March 2005

I finally did arrive in Minneapolis last night.  We were supposed to have arrived at 5:45 PM, but due to snow, the short-term closure of the Minneapolis airport, and some air traffic congestion, we didn’t actually park at the gate until 9:30 PM.  I called my parents from Chicago where I had my layover to tell them that I was coming in, but that it might be late.  We decided to push dinner back to Sunday night, hopefully the weather will have cleared by then.  Since the plane I took from DC was the same plane going from Chicago to Minneapolis, I chose to wait on board.  There were a few others who chose to do the same, but the rest ended up leaving as news of our continued delays came in.  I’m glad I stayed, because I ended up having a great discussion with one of the flight attendants.

In addition it was my first time flying ATA, and I highly recommend it!  I discovered that my parents are flying ATA into DCA when they come visit me in April.

Someone asked me tonight: what would you recommend as the most secure industry to go into?  I hadn’t given it a lot of thought before, but in the current day and time it seems that the jobs that offer the most “job security” seem to be government, public sector, defense/security jobs.  But for some reason, that is not the answer I provided, because a little piece of optimism inside of the hopes that this protracted state of fear will come to an end, meaning that jobs like those will become less prevalent (for better or worse, of course).

Instead, I answered that the most secure industry seems to be teaching.  I believe that we will always need educators, and even though people may try, it is an industry that will prove impossible to outsource to a foreign-owned company.  I always used to play “teacher” or “school” with my sister when we were much younger, but it’s not something that I honestly considering going into.  I’ve acknowledged the work of many memorable educators and the influence they have had on my life.  I can’t imagine having gone into a room, pulled up a computer screen with a training CD from a foreign-owned company come up and teach me everything I needed to know about cutting with scissors, sharing, etc.

I’m writing this from the comfort of my hotel room, in a suburb of Boston, taking full advantage of the high-speed, wireless internet connectivity!  Everything went very well today with the project I’m working on, the result of careful planning and the hard work of the team here in Boston.

I also had the opportunity to catch up with Sarah, something I usually get to do on average about twice per year.

Josh did end up stopping in yesterday afternoon to spend the night.  I got to see some cool RPI folk as well, all passing through town on their way to their final Spring Break destination at a cabin on the North Carolina/Tennessee border.  Several of them ducked out early to get some sleep while JW and I hit the Brickskeller.  He’ll probably be back down here in a couple of weeks for more apartment hunting, which is good because I’ll be available to show him some of the better regions to live in this area, a resource I wish I had when I moved down here last Spring.

JW left early this morning to visit in North Carolina.  I was already up, and with nothing better to do at nine on a Sunday morning, I decided to brew some beer!  There was a slight funk taste in the batches from previous attempts back in November, which I later attributed to the poor-quality water (filled with a nice chlorine flavor) that comes out of my tap.  I filtered all five gallons of the brewing water through my Brita pitcher (which actually took a long time) to remove the chlorine taste, so we’ll see how it turns out this time.  It should hopefully be ready by two weeks from today (March 27th).

The hardest part is always the waiting!  Luckily this week should prove quite busy at work, and this upcoming weekend I’ll be out of town (more details on that in a later post).  As for the rest of today, I have a few people that I want to call, and then I’m gonna work on uploading all of the pictures from Italy that have been on my laptop since I returned back in November.  I’ll post the link when they’re up.