Big meeting at work today. Very stressful to prepare for and to present (even though I only did the intro and provided a running commentary throughout). We were deciding the future of the product I just spent the last two and half years of my life acquiring, sweating over, cursing about, dealing with cranky clients about, and resulting in taking ten years off my life. Dodged the bullet - we will keep the product going. Have lots of action items and many mini-projects to pursue, but the product lives to fight another day. The presentation was, of course, a PowerPoint masterpiece, suitable for framing.

The streets in Malvern are all starting to prune-up, like pale, wrinkly roads left in water too long. This usually happens in the spring, when we get into the inevitable freeze-thaw-freeze routine. The pavement humps up in unexpected mini-mountains, making traveling over the 25 mph limit a hazard to the soft underbelly of your vehicle. This year these peaks have started to jump up while we’re in the midst of a freeze-freeze some more-freeze your ass off phase, causing the streets to look like tiny examples of tectonic plates at play. Since I, of course, never exceed the posted speed limits, I have little chance of impaling my car on one. That encounter with a grassy knoll as I backed up and turned around on a back road while trying to avoid an accident is another story – even the car wash people couldn’t get the strands of vegetation out of the back bumper.