Winter, the General and the search for red table wine

It is a cold, wintry day here in the Enchanted Mitten. As I type this, the external air temperature is a 10F. The windchill index at GRR is a bone chilling -15F. The photo to the right of this text is one of the spousal unit taken earlier today as we worked to clear off the snow from our back patio. Samson, our rescue GSD, appeared once again impervious to the cold. He was outside frolicking in the snow while we cleared away the snow. We had about 8 inches of snow fall last night, so we had some digging out to do. We have a plow service do our driveway, but I still needed to clear the walkway to our front door, as well as the walk to our side door. The snow that fell was light and powdery, perfect for skiiing and perfect for blowing and drifting. As I mentioned a few sentences ago, the windchill here is -15F, so there is plenty of wind to cause the snow to drift. I cleared the two walkways of snow a little before noon and had to repeat the procedure a few hours later because of the drifting that occurred. Yep, this is a Mark 1 Mod O winter day if I ever saw one.

Earlier this afternoon, the Maven called me out for not updating this blog since last Tuesday. Well, I have been busy. I am working on two big projects, one for Boeing and the other for Lockheed Martin. Both of these programs are in full swing and they are taking up much of my time. This is also the time of year that GE directs each employee to draft an input for their annual performmance review. GE has everybody submit their performance evaluation in the month of December, so people are scrambling to get them written and submitted before we shut down on 24 December. This is the second year that GE has been "running the show" here in Grand Rapids, so this process is still a little new to everyone. Before GE bought Smiths, annual performance evaluations were done on the anniversary of your hiring, so the work was done over the course of the year, not all in a month. My supervisor tasked me and the other technical manager in my department to help him write the performance evaluations of the technical leads. To be honest, wirting these evaluations has not been that hard, rather it has been time consuming, I have actually worked overtime the past two weeks in order to meet our self-imposed deadline to complete the evaluations bt 24 December. I am happy to report that this task is now completed.

Now, on to the search for red table wine. Our friends at Art of the Table were tasked to help us determine what kind of red wine we want to serve as part of our daily evening meal, or at least at meals were red wine is an appropriate beverage. 12 different bottles were selected, based on our past tastes. Dee and I prefer our red wine with a little bit of heft. Well, last night we had our first trial bottle with Stay in Bed Stew. The wine was Domaine Monpertuis, a French Vin de Pays du Gard. It was a good first showing, but the wine was a little young. One bottle down and 11 more to go.

I worked a half-day today and then began my Christmas break from work. I spent a good part of the remainder of the day running errands and shopping for the next few days. Check out how those meals turn out by going here.