The office

The office was originally a small private house with a garage on a large block and is one block West of the main I-45 highway. It has been extended a number of times and has a large area with cubicles for the engineers in the latest extension. There is a conference area with overhead projector which is wehere we are having meetings.There's a kitchen area near the front which has a well stock fridge and pantry. Soft drink and junk food - the lifeblood of America.

I went to sleep about 11 on Monday night and was woken at 2am by a phone call from Australia. I didn’t get it in time to find out who it was but I was wide-awake after that. I decide to call David since it was mid afternoon at home. He said they’d found the leak, which was under the slab, and they had to dig a hole through the concrete in tmy bathroom to fix it. The insurance will cover everything but the actual repair of the pipes. I’m sort of glad I’m not there.

I couldn’t get back to sleep for ages and let me tell you – there’s a lot of rubbish on TV in the middle of the night. I did catch part of the Men’s NZ Germany hockey match at the Olympics though. I did finally drop off about 5 and woke up at 9-30. By the time I had a shower and got to breakfast they were packing up, so I grabbed a juice and some Danish pastries and drove to the office. I’d checked the area on Google Earth during my awake period and found the GPS had sent me on a 6.5 mile trip home from the office. I found one through the back ways, which was only 3 miles.

Today I started on some of the fixes and upgrades we identified yesterday. About 1 Brandon took me down to a sandwich shop where I got a large sub with steak cheese and onions (a Philly steak) for lunch. This turned out to be quite large and I could only eat half. After lunch the 2 of us spend most of the afternoon in the conference area going through some of his problems and upgrade ideas. Again it seemed no time at all before it was time to leave.

I stopped at the super market on the way home and then changed into my gym gear. I got the pass to the gym next door and walked over there. It was quite big and at that time of day quite packed as well. The cardio machines were upstairs and probably 80% or more were in use. They don’t seem to have Cross trainers like I have at home or the more common rear wheel drive version in Australian gyms. They have something similar but there’s much more ankle movement than I like. I decided to do a session on the treadmill instead. I did a mile in 12 minutes, which was enough. I then tried their pseudo cross trainer but didn’t like it so I went back to the hotel. Their exercise room has more or less the same choices so there doesn’t seem to be any advantage in the gym. There is a huge room with various weight machines but I'm not interested in those either.

I had the other half of the sub for dinner and fell asleep watching TV. I got up and had a shower and am now watching a show called Highway 18 while typing this up. This is sort of like the Amazing Race, except the challenges are all golf related. The teams are chipping on a beach, putting in a basketball court as well as driving to golf courses and playing a hole. They have to replay it until they get a par or better.