the time I had before I had to get to bed for my early morning flight, I probably only did 1/5 of the lawn, if that. Assuming the spring comes this week I've got one hell of a lot of mowing to do on Saturday, and it's not going to be fast: when the grass is as high as it's going to be, you have to take it slow if you want to do a decent job. Argh.

5) Carole is still unemployed. She's been doing part-time work for the US Census as they assemble their address database in our area, but that work is almost done and she's finishing her last canvassing area today. She's starting to go kinda stir crazy, spending hours doing crossword puzzles and online games and then looking up going "where'd the day go?" As far as I can tell, she has applied for every accounting position that would reasonably fit her skills, but sometimes she doesn't get around to applying as fast as she could. She doesn't get called for a lot of interviews... but then, there aren't a lot of positions right now either. My main wish is that if she's done all the applying she can do and she doesn't have any census work to do, she could at least be more active around the house rather than leaving a lot of the household chores for me to do. I know she's depressed, but...

Yes, I'm glossing over a lot here. The sooner she gets back to work and can have a regular routine to her life, the happier I'll be.

6) I like bulldogs. I walking up to the door of our local independent pet food store the other day and as the door opened a young bulldog, barely old enough that you might think twice about saying "he's a puppy", came trotting happily out with his people bringing up the rear. Without thinking I knelt down and cried out happily, "BULLDOG BULLDOG BULLDOG". The pup apparently knew just what to do because he came romping right up to me and let me pat his head and tell him what a good boy he was. Carole gets like that with corgis, but the only dogs that make me go "OOOH DOGGY" are bulldogs.

His name was Ollie, an English bulldog, same breed as the University of Georgia's mascot, only spotted where UGA VII is all white. Nice dog. Nice owners. Wish I had a dog, but with my travel, it's just not going to happen.

I also met a Bulldog the other day -- I walked into our local movie theater to pick up our Internet-ordered tickets and a retired gentleman, wearing a Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap, was coming out as I went in. I cheerfully cried out "Go Dawgs!" and he blinked at this unexpected greeting and then replied with a hearty "All right!"

We don't get a lot of SEC fans in Vermont and it's probably not real often that he gets that sort of greeting. I didn't stop to ask if he was a local resident or visiting from out of town, but from his accent, I think it's safe to say that he wasn't a Vermont native. :)