Friday after work we drove west then south, over one of the many Susquehanna bridges in Harrisburg and then over one of the relatively few Potomac bridges into Washington. Our stop for the evening was Georgetown, where we wandered the crowded streets before settling on a very chic, very late in the evening tapas dinner. As we were enjoying the last drops of wine and the last nibbles of manchego, the phone buzzed and Anthony and Elizabetta were on their way. We rendezvoused on a busy corner and they led the way to hip Clyde's, where we had a nightcap.

In the AM, as I like to say, we got to the Metro and rode all the way to Union Station, where we took advantage of the foodcourt for brunch. Then we ventured into the heat of the day to circumnavigate the Capital, see the Supreme Court, take some photos, and eventually get to the National Building Museum. The Building Museum has several things going for it, not the least of which is an enormous, Italian-ornate lobby. We hit several great exhibits - on Wright's skyscraper and green/sustainable housing and DC's civic engineering history and the role of architecture in rebuilding New Orleans - before browsing a great museum shop and being on our way. From NBM we began the circuitous Tour of Monuments, walking the length of the mall, around the Tidal Basin, and back to Smithsonian Metro for the ride back to Anthony's place in McLean.

Sunday was meant to be a museum tour, but instead we toured a museum - Smithsonian's American History - and were fine with that. When we'd seen about wars and cars, Julia Child and children's fascination with the Muppets, Jenelle and I said goodbye to Anthony and the District and drove home, to Macungie, with weary legs and two MemorySticks full of pictures.

Under a deadline of sorts at Knoll today. Our report draft, project description, resumes, and final PPT deck are all due to various people for various reasons at various points throughout the next three days. It's almost fun to have a little pressure to wrap things up on a Friday afternoon once more; reminds me of those heady days of emailing CAD drawings hither and yon before powering down and heading out to Sarasota's Old Salty Dog for grilled chicken Caesar salad with Drew and Kim.

In the midday there was a flurry of MTrek emails that was without rival: almost 50 messages in the span of three hours. What? Joanna called it when she said [my paraphrasing] that MTrek isn't too fun anymore. Somehow I don't think that I really appreciated the amount of year-round work that this organization would be when I signed up in September last. Now I'm finding myself ready to go on the Michigan Trek and have a blast and then kinda be done with it.

This is maybe a bad segue, but I got a note the other day from Damon Dance that Ross Habitat for Humanity (for whom I'm the director of operations) officially has a house. It's on Watling Street in Ypsilanti. Beaut.

It was "50c off your order if you're wearing yellow" day at Rita's, so we donned some maize t-shirts and headed up there to pick up some vanilla custard to go with the key lime pie that Jenelle made today. So much for the WBP...

Saturday morning we crawled out of our tents, Anthony made some killer scrambled eggs, and then we gathered up our gear for a canoe trip down the Delaware. From our put-in at Smithfield Beach in Pennsylvania we headed south with the flow. The rain arrived a short time later and pummeled us, to varying degrees, over the next hour until we were soaked quite through. Just when we had nearly reached the breaking point, we were granted a dual reprive: the rain stopped and we rounded a bend and found a great lunch spot on some New Jersey-side rocks. Jenelle assembled pasta salad and we dined on great sandwiches and said salad and grapes and cookies while the sun warmed the day and dried our clothes. Then back into boats for the balance of our 11-mile trip through the flood-ravaged Gap to Portland.

Sunday was a lazy morning with Gram making a gourmet fruit salad and english muffin breakfast sandwiches. We sat around the remnants of the fire and basked in a great morning before we had to clear the site and head for our respective homes. On our way home, Jenelle and I stopped to pick a two-quart Tupperware full of raspberries from the bear-ravaged bushes lining Old Mine Road. Then home to the Lehigh Valley, where we unpacked, took a lazy nap, and headed to Quakertown for a date with Clerks II and Coldstone Creamery.

Today's editorial comment is about the way search engines work against blogs. If you Google "Corey Bruno" today you'll get six hits related to me on the first page - none of which will be this blog. I know, I know, you are thinking "that's crazy whack, yo" and I agree. Here's the issue: Google counts actual usage of the word, not inclusion of the word in the stated contents of the blog as denoted by so-called META tags. Yahoo!, on the other hand, returns this very site as the number one response because their engine heavily weights the contents of META tags. I understand Google's 'do no evil' reluctance to take internet users at their word, but this severely slams bloggers who rarely self-reference and even more rarely speak in the third person. In order for Corey Bruno to increase the traffic to Corey Bruno's blog, Corey Bruno must mention Corey Bruno on Corey Bruno's blog. That's no way to live! I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think Google's BlogSearch (where a search for "Corey Bruno" brings up a time when my name was used in a post) needs to have an updated algorithm that factors in the heavy first person point of view bias in the blogosphere, and I need to reconsider my choice of search engines. For now I've trained the search window on FireFox (I know some of you are holding out...) back to Yahoo!, leaving Google to benignly search content without representing what it truly is.

In the evening, home from New York, the three from 312 and the Davids went to Kutztown Fairgrounds to take in a night of Spring and Slingshot racing. I hadn't really ever been to a car race before, but it was loud and fun in a gritty, high-speed, low-tech mid-America way. We realized that it probably wasn't something that we would have done without the encouragement of David (the lesser) so we were thankful for the experience.

You have to be somewhere all the time... why not here?

Friday Ryan, David (the boss), and I left work a little early and swung through Macungie to pick up Jenelle before boarding a regional jet at ABE and flying south to Charlotte. There, after spending our layover in the USAirway's lounge, we took advantage of USAir's rebooking policies and scored a roundtrip ticket each by switching from Wilmington, NC, to Myrtle Beach, SC and delaying our arrival by an hour. On the ground at the beach, we hit Italiano delite ristorante Carrabba's before heading to David's house to settle in. Afterwards, we found the House of Blues Cafe for a nightcap before turning in.

Saturday was a sort of lazy old day, with beach time and swimming time and frisbee in the surf time. We explored North Myrtle Beach's beach/cool downtown and then got cleaned up for an orchestra concert at incredible Brookgreen Gardens. On the way south we picked up picnic boxes - then spread a blanket on the grass and toasted a great day. In the interval between last bites of sandwich and first sounds of strings we walked the impressive garden and sculpture gallery, noting the gathering darkness overhead to the west. As distant rumbling whipped clouds and sent incredible bolts of lightning landward, the concert was delayed. Instead of the Charleston Symphony in the garden we had wine in the car while the storm roiled overhead, then heard official word of cancellation and drove north to Crocodile Rocks dueling piano bar at Broadway at the Beach, where we joined a group of revellers in out-partying the storm.

Later in the evening we headed out on a date... across the street to Armetta's for a stromboli that was also partly my lunch and a canoli. Then we headed to Emmaus to return Wallace & Gromit's Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but on the way back there was a detour to the top of the big hill to watch a dazzling, intense, valley-illuminating display of lightning that lit up the night sky every 20 seconds or so for nearly half an hour.

Work today, sandwiched around the remains of a calzone, was very productive in the sense that we convinced management to fund our technology proposals and get behind a few other initiatives. It was the dash between offices, "yes I've got those figures," send that email, make the tough call MBA day that I've been waiting for. This evening we're baking and packing and getting set to jet away to Myrtle Beach, SC. I might explain more later if I can figure this weekend out.

After a day at work and a successful trip to Emmaus with Jenelle that turned frustrating when we got home, Ryan and I set out on what turned into a 24 mile Tour de Berks County. We rode over some hills, cruised along the farm fields, and flew down downhills as afternoon faded. It felt fun, like something worth being able to do. Something worth dying for? I'm not sure.

The most frustrating thing for me is the powerlessness of having 1/200,000,000th of the helm. Sometimes the idea of democracy feels like a runaway train - somebody is theoretically driving, but when the direction seems wrong it is utterly debilitating to be clinging to the middle cars. When the leader isn't dedicated to the followers, what improvement is that over any other -ocracy?

At work today, a company-sponsored lunch. The corporation bought pizza for customer resources, hoagies for finance, and because we're part of customer resources but each lunch in finance Ryan and I had both. This afternoon we're setting up the two parallel pilot programs we've got going next week, then it's ciao ciao and see you Monday.

At home I struggled somewhat with michigan trek stuff. It is really hard for me to accept that the collective group of MBA2s won't go on a trip in Michigan. MTrek's most common complaint is that trips cost too much. The most common request from people who didn't go is a cheaper option. Apart from the michigan trek every single trip will be over $1000, most closer to two thousand once airfare is included. The organization hurtled itself towards fancy trips, leaders backed out of domestic ones, and the North American ones that do exist are going to wind up costing something akin to the central american onces. If small group outdoor adventure can't be achieved affordably, what good is it? If bonding requires two grand, who wants to bond? I'll be a friend to a ton of people if I skipped the trip and had a free happy hour at Dominick's with the cash instead.