Near the end of last week, I was putting the finishing touches on a presentation that my boss's boss would give on Tuesday of this week. When I emailed it to him, his reply confused me, since it suggested that I was actually the one who would give the presentation. A short conversation I had with him later on that day (when I ran into him in the hall) confirmed that I was indeed on the hook for this one. Said turn of events was somewhat disconcerting. The presentation was to be given to a group headed by a pretty important person, (she runs the $2 billion business unit I work for). I knew the material, but that wasn't nearly enough to insure that I wouldn't make a fool of myself in front of these folks. I spent the weekend worrying about it (but not enough to put in a lot of work), and devoted Monday to writing out almost every word I would say and memorizing it. Incidentally, my boss was taken aback when he found out that I had been given the task, perhaps thinking I had been needlessly thrown to the wolves too soon. He was really supportive, though, and gave me some useful advice.

In the end, the presentation went much better than I could've hoped for. It was intimidating to stand there in front of 10 people (most of whom I didn't know, and all of whom are at least 15 years older than me) and go through my slides. At the same time, it was a great adrenaline rush to have prepared well enough to know the material, and answer questions adequately. The mood wasn't aggressive at all, but I could see how the wheels might fall off if something were to go wrong. The most surprising thing was how much people had to say. I was talking less than half the time, and the lively discussion definitely helped things go better. In the end, I was glad it was over, but it's the kind of experience I need if I'm going to make progress.

Organizationally, things are still up in the air. I will know more in a couple of weeks, but chances are that I will become part of a new group that's being formed with pieces from both businesses that are being combined. That would mean a new boss, and mostly new co-workers. I'd prefer to stay with my current boss for various reasons, but I've talked to him about it, and I think it will work out ok either way.

The day of the presentation, we signed a new lease for a house 5 minutes north of where we live right now. It's a great home, and will be better than where we live right now for about the same money. Mari did a great job of finding it. That's all for now.

Asha and her friend Kayla

 

We went in to check on Asha, and saw only this - an empty bed. She decided that the baby bed (which we had retrieved from the garage for her baby doll) was more "cozy".


 

 

A couple of weeks ago, we decided to use Labor Day to visit the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier that's been turned into a museum near downtown SD. The Midway was in use from 1945 to 1992 or so, and (among other exploits) took in about 7000 evacuees during the fall of Saigon. The self-guided tour was absolutely fascinating - a definite don't-miss if you're ever in San Diego. I have to say, though, that life aboard the Midway looked pretty rough. The highlight of everyday life appears to have been fruit loops in the mess. I work with a guy that used to be in the Navy. He said the hardest thing about the long deployements was living in a confined space with guys for whom personal hygiene was an oxymoron. On the ship, they had lots of different eating spaces - one for elisted men, two for officers (clean shirt and dirty shirt wardrooms), etc. The audio tour explained that the pilots tended to hang out in the dirty shirt wardroom so that they could sprint off to the flight deck if need be. I was talking with Jerome this week about our visit to the Midway, and asked if he remembered who was likely to be found in the dirty shirt wardroom. He replied - "the dirty shirt wardroom was usually used by pirates. Wait, wait - I mean PILOTS". We all had a good laugh.



On Friday, we went to the Sock Hop - a PTA fundraiser . We thought it would be a drag, but the kids had a blast. The kids just had a free for all in the middle of the room, bouncing around to Oldies, while the parents hung out on the edges and talked. Kai caused problems, though, since he seemed drawn, as if by tractor beam, toward the mosh pit at the center of the floor, where 5th graders 10 times his size were making merry with inflatable guitars and hula hoops. Oh, and he made numerous attempts to eat flattened pieces of popcorn off the floor.

On Monday we signed a new lease with our landlord. It will enable us to move somewhere else with 10 days notice, but will allow the landlord to show the home to potential buyers, and ask us to leave with proper notice if someone buys the house. For this, we negotiated $600 off our rent, so the longer we're here, the better. The reason our landlord has to sell the house is that he paid $690k for a $575k or so house in a shady real estate deal. Interestingly enough, the guy that sold our landlord this house was featured prominently on national newscasts a couple of weeks ago when he attacked an investigative reporter who was trying to expose his scams. Anyway, the mortgage is now upside down, and he can't make the payments anymore. A bad deal all around, because we would have been happy living here for a long time.

That's all for now.

Ok, so the Cougs took a beating. It was obvious that Auburn was the better team, and that our defense was overmatched. I kind of expected it. I see the game as a positive, though. Point one is that we're better than last year, especially in the defensive secondary. True, Auburn broke off 10+ yard running plays at will, but that was true last year, too. Unlike last year, though, the cornerbacks didn't give up an embarrassing number of big play touchdown passes (their longest pass play came on a coverage mix-up). Also, I don't think most PAC-10 teams will have offensive lines as talented as Auburn's. On the offensive side, Brink still showed no ability to go over the middle for more than 10 yards. He did, however, rediscover his penchant for throwing long E-W passes that are intercepted at inopportune times. Will the Cougs win the PAC-10? No. Can they give any team in the PAC-10 a run for their money? I think so. Can they beat a resurgent, Dennis Erickson-led Idaho? Only time will tell.

Upon discovering that Kai had taken a 1/4 full container of Krispy Rice and spread it over the living room floor, I was left to ponder the various categories of messes that can and do exist in our house:

1. The easy mess - the Krispy Rice falls into this category. It looks kinda bad, but just grabbing the vacuum and wheeling it around in the general area does the trick. It's so easy, it feels like a vacuum cleaner demo. It takes longer to wind up the cord than it does to clean up the mess.

2. The kid-ok mess - this is one where, for some reason, the kid who made the mess is able to clean it up when commanded to do so. An example from our house would be the play-dough set or the duplos. Having a container specific to the items creating the mess is obviously key.

3. The 1hr 15min mess - When we have people over to our house, it is always in an unpresentable state until we give it a thorough clean-up. This will always take us about 1hr and 15 minutes. We pick up all the stuff, vacuum the floors, and clean the bathrooms (chief among all social faux pas is allowing guests to use a bathroom which shows any signs of having ever been used for activities that bathrooms normally accomodate). This usually takes about 75 min. After the guests leave, the house usually still looks nice - a fringe benefit of having people over.

4. The "Rome wasn't cleaned in a day" mess - This is a type of mess that can't be tackled in one or two attempts. It must be gradually beaten into submission by 10 or 15 sessions. Because of this, such messes are best housed in non-public, low-traffic areas. For us, this area would be the garage. Our garage is actually doing ok at this point, and we are glad we saved the cardboard boxes from our move here because we're gonna be moving again.

5. The "I will never forget this mess" mess - This kind of mess will forever be burned into our psyches, and cannot be revisited without groans of digust. One such mess would be the time when we spilled a 2 gallon container of Kirkland liquid laundry detergent in the kid's bathroom of our Philadelphia apartment. Somehow the jug, which had been sitting on the sink, fell to the floor, cracking the cap on one of its spouts. The stickly liquid oozed and spread over the entire bathroom floor. In its super-concentrated form, the detergent was nearly impossible to clean up. Washing the detergent-soaked towels out in the sink just made huge mounds of suds, and they didn't pick up much of the stuff to begin with. I finally fashioned a makeshift squeegee out of a flexible plastic folder-cover, and scraped the offending material off the floor. The bathroom did always smell good after that. For mom, a certain honey container in the grinder room comes to mind.

Ok, that's enough. Work is still great, but my company is constantly reorganizing and changing itself. To that end, 2 businesses (one of which I work for) are being combined, and I'm not sure I'll be able to keep working for the boss I have now. That would be really disappointing - he's the kind of guy I love working for, and I have a lot to learn from him. We'll see how it goes.