Her next visit after Cleveland was Pittsburg where Sandy played the good cop to her boss's bad cop "strong-arm" tactics. I am sure Sands presence calmed the doctors somewhat and helped them signed up for the study. This morning, at 9:30am PST, she called me from Pittsburg airport.
Sandy: I am coming home early tonight. We'll be flying into Midway Chicago and then back to San Jose.
Me [groggily]: That's great!
Me [remembering something]: Awww...I forgot to ask you to get me a LeBron "Witness" tee-shirt.
Sandy: Huh?
Me: LEBRON. He's a basketball player.
Sandy: Does he play for Pittsburg?
My Sandy. I miss her. She's coming home. Yay!
Click on image above to view larger video. SWF SOURCE: ©nike and is a property of nike.
"We live in a cynical world. A cynical world. And we work in a business of tough competitors. I love you. You... complete me."
The above is a great line of dialog from the venerable James Cameron Cameron Crowe, albeit delivered over-the-top by Tom Cruise. In any case this is not about one of my favorite Cameron films but more along the line of blatantly cross promoting Knot2Us new quarterly bible study: Elijah: Living Securely in an Insecure World.
Read it for yourself here but the gist of it is that we live in a cynical, cynical...and may I add insecure world. Terrorism, hurricanes, avian bird flu, a possible war with Iran, oil prices, global warming, to name a few of the frightful news thrown at us from the media.
Where will we go to find courage to face our fears? In the next two months I will be learning about this and probably venture this question: "What would Elijah do?"
Okay smallgroup beckons.
Fire is bad.
It's been awhile since I had to "put out the fire", or been involved in a team effort of putting out fire. Before my current work at this place doing enterprise software GUI, putting out fires were common lingo in my other work environments.
This morning at 10:20 I had to rush into work on my normal WFHW (Work From Home Wednesdays). It turned out our web server was down and the worst of it...the CEO found THAT out. Bad...bad...bad. And on top of that the one IT person who configured the web server and knew it's complicated folder structure left last week to work for another start-up. Essentially the three of us who had to put out the fire were madly scrambling trying to figure out what happened.
The Panda Express officially opened at the office. Well sort of. This entire week my company is training customers who use our enterprise software. This happens at least once a quarter. For someone like me who is budget conscious this is a blessing. Nevermind that the office is much quieter and security around here has beefen up, the thing I most enjoy is the FREE lunch (read leftovers).
Today it was chinese food á la Panda Express. Nice and cold.
Yesterday it was sandwiches from "the Bay Area's best"—Le Boulanger.
Coincidentally I know of someone who resides in a condo *ahem*castle*ahem* above Le Boulanger in Cupertino. In fact there is a petition to make residents there be more aware of "the danger of Condo-tino". You can read about the hilarious entry here, here, and here. The condo-tino effect goes well with the white flight effect and if the trend continues condo-tino will be inhabited by mostly well-to-do asians. Sandy can probably relate to the reverse of the "let my people go" line.
Back to FREE lunch, who knows what tomorrow's lunch will be? But IF the people at work catches on to this I may have to hurry to the "lunch" line to avoid the stampede. Although I did get the last pot sticker today.
"You have to establish boundaries, let her know that some things are not prohibited."
"You can't be too submissive. And you Marissa cannot be too aggressive, either."
"You have to allow her to speak because that is the only way she can express herself."
You'll never know where you get relationship advice these days. You get what you can, wherever you can. Even if those advice blurs between human and pets, and comes from a dog therapist/trainer. That's right, all of the above advice are indeed for the shy Fidos out there, or in this case my co-worker's dog Molly. The one where the dog therapist is talking to Marissa, that is advice for their human owners.
Relationships ARE Hard. Amen.
A few months ago we had a gathering to watch Dr. James Dobson's video about relationship.
I have just recently moved to another cube and everything seems different. I feel disoriented physically and have to try to get a new feel for the space. The funny thing is all my usual routine of IM-ing coworkers, emailing, debugging, designing, etc...are all tied to the physical space even though most of what I do is through bits and bytes. In other words my virtual space is tied to my physical space. However it's safe to say that adapting to this new space will be easier as my cube-mate is in the same team and won't go through bouts of anger management issues.
On to another matter. I have been thinking about personal finance recently. I would like to do a simple survey and it would be great if you could answer some of these questions by commenting here.
Do you use personal finance softwares such as Quicken or MS Money?
Would you be interested in learning more about retirement planning, saving for your kids college tuiton, life insurance, budgeting, tax, investments, etc?
Would you like to have a personal certified financial advisor analyse your retirement goals and provide a personalized reports/statements for you?
Would you use this service online if the tradeoff between doing it yourself and having a web-based software and CFA do it for you is very close?
Lastly what would you pay for such a service?
Thanks and have a good day!
I left out something funny that I thought I share here, which has to do with what I wrote earlier about the Peking Acrobats. Essentially I left out a "highlight" of the night so I decided to use Sandy's email to our friend who provided us the tickets as the "mouthpiece" for this part of the entry.
We were in the very first row and dead center. I've never had front row seats for a show before. We even made eye contact with a few of the acrobats. One guy was pretty handsome, and he looked at me a few times then he would loook at Mike and give him a dirty look.
Really I didn't think he was all that. Sure he could do cartwheels and fly from one pole to another with ease but could he debug javascript for crossbrowsers, and say "Web Two Point OH" ten times really quickly. Who am I kidding I can't say it that many times either but the point is he's probably not all that threatening outside of his acrobatic tights.
VP (Vietpower, ie Alin, ie MD) came through for us, scoring us primo seatings to a grand night out at the San Jose Performance Arts Center last night. Why were we (Sandy+me) there? Oh to watch the Peking Acrobats, of course.
Before checking in to the Peking Acrobats, we made a dinner stop at E&O Trading Company in downtown San Jose. A few weeks ago on our way to the Melting Pot we noticed this quaint restaurant with a name more like an investment company than a 4+ star restaurant (according to Citysearch.)
E&O Trading Co. is basically an asian fusion place. Their menu you can download and view for yourself off of the website I provided above. I read through it and came up with these choices with the priority of getting the most varied foods out there without spending a lot of money. This is what we got in order:
Last night the Giants lost pretty badly against Houston Astros behind the nearly perfect pitching of Roy Oswalt. I should qualify that by saying the Giants had to play doubleheader games, making up for a rained out and cancelled game last Tuesday. In any case they split the games.
If you do make it out to SBC Park one of the best deal is the spicy Sheboygan sausages. (I was lucky enough to get this advice from Nick and Petey who were with us at the game.) The Sheboygan is basically a huge wurst sausage with grilled onion and sauerkrauts, extraordinarily huge, and extremely tasty—all for $6.50. That usually follows pretty well with the Gordon Biersch garlic fries. Otherwise everything else at SBC can get pretty pricey.
Next game? Giants vs. Dodgers in May (schedule.) Next eats? The Cha-Cha-Bowl.
On another note Barry Bonds was in the news although not in a good way. I think it would be ironic if he was 1 run from Hank Aaron's home run record (755) and he gets thrown in jail. Ouch!
Happy Good Friday and I hope all of you will have a great Easter celebration. And remember to always give thanks to our Lord Jesus.
I am stuck in code freeze limbo, at work that is. So I decided to notch up the fun factor a bit by planning on a short run. So I approached one of my co-worker with the intention of telling him of said run and get his go-for-it motivational speech. Didn't happen.
"You are delaying the inevitable...a year from now BAM! you'll be in the same shape."..."it's a downhill road for us"..."just eat healthy"...and my personal favorite..."that's why we play ping pong."
Did Christmas arrived early or did the bah-humbug bug bit my friend early this year?
And so with that motivational speech lodged in my brain I decided what the heck it IS a nice day for a run. And run I did nearby where I live, a brief one way out and back down the John Christian Greenbelt, a familar haunting place for another runner clieu. In any case it was a struggle of a run and I hated it. Or in Christian terms I strongly disliked it.
I wanted to blog about this if it wasn't for Dreamhost servers crashing earlier. Anyway they got it fixed now.
So after Kids Club this afternoon I thought I'll write some passages that will encourage us to think about what Easter truly means. There are many other religions but only one can claim that Jesus is the Son of God who resurrected from the dead.
Finally after a little over a month I got my 2005 Federal tax refund in the mail yesterday. In our modern electronic filing day-and-age, to get a refund back after more than 30 days is...well...the whole process just seems so antiquated. I could have use TurboTax to e-file but Sandy will do her's tonight and will probably file it that way. We share the software and only one e-filer at a time.
Oddly enough today I had to go to my nearest BofA to make a deposit. I don't remember the last time I actually had to do that. Incredible!
The hardest part is over. We won our first GRX Hoops game with a new team: Geckos. Much appreciation goes to the SLK girls (Sands Laurine and K-Dog) for coming out so late to cheer us on. You guys gave us that extra energy needed to get over the hump of the second half.
On a related note: Here is a flickr set of this year's draft night that I taken part in (one of the most exciting night) and a link of the Geckos roster. Some past articles of my scouting strategies and last year's draft night.
One madness down, one to go. Tip off starts at 7pm at the new gym.
Feel free to leave your post-mortem Bruins comment(s) here.
Time to go for some refreshment, design-wise.
