December is Here!
evil_firmware is very pleased at the snow up on the Zugspitze, and tells me the snowboarding is fantastic. Since he bought a new board, i get his old one. My friend Wendy will give me her boots, too, so all I need now is a nice pillow to secure to my rear end and off I go!
Does 30 years' experience skiing count for anything? No? Maybe? Guess we'll see.
My little brother ... ok, so he's 26, but will always be my little brother ... he's coming to visit us with his wife. We are all excited! We'll go see Neuschwanstein, maybe go up to Berlin, visit Wendy, and hopefully they'll go hike the Partnachklamm in the wintery icyness with me. That will be fun. We're excited also because they are going to bring us fat free, sugar free jello pudding and oolong tea, two components to my life that aren't available locally. ;) Whoda thunk it. I'll ask morningmoon to send us pudding and tea next time. :)
Speaking of whom, she has one gorgeous new granddaughter! Hey morningmoon , I have your girl's stuff on my table at work ... ready to pack up and ship, by the way. I am making progress. Last week mom's present, this week Anne's pictures and MM's kiddo's baby stuff. I'm doing really spiffy now!
By the way, I officially work in a hostile work environment. Unfortunately, our most recent climate survey is a vast improvement over the one in February because we've had 2 vital changes - a 40% turnover in personnel and a buffer of 4 directorate heads in place between the Boss and the Rest of Us, except for special staff and so on. We get briefed this week; maybe the Inspector General will get an e-mail from me as well. I've worked in hostile environment before and didn't like it. My uniform and juniority of rank sort of demotivated me to complain; my civilian and no-uniform status give me great bravery. ... except I'll wait until I see what my rating is :)
Got us a Wii and a Rock Band. Need to inaugurate that tonight. The goal is to not pull the Wii off the table while doing crazy guitar movements ... I don't want the Wii to go the same route the PS2 console did .. as well as 2 Rock Band discs. We will perservere as will our new Wii and new Rock Band. (that means I"ll be zip tying the Wii console to the table before playing RB rather than after.)
Hiring a new peep for my Anne's position. I miss Anne, but she's proving a good e-mail correspondent. I really miss her strong English writing background ... my strong journalism background is an entirely different set of writing skills ... like making up words and punctuation rules in the moment, and cutting things down in the nick of time for deadline. Whereas Anne always used large words and challenged my skill with the dictionary. :) She was fun, too. Miss her. Am enjoying the hiring process; I have someone in mind but must be fair. Hopefully we'll get them in before next summer.
Time for Rock Band. Was going to be Billy Blanks, but ate too much dinner. Which was great, by the way, no matter what evil_firmware says. Ground turkey with mashed garbanzos and spices burgers. Needed to be a little more juicy, can solve that with some beer and egg (we were out of egg) next time. EF says "next time???!!!"but too bad for him, I'm the cook.
Ciao!