No Sweat – August 24-25

“No sweat” is about as far from the truth as I could possibly be. This has been one of the most stressful weeks I’ve ever had. The VP is in town to review our work; we’ve got to wrap everything up in two days; and then I’m going to have to present my part of it. It’s rough. I’m not great on the whole public speaking thing, and they’re telling me to expect someone to dispute my findings. Great. I’ve been working all day long, which is unusual, and I’ve even had to take some time to look at things at night. I never take work home with me; so that killed me that I had to do it. However, it went just fine. There was very little discussion regarding my work. I doubt that it was because the work was just that great. I’m more inclined to think that they didn’t argue about my stuff because there were bigger fish to fry.

Dinner was a large and raucous party. There were ten of us at a very trendy-seeming York restaurant called the Living Room. Very nice: good food, good drinks, great service. The only problem I had was that I could only hear about one word in ten of what was said. I don’t have the greatest hearing, and the acoustics in the restaurant weren’t really made for casual conversation. I sat near some of the upper level people, and they tried to include me in the conversation, but it was really an exercise in futility. It wasn’t all that bad though. I had a pint of Guiness, an apple cidre, and two glasses of wine to keep me company. I’m just glad I didn’t do anything stupid to embarrass myself. We left early to go back to the hotel since we had a very early flight, but as a whole dinner lasted about four hours.