Work-Related

Today I flew home from Napa and was really excited to see the family!  The boys were probably the most excited!  I really love to spend time with them!  I almost didn’t make it home on my intended flight, however.  I changed the car pickup from the hotel to a half-hour earlier (6am) which I’m glad I did.  The hotel was about a 90 minute drive from the airport, and this morning, we hit bad traffic at the Bay Bridge.  When I got to the airport, I had about 30 minutes until my flight left.  Fortunately, I got through security pretty fast and got to the gate with about 10 minutes to spare!

I wanted to get home on time because Kirstyn had a chorus concert tonight that I didn’t want to miss.  She did a GREAT job and she loves to sing.  It may be a hard decision for her to make whether to sing or to play her clarinet in high school.  The concert was great and Kirstyn even had a speaking part in it as well.

I think Kirstyn has always been one of those who always likes to perform, no matter what the audience is.  At home, she’s really quite the performer!  🙂  Great job Kirstyn!

Today I had a GREAT day up in Milwaukee at an RLF Reconnect for my leadership program I participated in through work.  Once a year, the Midwest region hosts one of these and people come from all over to renew relationships, learn about leadership concepts, discuss the book we are asked to read for the session, and to have a bunch of fun.  This year, it was at We Energies in Milwaukee.  What a great place to meet.  It was an old building that  was built to be converted to a hotel, should the new “electricity” thing of the day fail.  🙂

Our 2009 RLF group was by far the most represented there.  We had a great time catching up and talking about the “old times” during our session.   The theme of the session was Driving for Success and we read the book The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon.  This was a very fascinating book and one that I would suggest to all to read.  We also had a keynote address by Steve Cartwright, the CIO of We Energies.  We also discussed challenges of developing and staying true to your vision, and did some fun group activities around RLF success stories.

What a great day!

Well, I’m back from a GREAT week at Microsoft TechEd 2011.  I had a great time and learned a ton!  I know, what a way to talk about a conference of geekdom!  🙂  I stayed in the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta and it was a wonderful hotel.  The staff was great and I slept pretty good for being away from home!

The conference was very informative and the sessions I attended made it worth my while for going.  I brought back a lot of things to implement at work.  The only drawback was the size of the conference center (as I mentioned at the first of the week).  The way it was laid out, you had to walk over a half a mile to get from the dining area to the trade show part of the conference.  The crazy thing was that the two areas were about 100 yards from each other.  They did have a passageway between the two as a huge shortcut, but it wasn’t always open.  It was very crowded.  There were over 10,000 people there at the conference.  You can see how big the dining hall was and that wouldn’t even fit everyone if they all came at the same time…

I talked to a lot of vendors as well.  In addition to the knowledge I got from them, I got a TON of junk that I brought home to the kids!  I have everything from rubber light-up balls, to cell phone holders, pens, pads of paper, tons of other toys, and 21 t-shirts… YES!  21 T-SHIRTS!  It was hard to get everything packed in a single suitcase to bring home!  🙂

The last night we had a great conference party.  It was over at the Atlanta Aquarium and World of Coke.  We had a great time and drank coke samples from all over the world (a room with kiosks from each continent and cups to have unlimited refills of your favorite coke products… see below).  We all got a mini 125 year anniversary bottle of coke.

It’s good to be home how and see the kids.  They were really excited to have me home because of all the junk I brought back for them!  They each got a couple of t-shirts and are enjoying them as well.  🙂

Today I left for the Microsoft TechEd 2011 conference and am now in Atlanta!  I’m pretty excited to attend the keynotes and sessions, and to talk to the vendors about products that might be able to help us out.  We’ll see how it goes!

The place here for the conference is HUGE!  I think I’m going to be walking a LOT this week!  🙂  I picked up my bag and other materials, went back to the hotel, and then set out to find something quick to eat.  Everything was closed (they are much better at closing on Sunday down here in the South than they are where we live) so I had to settle for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Chicken McNuggets from McDonalds.  🙂  Oh well, I’m full now and ready to relax and get ready for tomorrow’s activities!

Over the past 2 days, I had an IT Senior Leadership Team retreat that I was invited to at the Wyndham Hotel in Lisle.  As the chair of the IT Leadership Committee, I have been able to work closely with the committee to help draft the Grant Thornton IT strategy for the next 3-5 years.  We had a great discussion re-visiting the strategy, now that we have a full year of it under our belts.  We had some great discussion and some fun.Yesterday, as a service project, we went to Feed My Starving Children as a group.  We worked hard along side others and packed 92 boxes, which represents 19,872 meals that will feed 55 kids for a year.  It always feels so good to go there and to help.  Every time I go, I have a lot of fun and it is always for a good cause.  ).

After we finished up at Feed My Starving Children, we had dinner at Luigi’s house, a great Italian restaurant nearby.  We ate until we were stuffed!  What great food!

Today we finished up our discussions and I got home a little early, much to the surprise of the family!  🙂  When I got home, Angela and I went down to see Sarah at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.

We took the camera and embarrassed her!  🙂  It doesn’t take much at all to make Brittany mortified of us, but we have to work pretty hard to get Sarah to be embarrassed of of us.  I think we did it!  🙂

Keep up the GREAT work Sarah!

For the last 3 days, I have been in Austin Texas at Dell Corporation.  We are rolling out a new internet-based product that will help us with our asset management.  The trip was a lot of fun and we had a great time!  In addition to the great people at Dell training us on what we needed to do to make this product a success, we stayed at a great hotel (Intercontinental Stephen F. Austin), ate a ton of good food, and had a lot of fun.

What I always think is funny when I visit Dell is the fact that all the doors/entry ways to the buildings have stickers on them that say that no firearms are allowed in the buildings.  Only in Texas where everyone is “packing heat!”  🙂

The second night we were there, we went to an AWESOME restaurant that has some incredible “wild” food, named Hudson’s on the Bend (http://www.hudsonsonthebend.com).  For our appetizers, we had diamond back rattlesnake cake in a pistachio nut crust and venison wrapped sea scallops.  For our entrees, I had the Hudson’s Mixed Grill, which consisted of venison and rabbit tenders, smoked quail, game sausage, and buffalo.  Others had duck, elk back, and pheasant.  It all tasted wonderful!   The restaurant itself was pretty cool as well.  It was in a converted home, and we ate in what looked like what used to be a bedroom.  They had apples hanging from the ceilings all over the place as well (in preparation for Christmas)…

I also saw a sign at the restaurant that I absolutely loved that I wanted to take home with me and put right in the middle of our living room:

I laughed really hard when I read it and couldn’t help but thinking of Ben!

Our last night in town, we went into downtown Austin and ate dinner at a GREAT Tex Mex restaurant and then hung around the main street there which makes Austin famous.  It is EXTREMELY weird and liberal and they are proud of it.  We went to Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar (no alcohol for me) and listened to the musicians.  They were amazing!  Any request that came in, they could play.  They were pretty funny too!

It’s nice to be back home with the family now.  I really missed them and was really bummed that I couldn’t go to Sarah and Brittany’s Collage Concert at the high school.

Today, we had the Grant Thornton Thanksgiving party.  Our division was assigned to bring the main dish, so I signed-up to bring meatballs.  Little did I know that my boss had just given the event planning group some money to buy all the stuff.  🙂  From the list, I looked like I was the only one bringing anything, so I was a little nervous.  🙂

I threw a bunch of frozen meatballs into a slow cooker and covered them with 2 bottles of Lawry’s Caribbean Jerk Marinade and let it sit overnight.  I then brought them in and let them cook for 4 hours.  Everybody LOVED them!  There were a bunch of people who wanted to know the secret recipe and I just had to laugh as I told them.  It was pretty funny!

I ate a TON of great food and was totally stuffed full of food by the time I was done.  There were some great desserts as well and in total, I probably ate about 4000 calories!  I wasn’t hungry for dinner when I got home.  😐