Mild Amusement

At work, the team of which I'm a part asks that you let everyone else know if you're going to be out on a certain day. The idea is that it's easier to figure out when we have schedule conflicts and no one sits around waiting for you if you're not around. We have a group calendar, but often times, people forget about it. Really, the de facto way of doing this is by sending out an email to the group saying, "I'll be out of the office on day X for reason Y. I'll be back on day Z, if you need to reach someone, do Q." Now, you're under no obligation to tell everyone your business. You can say, "I need to take care of some personal matters" and that's that. However, most of the time the reasons are benign: doctor's appointments, obligations with kids, vacations. That means that people get in the habit of writing emails with the real reason why they're out. This has led me to laugh out loud on more than one occasion. Some...

Among the other fallout from my recent Houston trip , I ended up with a pretty nasty sounding cough. I didn't feel sick, but I sounded pretty bad. In fact, I got through a fairly intense "bootcamp" class with that cough, so I figured I was fine (side note: the running joke seems to be that I had mono). Still, I sounded sick. It got bad enough that I figured I'd use a sick day a couple of days after I got back to rest up. A day of rest is usually enough to help me recover from colds & coughs, so I figured I'd be back to the grind the next day. And since I was being all good about taking care of myself, I went looking for cough medicine, too. If I was actually trying to make myself get better, it couldn't hurt to actually try to make myself get better. Now I haven't been sick enough to take medicine in a while, so I had to ask where the medicine was. My mom pulled out a box of the stuff, and then wandered off to deal with something else. The fir...

I was recently in Houston with some work friends for a long weekend/vacation. It was a lot of fun; we ate & drank plenty, we saw a couple of shows (Miss Saigon & Wonderland ), and there was general merriment to be found. Heck, I even found a guy who used to be in the armed services that taught a class called "Bootcamp" (all you other "bootcamp" classes taught at random gyms, I'm pretty sure you got nothing on this guy). It was a good time, and I'm glad I went. But you know what worries me? On this trip, it felt like my friends were slowly taking more liberties with messing with me. It's not like anyone was out and out being a jerk (if they were, we'd have words). No, it was far more insidious & devious than that. It felt like a slow turning of the tides, with yours truly on the receiving end of the crashing wave. Don't believe me? I present to the jury Exhibit A: after watching Miss Saigon, a couple of people joked that I remi...

A while back, my friend talked me into running the Kaiser Half Marathon . There was actually a group of us that decided to run that race, so we'd all been fairly diligent about training. I had to skip out on a 10 mile run a couple of weeks before the actual race, but I'd been pretty good up to that point. All in all, I felt like I was doing a halfway decent job of training, so I was shooting for 2 hours or less. And seeing as how that was roughly the midpoint between my San Jose time and my Vegas time, it seemed like a reasonable goal. On the morning of the race, I got up early (side note: why can't there ever be a race that starts at 10AM or something?) and got all ready to go. I had opted for picking up my race packet that morning, so I actually had to be there even earlier than most people. Given that, I figured I'd skip breakfast at the house and grab a banana or bagel somewhere near the start line. They generally have something for the participants, and it...

I think I might be slipping on the social hierarchy at work. I've never exactly been at the top, mind you. But I get by, you know? I have a non-trivial number of friends at work, and they, in turn, are socially capable. I kind of figure that if my friends aren't social outcasts, then by the transitive property, I'm not one, either (really, I'm just riding their coattails). At least that was the working theory until today. Today, the guy I used to work with emailed me back about a birthday lunch. We usually try to celebrate people's birthdays with at least a lunch in their honor. If we know the person better or can get something together, we'll do dinner or hit a club, but that really depends on the circumstances. Anyhow, I emailed this guy yesterday asking him if he wanted to do a birthday lunch. Well, the question was more like, "when are you free for said lunch?" And he didn't get back to me. Mind you, this is an office environment at a...

My mom has run her daycare for a few years now, so I've seen a few kids go from being babies to toddlers, and from toddlers to kids. And I'll admit that it's kind of fun to watch them go from being completely incapable of taking care of themselves to being actual people (albeit small people) in two to three years. But you know what's really fun? Figuring out which ones are smart. Kids always pull shenanigans - they're little and haven't quite learned how to be responsible yet. But it's the *kind* of shenanigan that they try to execute that tells you something about them. If they run into a room they're not supposed to be in, that's normal. If they run into that room and then close the door behind them so they don't get caught, that's clever. Annoying, but clever. That said, I think we've got a smart one on our hands. For whatever reason, he likes to take the cushions from the futon, put them on the ground, and them jump on them. ...

ningun pendejo se mete. My dad is fond of saying that - it roughly means, "only idiots get involved in domestic disputes." Only "idiot" is probably a little too tame a translation, at least given the Spanish that I grew up speaking. No, the word (the one that starts with a "p") is probably more akin to "jackass." Anyhow, I was reminded of this the other day when my dad showed me the latest DVD he had found. See, it all started a few days before that when I was talking to my mom. I don't quite remember whether my mom was talking about exercise or she was just cracking jokes, but she started jumping around and shadowboxing. It looked very much like one of those cartoon characters just throwing their hands around in a circle. It just didn't look very intimidating, so I taught her how to throw a punch properly. =p I'm not the greatest fighter, but I took some kickboxing back in the day. I ran her through the basics of how ...

In my efforts to stay in shape, I've ended up working out my lower body a lot more than I expected. I don't know how many squats, lunges, and runs I've done/gone on in the last year, but whatever the number is, it's a lot higher than I ever figured it'd be. It's not exactly glamorous, but as a friend once commented, "in just about any sport you can name, you tend to need your legs more than your upper body." So it's not exactly like I'm disappointed about it. In fact, it's been helpful a bunch of times before: when I was hiking Half Dome, when I ran a half-marathon , and heck, even for playing with little kids . You know when it's not helpful? When I finally get around to shopping, and I realize that skinny jeans are in style. I've never quite been a fan of the style to begin with, but I never quite realized how much it has pervaded the culture. I've worn the same waist size for a while now, and I know that I haven...