~Thursday~ I caught the #1 Avent Ferry Wolfline bus today on which I observed a young man about whom I might invoke one of my father’s favorite sayings about, “He reminds me a lot of myself when I was younger.”
He was kind of a geeky kid, and he had a huge stack of papers, a stack so big that one of those extra large binder clips was stretched all the way open and it was hard to open it far enough to get around them, and when it did, it just barely contained them.
There was an orange sheet of paper acting as both a separator page and a cover page after every four or five pages. With a red pen, he looked down a list of things on the cover page, and then he wrote some comments underneath the list. I wondered how good his handwriting was to begin with and then what effect a moving bus ride would have on it.
For the first five or so sets of papers, when he was done with them, he not only moved them to the bottom of the pile, but flipped them to face the opposite way when he did. Then, on a subsequent one, he moved the set to the bottom but didn’t flip it, and I thought two things in quick succession: 1) No! No! You’ve put it the wrong way! and then, 2) Let it go. You have nothing to do with this.
As he got close to his stop, he reached into his soft-sided briefcase and pulled out a huge 3-ring binder that said IBM on it.
I only had one work meeting today, which was in the afternoon, was our regular 1.5-hour working team meeting, but we cut it short, so that was good.
At lunch time, I went over to the CSLEPS office to pick up my university-issued credit card, which will be good only next week while I’m in Thibodaux as a co-advisor for NC State’s Alternative Spring Break Habitat for Humanity trip. I’m hoping to use it only as back-up if I’m not with our other co-advisor, Tierza. Whenever we’re together, or if it can wait, we’ll use her card to minimize the amount of accounting we have to do when we return.
At about 4:30 I walked down and across the street to Tompkins Hall for the SIGDOC Launch Party. It was pouring the hardest I think I’ve ever walked in the rain, and in spite of having an umbrella I—as well as my laptop bag and my soft-sided briefcase—got soaked in the short walk. Not to mention (okay I’m going to) cars driving by either splashing huge puddles of water up into the air or over the sidewalk in a wave deep enough to cover my tennis shoes. When I got home papers inside my briefcase were even wet. Crazy.
With that said, I had a great time with the small group. I joined the professional chapter of SIGDOC while there, and toward the end of the gathering, after some most delicious pizza from Sylvia’s, we had a fun, fun, fun game of Pictionary whose players included:
- Sarah (who in addition to taking a turn held the white board while people drew and erased it between pictures)
- Nicole (who drew “The Sun Belt” in no less than four geographical locations from as far east as Florida to as far west as California)
- Jen (who had a “photo finish”)
- John (who drew a bicycle with a man next to it with one of his gonads X-ed out)
- Brad (who unfortunately for him followed John from whose drawing everyone had sex organs on their mind so first guessed his drawing as ovaries and then a uterus, before successfully arriving on “handlebars”)
I feel like I’m missing someone here, so if I have, feel free to comment about it. The important thing is that the people have been covered to whom it’s important to be mentioned in my blog whenever they’re a part of my day.
I spent most of the night updating the website and the blog for our spring break trip. I met Alex at Flex for Trailer Park Prize Night, well more accurately, for time between I arrived and the time the show started as I left shortly after it did.
Phil and Joe came in later in the evening and that always ups the fun factor by a magnitude of order.
On my way out, some kind of nasty fight was being mitigated by Matt, one of the muscular bartenders. I was happy to be getting out when I was.