January 2006

Apparently Lorilee (aka Midget Lover or Chompy) is right, and most of my posts come after midnight. I’m not drunk, which has to give me some sort of leg to stand on, but not much of one. A wooden leg, really.

My birthday celebration is starting to look like a genuine three-day event. Tomorrow (today) I will pop by work to kiss some ass, have lunch with Amanda, and buy a thing or two. Then I’ll have dinner with Dena and Melis, as well as Amanda and Savannah at Cafe Torre. After dinner is the mandatory Tuesday night trip to Khartoum, where I plan on getting ridiculously drunk on drinks that I’m not paying for. (Miles fixed the foosball table for us tonight, since it stopped spitting out balls last night.) (He’s still my favorite bartender…shhhh! Don’t tell Steve or Clayton!) Then Wednesday night, Bryan and I will have dinner at sanraku in San Francisco, then head to the Warfield to see Cake on my actual birthday. Thursday morning I’m driving to Tahoe with Amanda (provided she doesn’t flake on me for a variety of reasons) to snowboard at Northstar and hang out with MJ. Then Friday morning we’ll leave Tahoe bright and early so I can make work at 1pm.

Whew.

Did I mention that I got a raise today? :D

I didn’t get tagged for this, but I will liberally steal from kottke.org and then tag my pals.

Four jobs I’ve had:
1. selling rubber stamps in a stationary store
2. the only girl selling snowboards in a mom&pop store
3. student teacher for a class in college called “Mentor” which taught critical thinking and writing skills (where I then got the professor called out to the carpet for not following curriculum or even MLA Format)
4. supervisor at REI

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Bring It On
2. Singing in the Rain
3. Dazed and Confused
4. Fight Club

Four places I’ve lived:
1. San Jose, CA
2. Stockton, CA
3. Handa City, Aichi Prefecture, Japan
4. Los Gatos, CA

Four TV shows I love (which are still on the air):
1. Veronica Mars
2. Lost
3. Family Guy
4. Arrested Development (not on the air much longer…)

Four TV shows I love (which are no longer on the air):
1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
2. The X-Files
3. Firefly
4. Fame

Four popular “must see” TV shows that I’ve never watched a single minute of:
1. Survivor
2. American Idol
3. The Sopranos
4. Deadwood

Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Ireland
2. Vietnam
3. New York City
4. Niseko, Hokkaido, Japan

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. soupy-soup
2. cheese enchiladas
3. eggs benedict
4. cheese + wine

Four sites I visit daily:
1. bloglines.com (so I don’t visit the 80-ish sites I subscribe to)
2. GorillaMask.net
3. Salon.com
4. pinkisthenewblog.com

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. snowboarding
2. at the bar, playing foosball
3. on vacation…anywhere
4. in bed

Four bloggers I am tagging:
1. FlossMan
2. nougatmachine
3. Louie
4. Rachie when she’s back home

I went to a country/western club tonight. I might hate myself a little bit. But apparently this is what happens when I spend too much time with Amanda. Savannah and I both went as good-natured participants, trying to get close to John Corbett while he was performing. Savannah actually got to meet him and shake his hand…it was very exciting. Then we ate at Wendy’s via the drive-through, watched a little bit of Showgirls at Savannah’s, and I went home. I can’t believe I went tonight. Clearly my standards are slipping.

What’s happened? Here’s the quick recap, which I hope to expand upon tomorrow.

• I got into a fight with the ropetow at Northstar and lost. Twice.
• I had lunch with my friend Mike in Stockton, and got to see one of my favorite professors too.
• I went back to my high school for the grand opening of the performing arts center, which was destroyed due to arson a few years ago. I was the oldest non-performing alumni there. Doh.
• Work has been hectic, but probably in a good way.
• Saw Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe on a lazy Sunday and enjoyed it.
• Tonight I got really drunk and got to beat a bunch of guys in foosball. Guys don’t like losing to girls. It apparently dents the ego.
• Rachel and Darren are back from Oz for a while, and I got to see them today, where they spent much too much at my work for their own good. Which is just fun.

Sarah and I are heading up to her mom’s place tonight, then we’re off to Northstar-at-Tahoe for a day of sweet snowboarding on Thursday. So happy birthday to Sarah with good snow. Then Thursday night we’re staying with our friend MJ, to have a bit of a party-party. Whee!

Last night was Cirque du Mac Party 3.0, held at San Francisco’s Red Devil Lounge. It was a packed house, where the booze flowed freely. Bryan’s site, Mac Observer and their sister company, BackBeat Media hosted a great shindig. And the open bar always makes folks more apt to love the party. hee hee

I brought Amanda, DJ, and Mitra, and we partied like minor rock stars. All my usual trade show pals were there (hi to Greg, John, Jim With The New Beard, and Peter), so I got to mix my two worlds. Plus I got to enjoy a lot of Newcastle. I even got to dance a little, and I haven’t gotten to dance in a long time. It never ceases to amaze me how little rhythm middle-aged white geeks have. Then I go to one of these parties and it all comes crashing back.

After the party, Amanda and I had a fierce wresting match, which mostly involved me straining her back. I believe that Bryan and our friend Misha took a giant series of photos of the “girl fight,” but believe me when I say that they won’t make it to the internet if I can help it.

Normally people want to be number one, and in this case, it would be nice as well, but we’ll take number nine. With the recent publication of Fortune magazine’s annual list of the 100 best companies to work for, my humble little company was voted the ninth best company to work for. Woo!  I do love my company, and I love working for them.  They provide a great balance between work and play, and I often get to play as much as I work.  In fact, we also made the list of companies that provide the best work/life balance.  I work with fun people, and generally have a good time doing it.

Congrats to my company and the staff who help make it a fun place to work.

Last night, I had the “good fortune” to work on our semi-annual physical inventory at work.  Which basically means that we count everydamnthing in the store, to make sure that we have what we think we have, and to correct any errors in order to get the correct product into our store in case of any glaring errors.  Over the summer, we had a rocking inventory…it took a very short amount of time (5.5 hours with about 40 people working).  This one was much more difficult because of many factors.  We are still reeling from the madness of the holidays, and didn’t have much time to prepare for inventory.  We are also suffering, as a collective store, from the flu thing that I have had for the entirety of 2006.  Inventory took nearly 3 hours longer because of this, and I didn’t get home until 1am.

The good news is that it seemed to have gone well, so the recounts that happened this morning should not be too awful.  Here’s hoping!  It affects my year-end bonus, so good is better.

Also, congrats to Savannah, for getting a sweet new job!

Hooray! Savannah is home! Now considering I’ve known Savannah for less time than I’ve been hanging out with Amanda (while I participated in hiring Amanda ages ago, we didn’t hang out as friends until The Move Out about six months ago), I sure do miss her when she’s gone. She was in the Chicago area for two weeks, visiting her family for the holidays. We picked her up at the airport after work tonight and went out. First order of business was defeating all contenders at the foosball table. Then, because of poor planning, we had to pause to drive back to work to go get my car. We split up because I’ve got to work again in the morning…but look out tomorrow!

Last night, Adam/FlossMan asked me for a little Photoshop ninja skills demonstration. Ok, actually, he asked me if I could work up a new header image design for his blog. I was being somewhat facetious and said I’d come up with a ton of them. I sat down for about 45 minutes (according to the AIM logs), and spit out five different headers using two stock images and some randomness from my own mind, font-inspired ideas, and a few well-placed Adam quotes taken out of context. Awesome!

I swear, this is the first step toward my own redesign. Really.

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 and nothing has changed. Really. The back-end for me is different, but what you’re seeing as far as content goes should not have changed much. The comment system is a little bit different, but it should be for the better. The upgrade went smoothly. As I suggested to myself, via conversation with Adam/FlossMan, installing a second instance of Wordpress on my server, making sure nothing dies, then doing the real upgrade was well worth the extra effort. Though Alex likes to see my site die a horrible, upgraded death for 30 minutes of laughing at me, I prefer the painless sort myself. I know, I know, I have no sense of adventure.

Thus far, I must say that I appreciate the hard work that went into the 2.0 plug-in compatibility list, since it’s helped me freak out less. I still need to play with the joy that is (supposed to be) Akismet, but I expect good things. Raena mentioned something about a photo plug-in, which I haven’t explored. She also said it’s b0rked, but I imagine it’ll come along soon enough. My parents got me a new camera for Christmas/birthday, which I should receive soonish, and then I will start photo spamming much more. You’re all so excited.

I’m still sick, which sucks.  I got Amanda sick, which also sucks.  And now my right foot is asleep, which sucks too.

For reasons unknown to me, I’ve been struck down with a horrible flu+cough. It hit me new year’s day, and has been beating me down ever since. Mostly I think it’s taunting me because there is finally snow up in the Sierras, and I have three days off starting today. But instead of going up to Mt. Rose tomorrow, and getting to try out my new powder board, I’m at home, hacking up a lung. Plus I’ve got my man-voice on right now, and I sound like a dude. Ugh.