06-FEB-A-6
ELDP AND COMP TEAM MEETINGS AT ASHBURN,
WITH THE ONLY BLIZZARD OF ’06 CAUSING ME
TO BUNK DOWN AT DULLES IN CANDLEWOOD SUITES, STERLING VA BEFORE MY TAKEOFF TO
DESMOINES VIA DCA
February 10—12, 2006
I write to you from “any port in a storm”—the Candlewood Suites of Sterling VA in Dulles airport. This has been the intensive weekend of the ELDP with everyone in a twitter about Comps reviews in the teams that have been designated and we are going to meet much of the day I am scheduled to take off in the evening—if and when DCA re-opens after being closed down by an all-night snowstorm that has lowered thirteen inches on Ashburn and two feet in Derwood, though I would not know since I did not go home.
Fortunately, since I had heard about the forecast, I carried my baggage with me and never did get a chance to carry the extensive packets of comps materials that had constituted much of our weekend in Xeroxing and collating. In the course of our being “weathered in” in the hotel that Steve Miner had found on Priceline, we got to know each other a good deal more, with a fair amount of the strengths and weaknesses expressed. We are all supposed to take the Comps as a team and we all or none pass the oral part. The written part is an individual thing and appears to be the stickier of the two since all Inc’s have to be removed, and I had found out that I have a pair of Inc’s to fix by Wednesday—during all of which time I will be gone.
The ELDP
sessions were fast forward and getting intense with a lot of assignments
particularly important for me since I will be absent during the next one in
Our group is almost at the point of completion of the long classroom and reading phase and the number of trees killed in the pursuit of a comprehensive review of all the relevant “literature” is quite an amazing stack—it is impossible to read all that we have copied, thanks especially to the due diligence of Steve Miner and then the separate “Subject Matter Experts” who prepared whole bound volumes for the preparation of each specific question of the five for picking one and having them pick another two. The written will also come from a similar literature cramming session and since I will be doing that already with my small Comps team of four, we should go directly into the next phase to keep on the schedule for completion of this degree—my “terminal” degree!