chickenfeet

2014 kicked off with my annual physical because nothing says "Happy New Year" like a finger up one's arse.  I seem to be in reasonably good shape bar this cough that won't go away and rather high blood pressure.  Those two mean I have the bumper fun bag of inhalers and meds to work with for the time being.  Also I'm being good about exercising again (so far).

Work now includes a rather intimidating strategy project on top of everything else but no definitive word about my future post March 30th.

Recent DVD reviews include Busoni's Doktor Faustus; a christmas present from the lemur, a rather unthrilling Elektra from Baden-Baden and Puccini's Il Trittico from the Royal Opera House.  Live performances are a bit thin on the ground right now but I'll kick into high gear on January 18th when COC starts up again with Così fan tutte.  I'm hoping to interview Sir Thomas Allen ahead of the premier.

Otherwise it's snow, freezing rain and arctic temperatures.

From my email today:

We are pleased to send you the December 2008 Ontario Cancer Fact, ‘Looking back: fifty years of cancer deaths in Ontario’,

The current project is very hard work and very high stress and it gets to people. Fortunately the team is extremely talented and has a great sense of humour. For example, we have a fine collection of plushie microbes from www.giantmicrobes.com. This is mostly so that we can have conversations when visitors are around along the lines of:

"Who's got plague"

"I don't know but Rami's got ebola"

or

"I think Mark gave syphilis to Trish"

and so on.

I want us to get a bulk supply of MRSA to give to hospitals who successfully implement the expanded WTIS,

I flogged out to darkest Mississauga today for the sole purpose of doing some very boring project administration stuff that required me to access systems I can't get into remotely. Being the early bear I hit the office around 0715 to find that the email system and access to most everything else not physically located in Mississauga was out with no ETA on a restore. By 0930 they were hoping to have access restored by 1230 'or so'. So I buggered off home where at least I have internet access.

One of the projects I am currently managing has the client (and me) in Toronto, the design team in Nova Scotia and the developers in Newfoundland. As PM I get copied on just about any and all correspondence. I reckon I'm fielding upwards of fifty emails daily on this one project.

Years of playing flanker in the days when rucking was very much allowed has made me relatively immune to a certain small grey cat running up my back in claw assisted fashion but I really would prefer not to have blood stains on my shirts!

This work thing is seriously time consuming. It's a good job I get paid for it. Today featured a full blown reintroduction to the wonderful world that is health informatics in Ontario.