Friday Follies

Another week down. It's been another one of those weeks where you come skidding into the weekend all beat up and bruised but feeling glad to be alive.

Weather has been pretty darn good down here (for south Texas). Moderate temps and cloudy/rainy, but after a summer of no rain and blistering heat, this feels great. Makes for great hunting weather. Work lumbers on with its typical fire drills, political infighting, and mindless projects. This week has been no less chaotic. We staged a mock disaster drill where we shut down operations simulating major disaster to our facility (like a hurricane) and moved operations across town for half the day. My role was to insure we had communications with our suppliers to contact them in case we needed emergency shipments, but basically I was on the computer testing our system and answering e-mails. Typical dog & pony show. Looked good in theory and on paper, but when the real crap hits the fan, who's gonna stick around town and be here to keep the fires burning? When Ike hit last year, most of the area south of us evacuated north and were not in town to help recover. I was one of the "dedicated" ones who stayed in town and "volunteered" to help run the place when the rest of Houston was shut down. The rest of the week was pretty much the same stuff. Meetings with suppliers, chasing down part issues, trying to finish up our testing and keeping the lid on minor issues. I would complain, but that's part of my job: part firefighter, part magician, part sage, part hall monitor.

One of my ancillary chores has been making plans to attend our 30 year college reunion in October. 30 years? Geeze I feel old. Can you recall what you were doing 30 years ago? Part of me wants to go and see my old friends/roommate/outfit but part of me is hesitant. I like to think that, in all of these years, we've grown up a bit, but some people never seemed to have left college. I'll go just to see what 30 years and several kids & pounds have done to a few people. Of course, it is always interesting to see how many are on their second (or third) marriage (I'm still working on my first) or how many kids they have or who took the longest to graduate. Past reunions were a visit to the past to see how successful you've become and how much you have changed (in a few cases it wasn't that much). At this stage, we're at the age where we can start comparing grandchildren and retirement homes (none for me, yet).

I'll let you know how it turns out.