Yesterday we had an interesting interview with the grandson of the father of the hydrogen bomb.  Somehow that description makes me think of the dude as related to a hydrogen bomb...

Going on an impromptu Vegas tomorrow!  Dan and Chris have been there all week and somehow managed to get the weekend added on.  It's a 110 degrees there - it'll be a sharp contrast to NOLA when I get there.

Here's me at the end of last week's conference.  Yes, I was as happy as I look in the photo.

I have this cartoon pinned up outside my cubicle for all to enjoy...thought I'd put it here so that more than the 10 people in my office will see it.

I love this guy's cartoons - Don Asmussen has a regular section a few times a week in the San Francisco Chronicle.  This particular piece was attached to an article about UCSF giving ipods to staff.

Our project team went out on a nice unexpected lunch with the company CEO today - who was thrilled with how the event turned out last week. 

There was this great article in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago when we were hitting the major hurdles in this project - we never thought it would be so true - Assigned a Flop?  You Could Wind Up Looking Like a Winner (May 02, 2007).

That was all fun and exciting...until an expected staff meeting was called and we learned that due to some reorg, four people got the ax this afternoon.  It'll be quiet tomorrow morning...

Had brunch with my parents on the deck this morning, then went out to Pleasanton to run errands and go to the mall with my sister.  I meant to remove the InfoDot from my neck since I was going to be in public and people might think I had some weird cancerous mole on me, but I completely forgot and it's still there.

Our last stop at the mall was at Sephora.  It's always fun to poke around there because of the ridiculous variety of makeup, etc.  So much fun, in fact, that I got distracted on the way out and missed the door opening, and walked into the glass window in the front of the store.

My sister assures me that no one saw me. 

I must have bounced off really quickly.

Yesterday, in a bizarre effort to celebrate the end of our conference, my research manager stuck an infoDot on me.  The InfoDot was one topic of discussion at Thursday's event, a 2-dimensional bar code that stores more data than a standard linear bar code and is primarily used to identify surgical instruments.  Since one of the concerns is that it would fall off an implement and into the surgical field, I thought I'd leave it on as a scientific experiment and see how long it lasted.  So far it's been through a 2-mile run and a shower.  Not sure if that is comparable to being autoclaved 2,000 times.  It's also been mistaken for a pen mark, a giant mole, and a screw coming out of my neck á la Frankenstein.

Someone left this card on my windshield when I was at Golden Gate Park a few weeks ago.  Who does that?  Kind of cute, but would have been decidely less so if I saw the person actually placing it there.

After finishing a totally exhausting day at our RFID event yesterday, I felt so awful I couldn't even enjoy the reception.  Three tacos and two Aleve a few hours later with Mac made it all better.

It was 70s and sunny in SF today, so after work Aaron and I went down to the Marina to try and fly the stunt kite I have stashed in the back of my car.  I've never been anywhere with enough wind, but there was definitely quite a bit down by the water.  This was the first time I've really been able to get it up in the air, although I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do to keep it up there.

You can watch it crash and burn here: (in the second one, the kite was starting to get kind of close and I thought it was going to hit me, hence the yelling)

Afterward, we grabbed dinner at Osha on Union Street, then met up for Mac for an adventure to the Castro.  We went to one of Mac's favorite places, Badlands.  It was great, partially because the super-flaming bouncer looks at my red patent leather heels, and goes, "Great shoes, honey."  Love it.

Badlands also had really great music and we danced there for awhile.  The key thing about this place is that I can dance without getting groped by some sketchy dude...because the dudes there aren't even looking at me!  The music was pretty reminiscent of a good stretch of energy 92.7 - well-mixed versions of Kelly Clarkson, Beyoncé - Irreplaceable, some Princess Superstar, and my current favorite, Pink - U + Ur Hand.  I'd definitely go back there.  We left that after awhile to go to the Café, but the line was so long, I left when we were almost to the door.  Walking past the bars was pretty funny around midnight - lines that stretched the entire block.

Just about ready for Thursday's conference - we're packed and going to do a test run at the conference facility tomorrow morning to make sure the videoconference works the way I want it.   I rocked out in the conference room to the Shins on my iPod while getting the materials together so I probably looked pretty silly, but it helped me decompress.  Also good for decompressing - Play-Doh.  We had our Team Agenda briefing meeting yesterday afternoon and I brought Play-Doh for everyone to mush while we talked.  Always a crowd-pleaser, especially with the middle-aged folks.

Today we all went to District on 3rd and Townsend for another goodbye party for another future doctor.  All of these parties are at such great venues - a bunch of us (including the company CEO) were really into the Brutocao Quadriga Primitivo Blend, Mendocino, CA, 2004.

Stopped at the Apple store on the way home - my sister's MacBook had some issues and she lost her OSX 10.4 CDs and needed new ones.  I also got a cassette adapter for my iPod - hopefully this one doesn't get spit out periodically from my car's cassette deck like the last one I bought.  They have a little hand held contraption there that allows any store employee to charge your purchases onto a credit card, and they email you the receipt.  The guy helping me thought it was great that I can use my first name as my email user name - which is funny, since Dan said the same thing to me last week.  He's jealous because he can't have dan be his gmail name. 

As usual, I gave Bunny the core of my apple when I was done with it.  Here's the video, for kicks.

Another fish tank cleaning day - only to find a very, very dead fish at the bottom.  Don't know if it's Unagi or Wasabi since they look exactly alike.  I think he's been there for a few days - whoops.  I'm so much better with furry pets.

Went through the boxes I shipped home from Boston that I still haven't emptied, looking for a particular book to lend to a friend - He's Just Not That Into You.  Not that I'm into self-help books at all, but it's a funny one my BFF bought me awhile back.  It's actually the abridged version, subtitled 'Your daily wake-up call."  There's a witty one-liner or short anecdote on each page since I evidently don't have the time to read the full book version.  Not sure what calendar the author is running on - but there are only 271 daily wake-up calls.  What to do the rest of the year...?

Cooked dinner for father's day today - I even impressed myself.  On the menu: shrimp stuffed sole with fresh oregano I grew myself, sautéed asparagus and mushrooms, and roasted garlic and potatoes.  Even my sister, who doesn't even eat a lot fish, is a bit too stuffed to move right now.  And as it usually happens when I cook on weekends, there was a boatload of dishes to do.  Hopefully the parentals will get a new dishwasher soon so we can all stop hovering over the sink together.

Mostly just vegged out today - finally decided my route to NOLA for next month.  It looks like I'll be taking I-80 to Salt Lake City, out to Denver, Wichita, through Oklahoma City, to Dallas, then New Orleans.  I watched a couple of episodes of home improvement shows on HGTV with my sister - I think she has big plans to get me all organized when at my new house.  Just to get prepped for packing, we played tetris with moving boxes in the trunk of my car so I know how many I should be packing.

I cleaned Bunny's cage as well.  This is what he did while waiting:

I think he got tired of the computer pretty quickly.