Interesting thing, life

I recognize I have been remiss on timely updates to my blog. These last few days have been a whirlwind of activity.

Thursday and Friday were both long days at work. Recognizing that my driver's day begins before mine and ends after mine - making his Wednesday closer to an 18 hour day - I changed my work arrival for Thursday to 9 Am. I ended up staying until after 8 PM. Friday was not much different. We've been struggling to resolve some issues on our Help Desk application, and I'm trying to impress upon the team the importance of fully testing the application before publishing it for release. Thursday night, after seeing the results of our testing, I was highly confident that our code was ready for production release. To my surprise and frustration, there were two bugs - closely related - that prevented us from going to production. So, we spent Friday attempting to reproduce these issues - one of which we were unable to duplicate until 4:30 in the afternoon - and then resolving them for another release. I had high confidence in our code once again when I left late Friday evening.

At this point, I have no idea if my compatriots in Phoenix updated production with the new version. I made a conscious decision to not check my work email until tomorrow morning. If we did not release the new version, it would only upset me, and there is nothing I can do about until Monday morning, so no use getting upset over something I can do nothing about.

Friday afternoon my nose started to run. It's been itchy, on and off, since I arrived, but it really started bothering me Friday afternoon. I completed my work out Friday evening and ordered a massage (loving these $25 1/hr massages!!) for 8 PM. I've always known that a vigorous massage helps release toxins from your body. It's one of the reasons they advise you to drink lots of water afterwards, to help flush it out. After this experience, I'm a confirmed believer. About half way through the massage, as the masseuse was working my arms, my nose opened up like a faucet. I actually had to ask her to stop and bring me some tissue. At the end of the massage, I was so congested it was like trying to suck air through a straw clogged by a piece of ice. Luckily, ever since my first trip out here, I've carried medicine for food allergies, cold, and travellers diarrhea. Unfortunately, the only cold medicine we had at home was Sudafed PM, which knocks me out. I think I was awake for a total of 5 hours on Saturday.

Despite my Rip Van Winkle impression on Saturday, I did find an opportunity, in my medicine induced haze, to make the obligatory DVD shopping trip. I was on a hunt for Bolt and Wall-E, two movies for my daughter. They had both of them. I picked up a number of other Disney movies, too - Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Pocahontas and a few others.

To change gears a bit - when you travel for business, or spend time abroad, it's always tough to be away from family. Communication technology - email, phone, webcam, etc - helps shorten the distance by helping you keep in touch and stay connected. This works well when everything is fine. When there are crises, or when someone close to you is in pain, the distance seems even farther.

This week, a great person died. She lived well into her 90's and I think we all thought she would live well into her hundreds. She was vibrant, full of life, and spread joy everywhere she went. I'll remember playing cards with her at the lake, and hearing stories about her undying support for Michigan State football. I did not know her well, but I do know well the impact her life had on those around her. She will be missed.