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We went show-shoeing at Bradley Palmer State Park, a good chance to practice using our new gear before we go to NH next weekend. I enjoyed seeing people at church and singing at Sunday afternoon choir practice for our Easter cantata on April 1. I caught up with Ab and Dave on Sunday night for dinner. Our furnace is on the fritz but Brian and I are now well-practiced at re-starting the pilot light, and eager to get a high energy furnace when we don’t have to pay someone to come install it on a weekend. I made cookies and banana bread today. Brian and I re-organized our bookshelves, a task that we’ve been wanting to do on a cold weekend afternoon for months (but either didn’t have the time, or didn’t have the cold weather than warranted stoking a fire in the fireplace and locking ourselves in the library for several hours!). Brian made chili and we’ve been enjoying snacking on it all day. What a great weekend!

Sarah Sheldon’s last day of school was yesterday. After enduring more classes, exams, papers, readings, and academic BS than I can comprehend, Sarah has earned her Bachelor’s degree from Wellesley, a Master’s degree from BU, and a (drum roll!) MD from Boston University! Woot! Sorry I missed beers yesterday – a toast to you Doctor Sheldon!

I have been working on a set of proposals (see Murphy’s Law post on Feb 5), during most waking hours for the past 6 weeks. One of my colleagues led one proposal – it was a great trade whereby I assigned three people to help write it and allocated an evening for reviewing a draft, and he took care of all the rest. That left me focused on a single proposal since Feb 6, which turned out to need all the time I could spare (don’t they all?).

There is always a good story in shipping out a proposal. This one was no exception. The contracting department had 4 proposals going out on Friday and were completely swamped, so I didn’t get my cost volume until after 4pm (original ship plan was 2pm), but I can’t complain since we didn’t give them the final inputs until that morning. Once we got all the info and burned it to 11 CDs, I realized we also needed to make 12 paper copies, so all the color printers on the 3rd floor were recruited into action. My conference table became the collating and binding center. THEN, being paranoid, I re-read the proposal guidelines to make sure we really had everything this time, and discovered it said Word or Excel format – we had burned all the CDs in pdf. There’s nothing worse than the nagging feeling that that all our hard work would be disqualified for something stupid like the wrong file format. We had the tech volume in Word but the costing was not in Excel. The director of contracts stopped in, had caught the same issue, and we agreed on a compromise plan. Martha was a whirlwind, grabbing another set of CDs, referring me to Lisa who was still on line to send us a label template, finding the labels and CD assembling kit at Lisa’s desk, and off we went burning and labeling another 11 CDs, this time with Word and Excel.
At 6:33pm, the proposal (22 CDs and 12 hard copies), was shipped at FEDEX. I assume the other proposal went out (uploaded from the lab) as well. I’m a free woman! And it’s a long weekend! Brian and I had dinner and played Masterpiece with the Hones to unwind. I woke up this morning with the wonderful feeling of absolutely nothing hanging over my head. I’m going to resist the urge to call all my neglected friends at once (Ab, you’re first on my list!). I’m so excited to have my life back.

Yesterday we got about 8 inches of really fine, wet snow which was very heavy to shovel. Despite not feeling very well yesterday I dutifully shoveled a one shovel wide path on the sidewalk in front of our house. Then I got up this morning to shovel out the cars so Su could get to work. The snow was very fine and densely packed — about the consistency and compaction of white sugar in a bag. Each shovel full must have been at least 20 pounds.

Since we don’t get much company during the day I put off shoveling the front door and step until I was a bit less sore. I just got back inside from shoveling where I discovered the church next door had used their mini front-end loader to clear their sidewalk. They started at one end of their property, cleared their sidewalk, and left a 3 foot high pile of compacted snow and ice on my sidewalk that I had cleared up to their property the night before (where I DIDN’T leave a pile). I’m a bit cranky having had to reclear my sidewalk because the neighbors were inconsiderate.

You won’t be getting your Valentine’s Day card on time because the USPS apparently didn’t learn their math. Also, why did they capitalize ‘Due’?
In case the images are blurry, the stamp reads “Returned for Addil Postage Exceeds Max Standard Size 6 1/8″ x 11 1/2″ or 1/4″ Thick & Weight 1oz or Less an Add’l Surcharge of 13 cents is Due.”

UPDATE (3:30 pm) – I just got back from the post office and apparently the message stamped on is unclear.  In addition to maximum size requirements, mail must fall within a certain width/height ratio in order to be machinable.  So it took me 30 minutes to pay 13 cents to get a card delivered late — thank you USPS!

• The Soul Town station on Sirius radio. (Can you dig it?)
• Going for a run on a sunny Sunday afternoon, even if it’s chilly
• Pastries from the Semi-Sweet Baking Co. on Winter Street
• Yoga class (I missed this week because I was in DC, but it’s been great)
• Having a 99% complete proposal draft done

I’ve been working crazy hours writing and assembing a white paper. It is the first of three big proposal/white paper deadlines this month. The good news is that it shipped by noon, and the customer confirmed receipt. This occured after:

• I successfully chased down 3 updates by 9:30am
• One of the sections was finished at 10:45am
• Last-minute results were added at 11:20am
• The file was converted from 45+ megs in Word to 5.5 megs in pdf to 4.1Mb zipped, within the customer’s email constraints of 4.5 megs
• I successfully connected to the internet and was able to email via Sprint broadband when our email and phone system went down in the building
• When the email bounced (the customer’s system stripped the attachment) I resent it at 11:56 with a renamed attachment that ended up going through.

This is why I have learned to put files in at least three locations, with backup communication methods (blackberry, cell and land line for phone, hotmail, gmail and work mail for email), and at least two contingency plans for any proposal (go to Starbucks to log in, drive to one of three co-worker’s homes who live within 5 miles of work to use their internet). Not to mention leaving at least an hour buffer before the deadline, even when it’s internet upload or email. It seems like more often than not, more than one thing that could go wrong, does go wrong.

Dan did an excellent job capturing the highlights of Superbowl Sunday on Tabblo.

The chili cheese dip was fabulous in a disgusting sort of way. The cheese biscuits were delightful. The soup was tasty and spicey. There was also bratwurst in mustard sauce with rye bread and sourkraut, yum. Not to mention the usual assortment of chips. Something for everyone! Oh, and a football game and commercials too, right, the purported reason for having a party in the first place!
Good bye football season! When do pitchers and catchers report to spring training?

We had an all-company meeting on Friday afternoon. (Congrats to Brian Hone for being honored as AIT’s Software Engineer of the year!). Around 6pm as we left the meeting, it appeared to be snowing, but just itty bitty flakes. I went back to the office to work on a paper, and completely forgot about the snow until I left several hours later. I opened the door to find real, honest-to-goodness, make-the-roads-slippery snow falling quite rapidly, and already over an inch on the ground. Normally I would have been thrilled, but at 11pm when I just wanted to be home, a long slow snowy ride was not quite as appealing. I also assumed that late on a Friday night, there would be a minimal number of plows and salt trucks out (which was correct – the only set I saw was right at the Newburyport exit, so of little help to me). So, I started on my way, found the highways to be slushy but passable at 50 mph, and had a safe, alert drive home. This morning there is even MORE snow, probably not quite 4 inches [the minimum level for snow shoeing] but enough to shovel and coat the world in a pretty blanket of white. Hooray!

1) Hidden smoke detector with dead battery

Badness scale – Annoyance

Resolution: Wake up in the morning and track down the actual smoke detector location

2) Car battery died

Badness scale – Inconvenience

Resolution: Su picked up a battery at Sears and ran my errands for me so I could do W2s for church. On Saturday I tried to replace the battery but the mounting bracket was rusted tight. I tried all the tricks I knew to loosen it but with no success. I didn’t have a deep-well socket so I had to use a wrench that threatened to strip the bolt. I took the car to the mechanic who got the deep-well socket and promptly sheared the mounting bracket and bolt. The battery is replaced and I need to buy a cheap mounting bracket from the auto parts store.

3) CO detector starts chirping in the middle of the night

Badness scale – Dangerous, but will be resolved safely

Work in progress: I haven’t been sleeping well lately, but last night I got to bed at a reasonable hour. A few hours into my sleep the CO detector started chirping loudly. I checked the level, and it was at the warning check this out level and not the full blown, blaring, deadly level. So, I promptly turned off the furnace knowing that it is quite old and the CO level zeroed out fairly quickly. I went downstairs to examine the furnace and the quickly discovered the entire exhaust pipe had rusted through and fallen off. For a brief period last night we had a furnace with an 8 inch exhaust pipe venting directly into the basement.

As I write this the furnace guys are out buying replacement parts for the exhaust system and then going to write me a nice expensive quote for a new furnace. Right now, I’m very happy we have the CO detector and I’m very pleased nothing bad happened.