Cheddar Cheese Soup

This was the first weekend I'd been home in a while, and it was about as perfect as a weekend can get.

Things that contributed to my happiness: a new Italian place that turned out to be great; warm weather (Saturday was my first hammock day of the year); buying an empty barrel from a winery to use as an herb garden planter, which my guy sawed in half for me and which cost less than a quarter as much as buying a pre-made planter in a garden store; sleep; and last but not least, cheddar cheese soup (yes, it can be vegetarian, just switch the stock).

Of course, when I woke up this morning, I thought, "Why do I hear a garbage truck? The trash pickup is on Monday." Pause while the sleep clears from my brain. "Oh. Today is Monday."

Commentary upon Facebook

Since joining Facebook, I have noticed:

- A search for "literary" or "books" in network "Silicon Valley" gets zero hits
- A search for "literary" or "books" in network "Columbia" gets 3 pages of hits
- My friends' photos are niftily color-saturated. How do they do that?

Grrrr.

Presidential Paintball - Miniclip Games - Play Free Games

Presidential Paintball - Miniclip Games - Play Free Games

Victory lap

"What's on the agenda?" asked our tech lead. I paused, waiting for someone else to speak. It wasn't my meeting, and I'd only attended three times. They must have agenda items already.

Our tech lead looked at me. "I'd like to look at our list of projects and assign owners," I said.

"Great," said our tech lead. So we did. One person even volunteered. The meeting ran overtime because we started talking about exactly how to implement changes, and what kind of data we need to get back from the experiments we're running.

Toward the end of the meeting, I asked whether we needed to meet once a week or once every two weeks. "Once a week should be fine," said our project manager.

"You know who the individual engineers are," said our tech lead, "so you can talk individually about the specific projects."

"Sounds good," I said. "I'm sorry I sit so far away." It's a side-effect of my unofficial role: my office is with my current team, rather than with the team I'm aiming to join.

"We have some visitor desks," said the engineer who'd volunteered for my pet project. "You know, where the UI designer sits." I walked back with them, so they could show me where the visitor desks are.

"If you don't mind working on your laptop...." said the tech lead. A couple of the other engineers nodded.

"Sure," I said. "I can spend some time here."

Maybe it's going to work out after all.

Mexican restaurants to try

There was a very active discussion about this at work, so I'm noting down the best-sounding options before I forget 'em:

• La Fiesta, in Mountain View
• Estrellita
• Los Charros
• Los Portales
• La Bamba

Though of course, nothing will ever replace my favorite Palo Alto Sol.

Flood?

Out here in California we don't get what you Easterners call real winter weather - at least most of the time.

So I'm just here to tell you that today, it's raining. It's raining so much that the creek depth near my house, which was 0.0 feet yesterday, is 7.0 feet as I write this.

And how do I know that? I know that because Silicon Valley likes its toys, and so the City of Palo Alto has installed an electronic Creek Depth Measurement Gizmo somewhere in the actual creek, and the resulting data (complete with Creek Cam views!) is available on the Palo Alto creek monitor website. I can check it obsessively from my desk at work as often as I like! Oh goody!

Will my house flood? Will it not? Only time will tell!

A year abroad

If you have a credit card, you probably got a claim form for a class-action lawsuit wherein MasterCard & Visa owe lots of people money for fees charged for international purchases.

I like money as much as the next gal, so a couple of days ago, I started filling out the claim form. To fill out the claim form, I needed to estimate the number of days I'd spent abroad from 1996 - 2006.

And I wound up with 334 days.

This prompted the question, how much total time have I spent out of the US? If I include travel before 1996 (my first trip to England with my mom; my high school musical's exchange program with other schools in Europe; last spring's business trip to Hyderabad; this past summer's trip to France for a friend's wedding), I get to over 400 days.

In case it wasn't obvious, that's more than a year.

Huh. A year abroad. I have spent more than a year abroad. I don't know why I'm surprised - after all, I knew I spent six months in the UK during college, I was there - but I am. Isn't a year abroad supposed to be the sort of thing that one works toward and dreams about, rather than a side-effect of other experiences?