So long, Caribou...

Well, after a last-minute sprint to the finish that made going to Alaska actually look somewhat plausible, Nathan turned down the opportunity at Denali and they accepted. I had even gone as far as to talk to Denali's Science & Learning Center Technology Contact about volunteer opportunities that would have given us the chance to live in park housing. However, there wasn't already a good internet connection I could use to work there and the park would not let us affix a satellite dish to park housing. That was the last big obstacle keeping us from going, so we're not.

I'm actually relieved. It was a pretty exciting opportunity at first glance, but the extreme craziness of the logistics soon made me long to stay in the lower 48. Even if we could have gotten internet in park housing, I would still have had to volunteer an extra 8 hours each week just to live there (on top of a job where a 40-hour work week is unheard of). Plus, there's the problem of getting there, which takes about a week by car. Not to mention making sure someone is taking care of our house and yard. Anyway, you get the idea. Alaska, we'll come visit you sometime, how about that?

After a near-blizzard here Sunday/Monday, the yard this morning looked like this when I woke up:


I also got a chance to cross the Red River in Fargo on Saturday. I wasn't sure if I would see it until all of a sudden there were three-foot-high piles of dirt coming up the on ramp and then I saw a Red River sign right before freaking out. The water was almost up to the I-94 bridge! I estimate there was less than a foot left before it would have reached the road where I was driving. The restrooms in the park up the hill from the lake were half-way submerged. Sorry, I'm still kicking myself, but I wish I'd stopped for a picture!

Wedding Week

Wedding Week is officially coming to an end. We got quite a lot accomplished including three cake tastings, two flowers appointments, bridesmaids dresses purchased, and ceremony & reception sites viewed. Not to mention some miscellaneous verbal interrogations from various family members on other details yet to be decided.

If you are lucky enough to get an invitation to my sister's wedding, and if you judge weddings based solely on how delicious the cake is like Nathan and I do, I promise you will not be disappointed! Sam and Adam have decided to purchase a cake from Sweet T's Cakes. Don't be fooled by how beautiful they look, they actually taste even better! We were able to sample chocolate, marble, and vanilla cake with various flavors of icing from the normal chocolate and vanilla to snickerdoodle and peanut butter. Ammmmmmmmazing!

On Tuesday night, Meredith (Sam's other bridesmaid) and I made short work of the wine-colored collection at David's Bridal and ordered the following dresses:


The skirt and top are actually separate, so I may find a way to wear the cute shirt again.

In other news, Nathan has been deciding on jobs this week and yesterday he called Denali to turn down the offer he had from them. It just wasn't economically feasible and we really like having running water at our residences.

However, the hiring manager called him back and refused (for the moment) to accept his rejection! She came up with some very intriguing ideas, the front-runner being that I could volunteer a bit so that we could both live in park housing. Interesting - tell me more! Well, they're not sure what I might have to do or the hours, but after Nathan told them I was working on my Project Management Certification (PMP), they thought they'd be able to find some kind of project for me to manage.

We'll wait to find out what that might entail. I still argue that there is no use being in Alaska if I have to spend every waking moment either working or volunteering - even if my project is to count grizzly bears for the summer....eat, sleep, program, bears, get yelled at by customer, bears, program, beautiful mountain scenery, eat, sleep, imagine said customer getting eaten by bears - wait a minute, that's actually starting to sound fantastic! Where do I sign?

Working Vacation

Despite the horrors of my job currently (which you read about in my last post), I was finally able to pull myself away and take my vacation to visit my sister, Samantha in Wilmington, NC this week (sans work laptop, I might add!!).

Wilmington is right on the Carolina Coast and is currently 14 degrees warmer than Rochester, so I can't complain. I met my parents here, not for a relaxing beach vacation, however, but to help my sister finish off some planning for her wedding in October.

First order of business: meet her fiance, Adam. Check. Adam is great! We spent most of the day yesterday hanging out in an Old Chicago restaurant watching the Badgers lose against Xavier. I'm happy to say he has my official and enthusiastic seal of approval. He and Sam are great together.


Second order of business: cake, dresses, flowers, see venues, and maybe a few things I forgot about. I started the day today calling a half-dozen wedding cake places to see if we could set-up a cake-tasting. This is easily one of the best parts about wedding planning and although Sam had her heart set on one place, I convinced her to try several before choosing because, let's face it, what do you have to lose? (Except trying several fabulous cakes for free if you just go with the first place you see.)

Adam took a half-day to spend the afternoon with us, so we got to do some fun wedding and non-wedding things too. First stop? The beach! Even though it is just March and our temperatures were in the 60's, the ocean was dotted with surfers and the beach with mostly naked people. I guess some of the North Carolina students get together in large groups to rent out the beach houses to live in during the year, so they were out doing what college students do best - avoiding their homework.



After that, we drove downtown to take a look at the conference center where the reception will be and the park where the ceremony will be. The conference center room was open, so we broke in and took some pictures.


The place where the ceremony will be, however, was not open. When we drove up there were huge semis parked along the road supplying power to what I thought was maybe U2 on tour or something. Everywhere people were sitting with large cameras waiting to take pictures and the cops were keeping people from getting to Sam and Adam's actual wedding site. A guy came up and told us to clear off the path because they would need to bring equipment through. It turns out that they were filming a scene for the show One Tree Hill, which is filmed in Wilmington (Dawson's Creek, apparently was filmed here too)! I took a picture just in case there were any famous people out there, but I don't watch the show (and neither do most locals), so I may never know!

Into the Wild

It's back to the hustle and bustle of the "big city" for me again. Every time I end up in Rochester, life gets a lot crazier. Work is far too hectic due to the "resource action", which left our team one person short (although, you could argue that was an "addition by subtraction" situation [Bonus points for naming that quote's TV show!]). In addition, we just lost another person who is out on medical leave for an undetermined amount of time (who I truly hope feels better very soon!). In my blog intro, I mention that I hardly ever talk about my day job. However, I feel that I need to for one post so the kids out there graduating from college and not getting jobs know exactly what they're missing. If that's you, I promise it will make you feel better.

A Day In My Current Life
This day was my actual Thursday, I picked it to outline because it is very typical of how the rest of my week went.

5:30am - Shower, I don't have time to workout this morning because my first meeting is at 6am.

6:00am - Corporate Service Corps South Africa Meeting - I'm mentoring IBM's first CSC team going to South Africa. They are just learning the basics of the organizations they will work for in Mpumalanga. It all sounds very cool and I'm pretty jealous that I can't go with them this time. The 6am meeting is a little hard, but this is the one part of my job that I really love, so I am happy to put up with it. I find out that the next few meetings will be at 4am central time, which, by the way is 3am in Medora. *Sigh* the pleasures of working with a worldwide team.

7:00am - Grab breakfast while my environment upgrade scripts are running. Each morning this week I have to upgrade our test environment with the latest fixes so our team can continue testing. This is not normally my job, but somebody has to do it now that we're short-staffed.

7:45am - Quick brush my teeth and dry my hair so I can make it into the office for my 8am meeting.

8:00am - The team does an excellent job of figuring out how to do a test upgrade of our largest customer environment. It's pretty amazing how we all came together to pick up the pieces on a job we always relied on our genius on medical leave to take care of. Right now, I couldn't be more proud of my team.

8:30am - A customer pings me in the middle of my upgrade meeting with a problem he feels is urgent, but is not. I remind them to use our problem reporting system. This is the fourth time he's pinged me this week. I think about blocking him from sending me sametimes (IBM's brand of instant messenger), but I don't, he is a customer after all.

9am - A meeting about the future of tooling - at least in our department. I can't afford to go. Today is the last day to make fixes and I haven't even had a chance to start yet. The future will have to wait - I fix one defect and feel like I've accomplished more than I had all week so far.

10am - On Monday, I'm taking part in a Culture Panel Q&A session for the entire site. Most people will be there since right after the panel discussion, one of our Senior Vice Presidents, Jon Iwata, will be speaking. We don't get a lot of visits from upper management here in Rochester, so it's a big deal. His schedule is planned out down to the minute and I found it very interesting listening to the amount of contingency planning that goes into an event like this. As I complained about my week to Nathan, he sweetly reminded me that someday someone would be planning my schedule down to the minute for me. I'm not sure that is really any consolation - this guy, I'm sure, is much busier than me.

11am - A free half hour! I fix another defect, read two of the 100 emails in my inbox, then rush off to heat my lunch before my Project Management Study Group.

11:30am - I'm studying to get Project Management Certified (PMP) and there is a group of us that meets each Thursday over lunch to go over another chapter in the PM Bible (a.k.a. PMBOK). This was my week to present the topic to the rest of the group: Human Resources Management. I liked this chapter - it's the one that actually encourages you to set-up Happy Hours with your team.

1pm - And now a meeting to discuss the next release's requirements. We're not even sure we'll get out of this release alive yet.

2pm - Interlock with our administrator team. This is one that I can pay selective attention to. During the meeting we all email and sametime each other, trying to solve the latest problems coming in from our production machines. Recently, we're having a lot of problems with performance. We have no one to fix them, so our customers will have to be patient.

3pm - Our meeting got done early and I have a half-hour before my 3:30pm call - I fix two more defects. Four total was my goal, this is a miracle.

3:30pm - My meeting was canceled! This is the best feeling - I get a couple more emails answered, but I think the number in my inbox has meanwhile gone up to about 150.

4:00pm - Team scrum - short meeting where our small team gets together and quickly tells each other what we accomplished today, what we'll try to get to tomorrow, and what our blockers are. We got done early - another small miracle.

4:30pm - I start my second upgrade of the day. Our official regression testing starts tomorrow and the China team needs the environment ready to go by 7 or 8pm CST tonight. Our test manager always pings me right before I'm done. I wish just once I could beat him to the punch.

5:30pm - Thank goodness for my friends! Without our planned "Beans & Fajita Night", I would have worked all night. Instead, I close up and leave with enough time to get home, change into jeans, tape The Office & 30 Rock, and head over to their house.

6-10pm - Fajita Night - While there, we watched a video about Dick Proenneke, who moved to the Alaskan Wilderness in the 60's and taped himself making AMAZING things all by himself - log cabin, moss-covered refrigerator, chimney, etc. He was just up there surviving on his own for 35 years next to a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains and nature.

With the week I'm having, it's no wonder why a life of struggling to survive far from the rest of the world and technology sounds so appealing. I feel the call of the wild, if only I could find a clone of myself to leave with my team.

Friday Night Ice

It was the original icebreaker. Nathan came home from work today and declared that a giant wall of ice was headed down the Little Missouri River, straight toward Medora and he intended to go watch. I'm thinking, ok, this must be some wall of ice, as I pictured a 50-foot tall bulldozer of a wall careening at top speed towards the bridge at the edge of town.

My suspicions were confirmed when I got to the bridge as there were two other cars there already to watch the destruction - the largest crowd we've seen since Cowboy Christmas. Nothing happened, so we decided to drive to a place where there was more action. We found it. On a little overlook outside of town, there was, I kid you not, the entire population of Medora. Only one thing could awaken this town from its winter hibernation - the ice thaw.


It had gotten warm enough this week that the ice on the river had started to thaw, causing a wall of ice, sticks, and debris to accumulate, break away, and push downstream, crushing anything in its path. The funniest part about it was that word spread like wildfire and EVERYONE got down to the river in a hurry. Why? I'm still not sure, but I have to admit it was pretty neat.

Ice when we got to the overlook:


Ice when we left:



The best quote of the night: "Well, I guess 100 people really do live in Medora!"

Please enjoy this National Geographic-quality footage courtesy of Nathan:

Good News

Might I just mention that I love reading the news these days? Ever since January 20th, there's been one overturned stupid Bush law after another. Bravo!

Endangered Species Act

I'm also especially excited about the stimulus money for Green Energy. If you haven't read Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded yet, try to find some time to read a bit - it may change the way you think about government regulation and whether it's good or bad.

Also, it is 50 degrees here today. Boo-yah Rochester!