I was so proud to see my friend and longtime colleague Carol awarded Volunteer of the Year yesterday. I’m a little fuzzy on exactly who shares this honor with me, but I get at least some of the credit for hiring her into her first post-grad school job. 20 years ago!! I’ve learned a lot from her, and I can only hope I’ve contributed something to her over the years… at least some things to NOT do.

The project that catapulted her to this dizzy height was a 3-year (!) effort to define an inclusive and affirming set of gender codes. Now, there’s a standard way to record a meaningful gender in the medical record for all those people who used to be lumped into “Other”. High profile, sensitive, contentious… you can see how steering that ship earns you an award.

Well done Carol!!

The two above were on the (lovely) Rice University campus, where I wandered around while my overachieving niece was helping the next crop of MBA students get ready for a job fair.

And here’s a nice welcome to Baltimore… the airport has its own manhole covers.

The one below had me stumped, but it turns out that it’s a marker on the Baltimore Heritage Trail, and there are many languages represented. According to a grumpy Reddit thread, the Arabic is backwards and otherwise wrong, and plaques in other languages are similarly bad.

Frank, Monique and me outside the Goode Co. BBQ in Houston last week.

This week I’m back in familiar and comfortable grounds at a data standards meeting. It’s been about six years since I was at one of these, but before that I attended three to five meetings like this each year for a dozen years or more. Different cities, different hotels, but a very carefully homogenized experience so the work proceeds with minimal distraction.

Standards development work is hard, and it’s tedious. The academic, corporate and government stakeholders — from 23 countries at the meeting I’m at today — have conflicting agendas. The people attracted to this kind of work, by its nature and its culture, are thoughtful at best, and can be obstructively pedantic when not at their best. They (we) are all experts, and there is plenty of preening and hierarchy-establishing that has to go on. In many cases when there are two alpha dogs in the room it means the formation of a new committee to go in a slightly different direction. And standards-related work usually falls under “other duties as assigned”, so things only happen when they happen.

Despite all that, work gets done, and good work. Sometimes a person or a team pushes a little harder and there’s a breakthrough. Sometimes there’s an infusion of corporate or government money that advances some portion of the work. And everyone else keeps plugging away.

As a returnee, I commented that I could walk into a room years later and pick up on a conversation as if I’d never left. It turns out I was hardly the first to observe that. Sitting at the bar last night (another important component of these meetings that just might slow down our progress), a group of us riffed on that idea with much hilarity… although thinking about it now, sober, it’s not quite as funny.

So… I guess it works like any other community. Like an electorate. Like a family. Should it be better, smoother? Of course, and when we were new, or young, or both, we knew exactly how to fix everything that irked us. But now, older and wiser, we live much closer to the serenity prayer.

Hello again! It’s great to be back. I want to hear more about your son’s graduation. Yes, let’s catch up at the Wednesday night dinner function and — hopefully — the January meeting. Let’s see, is it Orlando or Vegas next time?

I asked my Houston family to help me eat my fill of the stuff I can’t get in NZ. We had a BBQ lunch and a Mexican dinner with all the trimmings. Both were wonderful.

But this was the (quantity) highlight, breakfast the next day. A chicken-fried steak the size of a dinner plate, 3 eggs, a pile of hash browns and a biscuit as big as 4 biscuits. Gravy. More gravy. And all for less $$ than a small Auckland breakfast.

It tasted just right, and I’m both proud and ashamed to say that I ate most of it. Thanks, Frank and Monique, for letting me hang on to my Texas breakfast stereotypes… even though you guys don’t actually eat like that. Itch scratched 😋.

A few months ago, Swatch and Omega struck marketing gold with the release of the MoonSwatch.

My buddy Paul is a watch guy, and owns a real moon watch and so therefore he wanted one of these. They’re only available in Swatch stores, and there aren’t any of those in NZ. But I was going to Sydney the weekend after the release, so he asked me to try and find one.

Ha! No way, lines out the door, sold out in minutes around the world.

Somehow in this process I got to wanting one too. There’s a Mars one, so ok I’m in.

Last week I happened to be near enough to a Swatch store (in Houston) to try again. It’s been months, and they claim it’s not a limited edition, so now that the hype has died…

Ha! Dream on. We might be going to mars before I get my hands on one of these watches.

Remember the awful times 2 1/2 years ago when hand sanitizer and masks were out of stock everywhere?

Then things got better, gradually and unevenly. Over the last few months we’ve come to the point that a box of masks sits at the front desk… or in this case on a chair by the elevator. And the supermarket was literally giving away quart-size bottles of hand sanitizer last week… help yourself.

I’m reminded of Peter Senge’s classic book The Fifth Discipline, in which he illustrates the importance of systems thinking via the Beer Game. Here we are suddenly awash in all the unfulfilled orders we kept increasing during the lean times.

All other things being equal, I’d prefer beer.

After more than five years away, armed with my same old passport and my shiny new international driving permit, I’m back in the USA.

How weird! Where’s home anyway? After about 72 hours on the ground I can confirm what I suspected… it’s both and neither. I’m an outsider in NZ by birth, culture, and language. But I now see the USA with an outsider’s eyes. The kinds of things Jeff Daniels ranted about in the opening of Newsroom are now much more real after having lived in a different system.

It’s still great to be here… there’s a lot of wonderful stuff in this giant messy country, and a lot of stuff I’ve missed. I’m making a concerted effort to binge on all of it over the coming days. And then happily retreat to home.

In the time between us getting the drapes back from the cleaners and getting them rehung, Misty saw her chance and took it.

A makeshift shrine at the Hospice Shop yesterday on the occasion of the death of Elizabeth II, Queen of New Zealand.

Her passing has unsurprisingly spurred a lot of discussion about the Crown and what it means. For most less-oppressed New Zealanders, the monarchy seems to be more of a curiosity than anything else. For those who have suffered more directly and more recently from the effects of British Empire-building, it’s a more complicated discussion. But as a public figure, Elizabeth seems to have created an extraordinary amount of personal goodwill… it seems she’ll be missed and remembered fondly by most and for a very long time.

Wellington is full of municipal cast iron labeled WCC for Wellington City Council. But this one is more celebratory…

Wellington pedestrian crossing lights honoring kapa haka performers.

This is in addition to the Kate Sheppard lights I saw back on my first trip here in 2016.

I’m back in Wellington this week, where the struggle is real…

I’ll assume that this photo of the Beatles on the balcony of the St George hotel is protected by the sort of copyright scrutiny that doesn’t encourage bloggers to share, so CLICK THIS LINK.

A copy of it was in my hotel last week, and I said to myself wait a minute I know that place. It’s just a couple blocks from the office!

That tour was a huge deal for little ol’ NZ. Times have changed… lots of visiting acts stay less than a day, and the Beatles wouldn’t be found at the St George any more with its promise of long or short term accommodation. But that solid Art Deco construction easily withstood the last round of earthquakes and looks like it will be around a good while longer.

Well, after saying I wouldn’t play in many more pétanque tournaments … I spent the last three months practicing and this week competed in the annual Chanticleer Cup tournament between Auckland and Wellington.

Wellington held the Cup from 2019, the last time the event was held pre-Covid. And they kept it this time, killing us especially in the singles games where their consistency outshone our brilliance. Although I personally won 7 out of my 9 games (and I got a nice bar of Lindt chocolate as a reward), overall the Wellingtonians were just too much for us.

Here’s me and my partners for the triples competition held today. We won all 4 of our games, and celebrated with a little glass of pastis. They’re both way better than me, so my job was mostly to try and play according to a simple mantra… Don’t. Fuck. Up.

As with other sports things I’ve done, I find myself quite actively torn between “never again” and “hmm, the NZ open is in November and it’s close by this year.”