February Weekend

The weekend basically started Thursday (sort of), with a nice reprise of the Pint Club at Rock Bottom. Several of us met there and had a few good beers while chatting about life. Since most of us work at the same place, work inevitably came up, followed by the inevitable cursing 🙂

Friday was a real pain during the work day, which is really starting to suck. It used to be that Fridays were relatively easy due to not having to deal with the Far East much, but now it is literally being taken up by all the meetings that don’t have to happen on Mon-Thurs.. 🙂

This is of course made worse by the fact that I am doing the jobs of about 3.5 people. I don’t care how good you are, you can’t do the jobs of 3.5 people very well. However, my lords and masters haven’t started bitching about it yet, so I assume I am managing to keep my fingers in all the right holes in the dike. But something is gonna have to give, and I can feel it coming. Maybe it is the fact that I literally do not have time during the day to “plan” and update my objectives for my employees, and yet I MUST have my latest quarter plan done, presented and rolled out this week. Never mind that it is for the current quarter, which is about 70% over already…. 🙂

Or maybe it is the fact that I have to teach another class again on Wednesday, this time to almost 50 people from various technical areas. I am supposed to be the “content expert”, and I am, but there are definitely areas of the 95 pages of material where I basically cannot find my a$$ with both hands, and I am afraid that with 50 people to teach, someone is gonna call me on it… Yay for Wednesday….

Where was I… oh yeah, the weekend. The weekend was actually pretty fun. Friday night I basically just stayed home and relaxed (and played CivIV until my fingers bled 🙂 ). Then Saturday I did some needed errands before dropping by my friend/coworkers house for some serious ethanol consumption. Wound up watching the Olympics and sipping brews and talking about work more. Then Sunday some friends and I went to the Matsuri Festival downtown. The Matsuri Festival is the local Japanese festival. They had Iaido, Shin-kendo, Aikido and Kendo demonstrations that were pretty cool. That pretty much managed to make up for the very wierd white guys wandering around in Japaneseish stuff carrying katanas…

We met up with some Japanese friends, including one of our local reps who had a friend just in for the week from Shibuya, so we had an interesting discussion about which part of Tokyo was the “coolest”. Shibuya won with Roppongi and Shinjuku coming in a distant 3rd. Our Japanese friends had a big laugh at how “authentic” the festival was, but hey, as long as I can have yakitori and Hi-Chews, that is authentic enough for me… The only real negative was NO sake… oh well.

Sun night wrapped up at another friends place, who is nicknamed “The Leprechaun”, because he is Irish 🙂 (yes, literally from Ireland in the last few years, versus most of the rest of us whose great-great grandparents were from there sometime back in the dark ages), where we watched Six Nations Rugby. Saw Ireland beat Wales pretty badly, and a really great game where an overmatched Scottish team managed to beat a much bigger English team in only the 3rd time in 20 years. I bet there were some damn happy (and drunk) Scots running around Edinburgh Saturday night…