This morning, after we went to the fitness club and had breakfast at Bo Peeps, Phil and I came to the 
Verdant Gallery and Cafe. They are currently running a display on Labyrinths, which is ending tomorrow. We studied the artwork carefully, reading the titles and captions. One described labyrinths as emphasizing the journey rather than the destination. My response was "mu": the journey is the destination (or the destination just part of the journey). Charlie would have liked the framed Yu-Gi-Oh cards.
Now I'm sitting in the cafe and watching the wind toss the gingko trees outside. There's no wifi, unfortunately. It's too bad, because this would otherwise be a perfect place. Instead it's just great, but flawed. We told the gallery assistant, who said that they're planning to add wireless. Maybe the next time I come...
This morning Phil and I talked about what made managers happy. His take was that managers want people with a "can do" attitude that are willing to take ownership of tasks. I extended this with two observations. The first is that managers want people who can see what needs to be done and do it without having to have someone assign them the task. Nothing makes managers as happy as realizing something needs to be done and then discovering that someone realized yesterday and just did it. The second is that managers want someone who will seek quidance appropriately, both when there are problems and when critical design decisions have to be made. Nothing is worse than finding out that an employee had some problem that stumped them and they have been unproductive for hours or days without getting the issue resolved. The other is always a difficult balancing act. As an employee, it can be very frustrating to make a decision to do something one way, only to be told later, "Oh, no. You have to do it this other way -- go back and do it again."
Last night a storm blew through. All through dinner, we would hear emergency broadcast system alerts for severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings -- mostly for surrounding communities. The rain almost completely missed us. After bed, it rained and was briefly heavy. I smiled and was glad I wasn't in a tent. At the reunion, I stayed in a tent all three nights, but got rained out one night. It was Charlie's very first night in a tent. It was raining when we went to bed, but rained harder and harder as the evening wore on. At 11pm, I checked the floor of the tent and it was still dry. At 1:45am, however, when I felt the floor, it felt like a full wineskin. I was safe on my Thermarest cushion, but Charlie was sleeping directly on the floor. After confirming that the sleeping bag was getting wet, I woke him up and we ran into the cabin where he could sleep in a bed and I could sleep on the recliner chair.
The very first time I slept in a tent, I was about Charlie's age and we were staying at a campground in Indiana. Lucy recalls they forgot to bring the flysheet for the pup-tent that was to be used by Phil and I. All I remember is that I woke up the next morning soaking wet in the collapsed tent. Phil had woken up during the night and he and Lucy had taken her sleeping bag into the car to get warm. It was fun to take Charlie in and see him esconced safely into a warm bed. And the next night we slept successfully the whole night in the tent.
Tomorrow I head up to BioQUEST. I'll catch the City of New Orleans train in the early morning and arrive in Chicago in the late morning. Pop and I are going to have lunch and then I'll need to navigate to O'Hare and catch the shuttle up to Beloit. Then I have four days with Tom, Buzz, Don and the whole BioQUEST gang.