Thursday night Grandma Amy flew into town from Florida to spend a week with us. She hadn’t been to our new house in Bellevue yet, and hadn’t seen us since helping us drive up here from San Diego in early December. She had a long day on Thursday flying from Florida to Baltimore, then to Denver, then finally to Seattle, but was lucky enough not to get caught in the east coast snow storms that basically shut down the New York and Boston airports. Since arriving she, Jessica and Ava have been having fun shopping and playing. Today the three of them are going to the Freemont Street Fair while I relax and home and watch basketball.
This past week was a big one for me as well, mainly because I had my first work trip with Amazon. I flew down to Ontario, CA on Wednesday morning with my manager and a co–worker. The purpose of the trip was to meet up with a few guys from our Toronto office and work on some new solutions for software applications to be used in Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Since this was my first time visiting a fulfillment center my manager wanted me to get a tour of the place and watch the people working with their current software tools so that I could better understand what’s going on and what I’m trying to accomplish.
I must say that being in a fulfillment center is pretty amazing. Its about a million square feet, filled with products, it’s perfectly organized and so clean you could eat off the floor. I took a photo of the endless sea of products from up above but quickly found out that the only public photos of the inside of an Amazon fulfillment center comes directly from Amazon. They want to control exactly what the public knows about their internal fulfillment operations, so I’m not going to be able to post my photo here on our blog. What I can say is that you’re in a building that feels like its the size of about a dozen Costco’s, and it’s very secure.
After two very long days at the fulfillment center I came home around 9:00 on Thursday night and got to visit with Amy for a bit. Ava has been showing slight signs of a cold lately, and now I’ve got a sore throat, so we’re trying to take it easy in hopes that things won’t get any worse. She’s also constantly getting new teeth so its not uncommon for her to wake up once or twice at night. Overall she’s doing really well though and I can tell she loves being able to play with Grandma.
Yesterday Jessica and I attended a funeral for Aunt Carol’s brother John, who recently suffered from a freak accident and was not able to recover. The funeral was in Renton, very near where I grew up, so we went down to pay our respects. It was a great service. Afterwards I decided to take Jessica on a tour of my old neighborhood. We looked at the house I grew up in and visited my Elementary School and High School. It was pretty strange being back but I’m glad we did it. Soon enough we found ourselves at the Olive Garden in Southcenter enjoying endless soup, salads and breadsticks. Not exactly something we had planned on but it was fun. Last night was daylight savings so we’re getting longer days now and Spring is around the corner. I’m sure this week will fly by just like the last two have, and I’m particularly looking forward to taking Amazon’s "Making Great Hiring Decisions Class" on Thursday. Until then…