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!

Confessions of a Dakotaholic

This was one wedding where both the Bride & the Groom got cold feet. On Wednesday, two of our friends who have been engaged for 10 months and wondering when they were ever going to get back to Massachusetts to allow their families to watch them get married, threw in the towel and decided to have an impromptu wedding in the park. I confess that it was by far the second best wedding I have ever been to.

We found out about it two weeks ago, no invitations were ever sent, and the morning of, the bride didn't even know what she was wearing. Rumor had it that the dress code was jeans and "something warm", so I pulled on some sweatpants under my jeans, threw on a button down shirt, a fleece, my coat, hat, gloves, and my hiking boots. A little afraid that Nathan had gotten the wrong message, I felt better when we pulled up to the visitor's center and there was an elated couple - also in jeans and jackets.


Not more than 15 of us - all of us related to park employees or local law enforcement - caravaned into the park for the ceremony, which started off feeling more like a funeral procession, but ended on a cute spot overlooking the Little Missouri River. The spectators grew by double right before the ceremony when a group of bison joined us on a parallel bluff. Thank goodness the Justice of the Peace kept it short, because it was FREEZING! Really, we have evidence. It was so fitting, though - for a pair that both loved & worked for the park, it started and ended with pictures at the visitors center.



Now, you know you're in North Dakota when:
1) At least one person at your wedding is in full cowboy get-up.
2) You are presented with this - a packet of recipes from the North Dakota Beef Commission and Cattlewomen!


That pretty much puts the booklet on safe pregnancies we got from Milwaukee County to shame.

The reception was the best part. It was, of course, in the top floor of the only restaurant/bar in Medora that is regularly open - The Iron Horse. They had all of the elements of a great reception - cake, appetizers, dinner, good fun, and the groom's brother, who couldn't make it out for the wedding, called and opened up the bar. The best part was, though, it was so easy and SO fun that it made me wonder why I ever thought my wedding had to go the whole nine yards? If I could marry Nathan all over again, I would definitely be taking some pointers from Dan & Jen!


Yes, by the way, that is beer in their champagne glasses. :)

In other news, Nathan drove to Bismarck today for an Elk Management public meeting. If you read his blog, you'll have already heard about the Elk Management plan in excruciating detail, so I won't get into it here. The funny thing is, I am one of about three people left in town today...which inspired me, at about 12:30pm, to get out of town too.

I'd already worked way too long and hard this week, so I thought it might be fun to go into town and see a movie! Just in luck, the Dickinson Carmike Theater had "Confessions of a Shopaholic" playing. Just the kind of brainless, hopefully entertaining theater I needed (and the best part is, matinee prices are $4)!



So, I drive the 30 minutes to Dickinson, get money, park the car, walk into the mall and.....yes, the theater is closed. What? Did I look at the right theater, day, time? Oh Well. I hung out in the mall, got some errands done, and came home. It just goes to show you that not everything is great about North Dakota and when it comes to going to an established, public event advertised on the internet, always call.

Reliving Kilimanjaro

Nathan is currently working on a video of our Tanzania vacation and it inspired me to go back and read some of my journal entries for the first time. I'm really glad I wrote everything down because details like what we had for dinner every night in our tent take me straight back there, but are details I'd since forgotten. I thought you might be interested in reading my entry from our summit day of Kilimanjaro. While no description can really prepare you for the agony of Summit Day, it captured some of the emotions pretty well - at least from what I remember. So, here it is uncensored and uncut:

Day 6 - Kilimanjaro (Summit Day) - September 27, 2008

I didn't get any sleep before our summit attempt. Because Nathan had been feeling sick, I gave him the down sleeping bag and was cold in his, which is by far inferior.

Timo [this was our porter/waiter] got us up @ 11pm to get ready for the trek. I ate my first and probably last Cliff bar - it didn't sit in my stomach well. Then I layered on the clothes in preparation for a cold ascent.

We had biscuits and tea, then Timo brought headlamps and we set off for the trail around midnight. We were VERY excited - little did we know this would be one of the most grueling days of our lives.

The stars were out in full force and you could see the lights of Moshi dancing around on the ground below. When we started out, the temperature was fine and I even thought about taking off one of the three pairs of pants I was wearing. It was fun to look back on the trail and see a string of headlamps from the camp. Lots of people were summiting that today. So, all was fine - we made it to 4800 meters and were feeling great.

All of a sudden, our guide Alex tells us that from a little over halfway up to a place called Stella's Point (from where you can walk to Uhuru Peak - the summit) the trail gets very steep and the weather very cold. Almost on-cue the wind picked up and those three pants I was wearing wasn't enough. I'm guessing the wind chill was negative 10 and the steepness of the trail along with the altitude completely changed the trail. For about four hours we were faced with this atmosphere and all we could do was concentrate on "one more step" and "one more breath". I think getting to the top of Kilimanjaro in these conditions is honestly the hardest thing I've ever done.

Once @ Stella's Point, there was another 30-minute walk to Uhuru Peak. At this point we have no energy and the summit is so cold that you can't take your hands out of your gloves for 2 pictures before losing feeling in them. So, under these conditions, the amazing Glacier, sunrise, and crater was kind of lost in the flurry of "yay we're here, I feel like crap, let's get out of here". Of course, we thought that would be the worst of it and, for the most part it was. However, the trek down was extremely long - about half the time it took to get to the summit (6hrs to summit). So, by the time I got back I had an altitude headache, a stomach ache from the Cliff bar, had to pee (too cold to do it on the trail), and legs, knees, and toes that were completely beaten up.

As if that wasn't enough, we got an hour to rest, a warm lunch of soup, noodles, watermelon, cucumbers, and sauce, and then had to hit the trail for another 2.5 hours to Mweka Camp to spend the night.

The trail over descended into the forest, so all of the pressure put on our knees for the summit descent was amplified on a rocky trail.

The forest on this side of the park, however, is very different from that of the other side. There are short trees and lots of birds here and lichens galore! The campsite is cute with actual campsites sectioned off and surrounded by short trees. The registration desk sells all kinds of things from "Just Done It - Kilimanjaro" T-shirts to Kili Beer. Today, Nathan and I broke down and bought a "Victory Coke" @ Barafu Camp on our way in. It cost 3000Tsh (or $3) up from the 1000 Tsh in most restaurants - extra charge for shipping it to the camp on the mountain!

We are both looking forward to a hot shower tomorrow and toilets with actual seats to sit on - ahh luxuries!



So you see, I'm not sure why Nathan thought I was nuts when I mentioned we should climb Denali this summer if he got the job in Alaska - 20,300 feet - that's only 1,000 feet higher than Kili! Ha. Only.

North Dakota Dreamin'

I'm in Rochester right now, but there's really nothing exciting to report. So instead, let me draw your attention to where Nathan and I ate last Saturday in Williston, ND: Trapper's Kettle.

You will need to watch the video on their website as the location in Belfield (15 miles from Medora) was in a show called "Extreme Truckstops" on the Travel Channel. We haven't been to that one, but I have a feeling we'll get there soon. I've actually made fun of this place before as the sign outside simply reads "Restaurant" and the usual vehicles in the parking lot indicate not only that our Alero would be out of place, but that if we didn't sport beards, cowboy boots, and a road-weary expression we wouldn't be seated. Luckily, Nathan is working on two of those and the Williston location was more family-oriented.

It was a great little place - fantastic tomato soup and my chicken fried steak came with some red thing that we still can't identify (Schrute Farms?). There weren't as many dead animals as the Belfield location too, just a nice set of traps and a cute buffet-filled canoe. All in all, I'm looking forward to visiting the location closer to home - there's really no end to the fun things you can find just around the corner in North Dakota!