State Fair-on-a-stick

Today I had the opportunity to have a day off of work and go to the state fair, all on IBM (and get $20 worth of food coupons too!) Thirty-six people from my area all got on a bus at 8:30 this morning and headed up to Minneapolis to go to the fair. It was a beautiful day! It's always interesting hanging out with all your work colleagues "outside" of work - not that it's bad or anything, but sometimes you don't get to see someone's whole personality in a work environment.

Anyway, on to the important stuff - the food! Walking in, we saw a stand called "Big Fat Bacon", so Brian and I got a quarter-pound of bacon on a stick, maple-cooked - YUMMY! I really do think that eating a quarter pound of bacon is better for you than the stand we saw a few down, "deep fried snickers on a stick" - deep fried fat and carbs not cool. I also managed to get two nice big ears of corn on the cob dripping with butter (I think I could eat corn forever - More Corn!), cheese curds, fruit-and-cheese-kabobs (not deep fried, these were actual fresh cheese and fruit, really good), and plenty of bottled water.

While wandering around, we went through some of the buildings - 4-H, the technology building which was featuring "green" technologies this year, horticulture, and the dairy barn, where you can see "butter busts" of the dairy princess and runners up. I couldn't resist taking a picture of that - how often do you see a head made of butter??? I guess they give these to the people they are sculpted from - I wonder what they do with all that butter?

Work News

This was actually the last area outing I will be doing with this area - after 11 years in the area I've been in, I'm officially being transferred to a new organization in the SWG (Software Group) division of IBM. That sounds way cooler and scarier than it actually is - I have already been working on this project for two years and now they're formally creating an organization for it. It doesn't mean moving anywhere (well, not out of town anyway - I do get to move to a new office), and it IS kind of a big change as my entire reporting structure is changing. But for the most part it's the same job, and I believe that being in this division is actually going to be good for my career in the long-term. So I'm excited, and still waiting to see how it all goes...so far so good!