12/19/06

What up Elder A,

It’s 1:04 AM on Tuesday night. Oh, that reminds me, I should have put my garbages out. I better wake up early and get those out. The garbage man is outside picking up my trash promptly at 7:00 AM without fail every Wednesday. If I forget to get it out and barely miss him, then I’m stuck with a full trash can for a whole week. Anyway, I’ve been sick starting Sunday night after I wrapped up and sent off your letter and all through Monday night till I woke up this morning. I felt like I could go to work and after I got there I didn’t think I’d make it through a whole day, but I nutted up and every hour I seemed to get better. I made it through a whole day and then some since I stayed till almost 7:00 PM trying to catch up on work I missed Monday being off. I think I got enough sleep by sleeping all day and all night yesterday to last me half the week. I’m not even tired right now. I should have taken some melatonin tonight. That always gets me back on track after I travel across time zones and get messed up. Oh well. It is giving me time to put together a nice work party music mix on Dark Angel for my work party on Thursday. We are at the Rodizio Grill so it’s somewhat Brazilian themed. My mix is 29 songs long and almost 2 hours. Yeah, I have almost 2 hours of Brazilian music on there that I can think of anyway. That’s what happens when you have almost 10,000 songs I guess. It’s all good stuff too. I listened to the whole thing tonight after putting it together just to make sure there weren’t any inappropriate music for the work peeps. I had to remove two songs, just because they talked about how hot the brazilian women are. No curses or anything bad, just not so fitting for a work related activity. The rest are mostly all in Portuguese anyway. So if they are talking about that stuff, all that will know it are anyone who speak Portuguese and RM’s from Brazil and Portugal. I’m not too worried. Anyway, back to my sickness. I think I got the flu. Usually I don’t get that sick from the flu, I’m down for about 12 hours and calling it good. This time I was REALLY sick! It lasted a little over 24 hours and I was miserable. Suzanne got a flu shot about a month ago and I passed it on to her and got her sick. That’s how bad this strain is. She stayed home today. Waste of money and getting poked for that! Ha ha. I never get a flu shot. I hear of people getting sick from the flu shot. So why pay for it and get poked and maybe get the flu that way? Why not just roll the dice and see what happens? Tomorrow is my work party for HR. We are eating at the Grand America. I hear they have a FATTY buffet of all you can eat EVERYTHING. I’m pretty psyched. Then Thursday is my Production/Manufacturing Division party that I organized. It’s way cooler than my HR party of 10 people. This is for 120 peeps and I’m giving away Crazy prizes. I negotiated quite the deal to swing the full Rodizio and all you can eat salad bar for every person and still had enough to drop $2,000 on prizes to give away after the dinner. How’s that sound? I’m MCing the event for good measure and doing the prize give away. That’s why I had to put together a sweet mix for the ambience.

Anyway, I’m going to try to go read and go to sleep or I’m going to be hating it tomorrow. I have to try to get back on a regular schedule. I’ll pick this up tomorrow and tell you about my meal at the Grand America. It was a year ago now that Bryan (the VP of HR) [my boss] called and offered me the job at FC from the Grand America at the HR Christmas party. He just got the call from the management team of my division saying to offer Travis the job so he called me right then from the Grand America. I was sitting in a meeting at the Cliff Lodge in the Magpie A room and walked out to that big room in the corner with the huge fireplace. What is that called again? So I talked to him there and accepted the job. I went back in that meeting and felt weird. Like I was sort of transcending Snowbird all the sudden. It was a weird feeling. I began feeling disjointed from there immediately. Speaking of Snowbird, I actually talked to Mark Paterson today on the phone. I called him to ask him about a story he read in a manager training. He gave me the story, but when I researched it, the story is totally bogus. That’s part of the reason I was at work for so long, because I couldn’t believe that I was finding out this story that inspired me and so many of the managers at this training he was presenting was totally illegitimate. Oh well. I guess sometimes ignorance is bliss. I still like the point he made with it, even if the people he referred to didn’t really say the stuff he said they said and one of the people is actually no hero, he was one of the biggest turkeys in US Army history that everyone hated and he was a lying scum bag that earned him that reputation well. Mark used the example totally out of context and twisted it to make his point. I loved the point, but didn’t like what I found out to be the truth. But that’s Mark. He’s earned himself a little reputation at Snowbird the exact same way this “hero” he referred to did. Kind of ironic. Mark’s a good fella though. I still like him even though I’m one of the few who does. Well, that’s enough for now. I’ll check you tomorrow.