Busy week (and bitter cold)

I had to attend a four day management training class. It was held at the Doubletree hotel and conference center in Downers Grove.  I could actually have stayed at home but they urged everyone to stay at the hotel since the activities would last until fairly late at night. It was good advice since we didn't finish until late every night and had to be in class at 8:00 AM.

The first day they asked everyone to line up in order of how long ago they got their first management job.  I was at the head of the line with 37 years.  The guy next to me had 26 and it fell off pretty rapidly from there. The first day was mostly typical classroom style training with a few exercises thrown in.  That night we were divided up into project teams.  Most of the projects involved dealing with abstract management concepts. On project though was called "Big Art" and involved coming up with an art project to illustrate some of the concepts we were learning about.  Thankfully I got on that team. After we kicked around some ideas I suggested that we doing something with blowups of digital photographs. The team jumped right on it so I was the "main man" with my digital camera and thousands of existing pictures to choose from.

I had a blast.  We created a piece of art using 6 16X20 photos. Of course I provided most of the pictures and did all of the digital image manipulation. The final product looked like this.

All week we had snow and bitter cold. I started my car a couple of times and cleared off all the snow. Our wonderful neighbor across the street cleared out the driveway again for Jill.  She baked him a cake and took it over there. Got home Thursday afternoon and back to work on Friday.  All in all it was a pretty good week.

This weekend we're getting quite a warmup.  The high Monday will be 42; I think the high Thursday was 8.