Will you be my high quality connection?

I lied in yesterday's post. What I miss most is not the time with my family. I miss the sleep.

I pulled myself out of bed at 6am this morning to make it up to campus for a day at a nearby National Guard training facility. We did a course with different obstacles that were designed to test our leadership and team skills. Being out in the sun from 8:30a to 11:30a added a nice new layer of burn to my skin. And when you're a few thousand feet closer to the sun you REALLY start to feel the effects quickly. The course was a lot of fun, and three of my teammates ended up in the water. One spectacularly so. Watching him fall was almost like watching something in slow motion. I've yet to fully analyze the experience, but did learn a lot from the ROTC officers who ran it.

In the afternoon we had an interesting course on leadership. When I first joined my old company, the majority of the people had a certain work style. Over time this style changed, and I remember discussing it with a few of my coworkers and Kristin. It was fascinating today when the leader of the seminar was talking about building connections (what he called "high quality connections" ... now if that isn't MBA-speak I don't know what is) and mentioned that there are four ways to do this. The two ways I had witnessed at my old company were two of the ways listed. It was fascinating to learn about something I'd experienced in my professional career. I really enjoyed the seminar. It caused me to think about how I can better recognize such situations and act accordingly.

During the seminar I took notes on my new laptop. It was my first time using Microsoft Word 2007. I turned to one of my learning teammates and said, "I feel like I'm in England: I speak the language but everything is on the wrong side of the road." I'm dubious about Office 2007, and have resisted well into 2008, something of which I'm proud. At least all my keyboard shortcuts still work in Excel. (Holler to my Excel peeps.) Hopefully the learning curve will not be too steep. I hear once you get used to the ribbon it's not that bad.

But I'm drained. Up too late last night blogging. Not enough sleep the last two nights. I feel asleep on the couch at 6:30 this evening, only to be awoken when Clara spilled a class of cold water on me. Not a nice way to wake up.

I'm heading to bed to get some rest.