OBSERVATIONS ABOUT DRIVING IN CALIFORNIA

There are a lot of people in California. A whole lot. Now that the holiday season is upon us, they are all coming out in droves. I say this because I went to the grocery store tonite, (day before thanksgiving), to pick up some firewood. I stood in line and watched the lady in front of me as her Thanksgiving dinner got scanned through the check out. Among other things, she bought five pies. Two of them were still warm... I know this because I saw the steam on the lid.

Because there are a gazillion people in California, driving is interesting. Everyone is in a hurry. But because everyone is a liberal in a hurry, they still stop for pedestrians. You don't even have to look before you cross the street. People always let you cross. Which is funny because in NC, I will stand in the pouring rain while five cars drive past me waiting to cross the parking lot to the grocery store. While Cali drivers will stop for pedestrians, they will stop for little else. There is an expression... "California Stop". This is a term for rolling through a stop sign without coming to a complete stop. Rightly named. No one here actually stops for a stop sign. I see people run red lights all the time.

The thing is, because there is so much traffic everywhere, the fastest you can go (except for the interstate), is 35 mph. I don't mean that's the speed limit, I mean that's about how fast you can drive with all the traffic. Also, the exits on the interstates, are not numbered. This sucks. Because you can't tell exactly how far you have to go, you have to just wait and look at each exit, hoping for the best. There aren't as many tractor-trailers here are there are in NC. Or at least not on the roads I travel. But the one thing that makes up for all of the traffic, (well not completely but it helps), are the radio stations. Man. They totally do not suck. They rock. There is one that plays old school, 80's dance music at 5:30 am. I love it. I get to drive to working listening to, "Look out weekend", and the "Push-it Remix". It's so fun. There are about 10 different stations that all play really good music.

For the morning wake-up, the alarm is set to the worst jazz station you have ever heard. It is nothing but bad jazz. I think it's actually probably live music from a 5th grade music class, but I've never left it on long enough to hear who the song is by so I'm not so sure. It is truly. Awful. I will have to record some of it and post it to the site as MP3. It's like when you taste something that tastes like funk and it's so bad that you are like, oh my god, you have got to TASTE this to someone that probably doesn't want to taste the funk any more than you did. It's like that... But with music. I think y'all should hear it too.
Turkey day tomorrow. I'm off to make butter-cake.

A FANCY WAY OF SAYING PORRIDGE

Ahhh... I almost look forward to going to work on a short week. It's much less painful to think of a three day work week instead of five day. Not a whole lot of excitement this weekend. Or at least not excitement to anyone except me probably. We watched the extended version of The Two Towers, and then watched most of the "making of" footage. It makes you want to watch the movie again... which I didn't, but watched the extended version of the first flick, (The Fellowship of the ring). The Return of the King comes out Dec 17th. Y'all have no idea how this excites me. Yeah, I know. I'm a geek.
I also had my first manicure this weekend. French manicure. Tres Chic. Also. Bought plane tickets for the trip home Christmas. The tickets are all crazy expensive. The airlines call it supply and demand. I call it price gouging. I looked at tickets four days ago and they are now 200.00 more than they were then. So, I went ahead and bought them.
The Southbeach diet. I have lost 7lbs! I can't believe it. And Saturday night, we had whole wheat tortillas with our fajitas. It was glorious. And for breakfast this morning. Steel cut oats. The oats are weird, they look like little pieces of brown rice cut in half. I used to buy steel cut oats but they never looked like this. The ones I used to get actually looked like oatmeal. These SC-oats are "Irish Style" that's a fancy way of saying porridge. I really like it. I thought about the three bears fairytale while I was eating it. Except I put spenda in mine... and I don't think they had Splenda back in the three bears days. Provided of course there was a time when bears sat at the table and ate porridge.

IT MAY BE ICKY, BUT IT WON'T HAVE FEATHERS STILL ATTACHED

I was sitting here trying to figure out what I should do next... and I thought, hey, I have to update my blog.
So. I'm updating.
This weekend we saw Master and Commander, ( I kept calling it Command and Conquer, which is a video game, but I said it enough so that Jorma, corrects me AND rolls his eyes a little bit, so now I call it Command and Conquer, almost exclusively because well, Jorma is fun to pick on) it was pretty decent for a "guy" movie. It's totally a man's man movie. I think I might have to create a policy that I only go see movies involving ships and sea when they come out on video. It did however, have Billy Boyd, who you will recognize as Pippin from the Fellowship of the Ring series, (Return of the King due out Dec 17th ), it also had great acting, and lots of wet, dirty men.
[Dewcom rating: 3] (Scale being 1-5, 5 being Fellowship of the Ring caliber)

Last night, we finally finished watching "About Schmidt", which I liked, in an independent film sort of way, and Jorma liked because it's a good movie to nap to. Check it out and you'll see what I mean. [Dewcom rating: 2 (or 4 if you pretend it's an Independent film) ]

We never made it down to the city this weekend. Too much excitement happening in Fremont I guess... We did however go to a Japanese Restaurant in South San Fran - it was a take off your shoes and sit on the floor Japanese restaurant. Pretty neat. Of course, not being able to have carbs, made it a little more difficult to choose dinner. They were out of both items I chose, so I had a salad and chicken wings. The wings were all good, until I noticed that a couple of them still had feathers on them. (gag)

After a week of eating meat and seeds I've lost five lbs. At least now I don't feel like my sacrifice is all in vain. I'm going into phase 2 of the South Beach on Saturday, ( I wasn't supposed to go to phase 2 until Monday but I can't take another weekend with no carbs). I've decided for dinner Saturday, I'm going to have a flour tortilla - wheat flour of course... it may be icky, but it won't have feathers still attached.

AT LEAST THERE WON'T BE A KITCHEN TO CLEAN UP

Thank God it's Friday. I'm taking over my team leads duties while she's on maternity leave till March. Essentially I am going to do my job, plus her job... for the next four months. I don't know how I got roped into this. They are doubling my workload with no compensation... but at least I won't be bored at work.
The diet.
Oh how I hate the diet. Mostly because Matt and Ryan keep bringing donuts to work. Why didn't anyone ever bring donuts to work when I wasn't trying to do the carb free thing, hhmmm? Nothing too exciting is happening this week. Amy's birthday is on Sunday. Tonite we're going to Burlingame, CA to a Japanese resturant. It's Ryan's girlfriends birthday party. Saturday I think we might go hit the shops in San Fran, Tiffanys, and Neiman Marcus and such. Better now than after Thanksgiving.
This Thanksgiving is going to be strange, being so far away from family and friends. I think we are going to hit the Boston Market and then go to a movie with Matt and Bae... Brother Bear probably. At least there won't be a kitchen to clean up. I'll try to get off my ass and post something this weekend.

IT IMPLIED SOME SORT OF "ah, that explains things"FEELING... EXCEPT I DONT REALLY KNOW WHAT IT EXPLAINS

So I'm doing this Southbeach diet thing. The first two weeks are basically Atkins diet, (no carbs), to help break you of the carb addiction. Carbs? Can you have withdrawl from carbohydrates?
Apparently. yes.
All I could think about for most of the evening was chocolate milkshakes. ok, so if I wasn't on the diet, the chances are slim to none that I would have actually had or even wanted a chocolate milkshake, but last night, when I ate my green beans and baked chicken I was obsessed with it. See? Carbohydrate withdrawl. So those of you are aren't on the Atkins, Southbeach, Zone diet at this time. Please have a milkshake from me. Chocolate if it's available. I guess at some point I am going to have to buy a scale. ick. I HATE scales.
I was hoping that I would get a little bit more energy, because kicking the carb habit is supposed to stop your body from spiking your insulin levels so that you maintain a consistant energy level. So far, I'm consistantly tired. This could be from getting up at 5am every morning, (ok, technically 5:10am) but still.
Oh! I saw the new Matrix movie on Friday. I liked it. But there are some things that I don't get... like why at the end the architect says, "What do you think I am? Human?". It was said in such a way that it implied some sort of "ah, that explains things" feeling... except, I don't really know what it explains. I think I need it explained to me.
Anyone willing to undertake this task, please feel free to contact me.
I've been digillently working on my website. I rebuilt the pictures page, posted the Halloween pics from the past five years, (much thanks to Jorma for the scanning), added to the faq page, created a new page to display all of my little dew icons, (the coolest one created by Mike Lynch I must confess), and made a special button just for Darlene so that she can find the halloween pics on the site. I would have also added a button to harrass Darlene by email, but she doesn't check her email but once every three months and that's because Pattie does it for her. So there. I think I might post a community blog so that everyone has the opportunity to ramble about stuff that people may or may not care about.
Let me know what you think!

HOT DAMN IT'S RAINING IN CALI

The first page of a journal, or blog or spiral ring notebook is always so imtimidating. I never know where to start. This isn't going to be a journal as much as a web log. Just some observations about life, love and the state of california. Speaking of which! It's raining here! It's the first time that I've seen rain in 3 months! And the rain brought clouds with it. Which means, finally some decent sunsets... and an increasingly interesting view from the balconey.
One of my windshield wiper blades is falling off. I just found this out today. These are the things that you forget to think about when there isn't any rain.
We were supposed to go camping in Yosemite National Park this weekend, but it was snowing and raining up there, (three hours away) so we canceled the trip. Instead I'm going to a crochett class at Michaels on Sunday. And soon, I'm starting guitair lessons. After all, it's only a hero's journey, if you bring something back.