It's been a while

I have been away from posting for a while! Primarily because I have been busy at work and finishing the kitchen, dining room, nursery and hallway! So let's start with work, it is great. My coworker and I won our company's innovation award for a recent development that involved the redesign of a vital output circuit. We use some pretty slick programmable hardware technology to increase the reliability and safety while also making it respond to failures 1000 times faster than the previous incarnation. Anyway, enough techno-jargon, here is some history. My company is Union Switch & Signal. However, were were purchased by an Italian company, Ansaldo STS, maybe 20 years ago. It is just recently that were are coming to be called Ansaldo STS USA. A similar transformation has already occurred for the French, Italian and Australian locations (as well as a few others I am not familiar with). Because we won the Ansalod STS USA competition, we were invited to participate in the corporate level competition. Through this, we were fortunate to have the opportunity to travel to France and give a presentation on our work. We flew into and out of the country through Charles de Gaulle Airport outside of Paris, which is where we stayed the day before and the day after the presentation. The presentation itself was given in the small town of Riom, 400km south of Paris. We flew to Riom from CDG the day of the presentation, but the next day we had a nice long bus ride back to Paris because of an Air France strike. This is the outside of the Ansaldo STS France offices in Riom. There are other offices in Les Ulis

As you can see, we are an international organization.

The presentation was great, as was meeting my international colleagues. But sightseeing in Paris was the best.... Amazing as it was, blazed in blue light, the Eiffel Tower....

..... turned into this! The lights were amazing. They were like strobe lights, bursting on and off, creating a brilliant display.

We saw the Cathedral de Notre Dame

The Siene River

I drank many, many of these!

Vibrant streets, bustling with activity

She was there too!

I hear some pretty fast bicycle racers ride around here every year

So when do I go back? Maybe next time Michelle and baby will be coming too! We'll save that story for another post.