catching up more (feb 9-10, Carl's visit, etc, really feb 9-12)

So, I got back to town on the 9th from Pittsburgh, in the morning, went to work... had a fairly productive day at the office all things considered, and then came home around 7pm... and immediately took off via BART again to go to the airport and meet up with Carl! The little company that he works for was sending him to SF for a meeting on Friday, so he made plans to fly in on Thursday night and stay until Sunday morning. And he was staying at our place... despite that I would be completely out of commission for Saturday and Sunday with a puzzle event. Shrug. Jenny was also going out of town so he was able to use her room to stay in, at least.

Anyway, so I met Carl at the airport and walked him back here to the house, and basically gave him a tour of the place and hung out for a little while and then went to sleep thanks to people having work on Friday and all.

Friday at work was "Fancy Friday", so I wore a skirt -- the plaid one that I used to wear sometimes in my JHS back in Japan, with the ruffley-trim leggings I usually wore with it. So it was kinda weird and reminiscent to wear that exact outfit again. The new trend is to have a special theme for each week's happy hour, so this week ours was "Flying High", and so the happy hour was full of balloons... which we decided to try to make float in midair by attaching pens and other stuff to them. I also came up with a brilliant idea during the engineering meeting, that I want to do a Stig project during Hackathon... but... unfortunately I wasn't really able to find anyone to really get behind my idea. But I did talk to a few people, so that was a good thing.

Anyway, after work I was supposed to meet up with Kevin and Eva and John and Cat and Carl at a CMU alumni happy hour, except that Kevin got totally confused and showed up at my house instead of at the happy hour, so I asked him to come pick me up from work (figuring that the 15-20 minutes it should take him to get there would not be more than the 15-20 it would take me to walk to the CMU happy hour...) but as it turned out that's not how it really worked out. In the end, we all met up right near the happy hour, and got dinner at Mel's Diner because it was there and had space for us. I'd had a little food at work, but still managed to eat more. (This is a recurring bad theme for me lately.)

Actually one thing at work was, we were playing with balloons, and one of our interns got really drunk (but in a confused way, not belligerent) and my CEO asked us to take care of him (the intern that is). It was odd but we managed to get him to his desk and then sent home with another intern.

After the Mel's thing, we were going to all come home to the Mission but in the end it was just Kevin and Eva with me and Carl, and Phil was here, and Eva napped on the couch and the rest of us played Blue Moon City, which yet again ended in a weird stalemate sort of situation. I really am beginning to wonder why this keeps happening, though, I still don't think it's necessarily a bad game, it just turns into very weird endgames is all.

I had to wake up super-early on Saturday so I tried to go to sleep early but in the end I think we even played some Qwirkle after the BMC game. Shrug.

I can't really talk about Saturday and Sunday -- I was in the playtest for the Dr. When game, which is a weekend-long puzzle hunt where you get in vans and drive around the area to solve puzzles. Seriously, I don't think there's anything I can say (without giving anything away) besides that it was awesome and it's going to be fun and I'm hopefully going to get to staff it at least one of the weekends. I enjoyed meeting new people, at least -- our team was me and Drew and Mike (from Liboncatipu), and then we were paired with Rich and Grace. I had randomly met Rich at GC Summit a few weeks ago and Grace was doing her first ever event.

Oh, and of course I can say that this hunt is definitely of Wei-Hwa quality :)

We also met some other cool people in the other playtest groups, hopefully I'll run into them in the puzzle scene later too!

I guess Sunday evening I went to dinner with Drew and Jason and then came home and crashed.

catching up more: feb 13-15? mon-wed at work!

So let's see what else happened during the week...

I don't remember anything about Monday, so it can't have been that exciting. I think I stayed late at work and we even played some Tichu, but it sucked because Joris and Cody paired up before I could sit with Cody, and then Jason and I had the most unrealistically stupidly unlucky cards EVER, plus I actually kinda wanted to get work done instead of goofing off (I know, right?) as we'd been charged with sending out a Stig update to the company and I was in the crossfire of trying to write it up to please as many people as possible.

Tuesday was Valentine's Day, but it wasn't really anything special. I dunno, I came home with the intention of watching Glee and Jeopardy, and mostly accomplished that, though I was a bit distracted on the Jeopardy due to chatting with people online. Shrug. Glee was pretty awesome though, I definitely am going with my theory of "the more Mike Chang appears, the better the episode" and the corollary that if he sings it's even doubled.

Oh, the other thing Valentine's at work was that it was massage day, which I have been trying for the last 2 times (we have them every 3 weeks here, a chair massage place comes in with 7 people and 7 chairs and we set up a room downstairs for it). This was better than the other one was (I didn't find myself repeatedly flinching in pain), but I'm still not sure I'm into the whole thing. I guess maybe if you always go to the same person then they can figure out what hurts and what doesn't.

Oh yeah, I forget what day it was last week, but there's this ongoing joke about me having interns as my minions, right? Like that I joke about ordering them around to do random things (but those things are always like, "eat half of these cookies for me" or "play ping pong with me" or whatever)? One day we were at lunch and Greg accidentally drank out of my can of soda, and I'm like "OMG THAT'S MY COKE" and another intern, Lucas, immediately jumps up like "I'll get you another one!" and runs to the fridge. Hehe.

Also sometime last week either Tuesday or Wednesday we moved Mike Park into the Stig quad. This involved my desk getting downgraded from a full-size into an intern-size desk... which isn't that big a deal except that I have no space for my paper rack anymore (it's still here, but behind my monitors so stuff isn't readily-accessible). So now mpark is in the corner, I'm still front and center for talking to people who come by, and at least he never has to steal my chair or desk anymore because his desk is here now. So there. The only thing that sucked was coming in and having to rewire everything (which happens every time they move me... because I have a secret extra linux computer and two monitors)

Oh yeah, and the ping pong thing... I was watching Davis and Kevin play one afternoon. Davis is left-handed but holds the racket in the "pen hold" style or whatever you call it, right? But Kevin holds it normally and plays entirely back-hand from the right hand, so he kind of looks like a mirror version of me. I played Davis and barely lost 2 games to 1 with the final game being like 12-10, so the next day I played Kevin but we didn't keep score and just ping ponged back and forth for a while talking about stuff. It's good though, they said I'm decent, so maybe I'll get to play more ping pong this semester after all.

We had D&D last Wednesday... our group of four have become known as the "ax-batters" due to Chris's tendency to beat the crap out of shop clerks while wielding his leather-bound axe (aka the ax-bat). We did have an actual series of fights occur this time, involving us going into a bell tower and assaulting the wererats that had taken it over, and it would have been great if not for Chris being a sillyhead and getting bitten by one of them. Oops. Still, I guess it was fun.

(to be continued!)