weekend, etc

Friday night was our company party, at 620 Jones, which is a bar/restaurant/whatever.  Everyone expected there to be very little food and lots of drinks like last year, and then of course there was a ton of food and drinks anyway.  Oops.  I got to meet Liliana, who I've known for YEARS through LJ and other baseball stuff, she's an A's/Giants/whatever fan, so that was kinda cool.  Other than that, I spent a lot of time mostly wandering around since I didn't have a date and didn't really have a group per se, either.  There was facepainting and costumes, so I got my face painted and a hat, and other people got all kinds of crazy things and boas and wigs and stuff.  Solidum got a Napoleon Dynamite wig and glasses and I guess I spent a while hanging out with him.  I did photo booth with him, also a photo booth with Jason, Drew D, Peter, and Kate.  The Taggle awards went to some people that we expected, and some that were unexpected.  Shrug.

Amusingly, I went up to the bar and kept asking for "non-alcoholic but whatever the heck is fine" drinks and thus got all kinds of things like mocktails, nojitos, whatever.  I had like 5 drinks... mostly because I noticed that it was a lot easier to go talk to people if I was holding a drink in my hand, I just didn't want to have alcohol because I've had a cold since Wednesday (well, and I just don't like drinking for the most part).  So when Chris and I walked home (and oh man my feet hurt SO MUCH) he was shocked to learn halfway there that I was absolutely totally sober.  Hehe.

Saturday afternoon I went to Google to playtest stuff for DASH with Dale, Linnsey, and Yuan.  I'm not going to talk about the puzzles, obviously, just that it was a good experience and that I am very much looking forward to staffing DASH, wherever the hell I may be for it (I've volunteered to basically help out in any city provided I have some other excuse at all whatsoever to be there).  Yuan says she may go to London to staff... I wonder if I could go too, that might be really interesting since I've never been to any other countries except Japan.

In the evening I went to San Jose, to the "Sharks Ice" rink, where I got to watch my coworkers Chris and Craig play hockey!!!  That was pretty exciting even though they're just in an E league or whatever, Chris and Marc picked me up from the Starbucks near Google and we went to the rink, I brought my dSLR and took a whole bunch of photos of them playing.  Marc thought there would be a public skate and we could skate on the side, but there wasn't, sadly.  Our friends' team won 6-0 though so that was cool.

Sunday, I finally got to go up the Campanile, the clock tower in the middle of Berkeley campus.  Those bells are LOUD.