Well Blog, appears I didn't do so well in my new year's resolution to keep you
up to date at all.  I've been pretty busy the last two months after the
aforementioned re-org at work.  I ended up staying on the same team, however I
did manage to lose the deadweight programmer and picked up another good guy. 
Afterwards, my guys and I have been furiously attempting to make the delivery
deadlines.  We have made excellent progress and everyone appears to be happy
with our work.  Then, my team lead wanted to take a 4 week vacation, so I am
now currently doing his job and mine.  On top of all of that, our contracter
dropped a bombshell on us and cancelled two of our product lines, so we are
still scrambling to recover from that.

I even decided to take my fate into my own hands and decided to take a job
outside of the test engineering department.  I'll be going back into HF
Products as a programmer as well as tester.  I wasn't happy with being stuck
being a PE all the time, and this provided me new programming challenges.  I
get to maintain legacy radio software applications, which means I get to pick
up real time embedded experience in Ada.  My transfer to the other department
will be on April 23rd.  It is always interesting how free people are with the
compliments once they find out you are leaving.  Amazing, if they had shown
half this interest in me when I was working for them, I would never had been
searching outside the group.  

Spring is finally coming around to Iowa.  The grass is now starting to show
green again, and the trees are budding, but haven't leafed out.  The robins
and black birds have returned as well.  Soon Dad and I will be putting in this
year's oat crop.  At the end of April we will put in the corn crop for the
year. For some reason, I'm really looking forward to spring arriving.  The
winter wasn't particularly bad around here, I just have this inner longing for
spring.  

Otherwise, not much has been happening with me.  Easter was pretty quiet,
spent it with the family once again.  The prior weekend, I drove through snow
and icy roads to help my sister out by babysitting for a couple hours while
her other sitter was unavailable.  At least my youngest niece is now old
enough that taking care of her isn't a big deal.  Hmm...appears work is
calling, so I have to return.  We'll see if I can wiggle some more blog time
with the new job change in the coming weeks.