There will be some upcoming pics soon with some details and stories from the trip. Below are a few pics from the trip, and if you click on them it will take you to my flickr account with even more pics to check out. I haven’t had a chance to fix any of them up (maybe this weekend) or add any tags/titles to them, but this is at least a start.
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Oscar and Pati’s wedding was amazing, and the trip was a fantastic success! I’ll try to have more up soon.
Golden tip:
Travel is much less expensive and stressful if you make sure to book your flight for the correct day.
I’m still going to make it out there tonight, but it would seem the dumb ass who booked the flight booked the right flight number as the rest of the group….but was off by a day.
That dumb ass was me….
I’m in the process of getting everything re-booked. More to come.
Monday nights at the coolest live music spot in Dallas (Opening Bell), Becky Middleton organizes and performs in a cool show that she calls “Song Writers in the Round”. I have wanted to go check out what she does down there for a long time, but for some excuse (a bad one I’m sure), I never made it down there until last week. I have to admit that I was surprised and impressed. The show was nothing like what I expected it to be. In my mind I had pictured 3-4 “new” artists with zits and head gear they had to take off before they could sing. I pictured them in a circle on stage, and playing in some sort of rotation or group jam. Just a way to get everyone some experience performing.
So…. Did I mention that I’m wrong a lot? What I saw down there was nothing like what I had in mind. There were 4 artists/groups, many of them very well seasoned performers, all playing a few songs before moving to the next artist. This night there was Becky Middleton, Kynsie Jo Zakem (try saying that 3 times fast!), Luke Rainwater, and Shane Whalen. I was really impressed with all of the acts and would like to see them again. If any of them are playing near you soon, I recommend you go see them too!! I’m sure that I’ve seen Shane somewhere before, but I can’t seem to place it.
Kynsie Say this 3 times fast Jo Zakem
Sorry, I couldn’t find a page for Luke Rainwater, please send the link if you have it and I’ll update this.
**Edit, I didn’t find his page, but did find this youtube…. enjoy
Most of the time it’s best, and most cost effective do make the intelligent choice. That is, if you know what the likely outcome of something is, you can (should?) make your choices and decisions with those ideas in mind. Following this wisdom, I probably should have pulled up most of the plants in my garden and transported them to the new flower/garden bed. After all, the main garden gets good light from about 10 am until 3 or so, and about 1/4th of it is always in the shade. The new bed/garden gets good light pretty much all day long.
I could have saved a few bucks by moving all my herbs/plants from the old garden to the new one, but instead I spent 30 bucks or so and got mooooorreeee stuff. My logic: This is the first year in my new house and I can see just how well, or how poorly the plants do. I’ll set this year up as a “learning experience” so that I know what to plant there next year. So even if my first garden fails, I don’t mind. I have all the stuff I need in the new garden, and next year I’ll know how to set it up right.
Here is the new finished bed.
You can see the shade problem with the old bed.
Here is the post about the first garden clicky
More on projects I’ve worked on around the house here
Most people would say that their birthday, or Christmas is their favorite day of the year, but for me none of those compare to April first. I’ve written about some of my April Fools day shenanigans on this blog before, and I thought I might share this year’s festivities.
Background: There are a lot of organizational changes that are going on at my job right now, and because of that there is some uncertainty and also some very delicate moves and changes that are happening right now in the group I’m a part of. Delicate…changes…. sounds like a good target for a joke! The changes that I’m referring to go something like this: A group of several managers, including mine, are all changing jobs and moving into each others positions. They are calling it a “manger rotation”, and it is somewhat delicate because the managers are moving in to spots they are not familiar with, and will be relying heavily on the support structure (people in positions like mine) to make the transition smooth. When they first announced this, the effective date was to be April 1st…. How could I resist a setup like that? That’s like tossing a great big cream puff slow pitch right over the plate. You have to expect me to swing for the fences. So I did.
Step one: build your team.
For this joke I enlisted the other 2 supervisors who work with me (Shannon and Terrance). The three of us would be expected to keep the daily business running while the new manager gets up to speed. We all agreed that if we could pull this off, making our manager and director believe we were all leaving the company would have a devastating effect. Fortunately for me, Shannon and Terrance both agreed to join me in the prank. The next step was somewhat critical to making this believable, and that step was to get our HR generalist in on the game.
Step 2: the set up
You can’t just do something on April first and expect to have people believe you. People have their guard up and will smell it coming from a mile away. So you have to start setting some of the wheels in motion before the actual prank. Also, the more people that are involved, the less likely your target is to think that it’s just a joke. To bring these elements together, on March 31st, near the end of the day, I booked a conference room and sent out a meeting request to the 3 supervisors, HR,my boss, and his boss. My boss sent me an instant message asking what the meeting was for, and I made him sweat a little bit. I just said that the supervisors needed to discuss some of the upcoming changes. He seemed uneasy when I didn’t explain everything to him. I usually over communicate, and don’t hold anything back, so being quiet and vague added to the mystery and confusion. I’m sure having HR and his boss on the meeting invite added to the effect.
Step 3: game plan
The supervisors all made sure we were on the same page. We came up with a good cover story as to why we were leaving and came up with a few details so we would have the same story. HR ended up not being able to go to the meeting, but we didn’t let anyone else know that until the meeting started. We printed up and signed a letter of resignation and went into the meeting.
We went into the room as stone faced as we could. I told the boss men that we had some things we needed to discuss, and we would like them to read our letter and then answer any questions. This is what they got:
If all of this was true it would have thrown a major wrench into a lot of different things. It would have messed things up in more ways that I can even explain in this blog post. It wouldn’t be so much about us leaving as how it would effect (stop?) all of the fragile changes that were in the works. Those changes would effect 4-5 departments and potentially over 100 people.
I was hoping for maybe 1-2 mins of them buying the story as the best case. Worst case would be my boss saying “About damn time! We have been trying to figure out how to get rid of you guys.” We had these guys going for about 5 mins! They asked a few questions about who the company was (AFD Technology) and how we thought the team would respond to the mass resignations. All 3 supervisors added to the layers of BS. My boss as quiet as he normally is, and the director you could see was keeping his cool, but pretty upset.
After about 5 mins you could see the light came on for my boss. He had a big smile on his face and said something to the effect of : I just have to ask, it is April first, is this whole thing a joke?” When I admitted that AFD Technology was April Fools Day Tech…. the look of relief on both of their faces was followed by the whole room laughing. We got them! Hook line and sinker.
Chalk up one more unsuccessful April Fools Day!
