Greetings from the new office. I was going to put up some pictures but I’ll have to do that later cause I managed to leave a lot of important stuffs at home today. So far I know I’m missing my camera and my Palm. I’m sure I’ll come up with some more things later on.

Office things:
I can’t complain about the commute – 12 minutes here and a bit longer to get home because people are still gawking at the gas station that exploded 10 days ago near exit 37 on the Merritt.
The coffee is surprisingly good. Like, forget about the coffee at FSP good.
I like the new color scheme of the office in general and my cube in particular. But my cube is definitely not as glamourous as my old cube was. At the old office there was definitely a cube hierarchy, cubes one aspired to move up to, and I had made it far. I definitely had one of the best cubes in the place. Now every cube is basically the same so the only place to move up to is into an office and I have no delusions – that isn’t going to happen for me.

Feh. I need to finish performance appraisals. They cause me great agony and they take me forever to complete because I care just too darn much.

This past weekend Jeremie and I spent a good couple hours out in the yard doing some weeding and general clean-up. Tired and sweaty, we looked up from our contractor bags full of yard waste and surveyed the land. Not good. We have a beautiful yard but due to a combination of crazy weather and love for other hobbies we had let the yard go, shall we say, a little bit insane. We realized that we had a good week’s worth of work in front of us and that it just wasn’t worth it, so instead we enjoyed the rest of the weekend and I called Andre’s Landscaping Monday morning. Andre stopped by Tuesday morning, I told him what we wanted done, he told me what it would cost and said that his team could take care of it that afternoon.

Fine by me.

When I got home last night it was like pulling up to a completely different house. What a difference some lawn mowing, weeding and having the edge recut in your whole yard can make. Best money we could have spent for our time. Andre and his people are fantastic. They did some work for us in the spring of 03 and I’m very glad that we called them again. Yay for nice yard! It was fun to wake up this morning to a gentle breeze blowing in through the window and to look out onto the back yard and see such a nice space. If only I had woken up early enough to have a coffee or something out there.

Two more days left in my office here in Stamford. Have I started to pack? Of course not!

I rode the Vespa to work today because I know my opportunities to do so will be limited once our office moves to Norwalk in a week. It was a nice ride but a little nerve-wracking, because my laptop doesn’t fit in my new top-case as well as I thought it did. I’ll need to keep working on this. I thought it would be a perfect fit when I tested it out at the Vespa boutique but I was off a bit somewhere.

I didn’t get much sleep last night but I’m surprisingly awake now and actually feel like going for a run. We’ll see if that feeling holds by the time I ride home through the muggy thick we’re calling “air” over here. Supposedly there will be a screening of Kill Bill2 at Jose’s tonight but we’ll see.

Nothing much planned for the weekend and that’s just the way I like it. The garden could use some gardening and the house could definitely handle some tidying up.

I should start packing up my cube. The movers dropped off moving stickers last night, kindly labeling my docking station, IP phone, monitor and external hard drive for me. External HD not standard issue. I’ll be moving that one myself, guys. Thank goodness the stickers are not very sticky or I would have been, shall we say, upset.

Tonight is the last game of the season for my soccer team, the illustrious “Stamford Untied”. I just realized I forgot my camera and that’s a serious bummer. We may not have won any games but I learned how to play soccer. If you ask me, that’s more of an accomplishment. I am dumb at sports.

It is quite dark outside, though not as crazy dark as the storm we had last week. I haven’t heard any thunder for the past 20 minutes but the rain is starting to pick back up a little so we’ll see.

Fresh mint tea tastes good.

darn Katie Couric and the what’s-his-name guy talked excessively during the Bjork segment and I really couldn’t hear the song at all. It would be nice if there was a channel that presented the Olympics without commentary.

From what I’ve seen so far, Greece did a nice job. I want to record some of the events tomorrow but I need to find a more exact schedule, if one exists, because all that tivo has in it’s program information is a 6 hr segment and that’s a lotta Olympics.

What a lady. You should give Appetite for Life by Noel Riley Fitch a read or go to the Smithsonian and check out her kitchen. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time but I haven’t gotten there yet.

So I started this running program a couple of months ago. Basically, it gives you instruction for how to go from not running at all to running a 5K. It breaks out routines by week in distance or time and I’d been doing it by time. A couple of weeks ago I technically finished the program by being able to run for 30 minutes but I was somewhere between 1/3 – 1/2 mile off from the 5K. Today I decided that I was going to push myself beyond the 30 minutes and complete the whole 5K, which I did in 34 minutes and change. The last few minutes were a struggle, but I’m glad I made myself do it. Once I can more easily finish in 34ish minutes I’ll work on getting my time down. For now, I’ll continue to be pretty happy with myself.

Today at work one of the guys asked me if I’ve been starving myself. Hardly, but it’s funny/nice nonetheless.

that this process hasn’t been bump-free? It’s taken me about 3 hours of messing around with wordpress settings and .htaccess to get comments to work. By work, I mean the ability to click on the comments link and have the form pop up. I haven’t tested if one can actually post a comment because a) posting my own comment even for testing purposes seems not quite right, and b) my faint heart can’t take much more of this today. I’m just going to knock on the composite material that is my desk and hope for the best.

I put up pictures of my most recent trip to San Francisco in the gallery. I was going to put them up yesterday, but the compact flash reader I got from Ben doesn’t seem to work with my shiny new laptop (an IBM T41 – nice, but not winning any beauty contests) so I had to wait until last night to pull them off. Jeremie and I took that trip in June so you can see my fantastic turn around time. That should improve now that all is FANTASTIC.

Another episode from the I-don’t-live-in-Grand-Rapids-anymore files..

So last night Jeremie and I went to see Bourne Supremacy at the Crown Theater in Greenwich with some friends. First of all, the theater is a pos but we knew that going in. The first five minutes of the film were fine but then the sound got all choppy and computerized-sounding so I went out to complain. A good 5 minutes later someone came in to check out the situation and after about 20 minutes the whole thing was resolved.

Now if this had happened at any theater in GR, most likely there would be customer service people standing outside the doors once the movie was over and they’d be apologizing and giving coupons for free popcorn or even a free movie. At the Crown? Nothing. Of course, I stopped at the ticket window after the show and asked about it and then the woman gave us passes but it blows my mind that I was the only person to do it.

People here routinely park cars on the street that cost more than I make in a couple of years. As we were walking to the theater last night we came across a Maybach and the boys got all excited. It is a very large auto but I didn’t find it overwhelmingly interesting. Apparently it costs well over $200K. How nice!