April 5, 2009

We finally had some warm weather this weekend, which led to some serious gardening. You might as well get prepared for several months of boring gardening stories. As Joann mentioned this morning, the beginning of spring gets one filled with the all the hopes for your garden. We are certainly hoping for more success this year than last - while we had several good crops last year, we still haven't mastered getting large tomatoes, lots of peas, or consistent yields from everything that goes into the garden. We are still investing more energy than we are getting back out in vegetables - especially since you can buy most veggies at the grocery store, even if they don't taste quite as yummy. The photo montage this week is our garden as we start another year - the greenery is garlic that we planted last fall.

Fairly quiet week as Joann was in New York learning how to become a more dynamic and effective leader at an internal Pfizer course. While I had leadership team meetings - first on Tuesday with my boss's team and then on Wednesday and Thursday, with my bosses boss. Friday was spent visiting IBM to learn how they transformed their Research and Development efforts from an internal funding model to a model that consists of a mix of internal and external. Very interesting and IBM certainly seems to have it's fingers in a lot of pies as they are doing things as diverse as computational biology, semiconductors, and IT servicing. We also got to tour a chip plant was fully automated. It was very impressive although as it had semiconductor wavers moving around the plant without any human intervention it was a bit scary as in computers taking over the world - Terminator type of future.

We spent the weekend being homebodies as we both needed to catch up a bit. Yesterday was chores and a haircut for Eric in the morning all leading up to a great home-made vegetable soup (using more of our sweet potatoes from last years harvest - so we weren't completed disasters in growing things) for dinner with our favorite french bread from our bread machine. Then we watched Michigan State defeat UConn in the NCAA's. We were routing for both teams - Mich State as our Big Ten representative in the finals and UConn, well you can figure that one out. Today as mentioned above was putting in the peas, potatoes, lettuce, and some berries (raspberries and strawberries) in the garden leading to a pretty good nap for both of us. Apparently running for an hour and then gardening for several more is a bit tiring for folks of our age. The rest of the day is preparing for another exciting week at work.....

Have a great week