Sorry I didn’t post yesterday, but it was a pretty busy day. Travel, additional arrangements, all that good stuff… and the discovery that I will never use a particular air carrier again.

I spent the last night in a hotel, and we had a fire alarm kick off about fifteen minutes after midnight. That led to a fun forty-five minutes standing out in the rain in pajamas. It wasn’t that bad for me, just an interrupted sleep, but for the kids, it was either excitement or misery.

I did feel for an elderly German couple that didn’t speak English. I ran across them looking for a room yesterday afternoon, and it became obvious that they were as comfortable speaking English as most Americans are trying to understand German. After all of the alarms were silenced, I was one of the first to start heading back to my room, but it was apparent that they had no idea what was going on, still up on the residential floor looking around, a bit lost in the moment. Fortunately, I fell back on that semester of German I took at Wichita State in 1982 and said with some confidence, “Alles klar”, letting them know that the “all clear” signal had been given by the local fire department.

That confidence rushed away soon after when another fire alarm went off… but that quickly subsided.

I’m glad nobody was hurt, nonetheless.

Enough for now.

Peace y’all.

The day is winding down for Kai and me, and we’re looking forward to an enjoyable ride back to our little base of operations followed by dinner and a couple of adult beverages.

This has been a great experience working with Kai this week, and I know that the next time I have a chance to work with him, I’ll jump all over it.

I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait or that opportunity, though. The coming weeks will be filled with a combination of one-day, two-day, and five-day deliveries with me, myself, and I.

(Cue the De La Soul theme music)

Tomorrow will be a travel day with Kai going back to his neck of the woods, and me going to the next stop on my junket. I’ve got plenty of work ahead of me, and I know that there won’t be a lot of time to get out and about to see much of anything other than a computer screen and a pad of paper to take notes.

I’ll nose around to find a few more tools I can lean on to create the best experience that I can for my pending deliveries.

I hope this missive finds you well. I hope you have pleasant thoughts of your old Grampa Bob.

Peace y’all.

Another day, another blog entry.

I’ve been diving a little deeper into the career path I’ve embraced. It seems like every day, I find out something new about Microsoft Azure. Kai and I are working well together, and crushing this road trip.

Today we’re going through things fairly rapidly. The class seems to be eating it up, but not offering a bunch of questions. That keeps moving along just fine. We don’t have a lot of choice on that front today anyway due to scheduled travel.

We’re tired. It was a rough road night last night, as our short flight was late arriving at the gate and later getting back out away from the gate, and that combined with another strange hotel room just leads to being bone weary. Add in that we have to catch a train later today, and that turns into an episode of what I call “turn and burn”. We keep turning pages and burning through the content. Not skipping anything, but simply putting our heads down and grinding. Not a lot of peripheral stories from history or the road.

The road show continues. I think I might try and grab a nap on the train. Just have to take care of business…

Peace y’all.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m done speaking for the day. My training partner is up in front of the room now talking about preview features in Azure, so I figure now is as good a time as any to get my blog entry in for the day.

It’s been a good day. We had a minor inconvenience with our bandwidth, but fortunately we addressed it early, so we’re in pretty good shape to deliver our certification exam to those that wish to tackle it today.

I’m not sure what to expect as far as participation. We’ve already had a couple head for the door due to work issues and transportation needs. Kai and I have some travel we have to worry about at the end of the workday, so getting things wrapped up here a little early would be a good thing.

I am curious as to how many are going to stick around. It’s a different setup, because of the venue and the audience – we’ve been primarily teaching employees from the same company, but here we’ve got over fifty people from a variety of different businesses and locations.

If I were one of the student, I would like to spend a little time with the curriculum first. I don’t like to take the exam on the same day that I took the class… I need a little more time to let the concrete set.

That’s enough for now.

Peace y’all.

Hi everybody. I guess last night I had enough distractions that I mis-numbered my blog post. That’s why tonight’s entry is 20,349 instead of 20,348… I’ve already had two 20,347s. I figure it was wisest just to get the numbering right and move on. Sorry if it was a distraction.

I’m bone weary tonight. Too many bats circling around my belfry, and butterflies doing aerobatics in my tummy. I have an important delivery tomorrow, and I am greateful I don’t have to deliver it alone.

That, too, will change.

I’m not at home right now, and you’ve read me complain time and time again about my bandwidth and internet speed at home. Now I’m experience that all too familiar pain when I go to write my blog inline.

I keep looking down at the bottom of the window checking my word count… but I’m writing in notepad tonight instead of in my WordPress site. Part of me wants to keep on writing and another part of me just wants to go to bed. That said, maybe just being this tired will help me sleep tonight.

Big day tomorrow.

I’ll take a few pictures. I can’t say that I’ll post them into this blog, but they will be recorded somewhere for posterity. I’ve got so much just whirring around my head, like some of possessed power tool spinning out of control.

That’s enough for now. I think I’ve come pretty close to fulfilling my pledge, even if I can’t acutally post this to my blog.

Peace y’all.

It’s been a good day. It’s a Sunday, and if it was any other workday, I might be a little more self-critical about the volume of work I was able to complete, but, once again… it’s Sunday.

I did get a bit productive late this morning and well into the afternoon. I found out that the hotel has a wonderful breakfast buffet with a number of items that fit on my diet. Scrambled eggs and a number of other protein options.

I called home tonight, and part of the conversation was pleasant, other parts reminded me that we all have individual lives and responsibilities. I wish I was home to help solve a problem or two, but, alas, I’m not. Can’t do much to remedy the problem. Best I can hope for is to be supportive and not be a self-absorbed asshole.

Not doing a great job keeping up with the news right now. I wish I was a little bit more intune, but there’s a few obstacles in front of me right now, and I just can’t be where I need to be to affect a positive change.

I’ll expound on the topic a little more tomorrow. Until then…

Peace y’all.

OK, I hit the sack last night in hopes of getting a good night’s sleep, following a couple of nights of less than restful sleep. Popped a couple of melatonin to help achieve that goal, and left the alarms on my phone and clock turned off.

I slept. I slept hard. I slept in.

I slept in a little too long. I guess I didn’t realize how tired I really was. It might have been that I was wearing my earplugs to filter out the extraneous noise from the street and square below, it might’ve been the melatonin. Might’ve been the Scotch I consumed to try and allay myself of some of the tension I’ve been dealing with of late ( for one reason or another, the tension likes to settle in my lower back).

Anyway, I got up well after anything that one would think appropriate, just in time to find out the laundry service I planned on using is closed for a holiday until late next week.

That’s ok, we adapt and overcome. Hotel laundry service. You’re paying for the convenience, right?

I’ll spend the rest of the day taking a look at an upcoming delivery and see where the day takes me. Might be an opportunity just to hang out in the hotel coffee shop and just “be” for awhile.

I hope your niche of the world is treating you right.

Peace y’all.

For folks from the Midwest, there are some dishes that will always fall under the category of comfort food. Macaroni and cheese. Chili and cinnamon rolls (yes, it’s a thing, and don’t give me no lip about it), and barbeque.

Barbeque. BBQ. Barbecue. Q. The glorious, spice-rubbed, smoked meats butchered from the beasts that helped us evolve into the apex predators we are. It’s true – morbid, but true. Our teeth, our sense of smell, our fingers, our braincases, all the product of an evolution that created our ripping, tearing, and grinding teeth, and the oh, so tasty, animals that are part of our nature.

Anyway, I found some pretty good barbeque in an unexpected place. I am satisfied tonight as I prepare to hit the sack and call it.

I’ve also learned some stuff today, too. I wasn’t having a lot of success with some of the casting apps I’ve tried, but I finally found the right combination so I can watch a movie while I’m on the road. Little things matter. Sometimes it’s just to reassure myself that I haven’t stopped learning when faced with something new.

Tomorrow, I’m going to sleep in if I can. I don’t have anything too pressing, and I need a little break from some of the recent activity.

Peace y’all.

I hope this missive finds you doing well in this wacky, crazy world where some people get it, some people don’t.

Just to start off, let me say that we are all on this journey we call life together. If we stick together, we can make this place a pretty damn cool place to live for us, our kids, and future generations.

Some people have a real hard time with that concept. I’ve found in some folks an incredible amount of some pretty negative behavior. Some folks feel like they have to control other people, and other people seem to welcome it. I just don’t get it. Makes me wonder sometimes if the soul is perfect, but the vessel that soul is placed in is capable of some terrible, terrible stuff if that vessel is broken on some level.

We’re all a little broken, aren’t we?

Sometimes it’s on the surface, sometimes that fracture exists a little bit deeper. Maybe it’s in that thing they call the psyche. Maybe it’s just that our brains are so complex that there are times we can’t rewire things through different parts of the brain and we just kind of have to deal with the wiring we’re given. Sometimes stuff shorts out.

I hope we can deal with the flaws, and realize no one is really any better than anyone else.

Peace y’all.

It’s cooling off here now, as the sun sets and what little heat that was stored in the ground escapes into the cooling, cloud-covered sky.

It’s been a day. I spent some time looking over the devastation that struck my home county and others. Some folks I know lost their house, and others have shot drone video of the path the tornado took heading through the patch just south of Lawrence.

Someone else I know posted a picture of the tornado’s path through Douglas County on the way to its destructive appointment with the community of Linwood, Kansas. I remember taking Dane and his teammates up there to participate in football tournaments years ago. And now, it’s trash and matchsticks.

They’re saying this tornado was an EF-4, one notch below the biggest class of tornado (don’t quote me on that, I’m reciting from memory, and I’m old, so I might be wrong. Even if I’m right, yeah, I’m still old).

On the good news side of things, it looks like a couple of KU’s players have withdrawn from the draft. Devon Dotson will be back at KU, but Quentin Grimes has decided to transfer. I wish him all the best. Having a healthy team next year will give KU a legit chance at making a run. I’m hopeful.

Not much new to share after that. I hope all is well with you, gentle reader, and I hope there is more sunshine than rain in your day.

Peace y’all.