Sitting here in Charlotte-Douglas International waiting for boarding back to a snowy Pittsburgh, reflecting on the week just completed.

I don’t get scared in planes and lost any sense of nerves some time ago, but I have to admit that Tuesday night was a knee-knocker after Pittsburgh got socked with snow. We seemed to sit forever at the de-icers, and while we were there I got to watch the snowplows struggle to keep the runways clear. Knowing a several hundred ton aircraft is trying to take off on an ice rink and flying through a mini-blizzard isn’t good for the mindset. The icing on the cake would be looking out the window as we’re climbing, watching the strobe light on the wingtip give the snow blowing past a creepy 1950’s horror feel.

How much meat is too much? Had dinner Wednesday night at a place whose name I continually forget where the specialty is smoked meats. We both ordered a dinner sized sampler platter that came with pulled pork, a mini rack of ribs, a quarter chicken, and pit pot roast…not to mention two sides. Yep, I never came close to finishing it. An OK restaurant, but not one I’ll be going back to anytime soon. The pork products were good, but the beef and chicken sucked.

As much of a fiscal conservative as I am, I have to admit that I liked my first foray into Charlotte’s light rail line. We drove to the southern line garage off 485 and took the northbound train to Woodlawn for the aforementioned smoked meat joint. Very convenient to get to the place, other than the brisk February air. I’d love to see the corridors cover the northern, northeastern, southeastern, and western lines, but my good bud on city council assures me that it’s not a financial reality and that they may never be built. That sucks, as I’d love to have a trip just once where I didn’t have to worry about renting a vehicle at all. It’s OK when I get great cars, but when I get the Korean subcompacts it’s not much fun.

Speaking of which…I’ve been a Pontiac guy for a long time, and this trip reminds me of that. I was lucky enough to get a G6 one time down here, and this time I rolled around in a Grand Prix. Big and sleek, yet not very heavy means the 3.8L V6 hauls some serious ass around town. This thing picks up when you tell it to, and the steering is super tight. If I had a spare $20k lying around I’d drive it home with me.

Our campus facility is quite large, which offers advantages and drawbacks. The good selection is decent and there’s a lot of other amenities for us during the day. Being so large, though, makes it easy to feel lost….figuratively for me and literally for a new hire. My favorite part of the enormity comes during breaks & getaways. Working on-site for my company can be stressful when being pulled five different directions at once. When I was here full time I used this method of relaxing occasionally, but now that I’m a road warrior I use it each day to combat the change in scenery, schedule, and stress. Some of the larges bathrooms in the buildings are tucked away in low traffic corners (I know exactly why they’re there, but I’m not giving away where they are).

(Ed note – “Sorry…somehow the rest of this post got lost in the mail and I’m not sure what else I had written.”)

While sitting here on a worthless conference call (one that makes “The Bobs” of Office Space look useful) I’m reviewing my e-mails and feedback from a quickie schedule analysis in terms of wins and losses. Since I have a nice, concise listing there it seems tailor-made for posting here. This isn’t a hard and fast 2008 prediction with full situational analysis, impact players, and the like. This is a “first glance, first gut” set of picks based on the press release.  (Of course, I always hope for 12-0 and think it’s possible this year too, but I’m trying to be reasonable.)

• Villanova (8/30) – W. Can’t see it any other way.
• at East Carolina (9/6) – W, but it may be more difficult than we’d like.
• at Colorado (9/18) – W. I know they pulled a couple upsets last year but they threw up some stink bombs too. Glad this is a September game, but it would be nice if it were a couple games later.
• Marshall (9/27) – W. See Villanova.
• Rutgers (10/4) – W. They’re going to be a second tier team in conference for awhile. Losing Ray Rice to the pros this year hurts big time and Mike Teel will be tested.
• Syracuse (10/11) – W. See Villanova, Marshall
• Auburn (10/23) – The first Big Test. If we struggle with ECU and Colorado, this could be an L. For balance sakes, I’ll keep it one for now.
• at Connecticut (11/1) – W. I expected them to be better than this overall as a program. The BE title last year was a fluke, as they won it Wake-style while Rich was betting the under on Pitt. Hard to replicate it again.
• Cincinnati (11/8) – W. We play them better here than there.
• at Louisville (11/22) – W. My gut tells me to write this one up as a loss, but I can’t knowing that a lot of offensive weapons are gone and the defense that sucked horribly returns.  Can Ron English make a big difference?
• at Pitt (11/28) – W. And in a big way. I sense that this will be a hardcore revenge game on the visitor sidelines.
• USF (12/6) – L. Dammit, it’s December on a Florida team and I want to call it a W, but until we show we can beat them I can’t justify it.

So 10-2 is a waaaaay too early call for 2008. I really think we can beat Auburn, but I have no confidence in the USF game.  I like this schedule for a couple of reasons.  First, as a giant FU to the former coach, five of our seven home games are played before Halloween and six are done by the first week of November.  Second, it’s backloaded for BCS exposure.  Third, it should be light enough on the front end to allow the new coaching staff a chance to get their feet wet before the meat of the schedule kicks in.  It still has the 1-AA/FCS/whatever division and two C-USA patsies, but it is also bolstered by an old Big 8/Big 12 name in Colorado and the always potent Auburn Tigers.  With return games and the addition of Michigan St. and Florida St., the schedule continues to improve.

Seems like I could find my share yesterday….

Good Times – Girl Scout cookies are in!  For three boxes my weakness for Thin Mints will be exploited.

Bad Times – Thanks to a long winter, a sedentary lifestyle, bad eating, and the crazy pills, my waistline is expanding and Thin Mints don’t help.

Bad Times – The toilet refill valve on the tank cracked and started leaking water on every flush.  I hate plumbing on the best of days, and it took us 3-4 tries to get the valve & related parts installed.

Good Times – Jen noticed the washer I was missing that would keep the tank from dripping water, and after installing that there were no more tank leaks.  10 hours and one overnight later, the newspaper we put under the tank for testing purposes was dry as a bone.

Good Times – I still have a job, and get to see some of my old friends soon in Charlotte.

Bad Times – It takes me away from family, and there’s inclement weather on both departure and return days that could mess my schedule up.

OK, it’s been several years, lots of therapy, much trial and error, and plenty of emotional train wrecks. After all the angst & mental suffering I’ve put myself and my loved ones through, I’ve reached a breakthrough point in my progress during the last several months and it’s time to come clean.

I am bipolar.

What we used to know as manic-depressive, where people would be flying high and fast through life only to enter a dark, brooding period of despair…that’s me.  Fortunately I am not sitting here with the extreme case where people empty their bank account on Furby’s, have sex with an entire apartment building in one night, then turn depressed and suicidal in the blink of an eye.  That’s the commonly known bipolar.  Several other flavors exist including mine…bipolar II.  Type II has the same mood swings as the main kind (type I) but not to the same extremes.  While I go through the swings, I do have more control over the actions & impulses than someone with full-blown bipolar does.  It didn’t always used to be that way, as my wife and friends will attest, but over several months of treatment both through medication and therapy it is now.

Bipolar was never a possibility in my mind as a problem – I just always presumed depression & anxiety.  The kicker for most people is that they seek help when they’re down, not when they are supposedly “good”.  I’ve also shown less impulsive behaviors over the year (I’m talking grand-scale impulsive stuff here) that with most people didn’t trigger the idea.  While all the depression meds were nice, they still didn’t keep the cycling down, and it was the latest shrink who saw signs and suggested trying a mood stabilizer to see if that would help.

It’s been about 3-4 months since I started down the Seroquel road, and things are looking much brighter.  Those close to me can tell a real difference, and I can see the changes now.  The story earlier about dealing with everything surrounding my grandmother’s death reflected my first post-episode wrap-up since starting the meds, and marked the first time that I was able to clearly perceive a change.  That is refreshing and exciting.

I still have a long way to go before I can be considered totally in control and on top of my game, and the acceptance of this as a lifelong item isn’t quite there yet.  It does give me a chance to feel good about myself for once, and right now that’s all that I’m asking for.

Perusing the Sci/Tech area of Google News before taking lunch today when a collection of articles on the new Thunderbird Messaging development project caught my eye.  I use the Thunderbird client as my main mail app since I don’t heavily calendar my personal life (yay Palm!) and it has some kickass spam filters.  The lead headline was an article complaining that Mozilla has spent more time announcing things and less time building them.  One passage in particular I found to be quite succinct and applicable to my daily life:

“I have a suggestion for you Mozilla : Less talk and more action. Instead of telling us what you are going to do to get in gear, just do it. Let’s see some nightly builds, finite timetables and milestones, you know the stuff we can sink our teeth into. Announcements about strategy and direction are all fine and nice, but there comes a point when actions speak far louder than words.”

It’s as if I work side-by-side with this complete internet stranger.

Since our application was moved from a “business” area back into Network, my senior teammate and I have been involved in “planning” and “strategy” sessions for months with different areas of leadership.  Quite a disparate group too, although they do share one characteristic – they either are or are representatives of our senior leadership.  And almost to a person, each and every one of them is wrapped up in the strategy & politics of a problem.  Very rarely do any of them have tangible ideas on actually how to solve a problem, and most look at us with a dumbfounded stare (or dead silence if it’s a conference call) when we ask questions or bring up ideas that magically get things done.

This problem probably exists prevalently in most companies amongst the layers and layers of middle/lower-upper level managers…the real life Tom Smykowski’s that make us all wonder how much more productive we’d be if they didn’t exist, and how much more money we could make if they weren’t taking up valuable budget space.

Eventually, we get to do the things we want to do after going through the tiring and generally worthless process of having three meetings and throwing out enough suggestions that eventually confuse the bastards.  Rather than admitting that they are woefully under-prepared and have no idea what we’re talking about, they’ll act authoritative and say “Sure, that would be a good idea.  Would you like to ‘investigate’ and ‘report back’ “?

At least it provides job security.