Trip Report

I've almost finished a long two weeks of traveling. I plan to write a few posts on the details of the trips, but here's a quick summary.

I've been participating as a member of the appraisal team in a CMMI Level 2 appraisal of an organization in Tellabs. This is a very intensive process which, not including prework, has lasted 10 working days at 3 sites - Naperville, Dallas, and Petaluma. We started each day at 8:30 and almost always finished around 6:30.

In addition, my mom took us to Las Vegas for four days in the middle of the appraisal to celebrate her 60th birthday. The appraisal was coincidentally scheduled around my vacation. So, here is my travel/work schedule from the last two weeks. Monday and Tuesday in Naperville, went to Dallas Tuesday night, Wednesday in Dallas, went home Wednesday night, left for Las Vegas on Thursday. I was supposed to come home to see my kids on Sunday, but our flight was cancelled. If I went home on Monday, I would have missed my flight to San Francisco on Monday afternoon, so I flew directly from LV to SF. I arrived in SF on Monday, and came home on the red eye on Friday night, arriving at my front door at 7:00 AM on Saturday. At 11:45 on Sunday morning, a limo brought me to O'Hare to return to Petaluma. I continued to work on the appraisal in Petaluma until Wednesday, then took a red eye back to Chicago. Whew. I'm taking Thursday and Friday off.

When we were in Las Vegas, that was the first time that my wife and I had left our kids with anyone for more than one night. My mother-in-law flew in from Florida to watch our kids. Including the first half of my Petaluma visit, I was gone for 9 days which is by far the longest I've ever been away from my kids. I really missed them.

We had a fantastic time in Las Vegas and were fortunate to stay at Bellagio and saw Cirque de Soleil and Danny Gans, and had dinner at Circo. Thanks Mom! I also played some poker, saw lots of poker pros in Vegas, shook hands with Phil Ivey. Hung out with Rodney and Rebecca in Mill Valley, played poker in Petaluma, had dinner at The Girl and the Fig and hung out with Rodney in Sonoma, had dinner with the appraisal team in Bodega Bay, visited my cousin Mimi and her husband David in San Francisco.

These will probably be the only details I'll add: the poker pros that I saw playing at the Bellagio were: Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein, Jennifer Harman, Chip Reese, David Sklansky, David Gray, Johnny Chan, Eli Elezra, Scott Fischman, Minh Ly, and Eskimo Clark. I'm sure there were others that I didn't recognize.

I was only in Dallas for 18 hours and I can't even remember it now.

- schneid