Good Afternoon MTAS,

Happy Columbus Day, or as some states are calling it, Indigenous Peoples Day.

I hope you have an exciting work week ahead of you. But first, here’s a week in review.

Did you know that Brett had a birthday on the first? Did you also know that Frances celebrated a work anniversary the same day? Congratulations to you both on another trip around the sun.

Also last week there were many consultants who met in Cookeville. I got to spend a little time with the technical/legal team and the management/finance team. I expect that their meetings were productive and educational.

The week capped off for me with a trip to Nashville to congratulate Kurt as he retired from UT. Many folks turned out to wish him well in his next adventures. I hope to share some photos with you soon from that event.

Speaking of sharing photos, here is a vacation picture from Honna. She tells me that it was a recent trip to New York City. She and her husband, Josh, took Austin for his 13th birthday and are at the Statue of Liberty with Manhattan behind them.



For those that have asked about my vacation, I share with you a picture from Segovia and the Roman built aqueducts. I am simply amazed by the craftsmanship and engineering that went into the structures that still stand today, centuries later. As a kid, my Lincoln Log constructions never made it past a few seconds!





I told you last week that I would share some of the things I learned at the conference in Baltimore. Here is one: Never schedule a medical procedure in the afternoon. The keynote speaker (Daniel Pink) was talking about timing, and the cycles of performance. Basically, for the majority of us, we peak in the morning, trough in the afternoon and have a recovery in the evening. Hence, his advice about afternoon surgeries. This applies to our everyday work experience to tell us that we should do our most critical thinking when we are at our peak and do the more routine tasks during the trough. Basically, we should be more intentional in scheduling individual and team work tasks.

To wrap things up, here are a few reminders: the campus chest campaign is about to finish. If you haven’t yet made a contribution, I politely urge you to do so. Collectively our donations make a huge impact on the charities and non-profits we support. Armintha gave us an update this morning and I’m so pleased with our progress but we do still have a bit further to go. Here’s the link in case you misplaced an earlier email:
https://campuschest.utk.edu/ . Also, I haven’t yet heard about our status on the computer security training, but we always do well and I imagine this year will be no different. The deadline for that was last week. Thanks for taking the time to learn about protecting ourselves, both at work and at home.

Speaking of home, it’s getting late in the day for me and I need to head there soon. If I can answer any questions for you, please let me know. Thank you for your contributions to making this such a great organization. MTAS rocks, thanks to you; and I hope that our contributions will still be noticed a hundred years from now, just like those aqueducts.
Margaret