Retrospective Recap #3

This recap is more work related. I can safely say that we've started into beans. Not much mind you but things are working well so far and we have a few spots harvested. Not as much as I'd like but hopefully if we have a nice week next week, we can be done with them and move on to the fun crop, corn. I'm going to mostly talk corn here. I was in corn all last week, with a brief intermission to do bean comments. This week ran a very similar course. I was co-hosting our NA corn advancement lead and another big corn technical player who reports to him. There was also a well known breeder visiting from the US at the same time. They arrived midday Tuesday and had to leave midday Thursday so I had two days and two nights to entertain them, pick their brains and mostly familiarize them with corn in Canada. From the emails I've been getting today, I'm pretty sure it was a raging success. I kept things at a high enough tempo during the week that I never really had time to think and wonder if it was going well. I had to pick up the slack of being gone so much as soon as they left so I never really had the chance to ponder the success after either. But now that I'm able to take a minute, it's pretty sweet that things went well. At least that is the feedback I'm getting from the visitors and colleagues who took part. Everyone seemed to have a great experience. The Blue Jays won both games they played during the tour as well. Things all around went pretty well over the course of the week. It was interesting with this experience, I wasn't nervous or over-prepared leading into the week. I had a decent plan with lots of flex points to accommodate deviations, but it wasn't a great plan. Everything seemed to go smoothly. The dinners were relatively off the cuff too but with great professional interactions. It was one of those things that appears as a big thing in your calendar, something you could worry about. A hurdle to clear before you can get back to "normal" work. I'm glad I'm done it, and that it went well. I have to roundup some folks to fix my data viewing options but other than that it's time to go like mad and bring in the crops (and results!). I'm hoping I can keep everyone halfways up to date.