{"id":11995,"date":"2016-07-29T08:23:57","date_gmt":"2016-07-29T13:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/bharry\/?p=11995"},"modified":"2019-02-16T22:46:14","modified_gmt":"2019-02-16T22:46:14","slug":"where-in-the-world-is-brian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/where-in-the-world-is-brian\/","title":{"rendered":"Where in the world is Brian?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I apologize for being away for so long.\u00a0 It’s been a weird summer.\u00a0 I was out of the office for\u00a0almost a month and have spent the last week furiously trying to catch up.\u00a0 So I’ve been absent from my blog for a while now.\u00a0 I’ll fill you in on some of the details.\nItaly<\/strong>\nThis year is my parent’s 50th anniversary.\u00a0 My brother and I (well actually our wives) decided to take them on a trip to celebrate.\u00a0 We packed up my family (my wife and I + 4 kids) and my brother’s family (he and his wife and 2 kids) and our parents and went to Italy.\u00a0 All told we were gone about 10 days (2 of which were just flying).\u00a0 We spent time in Rome, Pompeii, Florence and Venice.\u00a0 I think everyone really had a fantastic time – my mother, especially.\u00a0 My dad’s a bit more stoic and doesn’t get excited about much \ud83d\ude42\nNorthern Tier<\/strong>\nWe got back just before the 4th of July weekend and spent a couple days at home before my 15 year old son and I headed out for a Boy Scout high adventure camp called Northern Tier<\/a>.\u00a0 Overall, that trip was about 10 days – with 8 days and 7 nights in the wilderness.\u00a0 I can’t say that I was excited about camping for 7 nights with nothing but what we could carry (including canoes) but, having done it, wow, it was a cool experience.\nAfter the first day on the water, we hardly saw anyone.\u00a0 That is truly a remote wilderness and feels incredibly untouched.\u00a0 Overall, we canoed about 75 miles in and around various lakes.\u00a0 I think we did about 15 or so portages totaling 2-3 miles.\u00a0 We had a couple of particularly exciting days when we had heavy rain and high wind (~20 miles per hour sustained and ~40 miles per hour gusts).\u00a0 We still canoed and on one of the big lakes (called Knife lake) the swells were high enough to be coming up over the top of the canoe.\u00a0 That was definitely an adrenaline rush.\u00a0 One of our canoes swamped in the process and had the be rescued.\u00a0 The rescue canoe slammed against some rocks and got a puncture (which we repaired with duct tape – you only have what you carry).\u00a0 The scenery was beautiful and the time I spent with my son was priceless.\u00a0 I’m sure I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.\nHere’s one of our canoes (there were 9 of us in 3 canoes).\n\"Canoe\"<\/a>\nHere’s a couple of scenery views taken during lunch stops.\n\"Lunch\"<\/a> \"Lunch2\"<\/a>\nAnd here’s my son and I when we stopped at the Canadian border crossing.\u00a0 By this point, we were pretty ripe.\u00a0 It was the day before the end of our trip so it was 7 days without showering or changing clothes (did I mention that you only have what you carry? – clothes, food, canoes, cooking equipment, camping gear, etc.).\u00a0 Spare clothes are a luxury you can’t afford – each person only had 2 sets – a “wet” set that you wore all day, got soaked, never dried over night and then put back on cold and wet in the morning, and a “dry” set that you wore in camp at night and slept in.\u00a0 I can’t say that I ever before appreciated the pure joy of putting on dry clothes (especially socks) after spending all day in wet clothes.\u00a0 I’m not sure how the people at the border crossing handle the smell of all of the canoers who stop there.\u00a0 I was used to it after 7 days and it still was pretty awful \ud83d\ude42\n\"SonAndI\"<\/a>\nLastly, I was just amazed at how much water there is up there in the boundary lakes.\u00a0 They don’t call it the land of 10,000 lakes for no reason.\u00a0 Here’s a picture of the wall map that the kids used to plan their route.\u00a0 It was hard to get a great picture of it but you get the idea from the amount of blue on it.\n\"WaterEverywhere\"<\/a>\nRedmond<\/strong>\nI got back home from Northern Tier at 2:00am on Saturday night and at 7:00am on Monday morning, I had to catch a flight to Redmond for a visit to the mother ship.\u00a0 Between the normal craziness of a million meetings when I visit and trying to catch up on 3 weeks of being out, I didn’t have any time for blogging.\u00a0 I took the redeye home Friday night and finally got some time in my bed at home (though Saturday, I was pretty bleary from the overnight flight).\nBack in North Carolina<\/strong>\nSo, finally, this week, I’ve been back in the office in NC and finishing catching up.\u00a0 I made it through about 2 weeks of my mail backlog (that’s literally thousands of emails) and decided if there was anything older than that that I missed, someone will send it to me again.\u00a0 So, if I missed anything you sent me or any blog comments that were important to you, poke me again and I’ll respond.\nI haven’t been away from work that much in as long as I can remember – at least 10 or 15 years.\u00a0 It was fun but I’m glad to be back home and back into a more normal rhythm.\u00a0 Of course, in all that time, the farm work got just as far behind as the Microsoft work did but farm work is infinite so it’ll keep.\u00a0 The animals all survived and everything is OK so all is good.\nThanks.\u00a0 I hope you had a good summer too.\nBrian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I apologize for being away for so long.\u00a0 It’s been a weird summer.\u00a0 I was out of the office for\u00a0almost a month and have spent the last week furiously trying to catch up.\u00a0 So I’ve been absent from my blog for a while now.\u00a0 I’ll fill you in on some of the details. Italy This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":14617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-11995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-personal"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

I apologize for being away for so long.\u00a0 It’s been a weird summer.\u00a0 I was out of the office for\u00a0almost a month and have spent the last week furiously trying to catch up.\u00a0 So I’ve been absent from my blog for a while now.\u00a0 I’ll fill you in on some of the details. Italy This […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}