The fog

It has returned. Fall comes in slowly here, hot days, followed by a wonderful Indian summer when suddenly one morning you wake up socked in by fog. Then it burns off and you have a wonderful day, but pretty soon the fog will be a day in day out thing.

Growing up in Wyoming and Colorado I don't remember fog except a rare occasion. Well duh, we weren't near the ocean or a large number of bodies of water. I remember as a kid on one of the rare foggy days in Wyoming my mom told me that the fog was just clouds on the ground. I thought this was SO cool and played outside in the clouds all day. I even went out and took a container to put the clouds in to save. I debated on how I would decide to open the container to release the cloud one day... I likely never opened the container, because I have resolve and willpower like no ones business (as opposed to my sister who got the short end of the stick there). Instead my mom probably found it, opened it and released my cloud and put the container in the dishwasher one day.

Here we have the distant ocean, but mostly a large number of rivers. I remember my first year here, I counted 30 days straight of dreary fog before a sunny day hit. This is actually rare, but I found it concerning after growing up in sunshine Colorado and going to grad school in Reno. I do need the sun.

I like the fog as long as I can stay in my house with a cup of coffee or hot tea or cocoa and watch it roll by outside. I even like walking in the fog with Winny. I do not, however, like driving in fog (especially with some nitwit in a blue Buick riding my tail with a cup of coffee in one hand and the cell phone in the other...). Give me a snow storm anyday over fog for driving. There are days when I have parked in my parking lot (feeling semi-sure it was my parking lot) and not being able to see the building 50 feet away. Driving down the highway at 55mph in this, not my idea of fun!

I am busy here at work today, which is not new. My good project is running out of money currently and the PM had to make some tough decisions in concert with the client's PM. Decision was that the focus would be (drum roll)... my project. Sigh. Mixed blessing. I love the fact that this is big on their plate right now and that they are very confident about taking this to the industry floor, this also translates back to me and my team as we will hold the patent and it appears that licensing is likely, which also means royalties. So I need to get this to market so to speak.

But then the other side of the coin is that I am damn busy with other stuff and I am one of only a few people who can actually cover my time 100% right now. The other people whose tasks were put on hold pending the new year are not in the same boat as me. They are scrambling. I was able to offer one guy tasks on my project to do, basically keep my hardware up and running. But this takes a few hours a week at most. Where they are used to charging 20+ hours to the project.
Anyways, that is the status here at work. I have an abstract to submit for a conference in Hawaii which if accepted I will likely not be able to attend because it is on that one former project of mine, and funding is questionable. I don't blame them really. But I also don't really want to take the time to write the abstract either. Oh well.

Ok, I have to do some scrambling now... rumor is out there that promotion talk has begun.