This was an extremely stressful week. I'm trying to set up travel for a meeting and none of the three people organizing it will tell me what time the meeting is. (In fact, there is some contradictory information about what day it is.) Nor are they sending me the information I need to get my visit request sent. It's remarkably annoying, especially since they said they'd have the info out to everybody on Tuesday morning. The other travel annoyance is that a meeting I have next week is extending to mid-afternoon on Friday. That means either the red-eye home or staying over until Saturday. Either way, it screws up my weekend. And then there's actual work to add to things. We found out late Wednesday afternoon about some information our director wanted to get to senior leaders on Thursday morning. So I came back to the office after that meeting and worked on drafting a chart, which was good information, but he wanted more detail. So I spent Thursday morning making a bunch of phone calls and decided that both Los Angeles and Denver must have been completely depopulated since not a single bloody person I called answered their phone. I left a bunch of urgent voicemail messages. Out of 8 or 9 people I left urgent messages for, only two of them called me back before the time I told them I needed the info. (One more called me back later on.) We did manage to get things done, with the remarkable teamwork we're capable of. But, sheesh, I could have lived without the panic turn.
I should add that I didn't really mind the late night Wednesday night because it gave me an excuse to stay in Arlington late enough to go over to Olsson's and hear Dave Barry read from his new book. The place was packed and I could barely see. Annoyingly, this one woman and her two kids kept insisting on talking even while Dave was reading and glaring at people who were shushing her. We went to hear him, damn it, not listen to you yammer about how you can't get a photo because of all these people there. On the plus side, he was quite entertaining. His new book is about money. His advice includes things like making sure your kids get bad grades because bad colleges are cheaper than good ones.
Fortunately, I had a stress-alleviating weekend. I went to Savannha, Georgia for a Volksmarch event. This was a huge event, with 8 walks, 1 bike ride and 1 swim available, as well as some social events. I did two walks on Saturday and one Sunday and went on the Saturday night river cruise. I'd been to Savannah before, but you always do see cities best on foot. My previous visit had been during the summer and it was too hot to walk much then. This time, the weather was quite comfortable, although there were a few showers here and there. I was impressed with how they'd laid out the walks to cover different streets in the historic district and to have different themes. For example, the first walk I did was the Presidential Parlay and that focused on George Washington's Southern tour. The Religious Ramble pointed out various churches (and one synagogue), while the Historic Houses and Squares had more architectural information on the houses. The cruise was not especially interesting as cruises go (no narration and, really, there's not much to see from the river at night), but I met some nice people. So the weekend was quite a success, especially as I proved to myself that I'm up to doing three 10K walks in two days. My leg muscles and my back did feel the second walk on Saturday, but I wasn't at all sore in the morning.
Of course, the trip also means that I am way behind on things at home, but so it goes.
Copyright 2006 Miriam H. Nadel