Welcome Back!

Two weeks ago, we were crawling up a boulder strewn "road" to Hidden Lake, about 9000 feet high in the Rockies. Today, I am officially back to work, wishing I was 9000 feet high in the Rockies. Monday was my official first day back, but it took almost 2 days to get me actually back in harness.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day dealing with wise guys who dropped by to welcome me to the company. My free time in between "Welcome back, how was the trip?" visits was spent reading and/or disposing of 1336 emails that had accumulated in the 3+ weeks I'd been gone. That chore had to wait until I was done telling my computers that I still loved them and otherwise coaxing them to cooperate after a long period of inactivity. One didn't want to do anything but 3 weeks of middle-of-the-night updates and maintenance, and the other decided that it had had its fill of being connected to the company network.

One of the emails was interesting. The company is planning to go to a 4 day work week starting in October. I'm for it if they promise not to pester me the other 3 days. Unfortunately, the folks I deal with work 24/7, and are scattered across 20 time zones. It will be intriguing to see how this pans out.

This morning, all of the crud that had been festering for 3 weeks started to boil to the surface. There are installs to do this weekend, sales agencies that need stroking, and a new challenge. For the first time in my career, we are combining two sales offices into one. This would not be much of a challenge from the database perspective, but they also decided to rename the agency and give it a new number.

So, tonight, I get to connect from home to my desktop machine, and from there visit 4 agencies. Three of them are going to get a little cleanup work, and one will get a practice extract of the data to be merged this weekend. Ain't Technology wonderful? In the not too distant past, I would have spent 2 weeks on airplanes to accomplish what I'm going to do tonight.

On the home front, the garage is again host to a slew of boxes with the kitchen cabinets that were mis-ordered. The installers will be in full dudgeon again soon. The counter top is in production and expected to deliver within the week. It will be good to get rid of the cutting boards, scrap lumber, and other large flat things that are serving as temporary work surfaces. Once the counter is installed, they can put in the dishwasher, connect the sink and generally get us back to a functional kitchen. The ladies in my life, Marilyn, Sandy, and Gretchen have spent the last few days leaning over the tops of the new cabinets, spreading paint. It is really starting to look like a dream kitchen.

Time to get to work.