Buried!

You may have heard, we got some snow recently. It collapsed the Metrodome, which was pretty amazing. Actually I'm surprised it never fell before, really. What I love is the parade of "I KNEW it would happen eventually" people - forgetting it had stayed up without much incident for 20 years. That's not a bad roof.

We live in Edina, which means that even in the middle of the storm, we were getting plowed out. On Saturday night, we went out to a big birthday party for a friend, and it was Edina-to-Edina travel, which meant we didn't hit an unplowed stretch. The next day, going to visit my dad to help decorate their Christmas tree, we got hung up by impassable roads thrice and had to back out and find other routes.

It is days like these that I'm happy we invested in Mister Marshmallow, the 4wd Hybrid. We left Clive the Jaguar in the driveway for the first 2 days, but by Monday the roads were clear enough for him to be fishtailing down the road without hitting any snowbanks.

It's amazing to realize that we've hit a month since I started working at the new client (3 weeks technically, but I got wrapped into some meetings while transitioning out of Cleveland). The marker was that my first day in, they were doing a 90-day pre-live assessment, and today I delivered the 60-day pre-live assessment. And the things I know now versus then... whew. To be sitting at the table explaining exactly what the issue is with the Blood and Marrow Transplant Workflows, and what our next steps are... it's pretty cool. In this time, I feel like I've been able to really help the project along - not with any sort of magic, but just in listening, understanding, carrying concerns forward, and helping think of solutions.

Though sometimes I do get a little frustrated. One of my pet peeves is technical people who hide behind jargon. I had a person today who was quite obviously not telling the whole story, and kept dropping little technical terms as to why we would need to make some serious changes to our project or PATIENT SAFETY WAS AT RISK. I was watching the clinical people at the table getting hopeless - they were thinking that OBVIOUSLY what this guy was saying was true, it was technically explainable. I finally unloaded on the guy, letting him know I DO know the tech, and I knew exactly what the problem REALLY was, and that he had 2 ways he could fix it, and that it's not acceptable to put my project at risk like this. He made a look like a fish gasping for water.

It's good to have geek mojo. So we're still on target for our golive in 60 days, and it's going to be tight, no question. But I'm still happy. Almost unreasonably so. People keep waiting for me to crack. They don't know that I've been to Cleveland. Speaking of there, the cut cord remains cut, and they haven't brought me in for anything, which is wonderful. I do still get notes from people I brought in there wondering if I'm in a better place and if I can help them. We shall see.

Speaking of geek (and fish, actually), my poor Macbook Air has a cracked hinge, so the screen flops limply around. Apple said it's a free fix, but it'll be 2-3 weeks. They wanted to hold onto it, but I can't live without a laptop, and while it would have been a wonderfully acceptable excuse for getting that cute tiny 11" Air, I just couldn't do it. What is this... responsibility? It feels weird.