I’m off to Atlanta now for a mini-trade show tomorrow. It could be busy or it could royally suck. We’ll see.

Keep cool, y’all.

I think yesterday was a perfect day. It just seemed that everything went our way. Everything was easy.

We started off waking up a little on the late side from a good night’s sleep. We were soon joined by some happy kids for a good breakfast. Breakfasts where kids eat well are always a treat. We had no shortage of eaters!

Kelly took the kids out to Holly Springs for the birthday party thrown for Hallie’s friends. I went for a quick visit with my brother before getting started on mowing the yard. It was oppressively hot work but it got done and looks great.

Once the family was back we had a pleasant lunch, full of laughter. We then played a bit before getting the kids settled for their naps. Then Kelly and I took a nap: a nice long one. Man, that was refreshing!

After napping a bit, I went to work getting little things done around the house that I’d been meaning to do. I cleaned up my desk, shelves, and other junk that has been sitting around. I backed up some files on my server that had been neglected for a year or two. I felt plenty of energy for getting done things I’d needed to get done for a long time.

Once the kids woke I sat with them on the couch, looking at sailboats in a magazine while Kelly cooked a tasty dinner. Once dinner was over we spent some fun time outside with the sidewalk chalk and blew some bubbles, too. Then it was bathtime for the kids, followed by a textbook-like bedtime for the kids. Kelly and I remarked it was the first time in a while that the kids went to bed with no complaint whatsoever.

Oh, there was one bedtime issue that needed solving. Travis kept telling me something that I couldn’t understand. He was saying something like “door timer off” and said it patiently about thirty times in a row without a hint of frustration. I would just shake my head and tell him I’m sorry I didn’t understand. Finally, I brought Kelly up for assistance.

She listened to Travis repeat “door timer off” a few more times before she burst out laughing.

“So, what is he saying?” I asked, preplexed.

“Door came off,” she said through her laughter. “He’s talking about his bus!”

Travis has a toy bus he loves to sleep with and the door had come off of it. Travis never even looked at it the whole time he was talking about it, so I had no clue. Mommy to the rescue, once again!

The kids were mostly quiet and settled when a short time later we heard a knock at our door. Our neighbors Frank and Brea from down the street had invited us over to play cards. After rigging up an extended baby monitor, we were delighted to join them. Though I lost in our round of Hearts, we all had a wonderful time. In fact, we got back close to 1 AM!

Its so cool to live in a neighborhood where things like that can happen. It was also cool that our perfect day had a few extra fun hours added to it.

I got back from Charlotte Wednesday evening after a successful training session. I was happy to see people so fired up. Orders were being placed even before the session ended! You gotta love it when that happens. The success I’ve had in doing product training makes me wonder if I should leave sales engineering behind and focus on that instead. It’s something I’ll have to ponder.

I’m working from home today mainly because my car has been due for regular maintenance for months now. K made an appointment for it and we’re finally getting it done. I’m also home because I’ve been traveling a bit lately and its nice to be at home a bit. This upcoming week has me going to Atlanta for an overnight trip. The following week I spend a night in NYC.

Travel, travel, travel . . . That’s one thing that being in training would help with. Sure, a trainer gets to travel: sessions are held all over the world. Its just that the frequency of travel isn’t as great. And when training I am doing something I feel is more productive than some of the recent SE trips I’ve made, some of which could have easily been handled by local SEs or field engineers. I seem to have a knack for training, so I’m gonna have to figure out if I should pursue it.

We’ve got an “open” weekend here at Chez Turner, a rarity lately. Summer is zooming by. I told K yesterday that there are only 10 weekends before its October. What’s sad is I still haven’t been sailing this season. We haven’t been up to Lake Gaston, either. Our summer vacation to Panama City is approaching soon, though, and we’re all looking forward to that. This morning I showed Travis the picture we took on the beach before he was here and told him he’ll join us in a new picture soon. Our last Florida vacation was two months before Travis arrived.

Then again, its nice just being here and taking it easy for a change.

I’m in Charlotte now for my training. It’s been an event-filled day to say the least.

I left Raleigh a little later than expected in an effort to get Kelly’s PC working before I walked out for three days. Mission accomplished, I hit the road going west. On the way, I took a break from driving by exploring the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, checking out the impressive collection of rail cars (and automotive cars, too). At Charlotte at last, I worked with my coworker Wes to set up the classroom. Things went pretty smoothly there, too. Then I got a tour of my old house (more on that in the next post) and stopped over at my friend and former coworker, Mike B’s house.

Mike and his wife Kelly are the proud parents of a 14 month old son, Bryson. Bryson is a handsome young man who seems quite good natured. He didn’t seem to mind greeting a guest at 9:30 at night and kept his eyes open through most of my visit.

Mike and I used to work together well over 12 years ago. He had moved to Charlotte years ago but is now considering a move back to Raleigh. Some lucky local company is going to get a top-notch network adminstrator. I’ve taken it upon myself to find Mike a job here. He’s awesome.

We spent some time visiting and catching up before I could no longer go without dinner (yes, it was 10:30 PM already). I took a Jack-In-The-Box chicken salad for a tour around Charlotte and returned to my hotel around 11.

Its an early morning as I continue getting the classroom ready, but things will go smoothly. It will take a lot to top this kind of day, though. Wow.

I’m off to Charlotte Monday morning for two days of reseller product training. It will be the first overnight visit I’ve made to Charlotte in, oh, 15 years or more. Lucky for me the hotel I’ll be staying in is not too far from my old neighborhood. I fully intend to sneak out and take pictures of the old ‘hood and take stock of where Charlotte has gone since I left it way back when.

Its the end of an incredibly fun weekend.

Friday, we went over to our friends’ house for dinner. Saturday we went to my parents’ house to swim and have lunch. My Aunt Nancy and Aunt Linda were visiting so we got to spend some good time with them. After our swim and lunch, Kelly took Hallie next door to our neighbor’s birthday party. Hallie had a ball on the Slip-‘N-Slide. We topped the day off with nicely grilled steaks, wine, and Movie Night.

Today we slept past eight o’clock (!!!) and enjoyed a good breakfast before piling on the bicycles and going for a 4 mile family bike ride. It felt good to be pedaling, but then again it always feels good to be pedaling. I’ve ridden at least twice a week since the end of April and LOVE it.

Anyhow, the kids napped before Aunts Linda and Nancy came for a nice visit. We showed them the house and caught up until Hallie awoke and came down to play. It was nice to see my aunts and the kids really enjoyed seeing them.

We went for another family exercise after dinner, picking up our neighbors Frank and Brea and their kids along the way. After handfulls of rocks were thrown into our local creek, we happily made our way back to the house. Smooth kiddie bedtimes followed.

Then I got to focus on my geek task for this weekend: upgrading the hard drive in Kelly’s laptop. I could have just put a new drive in and reinstalled Windows XP, but I decided to put the “recovery” partition back on the system, since I’d messed it up last time I switched drives. Its now, uh, recovering itself and I’m ready to head to bed.

Pretty good weekend, all things considered.

I’ve got the day off and was going to do some things around the house today but then I remembered that the America’s Sail (the “Tall Ships”) is this weekend in Beaufort. Thus its off in the car for a half-day of photography.

I’ll check in from the coast once I can find a wireless point. Look for some cool pictures this evening.

I got back home around 6 PM after a fairly smooth trip back from Holland. My colleague Al was kind enough to drop me off at the Rotterdam train station early Saturday, where I caught a quick train to the Amsterdam airport. Heading through the Amsterdam airport was practically worry-free. The most time I spent doing anything in the airport was simply walking from the customs counter to the gate: the airport is huge!

At the Amsterdam airport, each gate has its own security screening, probably due to the amazing variety of airlines which serve it. I got all the way to the gate area wondering “hey, am I ever going to get screened for this flight?” Then I saw the metal detector and figured things out. A short hop later and I was in London.

In Gatwick airport I got in a long queue to be re-screened. I was told only when I got to the front of the line that I needed to check in at the airline gate first. D’oh! Add another thirty minutes to my travel. At least the UK hasn’t gone overboard with their security screening. Belts and shoes stay on and laptops stay in bags. It was a pleasant change, actually. Gatwick seems to wait to the last minute to tell you which gate your flight is leaving from, even though the plane at that gate must have been there hours beforehand.

American Airlines’ service to London has slipped a few notches. On any other international flight, you get complimentary drinks. The woman next to me was miffed – and rightly so in my opinion – to have to pony up five bucks for a gin and tonic. That’s just cheesy, especially after you’re already spending a fortune for the privilege to be wedged in a seat for 8 hours.

The flight was smooth for the most part. I’d requested a window seat so I could take some pictures. Instead the sky was a cloudy blanket below us. Bah.

The clouds finally cleared around Henderson, NC. I was admiring the green fields below when I felt the plane make a slight turn to the left. At that very moment I was startled to see a single-engine Piper airplane emerge from the clouds and pass right below my seat perhaps a mere thousand feet below! How ironic it would be to travel safely for 3500 miles only to crash a half-hour from home.

The plane landed on time and we filed slowly off. I got on the escalator to the Customs room but the room was already overflowing with passengers. Some idiot at the airline didn’t do the math: if you have x passengers on a Boeing 777 and the room they’re being stuffed into is built for x-50, maybe it would be wise to stop them at the top of the escalator before they get smushed. Instead people piled up at the bottom of the escalator with nowhere to go. Those people got crushed by the people above them on the escaltor, and so on and so forth. Only after many people fell over did the airline staff stop the escalator. Welcome to America.

In spite of the snafus I was in my car less than an hour after landing. Its good to be back.

Last night’s post made it sound like I was carousing wildly but the truth is I was making it sound better than it was. The fact is I never left the hotel yesterday. In fact, I haven’t held a Euro in my hand since I arrived, but more on that in a moment.

The training went extremely well, as my earlier post indicated. I wasn’t entirely sure how things were going until dinner last night. One of the Irish participants asked me if I’d noticed a difference in how Eurpoean students responded in class. When I asked him about it he told me that most Europeans are very reserved in class, unlike the Americans. In America, he said, a student is more apt to raise his hand when he has a question. Europeans like to keep a lower profile. So that explains why even though I tried to keep things interactive, there were actually fewer questions than I expected. In spite of his theory, he and his colleague proved it wrong by pestering me every ten minutes with questions!

Dinner and the drinks at the bar turned out to be great fun. I really enjoyed sharing stories with the guys from other countries. One of the m, an Irishman, is marrying his German girlfriend in Germany this fall. Thus, we traded wedding stories and listened to the Germans there talk about the wedding traditions in their country. One friendly African flew eleven hours (!) from Cape Town just to attend my training. Incredible! I’m really humbled by that.

One thing that is markedly different about this training session than the one I did in Australia is the obvious camraderie these partners show towards each other. Though Australians seem generally friendly, the partners I met there were not as open with each other. They seemed to view the other partners as competitors much more strongly than this group does.

I’d had two glasses of wine at dinner and was thinking of holding the line there but I couldn’t turn down an invitation to the bar. I was happy to see practically the whole class there, drinking and laughing. I nursed a pint while discussing world affairs, among other topics. My German told stories of how much he loved his visit to Las Vegas, and how he got a little too free with the speed limit in Nebraska. The state trooper pulled him over and then locked and loaded on him when he unknowingly sprang out of the car. As my friend was lying on the ground, the trooper realized he was German. Having been stationed there himself in the Army, the trooper gushed about the fun he had there before happily waving him on. The German had nothing but good things to say about Americans. I was glad to hear it!

Around midnight some of us had slipped out of the bar. That’s when Niall offered to buy me some whiskey. Normally I shy away from whiskey and I almost made it out of there before he ordered it. But not quite. It turned out to be about a shot of triple-blended Irish whiskey. On ice, no less. So I didn’t get quite as crazy as one might have inferred by my previous post.

Today’s training should be over quickly. I hope to have the team go through the set up and configuration all by themselves and make myself available for any questions they may have. Then they’ll take an exam before giving feedback on the course and heading back to their homes. Hopefully we’ll be done by 1PM, which should give me time to finally look around Amsterdam. We’ll see how it goes.