Great Retreat in Oklahoma

I still have some photos to crunch and remove proprietary information from the photostream, of course. I’ll be posting the gallery for the last 2 days when I get that done, though. I’m sitting at Cory’s house… but I guess you need to know who Cory is for that to make sense. I put our names on our team photo once we got back to civilization today and put it up at http://ithemes.com/about/.

It’s about time to go to bed, but I’ll have to turn my mind off. Going back a few days, I can run down our activities.

We got up at the pre-crack of pre-dawn on Monday at 4am and got to the airport just after 6:00 for my 8:00 flight, just like I like it. After the boarding started, I took my time to stand up because of the stupid tiered boarding for Continental. First Class, First Class wanna-bes, People who paid too much, and then cripples and young-ins. THEN it was time to start loading from the back of the plane. By the time I got to board 3/4 of the plane was full, and I was 6 rows behind the wing emergency exit rows. Ridiculous!

After we backed out from the gate, the captain came on the intercom to tell us that the engine light came on when he started it up, so we were pulling back up to the gate to have maintenance run diagnostics. Thirty minutes later, we were cleared to go, hopefully with a functional engine.

We landed in Houston, thirty minutes late, of course, and boarding on my next flight was set to begin in… 3 minutes! In another concourse! First thing first, I went to the bathroom and jogged to the monorail to go to the right concourse and got there a good 20 minutes into the boarding period. I ran right up to the door with the pass scanner lady and she asked me if I was ready to board to Oklahoma City… “yeah…” So, she scanned my boarding pass and I jogged down the ramp to the civilized world’s smallest commercial jet — I’m talking Gulfstream 5000-sized — only to find that I was the first person on board!

The flight attendant asked me where I was going. I told her, “Row 14.” She wasn’t amused. Apparently, because someone before me was a moron and was trying to go to Atlanta, she needed to ask me what city I was going to. I passed the test because I can read red LED signs above doorways, and was allowed to sit down, in the last row of a 14-row jet. Wow! I had the row to myself, and was quite pleased with that, at least.

After what seemed like forever, two people boarded, and one guy kept coming back further and further. You guessed it. Our flight was held for these two from a connecting flight, and he was my row buddy, and my armrest and left rib buddy, too. He was not a wee man. Yay for football programs and what they do to physiques!

Wow, this is getting long, and I’m not even there yet.

We arrived 30 minutes late, but Nathan was an hour late arriving from South Carolina. Once we were all present and accounted for, we had to hit McDonald’s before I died of starvation. A double quarter-pounder with cheese, fries, and 2 drinks later, I felt human again, and we got moving on to Lake Murray park, where we had a cabin reserved for 2 nights.

I can’t really say much about what went on… “what happens in Oklahoma, stays in Oklahoma,” but I can say that we are all, without exception, very excited about the near future, short-term goals, and long-term prospects that we really dug into over hours and hours of debates, brainstorming, and two coups against Cory’s previous ideas. 🙂 He’s cool with it, but it sure was fun to convince him that we were right.

Without a doubt, Beautiful and I made the right decision for me to leave CAE USA after 3 years that looked like they were going to lead me on to a career with them. Ultimately, our faith is in God and that we’re going to be taken care of, but it sure doesn’t hurt to have affirmations like what our team put together this week. We are all putting everything we have professionally into making this work, and there isn’t a slacker in the bunch, not even a bit. Every day feels like a blessing to get up and do exactly what my gifts and interests are, from the comfort of our own home, wearing whatever I want, eating whenever I want, and making a REAL impact on the day to day operations that people notice.

There won’t be a time, at least for a very long time, where what each thing our core team members do accomplishes a task or goal we need to complete a project or reach a new level of design, development, innovation, and support. We are right where we want to be!

Stay tuned for more as we develop more.