…an iPhone today. I am getting a Blackjack from work though, so now I can be one of those self-important folks who sit in airports and bang away at the tiny little keyboards, responding to those earth-shatteringly important messages.

It will be nice to end a travel day without having unread mail piling up. I try to work with the “Getting Things Done” system, which advocates the virtues of an empty inbox - do it (if it can be done in <2 minutes), defer it (to a known time, and actually follow through), or dump it. Except for vacations, I’ve never had my mailbox break ~200 messages in the last year.

So, the new job sent me out to the Central Valley region of California all last week. Coincidentally, this was to the same plant that Marcie’s been going to for the past month and a half. We decide to take full advantage of this and stretched the trip out over the weekend so that we could visit Yosemite. The traffic in the park was a serious mess as you’d expect for a summer weekend, but we took a few nice hikes and I got a few good shots in. Here’s a sampling:

Half Dome, Ansel Adams style…

Vernal Falls

See the whole Yosemite set at Flickr. I’m having a few issues with my own gallery at the moment, so it’s not there yet.

So, now I can let the cat out of the bag. Effective in a couple of weeks, I’ll have a new job at Kraft - I’ll be working as a Program Leader in our “Lean Manufacturing” group. In plain English, my job will be work with our production sites to improve the efficiency of their people and equipment, using a lot of different best practices from multiple manufacturing industries (most of the ideas come from Toyota, but we’ll shamelessly adapt good ideas from anyone).

I’m looking forward to this change - it’s a big step up in responsibility, the work is the kind of thing I already enjoy doing, and I’ll get to travel to a lot of places (in theory, anywhere in the world that Kraft has a plant). I’ve been looking around for a new position over the past few months as my Tassimo work has been wrapping up, and this job just seemed like a great thing to do. Now I’ll be in a job that has basically nothing to do with my degree…but it’s not like milk and petrochemicals had a lot of overlap anyhow.

As a random aside, all of a sudden, it seems like a huge chunk of my high school graduating class has been linking up over on Facebook. I was originally thinking that I’d blow off the 10-year reunion, but now I want to catch up with everyone from EHS…