Quite a day here at section 31, 9th floor of CIDA HQ. The place is EMPTY. Was I not cc'd on the long weekend memo? I'd ask my secretary, but she's not here either.

Out of the BPMO team of about a dozen, (a director, secretary, consultants on contract, some translators and me) there are only two of us here. Jeanluc, one of the head translators who is a hillarious guy, is here doing his usual work translating technical documents. I met with a lady to discuss the IMTB Roadmap earlier this morning, which I had spent about an hour preparing for, but that was what I have done thus far.

I can't see myself doing much else this afternoon unless some of these other people show up. All this week I've just been studying CIDA, because the people who delegate tasks to me have hardly been here to get me to do stuff. One issue is that my manager, Joe, his wife has cancer and he is retiring in June, so he's pretty tied up with those two things. I guess its gonna be a reading and listening to Radio@UPEI afternoon again today!

Today was a good day at work.

I shaved 4 minutes off my walk to work this morning by discovering yet another shortcut. I arrived just before 9:00, right on time. That seems to be the time I get to work these days usually. I'm given a pretty flexible schedule.. arrive any time between 7 and 9am, taking however long for an unpaid lunch, and leaving any time in the afternoon as long as I put in the 7.5 hours.

Later in the morning I had a meeting with Ann, and she tasked me to do a couple things. The things were to do with a program that runs in the fall, taking delegates from developing countries and teaching them how they can best use the information management and information technology tools that CIDA offers. She asked me to make sure the SIMP sites on the CIDA internet, intranet and extranet were up to date, and to prepare a mailout to the 67 field offices (missions, high commissions, etc) with promotional materials.

Where do I start?

Walked to work on Monday morning, met my new boss in the lobby of this huge building, and got settled in with a cubicle (read:1.25 walls), a security access badge, and was shown where the washroom was. It was pretty anti-climatic... at the end of day one I don't think I was much closer to knowing what I would actually be doing this summer.

Welcome to the first post of the Ottawa weblog. I'm gonna try to update this whenever I can on my adventures over the summer..

So what a day/night/weekend... I'm in ottawa now, but it was a long time coming. Not nearly long enough, but I'm here now. Feels like I just finished finals, had a couple bbqs, and now im living in a different province! I start work tomorrow, though, so things are definetly happening pretty fast, its not just my amagination!

Woke up this morning around 8, suprisingly I was packed and ready to fly after such a great night on the homebrew and a lot of sad, drawn-out goodbyes. I even had my leather jacket on the doorknob ready to wear. That was the only thing I ended up forgetting, surprisingly.