My company gave each employee a cardboard tube containing 10 legos. I’ll leave it at that.

This morning there was a thick layer of frost on my car. Sad.

I can’t believe it’s October! It’s starting to be consistently chilly and it finally feels like fall. Yesterday at the grocery store they had a big display of pumpkins and I would’ve bought one but it had just rained and they were very wet. And since they were piled on top of hay they smelled very, very bad because wet hay smells very, very bad. I need to get involved in some fallish activities like apple picking. I loves apples.

It’s late, late, late in the day & I’m stuck here at work because Jeremie and I carpooled and he is in crisis mode down on the first floor. As I am a nice person I am not going to leave him stranded here. Instead I will take some time and update this with what the heck I’ve been doing the past two weeks. I’ve been a busy bee.

A couple of Thursdays ago, the day after my previous post, Jeremie and I treated ourselves to a lovely dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, NY. I say treat because it was a little more than we usually spend for dinner and I had to make reservations a month in advance (thanks, OpenTable). The food was fantastic. Even the butter was out of this world. I recommend highly.

Last week Monday I flew out to Madison, WI with a couple of my work friends/colleagues to head up our recruiting efforts there. A very nice time was had by all. It’s a great school and we talked to a lot of good people at the career fair. Amy gave us a walking tour of the campus and so many things are eerily similar to UMich. Madison’s main drag is State Street and it has 2 Espresso Royale Caffes on opposite ends of the street, just like in Ann Arbor. Crazy!

We flew back to CT Wednesday morning, utterly exhausted. I did a couple loads of laundry that night and then Jeremie and I packed up the car and headed out to Detroit on Thursday afternoon. The drive was beautiful but served as an excellent reminder as to why I love flying. We didn’t get to his parent’s house until a bit after 1a Friday morning. The last hour and a half were definitely a struggle. Same thing on the way home. We left around noon on Sunday, planning to be home around 11p but Pennsylvania had other plans for us. We got stuck in construction traffic right near the end of I-80 in PA and that debacle cost us about an hour and 40 minutes of our life. Arrival at home: 1am.

It was all worth it. We had a lovely time in Detroit and it was the first time in as long as I remember that all of Jeremie’s siblings and I (and his parents) have been in the same place. We spent a good amount of time with his Grandma who is One Cool Lady. We shul’ed it up for Yom Kippur, fasted the whole day and had a great break-fast in the makeshift sukkah/florida room. Jeremie’s mom made this fantastic boterkoek with ginger in it that I’m still dreaming about. So tasty! Mmmn, butter. After most everyone had left from the break-fast, Jeremie, Elias, Adena, and I sat around the table and listened to Grandma tell stories while we enjoyed delectable fresh figs, hand-picked apples and pomegranates. She told us some fantastic stories of her times as a young woman working in downtown Detroit, back when Detroit was a fancy place to be. She was a feisty one!

The crazy travel is over for a couple of weeks, then it will pick back up again. For now, I’m going to try to get as much sleep as I can. So far, it’s been an unsuccessful week in that department.

Just taking a moment to say how much I love the coffee in the new office. Love it. Today’s flavor is cinnamon and it is a tasty delight.

I’ve been a right slacker getting pictures from msp up but I promise I’ll get to it soon. Lots going on lately. Last night I made apple cake and chicken soup to have for dinner tonight. Stop & Shop didn’t have raisin challah so I got a regular one. It’s nice that they have kosher baked goods else I’d be up a creek.

Back to work. Reviewing code. Eh.

I declare the word of the day to be: octothorp

a.k.a. “the pound sign” or just #

Did you know that? I didn’t know that.

I’m happy that our lawn got a trimming Tuesday while we were at work because it’s been raining non-stop since then and it would be looking pretty jungle-crazy right now. Rain, rain, rain. Apparently it’s hurricane remnants. I’m a big fan of hurricane remnants as opposed to actual hurricanes. I could not handle that kind of stress. Yeesh.

Jeremie and I had a great weekend in Minneapolis with the fam. I did some baking with my Grandma and made her a bunch of soup for the freezer. I love making soup. We went to the “Great Minnesota Get-Together” (a.k.a. the State Fair) with my cousins and my auntie and ate a proper minnesotan variety of fried foods including my favorite, fried dill pickles. I have a bunch of pictures of the butter heads and baby animals to put up, which I’ll try to do tonight. I haven’t been in the mood these past couple days to do much computing once I get home.

Last night I made a soup with yellow mung dal and sweet potatoes. It is very tasty. I also made my tasty tuscan bean spread but accidentally put too much salt in so I’ll have to figure something out. I’m hoping that the salt will mellow given a day in the fridge but if it doesn’t, i’ll just combine it with another can of beans and we’ll have bean spread sandwiches all weekend. The other thing I did last night was talk to Shana for the first time in well over a year and that was very, very nice. I emailed her yesterday afternoon to tell her about an old friend of ours that had a baby boy on Tuesday and she called me back. Three cheers for old friends. Hi Shana.

I need to go get some yarn and make some baby hats.

Last night there was a spider eating a beetle on the outside-side of the french doors that go out to the patio. It would’ve made the coolest picture but I couldn’t find my camera anywhere. Uh oh.
The last time I had used it was Monday at work to take pictures of my new space. On Tuesday I had looked for it at work and just figured I had left it at home since I couldn’t find it. Last night I looked everywhere at home and when I came up empty, I promptly told Jeremie that it must have been stolen. Jeremie, knowing that I often misplace things for a couple of days, doubted that it had been stolen and offered to come up to my floor and help me look for it. I remained unconvinced. But this morning I looked in one of my drawers and there was the camera. Jeremie-1, my paranoia-0.

So I don’t have an awesome picture of a spider eating a beetle to show you, but I hope this will do:

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.