Today is a death-or-glory sort of day (does that make me a Death-or-Glory toad? or
was that Mole?) in that I have severl meetings that really matter to me. The first
two are over; one went well and one went splendidly. The third, in which I have
the most skin, still looms. This is the one where I have to convince a bunch of
people who have to join my project team -- many of those including some of the
most senior have serious reservations that what I'm proposing will work -- and
some of those have a lot more knowledge of this area than I do. My tactic will be
to assure them that I'll listen to their questions and that we won't force changes
in unless we determine together that they make sense. (This is less common than
you'd think on big aerospace projects.) Wish me luck.
Because of all
those big meetings, today for once I am dressed in an outfit of which Rudder
approves wholeheartedly. His tastes being notably more conservative than mine,
this rarely happens. He's particularly happy that I'm wearing a scarf, which I
hardly ever do because I'm not good with them. I'm happy because the colors are
elegant -- pewter gray and ashes-of-roses and so is the cut -- lean pants with a
jacket down to mid-thigh. I'm even happier because instead of the pants which came
with the jacket, which are now unaccountably too small, I'm wearing pants I just
bought from REI that not only match the jacket almost perfectly, but that fit
comfortably and that stretch. And they're the same size as the too-small
suit pants so I can pretend it's the pants that shrunk. (Though I doubt Tencel
does shrink, so this is pure self-delusion.) In these pants, which are even better
for having been on sale at an absurdly cheap price, I can subdue anyone who does
give me a hard time with spinning Charlie's Angel kicks. If necessary. Or at least
my pants are capable of it; whether I can pull off spinning kicks is another
question entirely.