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catching up : feb 5-7
Feb. 14th, 2012 05:30 pmJenny pointed out that I haven't posted in 10 days. Honestly, I wish I had, but I keep feeling so behind every time I try to catch up.
So, the rest of the Seattle trip was good. Sunday (the 5th) I spent the afternoon with Fuchigami-kun, a friend of mine from college baseball in Japan... that is, he was a shortstop for Keio. We got lunch at Cheesecake Factory (where I had a salad and he only had cheesecake, claiming that he got drunk the night before with a bunch of Japanese exchange students at a yakiniku place! WTF!) and talked about random stuff, like that he's going back to Japan in a month... oh and he showed me email from Keio's manager :) That was cool.
After that we went to see Oklahoma, the musical. He had been super-interested in it as an experience he was unlikely to get otherwise and said it sounded cool, and he told me that he looked up the plot and stuff in Japanese so he would undertand it a bit. In practice, I realized that OMG, it's REALLY hard to understand those western accents, even for me, and I'm a native speaker of English! Oh man. But he caught a surprising amount of it nonetheless... and taught me words in Japanese like 三角関係 ("love triangle"), how did I never know that one before?!?! During intermission he got out the program and asked me for a plot summary like "okay... so Curly likes Laurie... Laurie likes Curly but is pretending not to... Jed likes Laurie... then there's this other girl, the one who 'cant say no', and she likes the salesman... but should marry this other guy?" Hehe. I think we enjoyed it anyway. Honestly, it was about as good as Oklahoma could be, the most impressive thing to me was the nice stage set they had, with houses and farms rising and falling and rotating into scene changes. The only sad thing is that, well, it would have been more appropriate to go see Damn Yankees, y'know?
In the evening I hung out with Carl! Fuchi went back up to UW after the show, and I went to Cap Hill to Rock Box and sang my lungs out for 2 hours (the song of the day this time was 春よ,来い by Matsutoya Yumi, oddly). Carl showed up towards the end for a little while and sang a little, and then we went to Taste of India for some good old traditional Sunday night indian food and chai. Whee. Then back to Ballard to hang out for a while before I tried to go to sleep early in order to get up early to get a plane early.
Oh yeah, I never even remotely watched the Super Bowl, go figure. :)
Monday (the 6th) I got up early. Carl did too and gave me a ride to the light rail at least, and I went to the airport. I had a suitcase with my old Mac computer from college in it that I was taking back here so I can go through it at some point, so that was kinda awkward to carry and to put through security, but other than that it was a fairly uneventful flight. Stopped off at home to drop things off, admired the cherry blossom trees (WTF?) and went to work for the day. Finished planning the CMU trip, etc. Came home and watched some Jeopardy in the evening -- I'm pretty far behind but whatever. College tourney is fun. Did laundry too.
Tuesday (the 7th), I went to Pittsburgh!! Chris and I were on the same flight, so we met up at the airport and also hung around in OHare. (Gretel, our recruiting person, was on another flight.) I had to carry a big banner with us for the job fair, so on the first flight I talked it into first class, but on the second flight just shoved it in the overhead compartment. Also, first flight showed the remake of Footloose, which was every bit as good or bad as the original (at least this time they had a younger guy playing Ren McCormick instead of Kevin Bacon. I enjoyed the scene where they teach his hick friend to dance, too). Second flight, they had DirectTV, but you had to PAY for it so we didn't bother. The guy sitting next to me was a CMU grad too, though he was many years earlier and in business, so we had very little in common. He even played football there!
Chris still has a valid CMU ID, so once we got to the airport in Pittsburgh we took the 28X to Oakland and checked into the hotel, and then we got Mirman (former Tagged intern) to pick us up. We stopped by campus briefly, to the Gates building cluster, which is apparently the new CS Lounge sort of place, and got a whole bunch of people and found our way to the Sharp Edge up in almost-East-Liberty. I mostly remember Sharp Edge as being a place that CS grad students went to be beer snobs, but now they have half price food and it wasn't terrible. So basically we talked to a whole bunch of these undergrads about random stuff, and I caught Mirman up with all the gossip going on for the Stig team, and it was a jolly good time. I guess it was the 2 of us from Tagged, our Mirman, and Mirman's friend who works at Dropbox, and then like 2 seniors and like 6 freshmen. Man, kids are young. But still a decent time I guess. Undergrads never really change... I can easily say, "I don't know you, but I knew you ten years ago," and mean it.
We went back to the hotel and made plans to wake up early and meet at 10am in the lobby.
So, the rest of the Seattle trip was good. Sunday (the 5th) I spent the afternoon with Fuchigami-kun, a friend of mine from college baseball in Japan... that is, he was a shortstop for Keio. We got lunch at Cheesecake Factory (where I had a salad and he only had cheesecake, claiming that he got drunk the night before with a bunch of Japanese exchange students at a yakiniku place! WTF!) and talked about random stuff, like that he's going back to Japan in a month... oh and he showed me email from Keio's manager :) That was cool.
After that we went to see Oklahoma, the musical. He had been super-interested in it as an experience he was unlikely to get otherwise and said it sounded cool, and he told me that he looked up the plot and stuff in Japanese so he would undertand it a bit. In practice, I realized that OMG, it's REALLY hard to understand those western accents, even for me, and I'm a native speaker of English! Oh man. But he caught a surprising amount of it nonetheless... and taught me words in Japanese like 三角関係 ("love triangle"), how did I never know that one before?!?! During intermission he got out the program and asked me for a plot summary like "okay... so Curly likes Laurie... Laurie likes Curly but is pretending not to... Jed likes Laurie... then there's this other girl, the one who 'cant say no', and she likes the salesman... but should marry this other guy?" Hehe. I think we enjoyed it anyway. Honestly, it was about as good as Oklahoma could be, the most impressive thing to me was the nice stage set they had, with houses and farms rising and falling and rotating into scene changes. The only sad thing is that, well, it would have been more appropriate to go see Damn Yankees, y'know?
In the evening I hung out with Carl! Fuchi went back up to UW after the show, and I went to Cap Hill to Rock Box and sang my lungs out for 2 hours (the song of the day this time was 春よ,来い by Matsutoya Yumi, oddly). Carl showed up towards the end for a little while and sang a little, and then we went to Taste of India for some good old traditional Sunday night indian food and chai. Whee. Then back to Ballard to hang out for a while before I tried to go to sleep early in order to get up early to get a plane early.
Oh yeah, I never even remotely watched the Super Bowl, go figure. :)
Monday (the 6th) I got up early. Carl did too and gave me a ride to the light rail at least, and I went to the airport. I had a suitcase with my old Mac computer from college in it that I was taking back here so I can go through it at some point, so that was kinda awkward to carry and to put through security, but other than that it was a fairly uneventful flight. Stopped off at home to drop things off, admired the cherry blossom trees (WTF?) and went to work for the day. Finished planning the CMU trip, etc. Came home and watched some Jeopardy in the evening -- I'm pretty far behind but whatever. College tourney is fun. Did laundry too.
Tuesday (the 7th), I went to Pittsburgh!! Chris and I were on the same flight, so we met up at the airport and also hung around in OHare. (Gretel, our recruiting person, was on another flight.) I had to carry a big banner with us for the job fair, so on the first flight I talked it into first class, but on the second flight just shoved it in the overhead compartment. Also, first flight showed the remake of Footloose, which was every bit as good or bad as the original (at least this time they had a younger guy playing Ren McCormick instead of Kevin Bacon. I enjoyed the scene where they teach his hick friend to dance, too). Second flight, they had DirectTV, but you had to PAY for it so we didn't bother. The guy sitting next to me was a CMU grad too, though he was many years earlier and in business, so we had very little in common. He even played football there!
Chris still has a valid CMU ID, so once we got to the airport in Pittsburgh we took the 28X to Oakland and checked into the hotel, and then we got Mirman (former Tagged intern) to pick us up. We stopped by campus briefly, to the Gates building cluster, which is apparently the new CS Lounge sort of place, and got a whole bunch of people and found our way to the Sharp Edge up in almost-East-Liberty. I mostly remember Sharp Edge as being a place that CS grad students went to be beer snobs, but now they have half price food and it wasn't terrible. So basically we talked to a whole bunch of these undergrads about random stuff, and I caught Mirman up with all the gossip going on for the Stig team, and it was a jolly good time. I guess it was the 2 of us from Tagged, our Mirman, and Mirman's friend who works at Dropbox, and then like 2 seniors and like 6 freshmen. Man, kids are young. But still a decent time I guess. Undergrads never really change... I can easily say, "I don't know you, but I knew you ten years ago," and mean it.
We went back to the hotel and made plans to wake up early and meet at 10am in the lobby.
