hrj

Having gotten a delightfully full night's sleep (the biggest sleep aid being the knowledge that the project was DONE), I showed up all bright and perky at work at my usual 8am this morning. My boss greeted me with the equivalent of "What the heck are you doing here?" but I figured today I'd have the biggest leverage for my comp time request. I probably needn't have bothered -- he agreed to my request for all next week (i.e., the 4 non-holiday days in addition to Labor Day, which I get anyway) so quickly that I probably could have gotten more if I'd pushed it. But it's all good. Then around about lunchtime he comes into the office and says, "You have an appointment with a chair massage at 1:30 and then I don't want to see you again until tomorrow." Do I have the bestest boss or what?

So ... I had a nice leisurely afternoon to start the logistics for my surprise vacation. Scheduled the Element for its 10,000 mile service (which will be about 400 miles early, but better that than later) and decided to take the opportunity to get a trailer hitch receiver installed because .... went to REI and picked up the bike carrier I've had my eye on. It attaches via a trailer hitch socket and has a hinged arm to swing the bike(s) out of the way to the side for access to the rear doors without having to remove the rack -- or even the bike(s) from the rack. (It still makes more sense to put the bike inside the vehicle for long drives to improve mileage, but the carrier will be more convenient in other circumstances.)

When I was thinking in terms of adding a couple of days to the long weekend, I was thinking of hitting the redwoods and up to Crater Lake. But with a whole week, it occurred to me that I should go a bit farther afield, so I decided on Yellowstone. It isn't an ideal bicycling area (although people do ride there) but there are lots of shortish day hikes and I can mix things up nicely.

So the basic plan is to spend Saturday and Sunday driving out. Then spend the week spread across two or three home bases in the park, taking side trips. Then the second weekend driving back. I've been perusing maps, hiking guides, and the list of the (relatively few) bike-oriented trails to get a sense of where I want to spend how much time, but I figure I'll leave the specifics for when I phone the campground reservation folks tomorrow and see what's available.

Given how hard it is to justify a purely kick-back vacation to myself, it's rather nice to have the time off on such short notice that kicking back makes the most sense. (The comp time policy is pretty much "take it now" -- they don't want people treating it as "bankable" vacation time.) Getting away will be far more relaxing than hanging around the house would have been. I've missed this sort of trip.

I suppose we could have pushed to make it to 24 hours straight working on this bleeping report, but the Directors and Managers all wimped out after 21 hours. It's ok, I haven't been much good for anything but taking dictation since around 2am. I made the effort to format another one of the appendices around 4:30, but Word could tell I was exhausted and started getting obstinate. We reconvene at noon or thereabouts. That gives me a whole six hours or so to try to sleep. I'm starting to be of the opinion that an entire week of comp time wouldn't be over-generous.

I made a big dent in dealing with the archaeological strata on the dining room table. Most of it was various pieces of paperwork that needed to be sorting through for either filing or disposal. The major incentive was the need to clear the table for dining with goldenstag, aastg, and the youngest brother coming over.

aastg and I had the planned objective of looking at sealing methods for early medieval Welsh charters in order to finalize the plans for sealing my laurel scroll, for which purpose the collection of charter photos at the National Library of Wales' Digital Mirror site was invaluable. (ermine_rat finished the scroll a couple years ago, but first there as the fruitless attempt to hunt down the original issuing royalty for signatures and then it's been kicking around for special seal handling for the last year or so. And given that the award was given nearly 30 years ago, it's not like there's a sense of urgency.)

The youngest brother was there for the purpose of utilizing HRJ's airport satellite parking lot and shuttle service.

We started out with sourdough baguette with two kinds of bruschetta (tomato and artichoke) and some Cowgirl Creamery "Mt. Tam" cheese. A salad followed, with sliced heirloom tomatoes and snake cucumber (from the CSA box) plus fresh mozzarella, all sprinkled with truffle salt. (Yes, I have a serious thing about tomatoes and truffle salt. I'm sure I'll get tired of it after a few years.) At this point I discovered that the big propane canister on the grill had run out -- with the lemon-basil chicken nicely browned but not yet cooked through -- so I tossed it in the oven and rearranged the dishes. We went straight to the cold tomatillo soup (which counts as a "mystery produce" item because I've never cooked it before -- another CSA box item), followed by corn-on-the-cob, with the roast chicken bringing up the rear. (Recipe: in a food processor, combine 3 cloves garlic, a handful fresh basil, zest and juice of 3 lemons, and one stick butter. Work this in under the skin of the chicken. Fill the cavity with the spent lemon rinds and truss on the rotisserie. Or if the propane runs out ... roast at 350. Cook until the proper internal temperature.) Finished up with mango sorbet. It wasn't exactly a menu designed for the brother's more narrow tastes, but I don't think he'll starve.

Then it was off to SFO the long way around through San Mateo (since the Bay Bridge looked like a parking lot) and twice around the domestic terminals before we hauled out the iPhone to go online and discover that Jet Blue operates out of the international terminal.

This morning I took in a silly movie (G-Force in 3D -- I'm just a sucker for those 3D animated flicks), put in a 15 mile bike ride along the bay (to make up for skipping the gym Friday), dropped by my haircut place to make an appointment before the trip east (they squeezed me in Thursday after work -- just barely in time), then continued dealing with paper strata (which had ended up being moved in stacks to a shelf to clear the table last night).

To-do this week: drop by the credit union for deposits and to pick up the new checks (which they don't seem to have notified me had come in -- I noticed the debit came through on last months statement, so I assume they have them); look into the previously mentioned credit card mystery; buy cat food; process most of the produce box into non-perishable form (since I'll be off in New York for half the week); pack; get my hair cut; briefly contemplate going shopping for something new to wear on the trip (the event is my uncle and aunt's 50th wedding anniversary) and decide I don't have time and have perfectly reasonable things to wear already; verify cat-sitting coverage; verify transit schedules to the airport. Oh, and work on a massively important investigation report at work. (After gloating that at least someone else was the principal investigator for this one ... they transferred it to me after all. I am, of course, flattered and comforted.)

The mad whirl that started last night with the unexpected dinner expedition continued apace. Today was my jury duty summons date. The phone message last night said to call again at lunch today, and the message at mid-day said to come in. No sooner had we gotten the preliminaries over than pretty much the entire jury waiting room (including me) got sent off for an empanelment. By the end of the day, they'd processed the first sitting (not including me), and whittled 18 down to maybe 9 or so. Tomorrow morning I get to go back and do it again.

But first, after we got released for the day from the courtroom, I dashed back to work because I had to interview a guy who works grave shift about one of my investigations. The first thing I needed his help on was to locate the duplicate "retain" samples for the batch I'm investigating. Retain samples are stored at -70 C. We pulled out an entire bin of them and froze our fingers working through them four times until we determined that not only were the retains from the day I was interested in not there, but the retains from that entire week weren't there. Now I have to track down the guy responsible for organizing the freezer and find out if they were discarded for some reason (bad) or moved elsewhere for some reason (good). Having spent an hour on sample inventory, I then had the guy walk me through the sampling process. I'd planned to get away from work by 7pm at the latest, but finally got un-gowned and out of production around 7:30, which meant it was a mad dash to ...

Reprising my "Dublin-Viking caps" class from A&S for the Teufelberg Wednesday night gathering. Had about half a dozen people making caps and a few others hanging out watching and listening. Just about the right number, although we had to do noise control several times, given the number of different activities going on. It was nice having other people there who could jump in on some of the philosophical and methodological blathering, so my voice was less likely to give out before the time did.

It might be nice to end up on a jury. It's actually a reasonable convenient time at work to get pulled away for a few days.

... for many reasons. One of them is that when I stay at work until 8:30 pm finishing the final version of the report for the Big Investigation, it's still mildly duskish when I'm bicycling home. With any luck, my two primary reviewers will approve my melding of our three opinions, there will not be an[1] egregious typos, errors, or formatting glitches that somehow escaped my last several reviews, and we can sign it off and close it out with no drama tomorrow.

And then I can begin working on the new investigation for exactly the same type of elevated test result that just came into the system last week. (There wasn't enough time to incorporate it in the current report.) Annoying, of course, but then one of the conclusions of the investigation was that we haven't actually addressed the underlying causes yet (we just understand the nature of the questions better) and can expect to have the problem recur.

Fortunately, I'm not bored by the topic yet. (We're really only closing the current investigation for logistical reasons -- we're confident the quality of the material is ok, but we can't move it forward until the investigation's closed.) This will give me an excuse to plunge once more into digging through that last half dozen years' worth of data ....

ETA: [1] Per internet regulations, any sentence mentioning typos must contain at least one typo ... 'scuse me, "typoe".

I swore to my boss that I wouldn't leave work today until the completed final draft of the investigation report went out in e-mail. I left work at 8pm with my honor intact. Now it's up to the rest of the investigation team to spend the next week reviewing and commenting on all 230 pages of write-up. *evil giggle* I'm going to be particularly interested to see what the grand-boss and my QA partner's grand-boss have to say. It still feels like I've invested the last half year of my work-life without actually solving the underlying problem. But I'm quite happy about how thoroughly I've laid out the questions that might lead to solving it (if anyone cares). And now I can forget about it until I get back from Kalamazoo.

The temptation was to blow off steam by going out to see Wolverine, but instead I came home and got most of the packing done. What I really need is a serious shoulder massage. I've got knots on my knots. Sleep now.

Great collegium. A bit odd holding it in a convention hotel, but on the whole positive. (I confess that the degree that a hotel environment interferes with the "medieval ambience" of a collegium seems roughly identical to the degree that an elementary school environment does, which is the usual option.) I managed to get through my lectures without running over time too badly. And I had something like 15-20 people there in LAST PERIOD on Sunday for my lecture "Tangwystyl blathers on about cognitive linguistics philosophies and how they can provide tools for talking about historic re-creation dilemmas." I do so love dissecting what we do from the oddest angles.

And I now have some pictures of the new dress ... but for some reason they didn't download from the iPhone to the laptop, so I'll have to post them later.

Also some interesting things potentially happening at work, but that'll be in a locked post. (Nothing bad, just ... interesting. Let's just say, on the plus side, some people in my department may have the opportunity to work a 4x10 workweek. On the down side, the "4" will be matched to the Sun-Wed and Wed-Sat production shifts, and some of the "10"s will be Swing/Grave.)

I carried through on my Sunday preparations and returned to bicycling to work today. At the time I leave the house it's just barely turning towards dawn: still dark enough to require lights, but probably only for another couple of weeks. So I plunged back into my full 10-mile route at lunch and was much more awake through the afternoon that has been usual lately. That might also have to do with project-direction-whiplash. It's a good thing I didn't actually put time in on the Work Brought Home yesterday, because today it was all about, "Let's not waste time on another detailed interim report. Just do the executive summary and then we'll finish everything up in the final report for the next version." So by spending yesterday evening sewing, I dodged a bunch of wasted effort. Sewing? More progress on the Gothic Underdress and more alterations on some modern outfits. Nothing completed at the moment.

It's a good thing I'd already decided to daytrip Crown because I'm utterly exhausted at the moment. And if I had been planning to pack up the car and go set up a campsite immediately after work ... well, I'm not sure it would have happened. I've actually been fairly good this week about getting to bed on time ... until last night when I was dealing with getting documents scanned and e-mailed for the refi and was up to all hours.

And besides that, I've Brought Work Home. Or at least, I've loaded a bunch of files onto a thumb drive with the intention of having them available if I choose to do some work on Sunday. All week I've been trying to work on the Third Interim Report on my interimable ... ahem ... interminable investigation report. I even received about a third of the contributions for the report due from other parties before this afternoon. (Hey, the deadline was only a week ago, after all.) But somehow things kept coming up. (Thursday was the kicker -- I found myself writing up two "emergency" investigations in the space of about three hours on Thursday. Which ate up most of the discretionary time in the day.)

Well, tomorrow I'll spend the day just hanging and not being responsible for anything. Then I can decide whether I want to be ambitious on Sunday. Now back to work on refi paperwork. (Well, technically website work.)

This afternoon I completed the entire slew of annual GMP and Health-and-safety online training (complete with graphic video dramatizations of all manner of horrific and bloody injuries that can happen if you Work In An Unsafe Manner). My department aspires to (again) be the first department to achieve 100% training completion so as our official Training Nag I must set a good example. My brain is completely fried. Maybe its that; maybe it's avoiding dealing with sorting out paperwork on my dining room table; maybe it's too many not-on-time bedtimes, but I've decided to hit the sack as soon as I've finished dinner tonight. We'll see if I succeed.

The surviving garments slideshow and lecture in SF last night was successful, I think. I even managed to finish on schedule despite not paying any attention to the time. But I was once again reminded that allowing an entire hour to get from the eastern end of the Bay Bridge to any given point in SF may be cutting things a bit close.

My first daffodil of the season is blooming. Its even almost light enough when I leave the house in the morning to see it (although not when I get home in the evening). I need to get more sunlight. Maybe that's why I feel all draggy.