Friday Work Weary

As I trudged home tonight, a cold and biting west wind blew full into my face. The gusts were mixed with enough sleet to make my face sting and it reminded me that the last few days of wonderful warming weather were just a tease.

The weather forecast this evening is for a either snow flurries or snow showers. Hmm, seems to me that is not an often used term. Wiki says a snow shower is a snow system leading to an accumulation of snow between 1-3 inches. Unlike flurries, which are significantly less, a snow shower can bring a decent amount of snow, be it less though than a snow storm or a blizzard. So, it sounds like we are in for some snow.

Welcome back winter… We have been basking in the glow of 2 days of wonderful spring temperatures well above zero. The walk to and from work has been pleasant and although it has not been sunny it felt like spring was here. Snow is just about all gone. Birds were singing and things seemed to be looking up. The smell of bread was in the air! Don’t laugh, my condo is near the Canada Bread company and when they open the plant windows (not during sub zero freezeups!)the waft of bread baking fills the air.

I was looking forward to resuming my habit of long walks. But no, not yet.
Not only that, but it seems I have a bit of a cold coming on. No, I am not a happy camper.
BUT – having said that, I am so glad Friday has finally rolled around. It has been a vicious week of long days and lots of work. Don’t really mind the long days and lots of work, but it does make me appreciate my weekends even more.

So I sit here in front of my nice fireplace (ok fake electric, but doesn’t it look nice?), feet up and Rickard’s White beer + slice of orange in hand. Life is good. Of course it would be better without the snow showers, but what can you do?

I am also trying to improve the quality of my blogs. So I will be posting at least one picture a day – promise! My blogs have certainly not had sufficient visual features lately and I do have a bunch of pictures which I would like to share.

This gets me to the sad news that for the next 3 weekends I will have very little time for fun. I am scheduled to write the PMP (Project Manager Professional) exam which will provide me with the professional credentials for the job I do. Not that I need it to do the job, as I have been doing his sort of work for (I hate to say, decades). The certification has only lately become de rigueur. It seems now that times are getting tough, and I may be job hunting soon, I need to have the “badge of honour”, the certificate, which says I have been certified by the governing body for my profession.

It is a 4 hour exam and there is a tremendous amount of material to be memorized, because they don’t want to know that you can do the job, they want to know if you can use the words they use to describe the 41 processes involved in project management, what activities are involved with each of them and the inputs and outputs of each of the processes. It is simply a memory test and I need to study in order to pass.

This brings me to the next point (aside from getting a bit of sympathy for the work I have to do) which is to explain to my readers how, sadly, this will affect my blogging. Truth is, I am not going to be able to write much in the way of blogs for the next number of weeks. I will write daily as promised, but I have the notion that most days I will just tell you (briefly so as not to bore) how I am making out in my studies. Promise not to recite any of the stuff I am learning for sure 99.9% of my readers would glaze over and stop reading immediately if I did.

In any event, today being Friday I plan to spend only 1 hour to put together an overall study plan for the next 3 weeks. Don’t laugh – I am a project manager after all! The first thing we PMs do is put together a plan for whatever we have to do!

BTW, you will only find the following amusing if you are a PM or have used the scheduling tool Microsoft Project. Sorry, that probably isn't many of you out there. I was looking for a picture to post and found this which grabbed my interest.

But tomorrow I must put in a full 8 hours of effort! Well, at least 6… got a date tomorrow night and I don’t want to be too brain dead!

Enjoy your Friday Night all!!!!