Monday, September 23, 2002

I lucked out today! I didn't end up preparing all that well for my presentation last night. I only spent about an hour on it and then an hour from 8 to 9 this morning. I would have muddled through more than likely, but the other fellow making a presentation, Russ, went over his time for his presentation and so we had to postpone my presentation till after lunch. But after lunch only Russ was available and not the conference room. So I got to give Russ a private informal presentation in my cube. That went very well and he encouraged me to communicate with Jim from the Open Cascade class who is hard at work doing Open Cascade stuff too and might be able to help me out with the things he is discovering as he works on it. I'm relieved I didn't have to give a more formal presentation. I have that "saved by the bell" feeling!

Sunday I went hiking with my friend Linda at Sanborn County Park. We got there at 10:30 a.m. and started out a day of not very well maintained trails, badly signed trails, and heart pounding hills. We had to do lots of map reading on this trip as there were hardly any signs indicated what trail we were on. We had to look at the map to figure out what junction we ran into and where we needed to go next. On the heart pounding up hill portion, we saw lots of extra trails that folks had made by trying to cut across the switch backs. Grrr, that is not good for the park environment. You should stay on the trails as they were built. There was also lots of poison oak on the sides of the trail. I managed to avoid most of it till we started to come downhill when I brushed a branch of it. Oops ... there came a Tecnu bath for me when I got home. Tecnu is a special soap that is able to wash off the poison oak oil before your skin starts reacting to it. Knock on wood that I got it all off and won't come down with a case of it in a few days! We got a good work out on the hike as it was all uphill then all downhill and it was a hot day so we sweated lots and drank lots of water. It was fun despite the orienteering challenges,the elevation gain, and the hot weather. We had the trail to ourselves most of the way up and saw some nice Redwood groves.

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