Another of Scott's Homes on the Web

Yesterday was travel - Minneapolis to Salt Lake City to Calgary

The plane took off late from Minneapolis - first because they needed extra time to get the cabin cooled down, and then because the pusher cart broke down because of the heat. My 55 minute layover in Salt Lake City was thus turned into about a 20 minute layover - which I spent speeding from the end of concourse C (where my plane landed) to the end of concourse B (where my next plane was already boarding). I was the last person to get on the plane, we pulled away from the gate about five minutes later.

There were three problems with this - first, I had to get through the airport way faster than I'd planned, second, I would have liked to have had a bathroom break, and third - and most important! - I'd planned on a quick supper. Oops. I had to make do with the snacks available on flight. Ah, well - I survived, and had dinner after I landed.

I'm in Calgary on business, my hotel is about six blocks from the company I'm visiting, it's 59F out right now, headed for a high of 68F. 70F for the high tomorrow. This is a lot better than the 100F predicted for today and tomorrow for Minneapolis!

iraunink is home with our dogs and two visiting dogs. I suspect she - and they! - are going to be very happy to see me Friday night. I have a direct flight home, taking off about 2:30pm MDT and landing about 6pm CDT.

I've got 60 hours left to work graveyard, and then I go to a Monday-Friday 8-5 shift. Two ten-hour shifts this week, then a week off for Minicon, then four more shifts the first week in May, and then I'm back to days starting May 9th.

I am quite pleased with this!

It was the long week at work - that meant I worked Sun-Wed. I'd arranged to be late on Sunday (in case I was elected to the Minn-StF Board), so I didn't have to be in until 11am. Pretty normal work week.

Thursday was overtime - 1 hour of work, and 8 hours of class - "Discovering your strengths". Interesting class - the basic idea is that you should try to arrange your work so that what you're doing is stuff that energizes you. The idea originally comes out of research done by Gallup - they claim that only 17% of people get to spend a significant part of their work-day doing this. I'd like to make it work out - I'm going to have to watch myself and see what falls into this category for me, and see what I can do to play to it.

Today I made hummus for the first time - my wife declared the experiment a success.

It does look like the elder step-daughter no longer considers me the source of all evil. I am ... relieved.

Today is the kind of day where I wish I lived a house with a cathedral ceiling wall of windows (at least triple-pane, of course!) with a huge fieldstone fireplace in the center. So I could sit and watch the wonderful blowing snow through the windows around the roaring fire.

I really do like winter.

Lets see, what else is there - last night was the family Christmas with iraunink's family. kosmickitten & bernesemntdog hosted - it was her first turkey, she mixed recipes. Unfortunately, she took the temperature from the shorter cooking time recipe, and the time from the longer cooking time recipe, and didn't monitor the internal temperature closely enough. It was good, but a little dry. iraunink & I got a Hogfather DVD! We're happy about that - I've been watching it over my shoulder at work today.

Speaking of work - 7-7 today and tomorrow (Christmas Eve), then 7AM-3PM on Christmas Day. Then four days off, followed by two weeks of 'work every day except Saturday' (except that I don't work New Year's Day). The days I wouldn't normally work, I'll be working 4 hour days to cover for my co-worker who's in Sri Lanka getting married - he's due back the 16th. Add in another OT day on the 18th, and I should be able to buy myself a Nokia N810 come early February.