Over the river and through the woods…

I’ve missed talking about life for a little while… politics is just too important now. However, life is good an I am compelled to share my happiness.

To start with, Theresa came down for about a week. Before her visit, it would be accurate to say I was just surviving. I thought I had a grasp on long distance relationships, but given how close Theresa and I have become, this is just a wholly different situation so I definitely needed some “face time”. She got here at about 10a last Tuesday. It was my second day of work in my new group at Cisco, so I was a bit uneasy about leaving to get her. I did manage to pick her up fairly quickly though and we had a quick lunch at Quizno’s before I went back to work. I could regale you all with stories of her visit, but to say the least it was good. I will say we did manage to try a Japanese steak and sushi house I found that ended up being quite good. Theresa went home Monday this week after a very enjoyable weekend… and on Tuesday I got to go for a trip.

After 3 weeks in the choice program: 2 weeks going to group presentations, demonstrations, and the life and one week meeting with individual managers and group engineers, I decided on the Security Technology Group (yes… I can year all of your groans and “shocker” comments). One of the interesting things about the group is that they’re actually based out of Boxborough, MA and as part of my introduction to the group they flew me and the rest of the RTP team out to Boxborough for a week. I’ve spent a fair amount of time at Cisco, but the area here is beautiful (I’m actually still here) and I’ve got to go exploring a little bit. Tonight, the director is taking the group to some swanky winery for dinner and tomorrow I get to go explore Boston for a bit (which is only 30 minutes from where I am now). Even better, for the foreseeable future, my group thinks they’ll be flying me up semi-regularly.

I don’t have a great grasp on what I’ll be doing yet. For the near future I’ll be working on bug fixing in the VPN products, but in the long term I might be working on the implementation for IKEv2… assuming the managers decide they want to adopt it.