Areas of Unrest

4 January 2006 - On the Agenda

My biggest accomplishment of the day was drafting an agenda for a meeting. The person who was asking for it has been whining about it since before the holidays. The interesting thing about this is that it took me exactly 6 minutes to do, of which 2 minutes were finding the memorandum that requested the meeting.

But, you know, it's easy to be snide about other people's lack of organizational skills. It's not like I've never spent hours kvetching about some task that ended up taking minutes to do. So far this year I've been good about keeping my "to do" list reasonably short and focused, but that's been all of four days!

My other accomplishment of the day was making some plans for continuing education. We have a requirement of a minimum of 40 hours a year, with a goal of 80 hours. I got an announcement in my email of an upcoming conference, which I've gone to in the past, so that's an easy couple of days. That also motivated me to check on some other events and I found a very relevant one in May. The best part of that one is that it's in Salt Lake City, which will give me a chance to find a couple of hours to do a capital Volksmarch.

My final note for today is that I have now discovered where all of the world's slowest people go to walk. I had to drop off something at my company's main office, which is several blocks from where I work. More to the point, it's several blocks in the wrong direction in that, if I wanted to take advantage of reasonably decent weather to walk part of the way home, I'd have to walk back up a steep hill. Being somewhat lazy, I used that as an excuse for a change of scenery and walked in the other direction instead, over the Key Bridge and through Georgetown. Normally, I would walk the canal towpath, but it was late enough that I thought it might be a bit creepy, so I stuck to M Street. Sheesh, do they dismiss people from hip replacement surgery onto M Street and tell them to just hobble along as best they can? And why do people who are so bloody slow all have to walk three abreast? It's one thing if I were planning to window shop and stroll, but the whole point of walking after walk is exercise, which means at least a somewhat decent pace. At least it got better when I got to Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, I walked to Foggy Bottom instead of Dupont Circle largely because I was afraid the M Street crawlers would continue all the way east. Well, also, because it was getting dark out and getting a bit cold, but I'd rather blame the tourists. At any rate, it wasn't quite as long a walk as I'd like, but better than nothing.