Nashville Trip

06.24.2018

Nashville has long been my close/weekend getaway spot, but last week said location became the target of a business trip. Is training business? It think it is.

Back in March I took a class in Nashville to become a Certified Scrum Master. This time I went back to become an Advanced Certified Scrum Master. Same venue. Same trainer. I even managed to stay in the same hotel room.

Advanced Scrum Mastering involves a lot of facilitation. Since March, I've learned that was a skill I was especially lacking. Besides being the second of three certifications on my current career track, learning how to (better) facilitate made me want to take the class RIGHT NOW. So I did.

I learned a lot in the 2 days of class. I learned things I was doing wrong. I learned I was just not doing some things that I thought I was - the difference between coaching and mentoring sneaks up on me faster and harder than I would have thought. I lucked out again with class and was with a good group of 20 people. Within that group I found that with any problem I thought I had coming into the class, at least one other people shared. It wasn't always the same person, and in a way that made me feel better.

As with any multi-day trip to Nashville, Dr Blondie is in charge of my evening meal selection as long as she's in town. Class was scheduled for the right week and she was, indeed, in town. I give Dr Blondie a very specific rule for dining selection: No nation-wide chains. The local joints ruled again as we went 3/3 on good eats!

• The Grilled Cheeserie - Sunday found us at a hipster grilled cheese based eatery. You can get a basic grilled cheese or have them add some oomph. I had a Buffalo Grilled Cheese. You can go look at the menu for what all was on it, but basically it was buffalo chicken/sauce in the grilled cheese. It was tasty, but the texture of buffalo sauce + grilled cheese was a little off. Not the toughness of chicken wings I'm used to with buffalo sauce. I'd go back, but get something different. Dr Blondie enjoyed a Spinach & Artichoke melt.
• Fogatas - Mexican food so authentic there's no website. So authentic I'm sure out waitress understood any English. I went out of my Mexican comfort zone and ordered pork carnitas. Tyler gets them all the time so I felt safe. I'm pretty sure these were better than what Tyler gets here in town. As a bonus, they served a glass bottle of Mexican Coke.
• 5 Points Pizza - After a bland and mediocre lunch at training, my final Nashville dinner of the trip was sharing a veggie pizza (with some added spinach) with Dr Blondie. Boonie me classifies this as hipster pizza based on the tattoos and hair color choices of the wait staff. I'm so old.

My personal side trip was to go to McKays to trade in some boardgames. Dr Blondie introduced me to this used Everything I'm Interested In store on my last trip. On the boardgame shelf at work (ie Overflow Storage), the top shelf is mostly taken up by Target/Clearance riff-raff that nobody is going to play, and is not worth the shipping cost for anyone I might be able to sell to online. Various versions of Scene-It, Trivial Pursuit, Jenga, and that damn Jeff Foxworthy Game that got about 3 rounds played. It was an opportunity to free up some shelf space and get some store credit, so I loaded up the car before I left with about 30 of those games. Oddly, it didn't seem to make that much of a difference when looking at the games I left in my office.

I wasn't expecting much for trading in the games, and Dr Blondie told me they likely wouldn't take everything. I bet they wouldn't take Mall World, near the top of my list on bad, uninvestigated impulse buys. But they did take Mall World. They took everything I brought. For the ~30 games I brought, which I admitted were crap (crap in great condition, but crap) I was hoping for $3, maybe $4 per game of credit. By the time they totaled up everything up, I had $212 in credit.

I was overjoyed with $212 in credit.

I didn't spend it all. I barely made a dent in it. Now I've started a list of things specifically to look for on my next McKays trip. DVDs over a year old. A couple of books that they might have that I'm in no hurry to read.

$212!

The day back was a long day. I gave Brenda a heads up that I was going to be in Nashville in case she was planning any trips to Florence. I'd hate for her to fly into Huntsville while I'm 2 hrs away in Nashville. She took this opportunity to find a great deal on flight into Nashville (on Tuesday), then back home on Saturday. I had 4 hours between the end of class and picking up Brenda at BNA. Pizza with Dr Blondie took up part of that, plus she let me use her home internet to take care of a little work that made Wednesday start off a little easier.

I forgot that BNA uses cell phone waiting instead of park & wait at the terminal, and the waiting area was pretty full. I ended up making 3 laps around the terminal when Brenda called to let me know where she was, which happened to be about 20 ft away. She got loaded up into the car, and we got to Florence about midnight. A little after 1 and I was home and in bed. While normally on End of Sprint Wednesday I go in about 6, I slept completely thorugh the alarm and didn't get out of bed until 7:15. Luckily, it didn't make a bit of difference.

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