Norcal girl

So the big weekend happened. Norcal girl came to visit here are my thoughts impressions. First everything went better than expected. She is smart, beautiful, and enjoyable to be around. We went on a bike date where we rode the bikes for 30 miles we did some hills and ended up at bonelli park to stare at the lake. We had a nice chat and shared an apple. I like that she can ride bikes hard, and also is ready for non-standard date activities. On the way home we stole oranges and ate them as a post ride snack.
My friends got a chance to meet her at lunch, and when we went to the driving range with about 10 other people. They all report back that they like her lots more than my immediately prior choice in girlfriend. This is good news for me since anybody I choose to date now might end up my wife (I am getting to that age where this is a distinct possibility) also I have learned to value my friends opinions since they know me quite well.
What I liked most about her was the general sense of ease I felt while she was around. There was no need to make conversation it just happened. I was not nervous, nor tense it was just me being me and making a new friend. The part that most made me at ease was that we had lots in common and similar outlooks on life. I did not need to explain myself with every statement and she saw the world through similar eyes as me.
I now can say that without a doubt I like this girl and am in deep consideration about what my next steps should be.

Start to a new year

After the amazing formal new year’s party at the beer garden, many individuals who had spent the night work up and wanted to relax in the morning. So after cleaning a bit we pulled out the pellet rifle and went shooting in the backyard. This was a ton of fun and we shot everything from leftover gourd skins, to lemons, to pictures pulled out of a GQ magazine. Everybody involved loved it since it was a sitting activity based in the shade and the temperature outside was 81 degrees. Things got out of hand and people started throwing lemons at each other. This progressed into playing baseball with a shovel and lemons, and then spiraled out of control and we began to play fruit ninja in real life.
Fruit ninja is an IPhone game where you slice fruit. Yea so we got out a knife and chopped lemons from the air. Everybody took turns and we managed to slice almost all of the lemons that were thrown into the air. Sometimes this happened 2 at a time. The record for most chops on 1 lemon was 6 (cut in half, cut in half, cut in half….). This activity was immensely satisfying knowing that you were capable of being fast enough and accurate enough to slice a lemon that was in the air.
After the lemon massacre we played the shoe game where you lie down and then throw a shoe in the air and try not to flinch. Also loads of fun. We then made our way over to the Hat for pastrami sandwiches and ate to our hearts content. When we returned it was still a beautiful day so we laid out in the sun and took naps.
The start to a new year was incredible, it was super relaxing and also quite enjoyable with good friends and tons of laughter. It does not take much to make me happy and I am glad my friends are the same and like to invent games and play outside. It was enjoyable and brought back great memories of childhood where we would go play outside.

A friend introduces a potential suitor.

Soo I went down to SanDiego for a friends housewarming party, yea my friends are buying houses… yikes I still have school debt, but oh well, I do not feel behind in the least. One thing he was certain to do was to introduce me to his Girlfriends close lady friend. Usually I am more than skeptical when somebody says you need to meet this person and then become romantically interested in. there are just too many expectations, and too much forced interaction and yea I usually avoid the whole thing. This allows me to not hurt the matchmakers feelings by telling them they are horrible at matchmaking and also allows me to not hurt the female interest’s feelings by being uninterested or uninteresting.
I went against better judgment and took an artificial interest in the special lady friend. Turns out I did not need to be artificially interested and the conversation was wonderful and there was much to enjoy about her company. Through the evening we chatted, and played standard drinking games. At the end of the evening I found myself just talking to her because everybody else had gone to bed, I looked down at my watch and it was about 4am and I was not even thinking about being tired, but rather how cool she was. We kissed and I fell asleep thinking wow this girl is awesome.
The next day we exchanged phone numbers after eating Mexican breakfast with the whole group. The reason we exchanged phone numbers was because she lives in NorCal at the moment. From this time forward we have been texting up a storm. Which is a great low pressure way to get to know somebody. We played 20 questions and I found the whole exercise quite entertaining and learned lots about her. I have since grown fond of her. I write this in preparation for a New year’s party when she will make the trip down to visit I will give the details with how things progress hereafter.

cellphones in bad places

As of late I have noticed that in large public restrooms there is a disturbing trend of hearing people use cellphones to type messages as they relieve themselves. This absolutely disgusts me for several reasons. The first is the germs, it’s just gross beyond belief to think that your hands are surrounded by germs in this place and you think it’s appropriate to mash buttons on the phone. Also if it comes time to wipe and you are halfway through the text I sure hope you finish the text and put the phone down then wipe not just take a break. And if this person does not wash their hands, oh man, the dirty factor just continues the next time they use their phone. I have since stopped touching other peoples phones to my ear, but instead ask them to use the speakerphone whenever it has been handed over to me.
The second part that bothers me to no end is that if you find yourself so busy that you cannot take a poop without your phone you are probably not that busy at all. Conversely if you were so busy you would just hold it, or change your diet so that you would not have the diahreiah of that often strikes office people who skip breakfast, then eat unhealthy lunch, and then top it off with a fatty dinner.
There is no need to have your device with you every second, and there is certainly no reasonable productivity gain to be had while multitasking and typing and pooping. The silver lining to this new pet pieve of mine is hearing that people dropped their phone into water and it broke. Cell phones don’t fit into cups, and since nobody does dishes anymore, I automatically assume that they dropped it into the toilet. If I was afraid of telling people I dropped it into the toilet I would say water as well. If I dropped it into a sink or cup or pool I would say that instead.
Today this is what I think I wrong with the world, cellphones in bathrooms.

A bunch of new

My boss got promoted to director. In order to accomplish this there was some horse trading, I was assigned to a newly promoted manager. I traveled with this guy and can honestly say I don’t much care for the guy. Whatever its just work. As I look to the new year I have a few things I want to figure out, that I do not have answers for as of yet.
1. What type of business do I want to own?
2. How do I network more?
3. What about starting to date seriously?
4. Do I like the lifestyle my current job is providing for me (traveling, and stress levels)?
5. Do I like where my life is headed and where am I going?
Hopefully I get to write a Christmas letter sometime soon also.
This stuff has just been bothering me lately as I accomplish my recent set of goals of make it a year at the TV company, and switch into my desired career field. Then I found a new job with a pay increase and better opportunity, as well as becoming a full member by completing probation. With all of this accomplished, I now need a new direction and waiting to figure it out is bothering me… it’s the float that I am uncomfortable with but I know that this uncomfortable time will bring an end to itself, because eventually the discomfort will be too great.

Christmas Tree

I went out and purchased a live christmas tree last weekend. I love the way live christmas trees smell and look, and no I am not so concerned about chopping down one tree a year as a household. I have pretty much no decorations, and as I live with a bunch of male roommates we collectively have few ornaments (perhaps less than 15 total). This year we took a bit of a unconventional approach, and hung a few magazine cutouts on the tree. We cut out a few of our favorite things. Bikes, pumps, helmets, and gear from the cycling magazine, power-tools from the woodworking magazine, and babes in lingerie from the Fredric’s of hollywood magazine. We also hung little bottles of booze just to tie it all together (thanks for the great idea team singapore). The tree looks really good, because well the girls are attractive, and wearing seasonal clothing, the bikes are shiny, and the powertools are rugged. The overall effect is that more visitors stare at the tree instead of just glossing over it and thinking oh hum just another tree with the normal goods on it, then they compliment what a great idea this is and also on how rare it is we can do something like this.

So in the spirit of Christmas, Merry Christmas. Now go decorate a tree.

Garden Symposium

Friday I was given a day off, and went to a garden symposium over at Huntington Library. I show up and get excited about the topics: Greywater irrigation(capture the rain), native plants (attract better insects for more crops), Edible wonders (eat the weeds… pass), revival of home food preservation, Living soil (make better dirt), Edible garden design, and garden tour.
The best talk was by the one guy who did not use powepoint, I have so much respect for people who do not use powerpoint, but those who did had great pictures so it was probably better they did not just talk. Either way I learned a lot and my garden will be better for it. I was exactly the wrong demographic to be attending. There were 100 people in attendance, and perhaps less than 10 were under 30. And 10 people total were male. So the main group was affluent old white ladies. Pretty solid if you are looking for a supercougar, but I came to learn about crops.
Besides loads of crop tips, and reading lists, and a huge new to do list I enjoyed myself and took away one unexpected idea. We should bring back Home Economics. Our grandparents lived in the great depression and had victory gardens to keep alive and saved food because there were not grocery stores like today that have all foods at all times of year. Our parents went to work and used these great grocery stores and forgot about how to save homey at home since times were good. Now my generation has no idea how to cook except microwave and think food comes from a grocery store. We do not garden, and we do not know the economics of a household.
This not knowing the economics of a household is the most apparent to me with my roommates who buy expensive out of season food, and pay a premium for meals ready to go instead of cooking from ingredients. They lack the ability to clean or improvise, and have little understanding of why or how a household functions and how to divide labor or resources.
Teaching home economics would not only help teach a new generation how to eat healthy and avoid-prevent the obesity epidemic, but also promote other hippy causes such as local food, slow food, and reducing carbon footprint, I might even go so far as to say that we could even help change farm subsidies and perhaps not promote corn syrup and instead vegetable gardeners.

Here is my to do list:
Become a master gardener
Become a master food preserver
Join a brew club
Improve my soil, and grow more crops
Perhaps start a business that installs and manages peoples gardens so they too can have local food.

The system is down, the system is down.

The facility in Allentown PA where I was a few weeks ago setting up the computers on the forklifts, last night had a problem. All the forklifts turned off at midnight + 45 minutes. The whole fleet just locked down and everything ground to a halt, since if the product cannot be removed from the lines they also shutdown. Yea I just caused 6 production lines of water to turn off for about 45 minutes. This is approximately 3 truckloads of water. Not so bad, but that’s just what was produced, this does not take into account the lost productivity for trucks that were not able to be loaded or unloaded, or materials that were not moved, overall the entire facility ground to a halt. Then my phone rings and I find out the situation. Since I installed it, I clearly need to know how to fix it and fast… No pressure right? So I hop on the phone and start making calls to try to wake people up who I need help from (they are on the other coast time zone).
Eventually a few people pick up and we find an option to open the hood and remove the wires to the computer and we are back in business. I think this is a poor idea. We agree to keep looking before we decide to take out the wires. About 10 min later one of the IT guys checks the logs and identifies the problem. The operator dates were entered incorrectly, and as such they were invalid, so when the automated check started at midnight + 45 the operators were removed one by one from the active list. Or in short everybody was deactivated. We reactivated the employees and sorted it out so it worked last night and made a ton of calls this morning to save the day and prevent this from happening in the future.
I learned several lessons from this:
-          Keep the work phone off vibrate and check before bed.
-          Keep good relations with the people you work with, when you call them at 1am and ask them for help.
-          Murphy’s law is still in effect
-          The first option is not always the best, so look for more options
-          Networking and knowing everybody involved is surprisingly important

You cannot drink them poor…

I used to keep a metal canteen by my side almost always since I preferred water and enjoyed having a reason to leave my desk for a refill or a pee break. Now I work for a water company, this means that we literally have a limitless supply of bottled water. This is so because anytime a pallet is misshapen, or a package is damaged, it is not worth the companies time to redo it, too high of a labor cost. So the pallet is broken down and placed in the office or by workstations, or donated to a charity. This means every fridge is completely full of water that I can drink as much of as I want. I have stopped asking for a drink with lunch since I don’t drink soda I usually ask for water, and then get funny looks from colleagues who always ask, “what don’t like the stuff at the office?”. On average I have been consuming 4 bottles a day, each bottle holds 16.9 fl oz. this means 67.6 ounces of water. I don’t know how much water a person should drink in a day, but I am putting away just over half of a gallon and feel absolutely normal. I have no qualms with drinking bottles while in the office, since the recycling here is set up to deal with used bottles, and I rationalize it this way, it’s a factory waste, that I am taking from waste and putting to use then recycling at the best possible location and reducing transportation costs. I have worked at this company for approximately 40 work days, this is 160 bottles of water, or 6 cases of water with 24 bottles per case.
In a year if this projection holds true I will have consumed 40 cases of water a year. A pallet of water holds 70 cases, there is no way a single person can drink Niagara out of business. It would take close to 40 years for me to drink enough water to fill up a single truckload. Now for the kicker, we have 8 facilities, and one facility set a record, and had close to 150 full truckloads of water ship out in a single 24 hour period. Yea… wrap your head around that.

 

build a better breakfast

So the lifestyle of traveling is getting more regular. I now understand that the breakfast provided by the hotel will suck. There will be fake eggs being kept heated in a food service tray which will invariably increase the moisture to be swamp like. There will be fruit cocktail and it will be kept alive due to sugar syrup and be recycled each day. And there will also be muffins and bagels, and a toaster that is always full, even though I never see people eating toast. The food service reminds me of the dorms, it’s a cafeteria style with mediocre food, that people eat mostly because it’s there and convenient. It’s mediocre and lackluster at its finest, food and variety is meh, but each day they do rotate the eggs:
Day 1: omlettes, or fake egg perfect circle pancakes, folded over a piece of American cheese.
Day 2: scrambled eggs, fake eggs + cheese instead of circle format they are chunked, but you can still see the edge of the circles on some pieces so they don’t fool me.
Day 3: Denver scramble, yesterday’s breakfast + ham. That’s all no veggies, or color, just ham chunks.
Day 4: Bagel sandwich: round fake egg pancake, placed on top of a bagel + topping from Denver scramble (ok that was a joke, its just American cheese +ham hunks)
Day 5: build your own Omlette, fake egg pancake, folded like a taco, you simply open it up and put in your favorites as long as your favorites are American cheese, pace picante, or ham…
I do love the efficiency because they sure do keep it soo similar its frightening perhaps there was one test they conducted that said this section of the country absolutely loves eggs, and American cheese, and that’s all we will serve them so it became self fulfilling, no options means more people chose to eat it so they thought you loved it so they made more and then down and down we spun until we arrived at today. The horrible brekkie buffet that is sometimes called all American. I for one would vote all American for one week (its tolerable) but more than that well declare me a 1%er because I , however have found that I am more a fan of variety.