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Personal Agility - How we planned the Month of Chassing Snow.

In a blog post by Michele Sliger - Personal Agile she has asked her twitter base if people are using Agile techniques to manage their personal lives.  Does the Agile mind set creep into personal lives?  E.G. do we eat our own dog-food?  I would hope so, and expect it if the philosophy is sound.

Here is my experience.  Written about the trip my wife and I planned to take when the Banking Meltdown, had dried up most of the software projects back in the winter of 2009.  I walked into my director and suggested that I could take a month without pay and that might be a good thing.  He didn't bat an eye lash - yes, when would you like to leave, are you really coming back?  Yes, I did wish to come back, I enjoyed working for SolutionsIQ.  The timing was great, it was January, 2009 and there were no new projects coming into the pipeline, layoffs were looming and I wanted a sabbatical.  A chance to go ski the best snow between Seattle and Denver.


We have packed up the camper and headed out for a month long ski trip.  We don’t have puppy dogs any more so we took along some old friends, Pokey & Gumby. Here we are passing the Amazon dot COM building.
 
Because of this shot, we missed the I90 exit and had to make the first U-turn, there will be more of these I’m sure.

Tracy & I used a Scrum style task board to prepare for the trip.  To Do items on stickies on the left, In Progress in the middle, Done items on the right. The map has a highlighted proposed route from Seattle through upper ID into MT then to UT and finally to CO.

Day one we change the plan, based on weather reports, doesn’t look like Big Sky has any fresh snow in days... bummer.  We head straight to Utah - it is snowing there now, can we catch up?

 Deer Valley - the best snow grooming on the planet.  And a host told us where to find the deep stash in the woods.  The next day we went to Alta - Telemark HQ.
That is thigh deep power, quite a change from the Sierra Cement in WA.

The trip continues, and we end up finding power days all the way to Denver and back to Seattle.


 Maybe you cannot read the name of Tracy's skies but it sums up the trip "Work Stinx".  This is at Sundance - we use to live 12 miles from this little resort, and had to go back for a day.

This is the "Chasing the Snow" rig, our Starcraft pop-top camper on a F150.

On the boarder of Utah is a land that time forgot - Dinosaur National Monument, with a nice museum in Vernal, UT.
At the RV campground we try to find Wi-Fi to check email and do some image processing.


When we hit Denver, Tracy takes a vacation from the snow and goes on a cruise with her friend, Kelly.  I head to Winston-Salem, NC and visit family.  Then on our return we stop in at Yellowstone NP and took a winter tour to Old Faithful on the Snow Coach.


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