So why didn’t I get in any journal entries for the last two days? I’m so glad you asked.

Wednesday was Kiddie Day. I had Hannah as well as little Najoni to mind, then Hannah’s mother and I watched over a houseful of rugrats. Later she went to pick up Wendi and Bernie from the airport, after which we all hung out until late in the evening. There just wasn’t any time for the Internet that day.

Yesterday was my first day back at the office. You wouldn’t know it by the amount of work I got done, though. John Graefe, my Corporate Boss, was in town to meet with the company’s Internet Director and myself. We discussed issues with website hosting, domain management, in-house audio streaming and the forthcoming intranet project. Let’s just say I have a lot of interesting work ahead of me between now and next summer. After we “did lunch” I showed him around the offices. He met Daria Landar (my trusted comrade over in West Sales), both Jacks (Hutchison the GM and Hernvall the Controller), and Dan Harbison (Dot-com-Dan, the webmaster for KNRK). All in all it was a busy, talkative, brainstorming, chatting, stimulating kind of day. I even managed to get a few small tasks out of the way.

All that talking made hell out of my throat, though. By the time I left I felt totally raw, and that didn’t get better when we had to spend a couple of hours at the school or when Amy and Michael came over for three hours of Diablo II. (Fun, though. Midnight rolled around before we could find out how badly The Big Pink Teddy Bear was gonna maul our haphazard group of intrepid warriors. We’ve got skill and equipment issues…)

Today was something a bit more like a normal day. Lots of small fires needed extinguishing. I’m caught up on my email at long last. Most of the people who were having the biggest problems are happy once more. Just about the only really major problem today was that Pacifier/Northwest Link/Europa had a truly stupendous downtime today. The problem first manifested at about 10:25am and was finally resolved just before 3:15pm. I’m not pleased with their technical capabilities right now, you could say.

I’m looking forward to going home, resting my sore throat and relaxing until Sunday’s marathon project session. I have the usual email maintenance to do, the usual tape backups to run, and a couple of unusual tasks that will fill the long stretches when tape is running…

It’s just about 10:00 Monday night as I write this. I won’t be able to post the entry until I get back to the office in the morning, however, as my room is apparently one of the ones not yet blessed with DSL internet connections. Ah well, it could have been a lot worse.

First, the resort. It’s in the foothills, nicely situated in heavily wooded surroundings. Some time when I have lots and lots of money I’ll come back and explore what hiking opportunities may be nearby. I won’t get that chance on this trip, unfortunately.

The meetings themselves went about as well as any other department heads’ shindig. We talked a lot about what our goals are. We took a valiant stab at creating a mission statement for our local cluster. Positive and negative aspects of our workplace were brought to light. We even talked a little bit about The Tipping Point, the book that served as the catalyst for this event to begin with. Towards the end we were given colored hats and fresh new logoed shirts.

Why colored hats, you ask? Our “scheduled fun” took the form of croquet. This isn’t the backyard variety, either. The layout and rules are a bit different, and rather strict. We originally were broken up into teams with the intent of holding a sort of tournament, but most folks really wanted to eat, watch a game on TV and get blitzed at one of the condos. Some of us got better accomodations than others, you see. (I’m not complaining: I’m tucked away in a small and quiet portion of the resort… far away from the noise and frivolity. Praise the goddesses.)

There was a last-minute rally by a sizable group of us to get some more use out of those nice (lamplit) croquet greens. An idea borne of alcohol and pure contrariness led us to play “double green croquet.” Four wickets up, four wickets back, four down the middle, both posts. The eight of us had a complete blast. (Score? Seven wickets to five, the team with seven hit both posts. Who knew I was a croquet savant?) After we lost and gained personnel, one more regulation-style game was assayed. The teaming of David Lichtman, Keevin Wagner and myself remains undefeated, thank you, thank you.

And now I’m out on my feet and have to get up at 7:00 or so if I want to have a nice full breakfast on the company dime. There’s one more meeting, then lunch, and after that we are encouraged to enjoy the available facilities at will. Gary Hilliard (Chief Engineer) is my ride, though, and we both agreed to bail for the office as soon as possible. (He’s got work to do, I have a vacation to prepare for.)

All in all, there are worse ways I can imagine spending a day in the Cascade foothills.