The busyness

A quick update before going offline for a week up to a resort on Gull Lake... where the relaxing will be wonderful.

After the wonderful weekend away, we got good and busy to get ready for the resort: Well, I was busy at work and play, and Pamela was the packing demon: Our car trunk was ready to go a full 48 hours before our anticipated departure!!!

Work has been good: The glow is still lasting from our successful rollout last week: Comments from the CIO on down are filled with praise and amazement that things went as well as they did (they're not used to things going smoothly here). In the "education of Jimmy" department - I spent a few hours with one of the Cardiologists, who talked me through the entire world of Nuclear Medicine, which completely blew my mind. This is where they inject you with radioactive materials, and then take a 15 minute photograph of your insides, and see what parts of your body are getting normal blood flow, and which parts are "starved". A nuc of your heart will show the whole thing glowing, except for areas that have been "infarcted" - which means the muscle is "dead".

The whole science is amazing, and while I've worked around Nuclear medicine for years, nobody has ever truly explained HOW it works... So I'm just thrilled.

In another fun moment, an "emergency meeting" was called for all staff (it was a quiet afternoon), and we reviewed a portfolio of nature photographs one of the Cardiologists had taken to pick a few to submit to a contest (his pictures have been in the Kare11 weather watcher calendar in the past!) They popped popcorn, it was fun.

It was a week of movies and bonding for me: Tuesday one of my old co-workers at the previous client asked me out to see Transformers and get caught up. It was fantastic - literally the Citizen Kane of transforming robot movies. Wednesday our Manny Justin had another premiere - this one a Coen-brothers-esque double-triple-quadruple-cross thriller. These guys are making feature length movies, fully produced, in their spare time. It absolutely amazes me. And it was a really good movie!

Last night was yet another Scotch Avengers night - a bit later than usual. The truly bizarre moment came when Chicken revealed the following: 2 months ago, Ant had brought a truly rare bottle - a 12-year Lagavulin which had a very complex character and we all loved. But it was challenging - it needed just so much water, and so much rest... it took work, but was rewarding. We all basked in the glow of "discovery" on this bottle.

Chicken revealed to us last night that he had been rooting in his cabinet and discovered that HE had actually brought us that very same bottle one year earlier, and we had all rejected it, not able to figure out how to enjoy it. He had the 2/3 full bottle as proof. But the funny thing is even HE didn't remember this until he stumbled across the bottle, tucked deep into his cabinet (since he didn't like it either!!!)

It was a fun moment to realize just what sorts of scotch nerds we had become, and how we had come in the past year... and how far we could likely yet go.

Well, this is the last update for a week probably - we're off just after lunch to our week up north. Oh yes, and Isaac's 4th tooth finally cut and he's so relieved.

Toodles!