Software and Pears

If you had asked me five years ago what I would be doing today, I would not have said I would be building software and picking pears with my dad. Let me say that my dad is one of the most wonderful people I know. As a kid, I wished everyone had my dad. They all seemed to have the wrong kinds of dads - too serious, too grumpy, too lazy, too thin, too demanding. . . My dad was just right. Anyway, he noticed I haven't been doing much with my little pear tree, and offered to take some off of my hands, so today I pulled out the ladder and we cleaned off the last of the pears. (This is after picking up a bucket of pears every week off of the ground.)

This is the best little pear tree ever. If you see it off season it looks like a good candidate for firewood. If you see it in late August/early September, you wonder how it is possible for such a small old tree to hold so many pears on its tiny branches! And great fruit it is. This year the earwigs have been diligently seeking out the ripe fruit, but even then, the losses are minimal by comparison. It was good to see you today, dad.

On the subject of software, we have been working diligently on the software surprise at work. It was a little crazy because I was trying to train one of the individuals I manage to help migrate pages out of a portal template into a simplified format while attending an all-day meeting. All day, all week, all month. My team is consumed by this project.

After doing a rush training, I had to give that employee the system rights to lock down pages, and then had to notify over ten-thousand users that we were starting the migration to avoid any community upheavals, only to field a slough of out-of-office and spam responses. Lovely.

Tomorrow we meet with another team to discuss integration. I love working with my team members - we have a great balance between head-down-press-forward, and letting the rubberband unwind for a few minutes with a few good laughs. There is so much pressure surrounding this task, it would be unbearable otherwise. Well, back to programming. Sometimes I think my head will explode, I try to fit so much stuff in it all of the time, but it just keeps fitting!