Richard and I, shortly before we flew off to Chicago, agreed to try to be good about food while we were on our business trip. Uh. Yeah. That hasn't lasted, but we're in good company. Half the group is on some kind of diet program, and we're all failing miserably. Of course we're having a grand time doing it.

Tuesday was our first day of training. The folks who are training us (plus the other people who work at the local Benthic Creatures office here in this lovely suburb of Chicago) are all incredibly nice and friendly. They had Chicago-style pizza delivered for lunch one day, and the next took us all to this huge 50's style restaurant with hot dogs and sausages and burgers and salads too big too finish. Then tonight King Squid flew in and took us all to the Weber Grill, where all the food is actually cooked on Weber grills (charcoal briquettes and everything). I thought this was so cool that I had to go outside and call my dad just to tell him about it. Yes, I'm far too easily amused.

The training hasn't been nearly as intense as either Richard or I had been expecting. For one thing, we didn't even get our laptops to take with us until yesterday (heck, we had no network access at all til Tuesday. We're talking serious computer withdrawal for the few of us computer nerds!). And frankly, the stuff we're learning is not rocket science. It all makes perfect sense. Sure the system we're learning how to train isn't perfect, but it doesn't need to be. I can train this, no sweat. I'm actually having a lot of fun with this. Granted I may be having serious second thoughts the first time I get in front of one of those classrooms full of 100 or so mollusk handlers, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

We've found the local Starbucks. We've tracked down two bookstores and a mall for later. We have access to email and I can catch up on all my journal reading (although having to do that on a dial-up has given me new incentive to try to avoid adding any new links to my already far too long list of daily reads). So far, so good!