Ben’s Blog

I made it to Boston in one piece - the movie Semi Pro made the flight go by quickly. I’ve been to Boston several times but over the years I’ve come to east coast many times to visit family in Rhode Island. I’m always so impressed by how interconnected everything is - after I landed I hopped on a “Peter Pan” bus to Providence. I was on the bus within 20 minutes of my plane landing and in Providence a little over an hour later. I was in such a rush all day that I didn’t eat anything so having a couple beers instead of food when I arrived may have been a bad idea. We eventually headed to Narragansett Bay for dinner and ate at George’s, a nice fresh seafood joint. Slow service aside, the food was great - I had lobster bisque and stuffed flounder.

I got an early rise this morning at 6am and got through most of my outstanding email from yesterday - and a pot of coffee. Now I am watching local Providence news (I love the thick accent, especially when they were talking about the chowda’ cook off) and now it’s time for Sunday Morning news on CBS.

We’re heading out shortly to visit Newport, RI. I think we’re going to take the cliff walk to see the ocean/mansions out there but the heat is a little insane here so we may opt for a mansion tour or something similarly air conditioned. Hopefully I’ll remember my camera this time and will have some pictures to share.  For now, I’ll have to include PGornell’s pic from Flickr.

Fun fact: In the last 48 hours I’ve driven over 1,000 miles and slept way too little. My 2 hour nap this evening was wonderful.

This has been a busy week - I’m going to be in Boston next week attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference so I packed as many meetings in this week as possible to wrap up all that I could before leaving. I don’t think the schedule would be too hectic normally, but this week was not the best timing for the Spring Break conference down in Athens, OH at Ohio University. This is always a good conference for the money and well worth the trip.

Highlights from the trip:

• The random and amusing conversation that stems from being in a mini-van with 5 people for 14 hours. This year’s trip included conversations on politics, relationships, relationships on laws and media, and poor dental hygiene.
• Enjoying a drink in downtown Athens. As much as I love GVSU, I would have truly enjoyed spending time in an established college town like this. The campus is in a very picturesque area, surrounded by nature and buildings that date back to the 1800’s. My favorite stop is Tony’s - a small bar with old wooden booths and baskets of peanuts.
• Selecting sessions from a couple conference tracks: best sessions this year: CSS topics with Eric Meyer, Podcasting with the host of askthetechies.com, customer service with John Cummigs and an interesting accessibility look at rich internet applications with Andrea Hill.
• Getting the itch to twitter again - we’ll see how long I stay at this, but it was cool connecting with others at the conference via twitter. Hopefully I can do the same at next week’s conference.
• Worst part: leaving Athens at 5:30pm and getting home at 2:30am.

Today I wrapped up the whirlwind road war with a trip to MSU to present the MI-CUPA group with an online tool for their salary reporting. The group loved the tool and had some great suggestions to make it even better.

I have a full day of meetings tomorrow, mostly on the Allendale campus, and then Friday I will have some time to make final plans for flying into Boston. I am spending the weekend in Boston before the conference, originally hoping Holly could come for a couple days, but jury duty changed those plans. The new plan is to take the train to Providence and spend time with my family there. I’m looking forward to this part of the trip as I usually only get to see these aunts/uncles/cousins once every few years.

For now, I get to wind down and get caught back up with email from this afternoon.  At least I can kick my feet back and watch Ice Road Truckers while reading work email

More projects, indeed, although this time at the house. Holly and I relaxed a little Friday night in preparation of working outside all day on Saturday. I think the fact that we are going to be living in this house for at least another 5 years is setting in so we’re making a list of things we want to do and will slowly keep checking them off.

Holly spent a good portion of the day weed all the landscaping while Mark and I installed a new screen door. I have to say, Pella includes excellent full-color instructions that were extremely helpful. They say the door can be installed in 60 minutes - I’m sure if we read the directions it would have taken that long but we were in a hurry and overconfident so we had to back track a couple times. The new door looks great and Bailey approves too. While I was at it, I also installed a new doorbell - it was easy but I bought a cheap kit so when you ring the bell it sounds like one of those things that chimes when you walk into a store or something - cheesy.

On Sunday we got a late start (I was up at 7 but others weren’t…) but we started by recycling some old oil from when I used to actually change my own oil. After that we took a leisurely drive up to Rockford to see Mark’s landscaping to get some ideas for our house.

Primed with information we headed to Flowerland and spent a small fortune. We got flowers, a bush, mulch, grass seed, top soil, and lots of vegetables. Not sure what inspired this, but I planted a salsa garden. If all goes well I will have more tomatoes and peppers than I’ll know what to do with in 70-80 days.

While I was at it I also planted a cool dwarf willow tree across the “creek” and used all the landscaping rocks that Holly took out in front of the house to make the new bush stand out. At some point the foliage turns a bluish color which should be cool.

And, just for fun… here is a picture of Bailey relaxing on the couch: