The Eye of Kris

For whatever reason, life is just a little more stressful when my desk is piled with stuff. So, yesterday, I spend most of the morning sorting through mail and papers and receipts that have been piling up for the better part of a month. It's made the rest of the weekend go much more smoothly, I think.

I've been very busy as usual, although there's not much new going on to write about. I have been to Boston again - several times. This week will be two weeks in a row without a trip up there, which is a first in a couple of months. I don't have another trip on the schedule at this point, but I am going to San Francisco for a conference at the beginning of November. Maybe I can spend the entire month of October in Tennessee. That would be nice.

I did get a chance to walk around downtown Boston a little bit on my most recent trip, and I had dinner at the oldest restaurant in America - the Union Oyster House, which just celebrated thier 180th anniversary. I had Clam Chowder and Lobster. It was good.

Other than the extreeme amount of travel, work has been going very well. I think I'm as busy as I've ever been, and I'm dealing with a lot of new challenges lately (or "opportunities", as upper management likes to call them). It's really stretching me in some areas, which I think will be good for me.

Since we're working so closely with people in the Boston area, the company has set up a videoconferencing system that is actually pretty cool. The technology for that stuff has come a long way. We now have rooms in each city with 50-inch plasma TVs and high-quality cameras and audio systems. We're also experimenting with webcams and software-based video systems, so that we can interact with each other even from our desks.

At home, we've been using Skype for videoconferencing, and it works pretty well (much better than Yahoo Messenger, which never really worked very consistently). The video is decent quality with very little lag and a pretty high frame rate. We are able to see my parents and brothers more, and of course, let them see the kids, and they like that. Mary's sister and brother-in-law in Europe are also using Skype, and we need to get some kind of regular schedule going for Owen and Ivan to see Clay and Thadeus. We recently upgraded our webcam, too, and that has made a difference (for those on the other end, at least).

The weather has been really nice lately, except for the occasional thunderstorm. We had some siding torn off our house in a thunderstorm several weeks ago, and I've had a really hard time getting someone to come out and fix it. It's up along the roofline of our two-story house, so it's not just something that anyone can do, but it's a small enough job that no one with the right expertise and equipment seems to be interested in doing it. We've got the name of a subcontractor that the original builder of the home uses - hopefully they will be able (and willing) to help us out.

Anyway, at the moment, the weather is very nice, so I think I'm going wrap this up and take the family out for some ice cream.