Saturday, February 19, 2011

A Test

If you'd like to find out whether you really understand American culture, here's a suggestion. Take an Asian work colleague who is in the United States for the first time to a Wal-Mart in a town you don't really know. If you navigate the colleague's shopping list correctly, you're a winner!

Friday, February 18, 2011

Shippensburg Sunset

I'm in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, in the middle of a two week training assignment. One of the companies under the same corporate umbrella as the IT company I work for has a manufacturing facility here. The manufacturing company had a bill of material and engineering change notice application developed by a third party several years ago, and now that they have decided to "bring it in house", I get to take over primary support and maintenance.

I got here last Sunday, in time to wander around town, find the plant, and have a nice late lunch at the Before And After Café ("...for before and after whatever you're doing...", as the menu put it). I spent the rest of the afternoon lazing around my hotel room. Once I got hungry for dinner, I decided to check with the front desk on what would be a good place to eat on a Sunday evening. I wasn't surprised, this being a town of 7500, when I was told that most places were closed and that my best bet was to head the 15 miles down Interstate 81 to Chambersburg.

It was overcast when I left the hotel, and I simply forgot to grab the camera, which is something I'm always going to regret. Since there is no picture of this, I hope my words do the scene some small justice: As I headed south on the blacktop, the quiet, sleepy fields to my right were covered with a thin blanket of snow. The sun slipped under the dark clouds toward the western horizon, and its red light transformed the closest ones, so that they were not on fire, they were fire. The ones dead in front of me and just to my left became glowing embers, while the ones to the east were gray ash.

As the song says, it's only for a moment, then the moment's gone. But the memory...the memory endures.