Air France

Morning!  I've been up since 4AM!  You?

I'm working hard on getting back into the work groove and early morning hours help the groove become the groove..so...here I am.

It's in the news today that Air France is cancelling about 50% of their flights due to an air traffic controller strike in their country today and that reminded me of a story from our Paris trip.

The King of Spain visited Paris - which I realized when I took a long, meandering bus route through the city only to end up completely stuck near the Eiffel Tower because they cancelled all city buses for most of the day for security for the King.  I had seen his motorcade earlier that day - not realizing who it was in the Maybach surrounded by policeman - and then spent quite a bit of time trying to figure how to get back to my hotel in the absence of the bus that brought me (mostly) there. Thankfully, the tourist bus routes were all running so I paid for another three day hop on/hop off bus pass and was all set.

The King returned to Spain early because of the airliner crash - so his State visit of several days was just one day.

The air traffic controllers agreed not to strike as well - though J. and I would have been fine with a reason to have been 'trapped' in Paris.

Paris....feels like a distant memory.

H.'s scans are all looking good and he's doing well.  Tomorrow is the one year 'anniversary' of his health incident - can't believe it's been a year already.  He has blood work and a check-in appointment with his oncologist in three months and the next scans are planned for six months from now. Everything looks 'good' and though there is still some 'thickening' of tissue in his neck, that is the area radiated and so the radiologist thinks things look pretty much the same scan to scan.  'Pretty much the same' is a good thing - no changes in lymph nodes; his labs look good.  Yeah!

We tried a new approach - I didn't go to the appointment.  45+ minutes there and another 45+ back and then the waiting time - they waited close to an hour past their appointment time to see the doctor. That time was put to good use with me plowing through things in my office while keeping in touch with J. via text - and when the doctor was ready, they speaker phoned me in so I could hear what was being said and ask any questions.  It worked pretty well and while I plan to go to appointments as much as I can, it's a good option when trying to get away to do that is a challenge.

We celebrated H,'s clean bill of health by buying new tires for his car.  Well, we bought new tires for his car and he'll pay 50% of it back now and the rest over time - now that he has a job!

It's after 5AM now and I'd better get going on getting ready for work - big meeting today - all day work session with my boss on things for budget; board....it will be a long, productive day -

There are a lot of changes afoot at work - none of which I can really talk about - and it's hard trying to work through all these things.  I miss when even hard things seemed easy - now hard things are just plain hard.  That's leadership defined - strong leaders make everything easy and not-so-strong leaders make easy things hard.  Growing pains are inevitable in transition but sometimes lately, I just want to say "Geez, can't we just figure this out and do it instead of spending so much time talking about doing it".

If only.