Mom visit, simulation game, plant tours....and lots of homework

It's late on Tuesday night, and I feel like this week has already been very, very long. I really need to go to bed. I should be reading the rest of the ops case, and the two articles that are due for tomorrow, but if I don't take the time now to jot down some notes of what has been going on this week, it will never get done.

Needless to say, this week has been very busy. Saturday was spent going through my distributed leadership assessment (this is an assessment of my strengths and weaknesses that my direct reports, managers, and co-workers completed before I left for LFM). I went through all the data to prepare for the Leadership paper that was due on Sunday - yes we had homework due on a Sunday! In the evening Mark, Julia, and I went to Dinner at D&D's house. It was fun and the food was excellent!

Sunday morning Julia and I went to the airport to pick my mom up, she is visiting from Sweden. I have been looking forward to seeing my mom again, and Julia was also really excited that "mormor" was coming to visit us. When we got to the airport Julia was first dissapointed to find out that we weren't going to fly on the airplanes today. But when i reminded her that mormor was coming, she got happy again. After a long wait my mom finally arrived with big hugs, especially for Julia. We drove back to the apartment. This is only the fourth time I have driven since we moved to Cambridge. Thanks to the Tomtom it has actually been surprisingly easy to drive here. Although, I still prefer the T and walking over driving! We got home and opened presents! My mom gave me some inflatable clothes hangers and toiletries that I had "ordered". Mark got "Dumle" chocolates, and Julia got an Astrid Lindgren songbook and CD, a Pippi Langstrump DVD, and a Karlson pa taket DVD. Julia was really excited and didn't realize that my dad had already recorded many of the same episodes for her and that she had been watching them for the past 2 months.

At 4:30pm it was time to meet Miguel at the LFM office to prepare for the start of the 5day Littlefield factory simulation game. This is part of our Operations management class where we get divided into teams of 3 and compete in running a simulated factory with the goal to make the most money. Our group had already met earlier in the week to forecast the demand, set up our inventory management plan, and calculate capacity utilization to set up our strategy for how to run our factory. Now it was time to put our plan in place. It was pretty simple, just purchase some machines, change the batch size, and set the inventory reorder policy. Then the waiting game started...we were curious to see if our calculations were correct so we decided to hang out in the LFM office until the first factory day had passed (1 factory day = 1 actual hr). The hour passed quickly as we were busy talking about the leadership paper and our personal goals and definitions. We were delighted to find that our calculations were correct. Sweet! I rushed back home to have dinner with mom, Mark and Julia and then spent the rest of the Sunday writing my leadership paper and reading articles for Ops class.

Monday was filled with classes after which we watched the movie Copenhagen to prepare for today's leadership class discussion. I'm glad we watched the movie since I hadn't had time to read the play yet, and with all the other reading due I wasn't going to have enough time. I came home to find that Julia was sick, she had a fever and was just laying on the couch watching TV. I sat down next to her and we snuggled for a few hours while I read the Leadership articles due today. It was awesome to cuddle with Julia, I just wish she would have felt better. The Simulation game was going well, we were in 2nd place!

Today after classes we went to Raytheon on a plant tour. They did a really good job with the tour and the information. very enjoyable! After the tour we went straight back to the LFM office to work on Statistics homework. I was really tired, it was hard to focus. Luckily the homework due date was extended 1 day, which is why I cam home at 12:30am instead of 2:30am, and why I'm able to write this blog for a while. The rest of the week will be equally busy, we have to complete a front line worker interview for our Lean class, complete the rest of the Stats HW, read more, and we have another Plant tour on Thursday, this time to Genzyme.
This weekend I'm taking my mom and Julia to the beach, I can't wait

.....Oh, and as for the simulation game, after 76 factory days we are in 5th place....