in the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway american dream

Today was a great day, despite spending almost three hours in traffic because I went down and came back at peak rush hour. Actually, most of the cold, hard facts would indicate that I had a bad day; the trip to work took an hour and a half, I got three allergy shots, I didn't have time for lunch until finally eating a sandwich at 3pm while sitting in another meeting, it took an hour and a half to get home, and then I spent two hours working.

But, it was still good -- mostly because I successfully led a team meeting, which was entertaining because I got to subject 500 people in four different offices to random Iowa trivia. For this particular meeting, the meeting organizers compile a deck of slides from all the presenters, but they rotate who actually leads the meeting, and the meeting leader has to introduce each speaker. For whatever reason, the meeting leader gives some trivia between each topic -- and I told the organizers that I wanted my trivia to be Iowa related. So they put together slides with Iowa features and supplied some trivia (John Wayne's birthplace, Iowa beating Penn State last weekend, etc.) I also supplied my own trivia -- in particular regarding the Honey Bee War with Missouri.

I think I was generally polished, but I did have one slip-up. One of the trivia facts was about where the name "Iowa" came from, and the answer of course was from the Ioway tribe. Unfortunately, my monologue went something like this: "Iowa was named after the Ioway Indian tribe, who was led by Chief White Cloud [pictured]...I probably should have said Native American, but we still call them Indians in Iowa...yeah, I shouldn't have said that" at which point I passed the mic abruptly to the next presenter. Other than that, though, it went swimmingly, and as long as no one complains to HR about me, I think it was a success!

So forcing that many people to learn more about Iowa pretty much made my day. The other thing that made my day is that it was effectively my Friday -- I'm taking tomorrow off, and I'm going to finish this book if it kills me! Despite the relatively early hour, I think I'll go to bed so that I can get up tomorrow and get started. Goodnight!