Still A Ham On The Inside

So this morning I'm on the Zoom call for our monthly TownHall Meeting at 8:15 AM. That, by itself, was already something new. I was also supposed to do the first introduction of the Benediction. I thought maybe I'd say something inspiring, given the platform and I thought of something along the lines of "all of you are a superhero" and put that in my back pocket just in case. But honestly when the time came, I told myself not to give in so much to my ego-nature and just focus on the fact that I think I picked some pretty good intro music... "Lovely Day" by Bill Withers. Even asked the participants to name the singer via chat. The ham in me really really wanted to take advantage of having a platform and being given center stage. But I also realized that I was one of the key leaders of the organization and I have more platforms to come not only this week, but in the coming weeks ahead too. And when my time came to speak about cybersecurity, I'm sure everyone liked the bit from Ninjio about ransomware. Funny that thing is already almost 3 years old and I think it still resonates to this day. Anyway, it was mission accomplished for me and Eloisa even gave me 5 Spark bucks for participating. But really it IS just Wednesday and today the different thing wasn't so much the town hall, it was the fact that it was raining this morning. Hey we do need the rain and given that it IS actually still winter for a couple of more weeks, then it is tolerable. Besides, it wasn't like it was even raining hard. And right after the town hall we still ventured out, going to Whole Foods so I could buy some puppy food for Claire. Lisa's stash had run out. By the time Johnnie's noon class had come around, the rain had stopped and in fact, the sun started to peek out. The only real complaint I had was that Claire's feet got wet and black with mud every time I took her out to poop and pee. I can't wait until tonight when we give her a really good bath. After the townhall I focused on some reporting that was due, as I now realize that the script had flipped and I was focusing almost 80% on reporting and not really a whole heck of a lot on the infrastructure side. I noticed at the Town Hall that Eloisa had focused almost 80% of her talk on data, and even mentioned my team specifically should they need to learn where all this data is and what it meant. Lam did a good job getting content aggregated and created. Now I really do need to teach people where to get all this stuff. Still there was nothing negative about my team and in fact, quite the opposite and again adding to the narrative of the value I provide the organization. It's all good. And that with Johnnie's last class I also posted a pic of him wearing MY Laker T-shirt as the focus today was on sports and teams and the kids had to wear something from their favorite sport or team. Johnnie's soccer gear was at Lisa's hence he gets to wear Laker gear. By the afternoon, it had actually gotten almost sunny again and back to routine. I excused Johnnie from karate class because he was engrossed in doing a class project on characters with rhyming color names. Love how they get them thinking creatively. We shifted back to the Wednesday routine including heading out to Panda Express for dinner. I still had lots of leftover food of course so no need to eat from there for me. And then after dinner, the puppy bath is now a thing. Part of the routine such as it were. It isn't exactly a non-event, at least not yet. That's because I am trying to let Johnnie learn how to do it and he seems like he gets even more wet than the dog! So much so I told him he had to go in to the shower without his pants on. It took roughly 20 minutes to get this done. A long time it seems for just one little puppy. And of course it took 3 times that long to get him to dry all that hair. But the reward was that she smelled SO great afterwards. I wasn't going to let him sleep near the bed with his mud-stained paws. But now, she was not only clean but she smelled that good. Johnnie of course was watching his new Binge-watch series which is Bubble Guppies but I could tell he was tired early. And so he didn't take much convincing when I told him it was bedtime and it was barely 9 PM. He barely made it through one episode of Bert and Ernie's Great Adventures before I could hear him softly breathing, already off to sleep. And to my left, I tapped on the puppy and she too was out like a light. Hmm... I guess everyone's tired tonight and we're all off to sleep early. Me too ladies and gents. me too...