Another Boston Visit (Work portion)

I got to enjoy a visit Boston on the company dime yet again--we had a company-wide meeting this past week, and folks flew in from all over. This, incidentally, is a shot of the harbor islands on the way in--the lighthouse at the bottom is Graves Light; it seems like it's barely above the surface of the water.


The meetings were pretty low-key; us folks from out of town stayed at the bosses' house, which is this lovely restored farmhouse with lots of bedrooms. It was pretty much like staying at a bed and breakfast... folks would pad down in the morning in their slippers, power up laptops, and we'd start talking over coffee in the kitchen.


The first day was the official meeting, and the second day was more casual--just a core group of people who work together and are pretty good friends. The bosses made dinner every evening--including osso bucco and risotto on night two. Yummy! I put in my share, making omelettes the next morning (smoked salmon, sauteed onions, and brie--pretty decent combination).

Anyway, I ended up not being nearly as stressed about thesis work as I thought I would be/ought to be during this trip. For one, I actually did get a bit of work done, after hours, making use of the large collection of references around the office library. Second, I got to sit down with my former boss and talk about the history of basement insulation--incredibly useful for my thesis. Basically, I had questions along the lines of "...when did you first start seeing insulated basements in production housing?" or "... when did the problems first start showing up?" or "... how did this construction detail originate?"

He was the perfect person to answer them: "... well, insulating basements pretty much started in Canada on a wide scale during the R-2000 program, which I set up the technical guidelines for..." ".... this guy introduced that detail on his home improvement TV show, and it pretty much got adopted throughout the country. We discussed it in this technical meeting for the Canadian homebuilders in..." He has a long history in this field, and knows all the back stories. As a consultant to production builders, he was the one they would be calling up in a panic, "Help help! Our basement walls are growing mold and our customers are suing us!" It was a lot of history that, as far as I know, isn't actually recorded anywhere.