Confession #1: I haven't blogged since Ojai. It's been a busy time.

Confession #2: I'm typing this in class.

Erratum: Jon is a rocket scientist, but he doesn't know how to use Pivot Tables. Not yet.

OK, let's catch up since Ojai first: it was a great experience, and I came home and spent the Sunday afterwards sort of zoned out and resting. I didn't get started on schoolwork until the evening, then I read all the syllabi, figured out what we'd have to do for our first class sessions, sent out emails to the class, and got started working on the assignments. I also bought a domain name for our study group and set up some custom email aliases and a mailing list to support it, and uploaded our study group logo artwork to cafepress.com so we could buy team logo totebags and coffee mugs - nothing like team solidarity.

Um, I think that about covers Sunday. For the rest of the week it was a regular (read: fairly dull) work week, and just about all my evening hours went into doing the reading and casework for school. Thursday night we did a conference call, but otherwise we were sort of all over the place, each working on our own things without the amount of coordination we intended, and coordinating by email. Dave set us up on eProject.com, which helped a lot.

Over the 3-day holiday weekend I tried to finish up everything I could, since I'd be out of town on a business trip all week. I got most of the way there, but when I took off for D.C. on Tuesday morning there were still several articles I hadn't read, and a couple chapters in the Stat book. I'm not much good at doing that stuff on a plane - I mostly read fun stuff and watched movies instead.

Arriving in D.C. Tuesday night was fun. I stayed in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, where I lived for a few months a few years ago, and it was fun to be back there. The point of the trip was a series of two meetings with Headquarters personnel on Wednesday morning. They went well, if I'm any judge, but I'm told the intricacies of Postal politics are beyond reliable prediction by anyone. We were done by early afternoon, so I visited Georgetown before settling down to a movie and an early night.

Thursday morning I flew back to California, arriving in Long Beach where my extremely generous father-in-law picked me up and took me to school (he's a UCLA grad, so it was a nice excuse for him to visit the place). I arrived before noon, so I had time to walk down to Westwood and take a nap before study group started on Thursday night.

Once class got started, it was all pretty much a blur - until this afternoon. Today's Stat class is really just re-covering the material we read, so I have a little time to catch up. It's a good thing, too, since I'm tired enough that I probably couldn't keep up if he were covering new material.