Content-type: text/html Ray Manning

Monday, July 19, 2004 8:58 PM

A BreakThrough


Monday is a reasonable day at work. I get home, have a great session with the weights, go for a walk, and take a quick shower before the ResourceScout partners come over for our weekly meeting. (This week we decide to have to meeting at my house.) Because it is warm I put on my kimono after the shower and greet Ruby and Joseph at the door with an anime fan saying, "I'm a little passive sub bottom Japanese boy here to serve you". We have a great meeting and a conference call with a statewide adoptions coordinator who is impressed with our work and now is going to pay us to fly to San Rafael and visit her and her colleagues and write us a check. Well, we hope that she is going to write us a check. After the meeting I handle phone calls or voice mails from Person M_C (who is recovering from surgery), Brandon, and Person C_T.

On Tuesday I receive the summons in the mail for the traffic violation. This traffic violation is the one where I got into the yelling match with the police officer. I am shocked and outright overjoyed to see that the summons has my name spelled wrong and has the wrong driver's license number on it. This one I can beat!

The entire workweek is characterized by spurts of productivity followed by spurts of boredom. For the entire week I am a bit tired - probably from the sudden change in weather to hot days and possibly still from the missing night of sleep. But I do get in great sessions with the weights on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after work.

On Friday Person C_T comes over. It was his birthday on Wednesday and we need to celebrate! We havea nice Italian dinner and I give hime his present - a double CD of Bach's Brandenberg Concertos. We go back to my house a continue long discussions about our lives, our frinds, our work, and our wishes. We end up going to sleep near 2am on Saturday morning.

We're up late on Saturday morning and not out of bed until almost 10 am. We have a quick breakfast and it is time to split for the day. I get out for a good bicycle ride during the heat of the day and then I relax with indoor activities until the heat goes away. I get another bedroom painted (first coat only) and work on some paperwork. The mobile phone bill comes and tallies 190 phone calls and 35 text messages. Hmmmm.

On Saturday night there is another one of those ice skating fundraisers. So I dust off the ice hockey skates (which I haven't been on since last November) and drive up to Burbank with an intermediate stop to pick up Person J_VKPI. There are not as many people as usual at the ice skating party, but I manage to see some friends that I haven't seen for up to 8 years and I manage to help a number of people who are struggling along on the ice skates. Person J_VKPI is in a weird and strange mood as he does very little skating and spends most of the time talking with and text messaging his friends with my mobile phone. I drop Person J_VKPI off at his apartment and I'm home and in bed before 2 am on Sunday morning.

On Sunday I get out for a decent bicycle ride and then run errands. Near 1pm I go inline skating for 40 minutes and it is an uneventfull skate except when I see a ChiChi sitting by the bicycle/skate path as I'm headed west and he's still there 20 minutes later when I'm heading back east. So I stop and start the conversation with, "So you don't have skates or a biccyle?" The ChiChi is happy for someone to talk to because he just arrived in this country a week ago. Person E_F... that's taken...E_P...that's taken....let's try Person E_ATTW (because he now works for ATT Wireless) and I have a nice friendly conversation and I surprise him a bit because I know a few words in his language. "Oh you've visited my country?" is what I have to respond to. So off I skate as I say to Person E_ATTW, "I'll see you here next week and you should have a pair of skates by then".

After watching a motorcycle race from Germany I head to Northrop Grumman to get a head start on the week and to make up hours for the following Friday (which will be taken up with contractor support).