A Trip to Chicago

I went to Chicago for a few days to visit with the IBM team there and to meet a couple of my soon-to-be fellow travelers. I learned a lot that will be helpful when I'm in India about some of the programs we do or will be supporting at some point. We are responsible for the Consolidated News Desk and I'm pretty familiar with that. Tribune is putting in another consolidated system - Discus - for Circulation. I learned a lot about that and understand how that will be working a bit better. The weather was hideous the week before, so I was a bit concerned about getting out and about. But it was beautiful. The hotel is next door to the Tribune Tower in a very pretty part of Chicago. Lots of good restaurants. I was very brave the first night and went out to Joe's Crab place. The food was fantastic. Ordered 3 appetizers and a lovely martini. One of the things I want to do in India is to show the wonderful food I'll be eating. So I decided to practice at Joe's.I know, doesn't that look appetizing! I was seated in the bar. It was very crowded, being ash Wednesday in a fish restaurant. I was alone at my table, highly happy because of the martini and my boldness in going alone. A nice dentist was at the table for a while. He was giving a lecture about some arcane part of dentistry at the conference in town. You never know who you will pick up in a bar. Well, Joe's is known for it's snow crab, so I got an appetizer. I was a little embarrassed to take the picture when there was really crab in these shells. Can't think of what emboldened me enough to shoot a picture once the crab was dispatched.

Oh, yea, the martini. These were my other two appetizers. A crab cake and, because I felt I needed a vegetable, artichoke's Rockefeller (stuffed with spinach and other good things I don't know.) As my friend, Rachelle would say, Oh My God. Actually that seems appropriate on Ash Wednesday. This was fabulous and way too much food. It became breakfast the next day. Not the martini. I'd polished off all those olives long before I hopped off that bar stool.

But before I left I meet some other visitors to Chicago, this time from Kellogg. I recommended this fantastic cheese cracker to them and started to talk about work. They develop new breakfast products. I guess they weren't thrilled with my oatmeal diet. Karen will cringe when she hears that I told them the evils of corn. Their eyes didn't glaze over once. They said they would be sending me tickets to Disneyland. I haven't received those yet. I guess you can't believe everything people tell you in bars. I hope they believed me about this cheese cracker.
The rest of the trip was all work. I'd stay so late at the Tribune printing facility, oddly named the Freedom Center, that I'd just get room service. I should have taken a picture of the wonderful blue cheese burger I had.

We Have Visitors

Teena and Suresh will be in our office for 7 weeks. They are one of three teams that are blanketing the US, visiting every Tribune property. Their goal is to learn what we do and how we do it. I think this is pretty daunting. We/I have never been good at documenting this process. The team who went to Chicago were handed a BIG book of everything the do there. Chicago has very high turnover. We don't have any. I keep telling people that they have to lay us off to get us to leave.

Suresh was working with Dean on Friday. Dean is our Mac expert, among many other expertise. He is also our proud grandpa. He could not resist sharing his two girls. Dean won't be able to join us in Bangalore, due to his bad back. He will be spending the next 5 weeks making sure that Suresh and Teena know everything about Macs and how we use them to solve our employee's problems.

The idea was to schedule IBM for 7 weeks with us, but travel to other sites if those guys needed more time. The other teams are staying at Tribune and Newsday for 3 weeks, Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinal for 2 weeks and the smaller newspapers for 1 week each. I can't imagine how they will get that done, so learning everything at The Times quickly is critical. They need to move out of here to help at the other Business Units (BU BU BU.) Learn and document. Glad that's not my job.

Teena has been working with Clif. Clif and Dean arrive very early each morning and check out all our systems. They do this before the other employees arrive so the 2nd tier people can be fixing problems before they are really problems. Clif has been at The Times nearly as long as I have. Unlike me, he started when he was a kid, so he isn't doing a happy dance about leaving. For a myriad of reasons approved by the lawyers, he will be staying. I've got to say, he was a little tempted to take the package, but he is a lot younger than me, so he decided to stay.

Clif is our Blackberry expert as well as being the go-to guy for all our exectives. Blackberrys have become as common as laptops and more common than Macs. We have over 550 of them. I'm sure Clif and Gernard (he is our first contact for Blackberrys, we call him BB King) would say that they are constantly having problems. Clif's hair was black before we got Blackberrys.

Suresh and Teena went to Disneyland on Saturday with my son, Adrian, and his friend, Emily. Adrian says they had a good time. I can't wait to hear what Teena and Suresh have to say. There is nothing like your first visit to Disneyland. Suresh said he would buy a throw away camera so we can see pictures. It was a lot of fun on our weekly conference call with ALL the people from IBM who are visiting the US. It is freezing in New York and Chicago. I got Suresh to tell them that they were going to Disneyland this weekend. Ha.

First They Shoot You

I'm pretty cavalier when I travel, but I usually travel to Europe. So I don't think about shots and such. For this trip, I checked the CDC website to see what they recommended because talk of necessary shots was in the air.
Nothing is required, but MANY are recommended. I went through the list and noted MY thoughts on the subject:

• Hepatitis A - hum, maybe
• Hep B - highly unlikely. Involved blood and hospitals. I have blood, but I don't go to hospitals other than to give birth. Highly unlikely.
• Japanese Encephalitis - involves chickens and unnatural acts. That would be a no.
• Malaria - Now that's a possibility. I diligently wrote down the suggested drugs provided by the CDC, just in case the people who do this for a living were unaware.
• Rabies - Not sure. I plan to journey into the more rural, but what are the chances? I've been camping and hiking (okay, not recently) and never been attacked. Hum, maybe.
• Typhoid - I think this was another maybe.
• Then boosters for all the childhood shots - Measles, mumps, polio, diptheria and tetnus.

The shooter was very nice. I didn't ask for his credentials, but he gives great shot. I would have taken a picture of the results, but a fat middle-aged arm with little round bandaids might put people off their feed. I got everything but the Japanese immunization. He painted such a great picture of me being bitten by some animal and being medivac'd to Thailand, filled with disease infested blood supplied by the hospital that gave me bad water.

Three shots in each arm, a series of 4 pills to take for typhoid (one pill every other day, an hour before food or 3 hours after which will keep me safe for 5 years; or one shot that lasts for two years. I am my mother's daughter, very good at taking pills, so that's the option I took.) and a big bottle of pills to take to prevent malaria. AND an emergency Delhi-belly kit, just in case I insist on drinking something I shouldn't. Pshew.

I was asked if I was okay with getting shots. Needles aren't a problem for me, but it always brings to mind the image of my sister and two brothers and I getting shots when we were very young. Karen and I were stoic, sticking out our arms and getting the shot. I still remember Jeff and Eric being chased around a table. Were they screaming? Did they really hide under the table? Memory is a strange thing, but I could swear that happened.

Putting Pictures in a Blog

Today I want to make sure I know how to put pictures in my blog. Can you imagine being in India and not showing the different sights? Too bad there is no button here for taste and smell. I bet there will be wonderful things to eat. This picture is of my brother, Eric, and I at Niagra Falls a couple of years ago. He's a good traveling companion.

So is this crew. Here we have Adrian standing behind Karen and Peter. We were just pulling out of the dock in Narbonne on our barge last June. It looks like we knew what we were doing, but it was all a ruse. It was so beautiful. They are all looking at our first exciting lock.

Okay, that wasn't too hard. Let's see how it looks.

Parting Gifts and Other Sorrows

After nearly 30 years at the Los Angeles Times, I will be leaving in October. Not with a heavy heart. They have out-sourced my 2nd department; I've been in 2 other departments and they are both gone or shadows of their old selves. Maybe it's good for The Times that I leave now before I bring down the house. If it hasn't already been brought down.
Everybody says as they leave The Times that it's the people they will miss and that is certainly true for me. There is a whole building full of good friends at Times Mirror Square (a name NOT approved by the tribune company). The nice thing is that I will be given parting gifts; not parting gifts like the executives get as they leave, no rolling in clover for this work horse. Instead, I get to have a very interesting 9 months. And in my book, that is a great parting gift.
I supervise the computer Help Desk for employees and, you guessed it, our jobs are being outsourced to India. I'm not going to write now about the group that is being outsourced, just to say that they are the hardest working people I know. They will do well wherever they go. For now, we are working on the transition.
We have two people from Bangalore working with us now. Four others will be visiting all the other tribune publishing properties throughout the United States. Then, in April, I will be traveling to India for 11 weeks to help make sure they treat our people right. Now, that's what I call a parting gift.
I love to travel and have written emails to a bunch of friends about each journey. Most notable was the barge trip in France last June with my sister, her husband and my son. We had too much fun, which I wrote about every day. So why not a blog about two and a half months in India.
We'll see how this goes. For the next seven weeks I'll be practicing on the transition team and what we're doing in Los Angeles so the blogs from India will be complete.
Keep your fingers crossed.