10:32 p.m. - 2004-05-19
Changes
From the sound of things there is a big rally going on about two blocks from my home - over at the shopping mall. It's been going on for an hour as people celebrate the fact that our hockey team has just won the opportunity to play in the Stanley cup for the first time in 15 years. Just in the last few minutes there have also been a lot of sirens. Hoefully that just means that some preventive police work is being done. Fans here are generally of the "let's party" sort - not prone to violence. There also sounds to be some drivers parading up and down the main street showing the colours of the team. When we were coming into the community on the bus after work, there were four or five young guys between maybe 8 to 12 with large Flames flags standing at the side of the freeway waving at all the commuters as they went by. It appeared that most everyone took it in good fun. All of our trains have been decorated with the team's logos and the flags that are usually put up downtown for the Stampede were also up this morning. We still have a large torch on the Calgary Tower that was used during the Olympics here in 1988 so that has been lit as well. At least it is a positive way to blow off steam and it does seem to be raising spirits considerably in the City. That's not a bad thing.
Work this morning was interesting. First up a meeting with my co-worker and our supervisor to go over the report and spreadsheet I had put together on the weekend. Took about an hour to ensure that everyone understood the same thing about what I had written and had come to consensus about how it should be presented to our liaison with the company. When you are dealing with a client it is important to show how even a negative can be turned to their advantage so we were coming up with several possible solutions for each challenge so that there was choice for her instead of pressure on her. The pressure would have come when she had to report back to her supervisors. The bottom line is usually cost but in this case there are costs for not addressing what we've found too. Which will be in the best interest of the company in the long run is the question that needs to be answered. The second meeting was right after the first and just expanded to include our liaison. My supervisor presented the first half of the report then asked me to address the second part because I had put together the screen shots that illustrated the problems we were encountering and the spreadsheet that we hope to use to track things for the company. He hadn't warned me he was going to turn it over to me so I was a bit tongue tied at first, lucky our liaison is so pleasant to work with. That took another hour and a half. Most of the morning gone but a much clearer picture emerging of our scope of work I think.
As the discussion progressed two more shoes dropped into place - or as the Scarecrow said when they reached the Emerald City -"Now that makes it a horse of a completely different colour (I think the horse was purple)" Wizard of Oz. Me however, I was back hearing Dorothy say "You know Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." Those shoes? Well one was a revelation about my co-worker, while the other was about something I had wondered about the company and our reason for being there. It explains some of the tension I keep detecting when dealing with certain staff. My supervisor seems very pleased with how things are progressing even though we've identified a lot of problems. If he's happy then I'm happy too. I think.
At lunch I decided I needed to visit my favorite second hand book store. It's at the opposite end of the downtown core so it was quite a hike there and back again with shopping in between. The purpose was two fold. My oldest son keeps borrowing our books to read to his babies - that's great. The problem is that it takes a lot longer for him to go through the series than us. I wanted to get him his own set. I had popped into the bookstore in the main mall yesterday, but the prices were way too high. A young woman came to stand beside me as I was contemplating my options. She was a very pretty young thing and was asking about the books I was looking at. It was her mom's birthday and she wanted help choosing a gift for her. Apparently her mom, who speaks Russian as a first language, loves Harry Potter but the young lady wasn't that familiar with them. She just wanted to know the sequence of the stories. We got into a bit of a discussion of Russian literature when she noted she had read portions of the Harry Potter books in that language on the internet. I had taken a course on Russian authors in high school as a special project. I could recall enough to carry on a brief conversation, but not much more. We discussed the problem with getting a good translation from any language to another especially if the material was written during the medieval or renaissance periods. Just the difference in culture and values is difficult to illustrate well, without even touching the actual text. Think of Shakespeare for example. He had a wonderful sense of humour - raunchy, but funny - but very few readers catch the jokes now because of the old English and the slang of the day. She asked if I would rather have the Harry Potter books or the two coffee table books of art by Monet and Michelangelo if the gift were for me. I noted that taste can vary a lot between different people but that I would prefer the art books for two reasons. They are unique and are very personal because the giver would think very carefully about one's tastes. Also the Harry Potter books are very expensive, and although I think they are worth the cost, it might be possible for the young woman to find them second hand at a later time to give as a casual thank you for her mom or a just becuase surprise. I like doing that with my family just as a boost once in while. So anyway that conversation prompted my trip at lunch today. I managed to get good deals on a couple of the Harry Potter books and then picked up a couple of books for one of my sisters who has found the lack of information or stories about women as part of the Christian faith really frustrating. I love that store.
The afternoon was just focused on getting back on track wiuth our project. My co-orker and I had a couple of conversations about what had been discussed in the morning as we processed all the information and discussion. It had some of the permanent staff looking askance both morning as they passed by my office with it's door closed and in the afternoon as either my office or his was the scene of further planning. There is a lot of talking back and forth between them on a very regular basis but that hasn't been the case with us - most time has been spent infront of our computers. Funny how changing a pattern a bit can throw other people some times. The commute home was ummmm well interesting, dear diary, but I'm tired right now and I think I'll leave that for a tomorrow story.
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