We arrived in the Keys on Saturday without too much incident. The trip was long as always but spread over 2 days, it seemed like more than forever. I think we’d just rather have drove through the night and gotten it over with. And why couldn’t Georgia have something worthwhile to look at along the highway? We didn’t get into Florida on schedule due to road construction and the kids needing to pee at inopportune times. We had also planned to eat picnic-style for lunch but the weather would threaten with rain and thunder.

We got into Gainesville late in the evening and stopped for the night at a Days Inn. After a [good] night’s sleep (it was as good as it was going to get, frankly), we headed back on the road onto the turnpike. There was some traffic congestion when we first got onto US-1 but we did get to Steve’s before sunset. We even had time to relax in the pool before bed.

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Thursday was “Bring Your Child to Work Day”. This is the first year that I’ve been able to participate father-wise. The past years, I’ve participated on behalf of the company with our laptop teardowns. This year, they didn’t plan anything truly special which, I think, is kind of sad. Overall, the kids though that was the best thing, taking apart laptops. Something mom and dad would be fearful of them doing to their own equipment. Alas, there was nothing special planned. I brought Jacob with me in the morning and he spent the entire day, helping me out and asking questions about what I do all day.

The day was good. Jake thought it was cool that he got his own visitor badge at the security desk when we came in. We went up to my cubicle and he was introduced to my coworkers. After taking part of my morning ritual of hot cocoa and daily origami, we set out via the gerbil tubes into the campus to work on a ticket. Jake did seem interested in what I was doing when I talked with our customers and I explained to him how we could fix the problem at hand. Afterwards, we went up to the hardware team’s area and my ex-team lead gave him a personal laptop teardown session. I had forgotten the camera at my desk or else I would have a picture of that. Well, tarter sauce.

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