Mild Amusement

I have an interesting relationship with shopping. To begin with, I tend to do a fair bit of it online, since I find it's easier to find what I need that way. It's also rare that I need a particular item in that exact moment, so I can usually wait a few days for my package to arrive (though there are definitely exceptions to this rule ). I tend to shop from home, basically. Now, that's not to say that I don't ever frequent brick and mortar retail stores. In fact, I've written about an adventure or two that I've had when stepping foot inside of these stores. One of the more interesting ones was a recent one, when the Mild Fiancée (then the Mild Girlfriend) and I swore up and down that the cologne I liked had somehow changed its smell . It all got settled in the end, but it was a pretty amusing way to get to that point. Lately, though, I've noticed that there's another, implied type of shopping that we end up doing. I call it shopping at home, because i...

A while back, I remarked that I like to get creative when serving the food . It doesn't happen all the time, but every now and then, I come up with something good. All in all, though it's mostly just a way to have some fun with putting food on the table. And since I'm the sous chef and we're cooking more these days, that gives me more opportunities to play with the food. My favorite example of this was with a simple brownie. The Mild Fiancée and I were sitting on the couch, and she asked me to serve the brownies for dessert. As I was pulling the brownies out of the pan, I noticed the rounded corner. Now, I can't tell you exactly what it was about that corner that triggered a memory, but the shape of that corner harkened back to my childhood. I'd seen that rounded edge before. I knew it from somewhere. As soon as I realized what it reminded me of, I knew I wasn't going to just plop the brownie on the plate. Oh, no no no. I was going to have some fun wit...

The Mild Wedding preparations are in full swing, and it's becoming more real by the day. A friend of ours once described the whole process as an exercise in project management, and I'd concur with that assessment. It definitely feels like we go through checklists and spurts of activities. Put it this way: there's a spreadsheet with a bunch of tasks and dates that we need to get through. Now, it's not all work. There's some fun and games that go along with it, too. In this particular case, the Mild Fiancée had a bachelorette type outing with friends and family. I say "bachelorette type" because it wasn't your stereotypical outing. She's not a stereotypical type of girl, so I can't say I was very surprised. Besides, it was her day, and that's how she wanted to have fun. She could've dressed in a bunny suit and gone to IHOP and I wouldn't have questioned it. The one bit, however, that was slightly more traditional came courtesy of ...

As I've written about before, I have a mixed heritage . You wouldn't know it from looking at me, but I have Chinese family. On the flip side, you wouldn't know by looking at my name on paper that I was born in South America and speak Spanish. Basically, I surprise people all the time. It leads to all sorts of laughs. For example, someone called me at work the other day to talk about working with some interns from minority groups. I've never worked with this person before, but he got my name from some folks that I have worked with. Since he only knew my name, he had no idea that I actually had first-hand experience with some of the teams and programs that he was describing. The kicker of all of it was when I let him in on the secret. He asked if I spoke Spanish, and I responded in a few Spanish sentences. Apparently, though, he did not speak any Spanish, despite a very brown-sounding last name of his own. I got a good kick out of that. As much fun as that can be, th...

Every now and then, I attend a conference for work. For the most part, the point of attending these conferences is that I'm supposed to learn some stuff and meet some people. The proportion of those two things changes a bit depending on the conference, but that's the basic formula. Of course, there's also some amusing anecdotes thrown in every now and then. This is a tale of that last part. Recently, I had to attend a fairly large conference. I was warned in advance that there would be lots of people there, to the point where you had to go in with a plan lest you get sidetracked. I did my homework, so I mostly knew where to go and how to navigate the crowds. The one item that I left somewhat unsettled, however, was a meeting with a vendor we work with. We agreed on a time and a general area, but left it at that. Me being me, I arrived early to make sure I didn't miss the guy or keep him waiting. When I got there, though, I quickly realized that I was not going to be...

Planning for the Mild Wedding is in full swing, so the Mild Fiancée and I have been spending a good amount of our time working on various wedding tasks. As one friend of ours put it, wedding planning is an exercise in project management. There's a good number of tasks, but so long as you meter them out, things get done. Even better for me, the Mild Fiancée is a pretty good partner in crime for that sort of thing, so a good chunk of it has been surprisingly straight forward. That said, there have been a few amusing stories here and there as a result. I'm sure there will be a few more posts about it all once it has all passed, but one of my favorites involved the wedding invitations. We'd already sent out the Save the Date announcements by this point, so our loved ones knew about the relevant dates. However, once the invitations went out, we had to have a lot of the mechanisms in place (i.e., a wedding website, a functional RSVP mechanism, a registry). In this particular ...

It’s funny how reliant we are on the Internet. There are entire parts of my job that I haven’t bothered to memorize, because I simply don’t need to. Rather than memorizing which C# class lets me parse file names correctly, I can search for that sort of thing. Sure, there are some that I’ve learned through sheer repetition, but for the most part, I don't bother with information that I can find via Google. I say that because I found myself in an interesting predicament earlier today. I had a couple of hours to myself at a coffee shop, with the full intent of writing some blog posts and a story or two. Normally, I would dig through my email and my text messages for inspiration, since that tends to be a good source of humor. Alas, it was not meant to be this time around. I was at a coffee shop I’d never been to before, so I didn’t know what the protocol was for the Internet. I paid with a credit card, but the person behind the counter made no effort to give me any kind of rece...