‘Not the year for Carnival

i had set time and travel aside to be in Maastricht for Carnival this year – the four-day  pre-Lent celebration filled with food, drink, and costumes (did I mention drink?).  The parade is Sunday, official kick-off in the Vrijthof square with the raising of ‘t Mooswief, and the ‘skade filled with color until the wee hours of Tuesday.

Unfortunately, work and milestones overwrote good intentions this year.  We are literally days from regulatory submission on the project, everyone hard at work testing, writing, and collating. 

The amount of detail in these Technical Files is really daunting, and every cross reference and report has to be checked, verified, and files into a particular slot. 

The product descriptions, the Design History file, is a constant work-in-progress, requirements and specifications revised each time a test falls sort, the failure mitigations being revisited each time someone imagines a new risk.

We’ll get there, but it isn’t the time for travel.  We’ve spent years getting to this point, and we need to cross the finish line successfully.

TEFAF comes in a few weeks, birthday and spring beyond: ‘time enough to celebrate when the work is complete and submitted.  Still, I don’t like subverting scarce free time to ever-expanding work-time (I’ve been working through the past four weekends).  It violates the spirit of balans en grenzen that I committed to years ago, and reminds me to see that everyone gets a reward and a break when our work is done.