Friday, September 27, 2002
I am playing hooky today, even though I have had to be on the phone and working on budget stuff for awhile. Still, I finally got to do some weeding in the backyard jungle, and get poor starving Dewey some food. Maybe I'll even get to do some laundry and cleaning! It's a beautiful day to not be at work!
Thursday, September 26, 2002
I forgot to mention our work diversion yesterday: following the Enron auction. When this was first announced, I was looking forward to going to the warehouse over on Shepherd (a few blocks from our house) and looking over the merchandise. Then it got so huge that they decided not to do previews. I did register for the auction, but it quickly became clear that I was not going to get any good deals on flat panel monitors or plasma screens. It was fun listening to the auction, though. One of my friends had her heart set on an Enron shredder. The auction continues tomorrow.
Wednesday, September 25, 2002
I decided I needed to post something before Mom and Dad left for their trip...
I have been very busy at work. We had a big project with a tight (way too tight) deadline. Phase one went live on Monday, so I have spent the last three weekends at the office, not to mention many late nights. I wasn't actually doing the conversion or programming work, but people who work for me were, so I felt I needed to be there. Needless to say, I'm sick of my office walls! I'm going to take some days off now, though.
Things are changing at work. Our CIO was named Chief Operating Officer, so who should become the new CIO but my own boss, Loren. This is a good thing. I have worked for Loren the entire time I've been with Williams / NextiraOne (I'm the only one who can claim that). He'll do a great job, and it doesn't hurt to have such a close relationship with the CIO! Not to mention knowing the COO (and, in an unrelated note, I had lunch with this guy today). I will miss reporting directly to Loren, though. He's a good person to have as a manager.
By the way, in case the above link has you wondering, we will finally be releasing our new NextiraOne website in late October. We've had a "temporary" site up for almost 18 months now!
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
I do feel the need to comment on this anniversary. I didn't really think I would feel emotional about it, but I do.
A few months after last year's terrorist attacks, I realized that I was playing a little game with myself everyday. I found myself making a mental note each morning of the first mention of "September 11th" or "9-11". As in "Since September 11th", or "In the aftermath of 9-11". Our alarm clock wakes us up tuned to NPR's Morning Edition, we listen to that as we get ready, and then drive to work listening either BBC World Services or Morning Edition. Consequently, I would usually hear one of those two phrases every day before I even opened my eyes. And I still do. Just those syllables have become a clause in so many of the sentences we hear now. For that reason I am really looking forward to September 12th. Maybe this will help; maybe the media will have to start calling it "September 11th, 2001", and that will force the date itself to become only a date once again. We'll have a September 11th every year, and every year good things will happen, and bad things will happen, and hopefully not something so very bad. And then it would be nice if we could find another name for this day. Something like Krystalnacht, or D-Day. Just not September 11th. The date itself isn't a bad thing, after all.
All of which does not mean I don't want to remember the day. I've been going over my experience of the events today -- how I heard, what I saw on TV, my conversations with friends and family. The bright blue sky, the absence of planes afterward, the nervous energy. Ed and I driving around to stop watching TV -- I told him he should get gas, he told me not to be paranoid, I pointed out to him that his gas gauge was way below empty, we laughed because that was a shot of normalcy. The stories about survivors buried in the rubble, and the ensuing days revealing that those stories were wishful thinking.
I still can't believe it happened. I still devour accounts of the disaster even though I think they're overdone. When I flew over Manhattan on my way back from Connecticut in March, I couldn't get my bearings at first. I remembered the first time I saw the World Trade Center, my sophomore year in college. My friends Mary and Jean and I took the subway there. When we got out of the subway, we walked outside, looked around and asked someone where the towers were. That person laughed and said "You just came out of one!". They were so big you couldn't see them. They were so big that when you stood on top of them you not only pointed out how small the people and cars looked below, but how small the planes looked below. They were so big that when I flew over New York last spring, I couldn't recognize anything.
Here's to tomorrow.
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