Four. Three. Two. One.

"Right out the Barrel of a Gun." - Guster

That's pretty much how this day went. And before you grab your lanterns and pitchforks and go hunting for your morning post, let's just pretend that the business trip I was whisked away to was in...um...Kamchatka. That way, it's still before 10am, and if I can conquer Irkutsk and Yakutsk, and fortify Mongolia, then I will win this game of Risk. (If this doesn't make any sense whatsoever, please disregard. It's been a long day.)

My job is pretty easy-going. There is always plenty to do, with a list of tasks as lengthy as Clinton's epic. But the deadlines are established well in advance, the scenery always changes, and they let me use explosives. (name that one, Harford.) I've been preparing a feasibility study to rent $16 million dollars of office real estate in the Columbia area. (Maryland, not South America.) (SAIC is in homeland security, not crack.) A feasibility study answers one question: "Can we do this and not kill ourselves?" An example, if I will:

Premise: Standing on a rock high above the water at Buttermilk Falls in NY. Thinking about jumping into the water. Can we do this and not kill ourselves?"
Fact: Good leg strength to jump away from current standing place. CHECK
Fact: Water is not too cold to jump into. CHECK
Fact: Waterbed filled with "sharp pointy rocks" CHECK MINUS.
Feasibility: That's ah-no good.

See, easy stuff, right? (By the way, that one was for you, Emerys..) Well add complex Excel formulas, 19 sheets of back-up, a boss out on vacation and an ever-changing deadline, and it gets a little more difficult. Like beating the Chinese in ping pong difficult. (I fought the Wong, and the Wong won.)

This is why I don't post in the afternoon. Blog dementia sets in.

Ok, focus. The study was to see if this one business unit could take on 356,000 square feet of space for expansion and not force their employees to work for snack cakes (That's pro hoho, in Latin) I thought doing the spreadsheet and its dizzying calculations was my end of the job. That all changed at 9am, when I was about to sit down and mock the Redskins on the blog.

Turns out I was going to Columbia (Maryland, not South America) with the head of facilities to brief this manager on his options. Oh, snap. I hadn't exactly dressed the part today, kicking it in the polo shirt / khaki kind of life, rather than the business suit / power tie way that I would have felt more comfortable in. Kind of like Affleck in Sum of All Fears when Freeman pulls him into the NSA meeting.

Needless to see, all that I had planned to get done today before being off tomorrow for G-Dub is still undone. But the meeting went well, I had McDonald's for lunch, and I found out that Columbia (Maryland, not....nevermind) is only going to get more complex. So I've got that going for me.

"Keep my head way down, Stay out, I'll stay in."