Winter B - Week 2

Greetings from the Hoosier state! After I left the office today I drove down to IN to meet my brand new niece. Sonia is absolutely adorable and so tiny! I had forgotten how small and fragile babies are. Nadia looks like a complete giant next to her! While I enjoy some family time, here's a recap of the second week of MAP.

• Monday - We had our meeting with our faculty advisor at the ungodly hour of 8:30 am, so I was not quite alert at that hour... It's possible our advisor thinks I'm mute. Afterwards, we headed to Borders to get more insight on our project scope from our sponsor. We thought we knew what they wanted, so even though our sponsor was going to be out on Tuesday and Wednesday, we decided to meet with other Borders personnel to get as much info as possible. After spending pretty much a full day in the office, I thought I was going to break out into hives. It's crazy how much I don't miss cubicles! Per Section Six tradition, Meryl and I went to trivia at Connor O' Neil's that night. Unfortunately, with so many people gone for MAP, it was just the two of us... we totally got our asses handed to us. We came thisclose to getting our entry fee back (ie, last place).
• Tuesday - Meetings! With more Borders people! Meetings! To debrief the Meetings! Meetings! With the Admissions Office for UpClose weekend!
• Wednesday - We took the day off from the Borders office and met at school instead to talk about our Project Plan and Letter of Engagement. In my previous life as a government employee we never had documents about ANYTHING, so a Project Plan was definitely new to me. After our meeting, I had lunch with Nathalie and drove her to airport. Crazy enough, I won't see her until mid-April, and she won't have cellphone access either. So I will definitely NOT be going over my text limit this month! Once I got back to Ann Arbor, I met with our Team Process Coach, followed by Lauren coming over to my apartment to get acquainted with Beasley. She was nice enough (or naive enough) to agree to watch Beasley for the weekend while I'm in IN. She was concerned about the whole thing (and probably still is), but the first meeting went well enough that I am not worried. Wednesday night was spent at btb cantina for a fundraiser (Drink for Drugs! was a suggested tagline). After spending way too long at the bar (I was tired) and arguing way too much with some people (I think people doubt my memory), I finally headed home at 1am.
• Thursday - We met with our other faculty advisor at 9am (still ungodly early) to go over our proposed LOE. She was very enthusiastic and gave us some great feedback, so we were excited to get back to the office to hear from our sponsor. After a brief detour to the Sprint store, where I got a replacement grey razr since the LCD screen on my red once was busted, I headed into the office, only to learn that our sponsor was out sick. So we met with his boss instead, and they promised to get their remarks back to us by the next day. After work, Lauren came over for some more bonding time with Beasley and I eventually got my butt off the couch to head to Happy Hour (only 45 minutes late!). I was pleasantly surprised to see 7 Sixers there, but there were plenty of people I had never seen before in my life. After trading MAP horror stories (at least I wasn't driving anywhere in a blizzard), and somehow being accused of being a vampire, Lorraine and I headed to dinner with Meryl. The Last Supper before she was off to the rainforest!
• Friday - There was a lot of last minute cleaning to get my apartment ready for the "Dog Sitter." Also, last minute packing that led me to forget multiple things, including my toothbrush, my phone charger, and a DVD that I had promised Joe and Tatum. Oops! My stay in the office was brief (only 2 hours), but we got to meet the Borders data guy. I think we had a moment when I shared that I worked at the Census Bureau during my previous life, and I'm pretty sure one of my teammates called us "data nerds." Hey, play nice! Our meeting with the Data Dude went very well, so I left Borders in a positive mood and got on the road to IN. About 2 hours into my drive, I got a text message from Lauren. Surprise! They've changed our Project Scope! I'm still not clear what it is that they want us to do. But, I guess that's the consulting life... After a 4 hour drive, I got to Joe and Tatum's and got to hold Sonia. Again, so tiny! That was followed by a Russell Crowe-style phone throwing incident, which coupled with my faulty hand-eye coordination, led to a super sexy split lip. Despite my deformity, I'm looking forward to the weekend and spending time with the family.

Ooh, and some bonus fun! The weather for the past 2-3 days has been AWESOME. Not quite warm, but much better than normal! On my drive down, the temperature gauge hit 59. It's not going to last, but I will definitely take it as a promise of things to come!