I gave three full days of "knowledge transfer" (two Thursdays and the following Tuesday) to a nice assortment of business teams.  It was deemed important by the IS PTBs (and rightly so), but not important enough for the allocation of measureable time (boo).  I spent time on it anyway, and got a lot of good out of it in return:  knowledge transfer, when done right, is a two-way process.

That's been the highlight of work lately, as it was slightly less rushed and disorganized than the project work, and more subversive and more satisfying.

In the middle of that, I drove to Mom's (and got lightly rear-ended), to take her on a birdwatching boat trip on the Mississippi.  It was windy so most of the wildlife was tucked in for the day, and the rest had abandoned the flooded islands, but the tour delivered on its promise of active eagle nests.  Mom had a good time; we hit a few fabric shops along the way.

I saw both eldest and youngest brother while in the area.  Introduced eldest brother to Agricola:  All Creatures Big and Small; he was impressed.  He gave me 2 cans of toasted coconut beer from his recent trip to Hawaii.  I managed to drink one; if you could set beer on fire and then beat the flames out with an old shoe, I think this would be the result.  With the aid of rye flour, yeast, garam masala, and ginger-infused balsamic vinegar, I turned the other can into a couple decent loaves of bread.

Can't complain about the weather:  regular rain, not quite too damp currently, no local schools demolished by horrid huge tornadoes, and we seem to be safely past that "last frost" point.  The garden is well on its way:  I've harvested my first salad (spinach, kales, parsley) and a hefty bunch of asparagus (despite never getting around to weeding); peas are perking along.  I planted beans yesterday, along with tomato and pepper plants.  I still need to prep the beds for the herbs (fenugreek, basils (sweet, holy, and Thai), papalo, epazote...).

It's hard to get a good look while I'm driving, but I believe the pair of sandhill cranes nesting in the ditch next to the dog park have hatched their chick(s).  Totally exposed on a low mound of grass...what must they go through when the weather's bad....

I continue to show signs of being properly out of the years-long depression that no one else seemed to notice (I cover well, and bury myself in work as I wait out the mental slump).  Now if only I had a few years of vacation in which to clean up the debris field....

I turned the corner for home tonight and heard the chorus frogs going at it in the wetland.
And currently the wetland is very wet indeed:  possibly it has rained (or snowed) at least a little every day for the past two weeks.  I managed to plant my Fedco tree order (one sweet birch, one South Dakota plum, and one Virginia sweetspire), but it snowed that night and rained buckets the next day.

In other news, poignant words from Iain Banks.

And speaking of Iain Banks, I finished "Learning the World" by Ken Macleod.  The more I write (or try to write), the more critically I view books when I read them.  Not because I think I can do better, because because I want to do better:  I want to figure out what I can learn and use.  "Learning the World" was interesting because I liked the ending better than the rest of the book.  More often than not, it seems like a book's ending is a hasty attempt to stop talking about a world the author does not want to leave.  The ending rarely lives up to the promise of the story.

In this case, the ending appealed to me, reached back and made sense of much of the rest of the story, and kind of made me want to re-read the book now that I knew what he was getting at.  The ending could be seen as a bit too preachy or idealistic, but it's something I can study to learn more about endings.

Unfortunately, the beginning and the middle were stripped bare, almost an outline.  Housemate, who reads far more than me and who reads about the publishing world besides, immediately posited that the book had been edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, then flipped open the book to confirm his assumption.  Yet another complication in the life cycle of a published novel.

Went up to barado6 again on Friday, as soon as I could extract myself from work.  Spent the evening drinking tawny port and tokay out of a hollow Cadbury chocolate bunny, then we went on a starlight trek into the woods.  Got kinda lost, got whacked in the eye with a rebounding twig (no major damage, just a warning to be less stupid in the future), then we sat very quietly on a fallen tree.  Heard something moving around; we think deer.  I think most of the wildlife was scared away by our noisy stumbling through the underbrush.

Saturday was more fun with trees, saws, and ropes.  And a "business rake" (thatching rake, very handy for removing layers of debris).  The "widowmaker" tree refused to fall downhill despite a deep notch in the suggested direction - too much weight from uphill branches - and instead fell toward the saw so we couldn't remove it (we were full of cautionary tales this weekend).  I finally made use of my trailer hitch - the trailer hitch I just had to have "because I'm a homeowner and I'll want to haul things" and haven't touched in nine years, and that eventually caused my turn signals to short out when the hookup for the trailer fell down onto the exhaust and melted - we threw the rope around a half-fallen tree, tied it to to the Santa Fe, and pulled the tree down.  Well, partly down; then I did some old-fashioned manual pulling to twist it off the tree it was hung on.  Which released the saw, unharmed, and the tree fell (uphill) in such a way as to provide an excellent perch-with-backrest about six feet off the ground.

Then Z took me to Little Village for goat cheese appetizer and yummy burritos.  The deer were frisky and abundant yesterday - I think they too are a little drunk with the idea of spring - so I tried to keep an eye out for them on the drive home.

Today, back to my own homestead.  Instead of trees, I must tackle dishes, laundry, and the much-delayed taxes.  There's yardwork to do, too, and I'm eager to do it.  I might sneak out and plant some early snacks in a thawed corner of the garden.  But despite the relative warmth, we still have snowpiles in the yard, and tomorrow is another cool-down.

I am still in need of some stay-at-home vacation:  time alone, time in the yard, etc.  Hopefully will take a day or two this week.

In other birthday-related goodness, I got many well-wishing emails from people I haven't seen enough of lately (and a handmade card from my sister).  And eldest brother sent me a package of goodies from his recent trip to Hawaii.  Yes, he went to Hawaii and I got a t-shirt, but it wasn't lousy; it's a "mirrors of the Mauna Kea observatory" shirt.  And he got me some adorable maneki-neko origami paper.

And of course I got six or seven inches of new snow to shovel.  I am well ready to stop shoveling and start planting the garden.  But it was a good workout; I just put on the headphones and got into a rhythm.  Drinking many fluids now to try and stave off muscle soreness...so far, so good.  Need to build up my tree-carrying muscles for helping Z at her Baraboo home.

Made walnut-pistachio-cranberry bread pudding.  Good après-shoveling food.

Friends are coming over this weekend, for gaming and chatting.  I plan to make a belated angel food cake for my friend's birthday, and "pasta bar" for dinner (homemade tomato-garlic sauce and homemade pesto in the freezer, so I just need to add meats and cheeses; it's not a heavy veg-eating crowd).

It's The Big Weekend for the project at work.  Our particular team probably won't be able to do or fix much until next week.  But I am still running queries, looking for stuff that's still wrong...and finding at least one new wrong thing each day, and dutifully forwarding my findings to the appropriate authorities.

For my impending birthday, Z got me The Science of Good Cooking.  I'm about 200 pages in (reading the tips and explanations and just skimming the rest).  Good stuff.  My only complaint - and I knew this when I put the book on my wishlist - is that over half of the book is devoted to meat and eggs.  The same is true of America's Test Kitchen in general.  Which is fine:  it's good to know how to make the most of meat, and eggs are little science-labs-in-shells that deserve extra attention.  There are some bean, veg., and grain tips in the upcoming chapters:  these are foods that also deserve to be studied scientifically and treated well.  The other very tiny complaint is that when they talk about low&slow cooking, they don't mention the crock pot; this is something ATC has remedied in more recent television shows.

Anyway, I am pleased with the book.  The next time I make deviled eggs, I will set the egg carton on its side the day before.  I'm very curious about the cold-oil method for making homemade french fries - apparently they soak up less oil that way....

For the project at work...we in the trenches have very nearly done all we can to try and avert disaster pre-launch.  It's deeply disheartening to have good - or even seemingly-crucial - ideas dismissed or ignored, but one can only do so much hopping up and down, waving one's arms excitedly, and explaining to everyone who walks by.  When it becomes clear that once again our input will not be utilized, we switch to making sure it's on the record that we brought this up and told the right people.  For the next while, I'll try to pick up the pieces of the other projects that were abandoned along the way, and we'll compile an arsenal of queries and fixes for the inevitable difficulties to come.

I will also pay more attention to lowering blood pressure and stress level;  a decent work ethic can be deadly on this project, and this is nowhere near worth dying for.

Physical exercise is always a good option.  I'm working on partitioning the basement - not like a normal, sane person would, with proper framing and drywall, but instead with minimal framing and $5 doors from Habitat ReStore.  This will work fine, and the doors fit into the Santa Fe for easy transport (a 4x8 sheet does not).  ReStore has some fun stuff:  the one in Baraboo has a player piano and one of those stairway chair lifts, and the one in Wauwatosa has a massive conveyor belt system.  Intermittently, I help Z. take down trees to make room for the orchard.  Today, I plan to shovel snow from the garden, to help it warm up and dry out.

Phenology:  saw a sandhill crane yesterday.  A brief internet search implies this is not particularly early for their return.  The general songbird population has been talking about spring for weeks already.  Talk of snow again on Tuesday, but highs in the 40s for a while after that.

Weekend before last was another short trip to Baraboo - headed up after work on Friday and came home Saturday evening.  In between Z and I made good progress clearing the brush and trees from the not-yet-orchard.  Taking down a tree using saw and axe is quite therapeutic.  Most of the trees were dead or half-dead.  We left stumps that are 4 or 5 feet high, because they might be useful as fenceposts, and anyway bits of dead tree are cool.

My arms ached for a couple days, but it was good.

Back in cubicle-world, I continue to run the risk of over-seething.  I am still trying to convince the right people that the changes I've made are necessary, well thought-out, and properly reviewed.  I am currently being thwarted by one person, who says they couldn't possibly test my changes, because I had the audacity to fix the entire system rather than just the specific case described in the defect, and in fact I must back out all of my inappropriately ambitious changes.  I've offered to do the testing for them, but have gotten no response.  This particular battle, on one front or another, has been dragging on since just after Christmas.  The change is nowhere near complicated enough to warrant this much time and effort.

I put my foot down - refused to back out the changes and re-introduce dozens of errors into the system - and made sure both bosses knew.  Boss-of-boss got into the mix too, and I appear to have all three on my side.  But as yet there is no official word on whether the changes will stay.  Likely there won't be until I kick the email thread again.

So while they screw around with...whatever the heck it is they're trying to do or prove, I'm going to locate the appropriate data and get the needed test results.  This too is harder than it should be, because I'll have to go foraging in another team's test results.  The battle to get a functional testing environment has been going on for years.

If you're an IS person, you'll understand how...icky...it is to be told to make changes and hand them off without unit testing.

Astronaut photography of Earth:  http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/.

February 1 was a day of remembrance for NASA. 
I am of an age where the Challenger explosion was the first large-scale event to break my life into a Before and an After.

...classic Doctor Who with commercial breaks.  On the one hand, I am happy to watch "The Aztecs".  On the other hand...gah!

...well, it's a word in urbandictionary, but that doesn't quite count.  And neither definition there conveys its business-related context:  when you reply-all with a question or concern and the thread forks a few times and a bunch of people are added to the thread.  And you spend the rest of the day/week trying to get a reply in at the right time, to the right people, to prevent even further confusion and re-emailing. 

Eventually, someone will set up a meeting, because they know that's the solution to these things.  Except half the time it isn't, because the wrong people are on the call or the wrong information is available.  (If you don't know the answer then stop speculating and look it up!)  Often, the same thread will spring up again a week later and more urgently than before, like an infection that didn't get the full course of antibiotics.

You actually do care about the discussion, but you probably needed a reply today about one specific thing that has since been buried in the thread.  And with each subsequent reply-all you care a little bit less, and you hate that your work ethic is being damaged by your own good intentions.  And tomorrow, you will stupidly do it all again. 

You wouldn't necessarily know it lately, but I do write.  I lean toward semi-historical fiction and/or hard sf (which parallels the mix of books I grew up on), but one of the most viable current projects is mainstream fiction. 

I also write poetry.  I suspect poetry is as close as we'll ever get to direct thought transference to strangers across distance and time, but human language is such an inadequate tool for the job.  Most poetry I read sets my teeth on edge.  Some of the poetry I write does not.  Sometimes it conveys a strong image to someone else, but usually not the one I'd attempted to send.

I write non-fiction and expository text, but that doesn't seem like writing so much as outlining; the meat of the story is missing.

I write because I get crabby and itchy if I don't.  I write because there's something I keep trying to say, and I need to keep trying to say it.  I always return to writing, even if the absence is sometimes far too long.

...There is something I wanted to say here, but I've deleted it at least four times now.  The above innocuous bio is all that came out.  What I wanted to say is nothing new or earth-shattering, but it involves a story that is not yet mine to tell.  And I hate sounding all emo and intentionally mysterious; there's enough of that online. 

For now, I have no idea how to put this in a poem.