Red Panda Issues

   {{Wife}} made a comment on the drive back from Boise today that bringing the family on work trips probably makes them much harder. While that is true, it doesn't make it less enjoyable. One blessing in disguise for this trip was that the marketing folks registered us for the Professional Pass for this water conference, which gives you access to the vendor floor, classes, and food, but does not include a booth. Had I known that in advance, I wouldn't have packed an entire trade show into the bed of my truck. But I can't say I was sad to not have to set everything up and stand around for two days trying to coax people to talk to me about measuring and controlling their water.

   It gave me a lot more flexibility to make sure the family was taken care of and having a good time. I'm very glad the Riverside Hotel has two swimming pools, because without them, this would have been a very different trip. Boise in early spring is not exactly brimming with activities, especially when it's raining the entire time. We made it to the zoo, which was surprisingly good. Most of the enclosures were large, and almost all the animals were out. Unlike at Hogle Zoo, which is a mishmash of new and old enclosures where the animals always seem like they are hiding. The red panda exhibit was our favorite. They look like giant stuffed animals walking around. One of them was doing something odd almost the entire time. There was a log against a fence, and it walked back and forth, standing up on its hind legs and rubbing its face against the slats. It was hard to tell if it was just touching its nose to the fence as it turned around or brushing against it. Over and over, back and forth. For the rest of the trip, {{daughter}} loved to say, “Red pandas have issues.” This didn’t stop her from convincing us to buy her a stuffed animal version at the gift shop and naming it SeeSee (making sure we knew it was from Boi-SE). 

   Speaking of odd, Idaho recently seems to be pulling me in as much as Montana was pushing me away. Starting last week, almost every phone call and email was about something going on in the Gem State. This didn’t really occur to me until last night as I drifted off to sleep after watching season two of For All Mankind, my interest rekindled after the launch of the Artemis mission this week. Some of the activity has been related to existing projects {{salesrep}} started, but much was not. This trip has been on the books for a long time, so it worked out well for me to at least call on {{Construction company}} while I was in town. I was aghast to find out they've seen no one from {{my company}} before. For as big a project as this is, you would think an in-person visit would be a good place to start. I brought them Cafe Rio yesterday, and it went very well.

There was a moment after I dropped them off at the front entrance, I was hunting for a parking spot, driving down a narrow aisle between two rows of cars, when two geese stood in the way. It was just like at the refinery. Two birds just standing in the road, oblivious to their surroundings. I shouldn’t be surprised, since the hotel is along the river and there are tons of geese, but it was still strange.

   But all the calls and emails have already generated two more trips to Idaho. One next week to do some training at the {{ice cream}} plant. And another the following week. After my Teams meeting with {{dairy}} yesterday, it's apparent there are a lot of chart recorders in this area, and virtually no support for any of them. This is the perfect way for me to get into just about every single food plant in this area.

   The specs in the pressure transmitter request from {{engineering firm}} this week, a company I've never heard of and whose website is spectacularly generic, were extreme enough that I'm guessing they are involved somehow in the development of these micro nuclear reactors. I know the INL is in that area, but most of the business we do with them is through local integrators. Everything about their branding and presence gave off the vibe of deep-pocketed dude bro VC. I'll need to do some research to have a better idea of what's going on. Between the money being spent on those projects and on the Micron plant expansion, cracking into either of those would be great.

   For as many times as I've driven through Idaho on the way to the Pacific Northwest, I've done little exploring off the beaten path. There was Camp Perkins one summer someplace in the Sawtooths (send a sheltered Mormon boy to a Lutheran summer camp and you can just imagine how that would turn out), and a few trips to the Jackson Hole area, but other than that, I've just seen a lot of volcanic rock from the highway, then plenty of food, cow, and wind farms en route to a PNW vacation. Over the long weekend, I'll do some research on ways to maximize my trip next week in between calls and in the evening. I thought these would be my two weeks of no travel before heading to Denver for Steering Committee, then back to Montana.