I learned this in college and while I don’t know who Adam or Nemo (sp?) are, I can’t seem to forget it. This is how I imagine it came into existence.

It took 38 hours to get there but there was a lot to see so it turned out to be pretty fun. Once we were in Seattle, we spent a few days walking around the city. I’ve grouped the things I found interesting into this picture:

After that Jenn’s cousin Sarah took us on a two day trip to Victoria BC. Victoria is on a peninsula so the easiest way to get there is via ferry. We went north from Seattle, crossed into Canada, took a ferry south to Victoria where we stayed overnight, took another ferry south to the US, drove south to Tacoma and then north back to Seattle.

The best part of our trip was going to Mount St. Helens with Jenn’s aunt and uncle. On our way there we stopped at the “Charles Bingham Forest Learning Center.” Standing outside the learning center there was a forester giving a little speech so we decided to stop and listen. As we were listening this lady walked up next to us, she stood with us as the forester explained how after the eruption in 1980 the government sold off all the destroyed lumber. Then right in the middle of his next sentence this lady interrupted by saying in a real bitchy tone “they should have left those trees right where they were, the greedy corporations just pressured the government into selling them so they could rape the environment.” It was at that moment that I realized that this lady was a actually a guy, I was just thrown off by his long ponytailed hair. This led me to realize that I was in the presence of a real live hippie. I was shocked, I’d never seen one in real life before. I thought about peeing on his shoes or maybe kicking him down the mountain but decided instead to see what he would do next.

When he was finished with his BS environmental rant he went inside, Jenn and I followed him. We made sure to maintain a safe distance because once indoors he kind of smelled like swiss cheese. He pretty much went straight through the learning center over to the information desk where he wrote on something and then left.

I went to investigate and found this:

I’m sure you can’t read it in the picture (and I want the search engines to pick it up) so here it is typed out

The way he signed it makes it seem like he had his family along but I didn’t see anybody with him. Maybe they found an opportunity to ditch his stinky ass.

I thought for sure someone would have taken them by now.

We went to breakfast the next day with Rod and Heather. I wanted Tara to come out too but she lives in Ely (two hours from Duluth) and hates me so she stayed home =/

Spackle came with us but didn’t have much fun since he spent the majority of his time in the hotel watching HBO

It was nuts!

UPDATE: For some reason Chris shut down his blog so here is the text as it appeared on his site

IT Professional the Right Way

So I have started a new job for a new company in the past week. I will not name companies because I don’t believe they have to be mentioned. People who I have worked with in the past know my past companies I have worked for.

I have worked under four IT managers
in the past 8 years and 2 of them were good. Thankfully, one of those four managers I am currently working for. The first IT manager I worked for was a terrible manager, knew very little about IT topics and refused to listen to his staff. The company I worked for at the time had a CTO that saw something had to be done with this manager for the good of the company and the good of the IT dept. This IT manager was moved to another department and I got a new IT manager. He was a great manager in my opinion, he listened to his IT staff, he empowered his IT staff, and he backed his IT staff. I learned a lot from him, how to manage people, how to handle day to day politics, how to get things done.

I loved working at this company for this manager, I unfortunately had to leave this company because the they were bought out. I moved to another company in the area that sounded great. With their talks of bonuses, trips, and free pop. In the interviews the IT manager talked about how cutting edge they were and all of the huge projects they were working on. I joined their team, moved into the lead Network Administrator position. From the first week that I was working for this new company I knew there were issues in the department.

My first week another Network Administrator quit without notice basically saying he could not work another day under this particular IT manager. In the following weeks I saw blow-up after blow-up of different IT employees when they had run-ins with their manager. Things rolled along somewhat ok for the first 6 months I was there because we were really busy. The company was building a new corporate building and we need to set it all up. Once we moved into the new building and really settled in the issues that had been brewing really started to explode. More and more highly stressed blowouts were occurring among staff. It got to the point where a number of staff went to the COO about it.

The environment at this company in the IT Dept continued to degrade, projects of all kinds broke down. Nothing new got approved without overly drawn out battles with the IT manager. Projects pushed by the manager just wasted everyone’s time. Larger project would get restarted halfway through by the manager and shifted from person to person throughout the staff. The entire department basically lost the will to work, a 2nd person in upper management was involved with the issues and still nothing change. IT personnel started to jump ship, 9 of the 11 staff within 9 months. A 3rd person in upper management was involved and still nothing changed.

It is my opinion that a bad manager is a bad manager, it doesn’t matter what training you send them to or how many discussions you have with them. You can micro-manage them and still they will be a poor manager. Their staff will know this and once the staff loses all respect for their manager the game is over the department has broken down. You can do one of two things as upper management, you can ignore the reality and try to fix the manager, you can hope it gets better, even throw money at it. The other thing you can do it make the hard move, replace the manager, hopefully before too much damage is done.

Thankfully the first company I worked for that had a terrible boss realized what needed to be done and was able to turn around the dept almost overnight. Instead the second company decided to look the other way as their department was decimated by the in battles between staff and management. Is the feelings of one person that much greater than the lives of 9 others and the stability of the company as a whole?

To my fellow past co-workers: Brad, Brye, John, Mike, Mike, Allen, Chee, Calvin, and Josh good luck in the future. I am sure your future jobs will be brighter than you past. Garry I hope things can turn around there before things are too late for you.

As for myself I look to the future and it shows great potential at my new company. I have seen in only my first 5 days that things are back to the way they should be. I am getting things done, getting projects moved forward and making a difference. My boss listens to my opinions and has faith in his staff.

Dead tired, we slept for maybe two hours and went back to searching and posting fliers until the sun came up. Once 8am rolled around we went to the shelters and animal clinics to see if maybe someone had found him. No one had. We went back to searching. Finally around 4pm (23 hours after he ran away) animal control called, they had him in custody. We picked him up and he was in pretty rough shape so we took him to the vet and they fixed him up with some bandages and a new collar

Spackle’s pretty pissed about the cone; I figure it’s a good punishment for running away.

Nothing was working. Then I listed it on autotrader and sold it the next day, amazing. I paid $4000 for the Saturn when I bought it two and a half years ago, sold it today for $2800.

Shortly after I sold my car, Mike spilled cheese fries in his car in the space between the seat and the door, what a dumbass.

After I had moved the old fridge to the other apartment I went to put the dolly in my truck but I got sidetracked by the note on my neighbors cars gas door.

so I stole all their gas, and went to bed
what an awesome day.

So there was only one snake and it was a gardener snake, but there was a snake in the building nonetheless. When I’m not dodging snakes I’m at home wrestling with spackle

Some day I’ll have time to write something interesting… I promise.

Onto the reason I am writing this entry. I was reading the paper today and to my absolute shock, I found out that Ainsworth will be suspending operations in Cook in just two weeks. They will lay of one hundred fifty of about one hundred seventy employees. Unbelievable. The paper said the reason for the shutdown was “insufficient demand in the market”, I find this hard to believe. Here is a picture I took today of the building going up across the street from Freeze. No Joke.

If there is insufficient demand in the market, then why do I see Ainsworth OSB is everywhere I go?
Truth:
There is no shortage of buyers.
Allen, Brian & Catherine Ainsworth are evil.