Brand New Day

Quick post before I need to Start my Day. (And go back to work!)

I am missing the Seahawks game this week and next in order to work. TJ is going today with his friend John from work, who's from Texas (I think they're playing Houston, but I'm not sure).

Looking for something funny? Here's what they call the @ sign in other languages. Thanks to Richard for pointing this out - it's really amusing, especially the language (Thai?) in which they call it something that translates to "the wiggling worm-like character".

I got about 9 hours of sleep last night. Yum! I made myself promise I'd finish my presentation slides before I went to bed. I started working on them around 2pm yesterday (already had a skeleton of a deck before that!) and didn't finish until 12 midnight. I seriously underestimated how long it would take, but I'm pretty happy with the results, except for a few minor changes I need to make.

OK, back to work. Today I get to set up the Website we use to communicate with our customers. That should be fun and not too challenging, as Microsoft already has a configurable tool where I just "plug in" the content I want to appear on the site. Yay for easy things.

How long have I been sleeping?

Ugh. It's crunch time at work. The customer event I've been vaguely planning since March is now less than 2 weeks away. I've spent nearly every waking moment for the past 3 weeks at work, doing work at home, or thinking about work (in the shower, before bed, when I wake up in the morning). Which is sort of cool because it's been a while since I've been this motivated about my job. And I have always worked well under pressure. But I'm not sure I can keep this up through Oct 27, when the event ends, so I'm trying to take it easy a bit and not stay at work until 11pm every night.

Oh, and on the off chance I'm not working, I'm doing homework for my class. I'm not sure why I actively sign up for that kind of punishment...

So if I haven't called you in a while (hi Amma and Appa!) or responded to your email, that's why. I'll be back in the real world on Oct 28.

If you want to see what Suz has been doing while she's been at MIT, check this out.

Cheers!

It's taken me all this time

Now that I'm finally done with all my homework for my class (last minute of course), I can post here without feeling too guilty.

The next few weeks are going to be insane. I am planning a huge customer training event at work, and getting all the details nailed down is huge work. Not to mention I need to put together a couple of presentations for it and make sure everyone else is doing their stuff. It's kind of like planning my wedding all over again, except this time my livelihood depends on it and my entire team is watching whether I can pull it off. (no pressure or anything...)

I met with my writing group for Happy Hour on Wednesday. They seem like a decent bunch of guys. (Then again, would I really say otherwise, out here on the Internet?) :) I just finished reviewing their papers for the first assignment we had to do. Fortunately it was a short one, so it took less than an hour to read all three and jot down some notes about each one. It's kind of a neat exercise since it makes me think about my own paper as well. We'll see how the "exchanging feedback" part goes tomorrow. Hopefully it won't be too painful.

I found out that one of my co-workers has a brother that went to high school with TJ (in Arizona) *and* she and her husband live in the house that's diagonally behind ours. Very freaky. Apparently one day she saw TJ chasing Spike through her yard since that's where he likes to go when he escapes. I guess I should be careful if I ever decide to have a loud tirade about work with the windows open...

I watched the TiVo'd finale of "So You Think You Can Dance" today. I can't believe Nick won! Melody is so much better. Ugh, I am a slave to these reality TV "talent" shows.

Now that Rock Star: INXS is over, I'm not sure what to watch!! Nathalie is going to try to get us tickets for the INXS concert in Seattle, which is in January. Woo hoo!

You're no problem at all

Class turned out to be ok. The four hours went by much quicker than expected and OneNote performed admirably as a note-taking tool.

We had to form 4-person "writing groups" on our own, which is kind of weird in a classroom full of people that don't know each other. Oddly enough, I did know one person in class - he was in my last group at Microsoft and was part of a group of folks I went to lunch with occasionally. So we decided to be in the same group and found 2 other guys looking for some more people.

I gotta say, group projects terrify me. I'm just more of an independent worker. But none of our assignments are actually group efforts. We each write up the assignment for the week and our writing group reviews it and provides feedback. That I can handle. So far it's working out pretty well - one of the guys set up a Yahoo! Groups site for us to post messages and our drafts. Yay for technology. Oh, and we're planning to go to Happy Hour this week. It works better for me if I'm comfortable with the people who are trashing my writing ;).

The class seemed to be mostly "non-traditional" students, or at least people who aren't 20 years old. So that was cool. And the other students seem pretty interested and motivated. I am really glad I'm only taking one class - I've already spent a couple of hours on the reading and homework, and I'm not even halfway done. I've got two writing assignments to complete this week, which shouldn't be too difficult, but I also have a ton of reading in the 3 (!) required textbooks we have. I think it's going to be a lot of work, but not terribly difficult. (Unless the prof thinks my writing sucks, in which case it's going to be a long and painful quarter.)

I'm having flashbacks to that stupid remedial composition class I had to take at Caltech, when something like 60% of my class got stuck in ESL or remedial English for no apparent reason. The best was the native English speakers who had to take ESL. I wasn't that unfortunate.

Did some cooking today with so-so results. Annie's white cheddar mac 'n' cheese with some fresh steamed broccoli came out pretty dry for some reason. I guess being all-natural has its drawbacks - no chemicals to make the sauce nice and gooey. I also steamed some vegetables in soy sauce and rice vinegar with garlic and ginger, but they didn't taste too good. And I baked the beets I got in the Pioneer Organics box. I think I just don't like beets unless they're the marinated ones you find in the salad bar. Well, at least I have food for this coming week, which is going to be crazy busy.

Here's a special shout out to Kristin who's moving back to DC in a week. I'm sad that she'll be so far away again, but hope she likes her new job better!

G'night!

Let's get it started in here

I'm sitting in the classroom, waiting for my first day of school to start. So far I'm the only girl, and there are about 7 other people here. The classroom is very nice - the whole campus is brand-new, so there's a place to plug in my laptop and they use tables instead of those annoying individual desks.

The cool thing is that I can just connect to the UW wireless network automatically - nothing to configure on my laptop. Awesome. But also bad. If the class gets too boring I will probably end up surfing the Internet. Very distracting.

Well, class starts in 4 minutes so I better get going. More later! (If I'm not comatose after a 4 hour lecture, that is.)