| Good week for… | Bad week for… |
| Health-food stores, after Italian researchers isolated an erection-inducing plant compound in a widely sold Chinese herb known as Horny Goat Weed. The compound, icariin, may be as effective as Viagra, researchers said. | Biological warfare, after a West Virginia man was charged with battery on a police officer for passing gas in the direction of the cop who had pulled him over for drunken driving. A prosecutor later dropped the battery charge. |
—From The Week Magazine 10/10/08—
Our manager worked from home today with a massive head cold, which I appreciated. I truly would not like to be on a plane for 13.5 hours with a cold.
We had a staff meeting today for everyone who works for my boss’s boss—so about three departments of 25 or 30 folks. I volunteered to take the meeting minutes.
In the afternoon, I met with my officemate and teammate, Rhonda, where I filled her in on the work I’ve been doing in case anything comes up while I’m gone that she might need to handle.
Our P2P delegation leader, Linda, asked me to update a table for her with everyone’s areas of expertise and personal goals for the trip, which will be used in our introductions.
After a lot of traffic drama for Joe, he and I took the bus from Hillsborough Street out to the State Fair.
Joe’s work gives their employees two free tickets to the fair each year, so we used those, and went there solely to eat. We did a good job at it, too.
With and alternating salty and sweet agenda, we started off with Polish Sausage gyros with grilled onions and peppers. We got some root beer at the A&W booth. Next was a funnel cake with powdered sugar and glazed apple chunks on it. On to salty—french fries with vinegar.
Our final, sweet, stop was in a tent-like area, where you got a big plastic bowl upon entering and the candy was $2.50 a pound. They had hundreds of tubs with hundreds of kinds of “penny candy,” several of which I haven’t seen since being a kid. We actually didn’t go too wild there, and walked out with just under two pounds worth.
On the way out, we were looking for the place to buy fudge, but we didn’t try real hard, and never found it. Having gotten totally disoriented walking around there and gorging ourselves, we had to ask a cop to direct us to the entrance we had come in through, as we had to return to that particular one to catch the bus back to Hillsborough Street by my work.
Joe came up and saw my office, where I checked the Method Road city bus to see if it was still running. It was about 9:45, and the last run was at 10:13, so I sent him on his way, and caught that one home.