return of the weddings

I went to a wedding this past weekend. As I was getting dressed, I realized it had been awhile since I'd been to a wedding as a regular guest, although I was a bridesmaid in one on New Year's Day.

D and I only attended two weddings in all of 2009, so we started to think that maybe the rush was over. Then the save-the-dates started to pile up again, and we are now scheduled to attend eight weddings this year. (At one point there were nine, but shit happens, I guess.)

Last year, we had the luxury of making mini-vacations out of both wedding trips. It helped that one was in Vegas, and the other was in San Diego over 4th of July weekend.

This year, things are likely to be a bit more hectic.

The current list:
January 1st: in San Francisco, CA
March 27th: in Santa Clara, CA
July 3rd: in Falls Church, VA
August 7th: in Leesburg, VA
August 21st: in Carmel, CA
September 4th: in Palo Alto, CA
September 26th: in San Jose, CA
October 23rd: in the DC area

(At this rate, I will have attended 51 weddings by the end of 2010.)

Out of curiosity, so I went back and looked at the list of people whom D and I had invited to our wedding. I identified all the guests who were of "our generation", and then classified those people as married or unmarried. It turns out that only about half of those guests were married at the time that they attended our wedding. I guess that means we might have some way to go weddings-wise, although I don't presume that all of our friends and relatives want/plan to be married, either.

missing the (inside) joke

I have a new coworker named Mark, who has lived in the Bay Area for nearly ten years but still has a thick Australian accent. That makes two guys named Mark in my group, and to distinguish between them, we call one "intern Mark" (he was an intern a few years ago before joining full-time) and one "Maah-k", which is an exaggerated version of what it sounds like when he says his own name. I don't think he's entirely amused by it, but it's kind of stuck.

Anyway, D met him for the first time last week, when we went to dinner with a bunch of my coworkers (as an aside, Choi's Kitchen, in Santa Clara, is delicious). The conversation went something like this:

D:	Hi, I'm D****.
Mark:	Hi, I'm "Maah-k".
D:	Hi "Maah-k".
Mark:	(a little irritated) Yes, I get it, I have a funny accent!
D:	(confused) Huh?

In his defense, D honestly had no idea why Mark was so touchy about the pronounciation of his name.

it's a miracle!

Back in 2000, when my parents were visiting me in Boston, they stayed at the Cambridge Marriott. When they were leaving, an over-eager bellhop crammed the trunk of my '99 Subaru too full with their bags, so when we got to Logan Airport, it refused to open.

The next half hour was extremely stressful. I tried opening the trunk with the lever inside the car, with keys, and by pulling on it while holding the lever, to no avail. The security guys at the departure dropoff area were pretty cool; they brought us a crowbar, and eventually offered a sledgehammer (not kidding). My dad finally managed to pry it open with the crowbar, while standing on the car and jumping up and down on it, and in the end my parents made their flight.

Ever since then, my trunk has been kind of screwy. As a result of all the prying, it doesn't look like it's closed all the way, even when it is actually latched shut. Then, a few years later, the release lever inside the car stopped working. After pulling on it futilely a few times, I learned my lesson. For the last six or seven years, whenever I've dropped off passengers with baggage, I've always turned off the car and run to the back to open the trunk with my keys.

This morning, D accidentally closed the trunk with my keys inside. After a few moments of panic, I got on the line with AAA. The rep was helpful and efficient (as always...I love AAA) and when she got to the end of filing the request, she asked me to confirm that there was no way to open the trunk from inside the car. As I was apologetically explaining to her that the inside lever had been broken for six or seven years, I yanked on it anyway, just to check. And, the trunk opened.

I felt pretty stupid for a few seconds, but now just I'm psyched that my car has a working trunk release lever again. I wonder what had happened; maybe the Boston weather had caused something to freeze up or something?

pain in the ass

I'd been having problems with my workstation crashing over the last few weeks, so I filed a ticket, and my replacement arrived this morning. The person who delivered it swapped in my good upgraded memory from the old machine, hooked it up, and left.

I booted it up and it refused to let me log in ("not provisioned"). I rebooted, and it still didn't work. I called the Tech Stop and they were unhelpful ("wait 30 minutes and reboot"). I went to my 10:30am meeting, figuring I'd deal with it when I got back.

When I got back, I rebooted, and of course I was still unable to log in. I stopped by the closest Tech Stop, explained to them that it had been over three hours since the machine had been provisioned, and that it was still not connecting to the network properly. They tried pretty much the same things that the phone support guys had tried, and then said that they'd send me a field tech. So, I stood there and waited, idly checking email on my phone.

After a few minutes one of the techs told me that I could go back to my desk and that someone would be there shortly. Apparently the field techs had a queue of desks to visit. I told him that I couldn't work anyway, so I might as well wait. He suggested it had been awhile and I should go back to my desk and try rebooting again.

I went back to my desk, rebooted, and surprise! It didn't work. I promptly ran back over to the Tech Stop to wait some more. This time, within minutes, I was able to persuade a field tech came back with me. He copied over some files, and voila, my new workstation was functional.

I'm pretty good at being a pain in the ass...it seems to be what works to get things done. Unfortunate.

well-planned

Last weekend, we went to a scavenger hunt/race disguised as a birthday party. I'd planned one for D's birthday myself six or seven years ago, but mine was nowhere near as elaborate as this one.

As we arrived, we were assigned to different-colored teams, and given color-coded leis. The teams appeared to be assigned based on local knowledge (we were in Moraga), internet access (in our group we had one AT&T smartphone, one Verizon, and one T-Mobile), and skill set (puzzle-solving ability turned out to be very useful!). The premise was that the birthday girl's cats had been kidnapped, and we had to solve some clues to help rescue them. Each team was given a different clue packet, and we were on our way!

It turned out our very first stop was a Fear Factor-style challenge. We were given a padlocked box and a bowl of mealworms containing ten keys. Nine keys later, we finally unlocked the box. At that point we were given the opportunity to win bonus points by volunteering to eat one of the worms. Later on we discovered that we were supposed to get the points for just volunteering, but our fearless teammate had already consumed the poor mealworm. She even reported having chewed it so it wouldn't suffer. Eww.

I won't enumerate the rest, but there were a variety of subsequent challenges involving blacklights, the 4-gallon bucket problem, birthday girl trivia, and more. We spent much of the day criss-crossing Moraga and punching up answers and directions on our phones:


Our team finished the clue packet first (several hours later), but unfortunately we did not score the most points, due to sloppiness while measuring the buckets of water. As a result, we had to wait two penalty minutes before we could start the final challenge:


Luckily, we had several puzzle masters on our team. They got started solving the puzzles, while D managed to figure out the combination (based on previous clues), and I dredged up ancient high-school memories about how to open a Master Lock. Inside we found the eight corner pieces and diagrams of both puzzles. We finished our puzzles about ten pieces ahead of the next team, and were declared the winners by the mysterious cat-napper!


I was really impressed by how well organized the event was. There were video segments, custom-built software applications (used to enter solutions), and lots of other props that looked like they'd taken some time to make. Also, during the course of the afternoon, we encountered maybe ten people who had been recruited into helping run the race (mostly people's parents, relatives, and coworkers). Fun!