For a while now I’ve been mostly “everything is awesome… life is amazing… blah-blah-woof-woof”. It’s really nice to be a part of this repeating record, especially given what I’ve been through to get here. It doesn’t make for very exciting writing though. I mean, day after day of the same routine gets boring to write (and most certainly to read too), so today I’m happy to be reporting live from the airspace just above Iowa.

Yes, it’s leg #1 of my two-week, whirlwind travel burst across the US. In total, I’ll be on 12 flights in the next two weeks. Today is the start of it. As I said I’m up in the air now and will be landing in Chicago in about an hour. Then it’s up again and back down at my first destination which just happens to be Nashville!!

I’ve never been but I’ve had a couple people tell me it’s a great city. Though I will only be there for 2 and a half days, I’m going to get to experience a couple really great things. Dinner out at a great place with live music tonight, co-working downtown with my Work peeps tomorrow, and out on a boat on a lake on Saturday. Winning!!

I will be meeting my boss(es) in person for the first time today. That’s pretty nerve racking but I’m sure it will be fine. I just have to keep telling myself that like a tiny little pep-talk until the moment arrives. My anxiety about this sort of thing never gets better but history has repeated itself so many times. I feel it, but the moment arrives and the social autopilot takes over and, Walaa!, everything goes just fine.

The most insane part of it is that I worry what my hair looks like, and clothes and how they might judge me. I professed a while back that I was coasting into “don’t care” mode about what other people think, and in general, that’s still true. However, these people are signing my paychecks (virtually speaking), so there’s still a fairly significant desire to make a great first impression.

I brought one of my favorite business casual dresses to change into at the Chicago airport so I can arrive looking the part. One of the other consultants who lives in Nashville is picking me and another person up at the airport so I’ll have to have my A-game on from the start. Considering this trip is supposed to be a retreat, half of what we are doing is social and “fun”, so I have to be prepared for that too.

For that reason, I brought my “dress to impress” dress to wear to dinner tonight. I swear, if I’m wearing that dress, it doesn’t matter what kind of a hair day I’m having or what I say. All I have to do is show up and just Coast through whatever the event is. Yeah, the dress is THAT powerful. Its like Popeye’s spinach. Most assuredly that’s all in my head, but whatever.

Tomorrow we are going to the office downtown and I guess they are having a photographer come in to take headshots of everyone to put on the web sight. Whoa! That sounds serious. Again, whatever. It just means I had to also pack a suit. My professional wardrobe has dwindled quite a bit in the last 6 years, but I still have one nice (relatively new) outfit for job interviews and funerals. That sounds so bad, but it’s true. In my everyday life I will NEVER wear that stuff again. If I went for a job and going to an office wearing business attire was part of the deal, my response to that is “no thanks”. Actually, if I can swing it, I will never go into an office again.

This new remote worker lifestyle is IT for me (minus any regular travel). Now that I’m becoming a “Cloud Guru”, it’s almost a guarantee because that is the whole point of the cloud and cloud computing. You can be anywhere in the world and log on and do your thing, run your business, spin up new servers, or run serverless. Yeah, you heard it here first folks.. server-less computing is the new black!

Anyway.. I’m feeling the plane doing a slight decline and I’m guessing my time here is almost up. The next time I write will likely be from Nashville.

On the Move Again,

~Miss SugarCookie