Another milestone

Just before the weekend, I reached another important milestone: the end of two major projects I have been working on for the past 18 months. These were large, million-dollar projects involving, at times, between 30 and 40 team members in India and Vancouver. There were times when I doubted we would ever be able to ship, as these are software projects and you always find bugs to fix in software. That's simply the nature of the industry.

For the first time since I joined my current company, I have a fairly light workload. I have to admit that I'm enjoying the break, and the time to reflect, to clean up my PC and my desk. I also looked at the project slate, and until the end of 2008, we will mainly be working on small projects, service packs and add-ons, nothing ambitious like what we just delivered to market. I guess now it's our sales team's turn to work their magic and close new deals. We're received feedback from customers and partners who have attended a recent conference, and it's been overwhelmingly positive: they like the product.

I think I did a pretty good job on these projects. My boss also seems to think so, as I have received a stellar evaluation earlier this week: exceeded expectations. And today, this beautiful bouquet of flowers was delivered for me at work (from my boss and my boss' boss):

How wonderfully thoughtful. It's a gorgeous bouquet with lavender-coloured roses, lilies, and other flowers I can't identify that are white and dark purple. I love flowers. They brighten up a room, smell lovely and great conversation starters (even with perfect strangers!).

So, I promised a short recap of the past weekend, here it goes. My friend Scott, whom I've met through Tucker, regularly organizes these roadtrips to music festivals. Until now, roadtrips had been reserved for guys, no girls allowed because we apparently would spend too much time on girly stuff and drive the guys crazy. I, not being a girly girl, had been bugging Scott to let me tag along on one of the trips. Well, here was my chance now. Scott and Tucker had planned to spend the weekend at Sasquatch, but they were looking at options to keep the price of the trip down. Scott asked if I was interested, I asked if I could bring another not girly-girl along (Sarah) and next thing you know, the four of us are planning a roadtrip.

Scott had already reserved a hotel room a 30-minute drive from the Gorge, so we had a place to stay, but we didn't have tickets. We soon learned that Sunday was sold out (that's the day when The Cure was performing). "Sold out is a state of mind", said Scott. We had no choice but to believe him and left Vancouver at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Our destination was five hours away, quite a ways to drive when you're not sure you'll get in to the event.

We made it into Ephrata, Washington and checked in at Travelodge. We dropped by Safeway to buy some food and bottled water for the festival, then quickly visited the Subway for lunch. We then headed for the Gorge. The temperature was very warm and sunny, there was already a lineup of cars waiting to access the site when we arrived. Scott rolled down his window and started yelling: "Tickets, tickets, who's selling? We're looking for tickets if you're selling." Even in the traffic lineup, we got a few show of hands, or calls back. Unfortunately, we had to keep on moving and decided to focus on tickets once the car was parked.

Well, it took well over an hour to get our four tickets. At first, Sarah and I stayed at the car while the guys were scouting the parking lot. We didn't really know how to haggle for tickets, how much we should negotiate them for, hell, we didn't even know what to look for on the tickets themselves (how do you know if you're getting a real ticket?). But after only scoring two tickets, Scott came back, gave us a quick overview of his tricks and set us off to help.

We did pretty well for first timers and managed to buy two tickets (one for Saturday and one for Sunday) for $50 each. The face value was approximately $80, once you included taxes and surcharges. Not bad. With Scott's other tickets purchased at $20(!!), $45 and $50, we averaged $41 each for Saturday's show. I'll save you the details of our experience on Sunday, which was similar, but where we managed to average tickets at $35 each. We were apparently getting better at negotiating, and we bought one extra ticket that Scott managed to sell back to someone for $100. Unbelievable.

The two days of Sasquatch were incredible. If you've seen the pictures, you'll understand what I mean when I say that the site was incredible. Here are my highlights (and lowlights) of the weekend:

• Highlights: Discovering M.I.A.'s music and rushing down to the stage level to dance with the crowd, R.E.M. first hour, no sunburns, napping on the grass between shows, no lineup at the border (each way), people watching (the stories I could tell about how people dress), The New Pornographers and their amazing singer, Tegan & Sara who are two adorable sisters from Calgary, Sarah and I scoring our own tickets
• Lowlights: R.E.M. second hour (rain + wind = freezing), Modest Mouse (mainly screaming, not singing), waiting for The Kooks to start and giving up after 45 minutes of soundcheck, portable toilets in the evening (good thing for the night falling, you missed out on the gruesome details), not having a blanket and getting your ass wet from sitting directly on the grass

We drove back to Vancouver after The Cure (who gave a pretty good performance but played too many songs I didn't recognize), leaving the Gorge at 1 a.m. and making it back home around 5:30. I slept from 6:30 to 8, had a shower, and went to work for the day.

Would I do this again next year? You bet!