Vacation, eh?
I'm back after spending four days on Craig's family vacation. They were staying for the entire week, so I tagged along on the front end. I was a bit nervous about the whole thing for obvious reasons. I mean, this is HIS family vacation, and the first time I'm tagging along, and you really can't hide anything with full immersion like that.
Oh no, you most definitely cannot.
And let me mention one more confounding factor: Craig's dad was paying everybody's way, including mine.
We started off in Montreal which was a cool place, and probably the second-most gay place I've ever been. I'd say San Francisco is the gayest, with Montreal coming in as a strong second. They were even hosting the Out Games there, which is a gay olympics. Montreal also has a four block long Chinatown where you could get some pretty authentic looking food. I had bubble tea and was thrilled about that. Yum! Bubble tea! Craig took a lot of the Montreal photos, so you'll have to wait on those.
We went to Quebec City shortly thereafter, and it was pretty cool. These parts of Canada are VERY French, so they're acting French, speaking French..you feel like you're overseas somewhere, and not across the border from the US. It's very weird.
How about this?
Charlie? That's a pretty common name. I don't know if it's very common in France, but heck, do you know anyone whose name is Waldo here? Where's Charlie? Is that the same thing as asking something like, Where's Joe?
There was a giant music festival going on and it added a lot of life and movements to the old downtown streets of Quebec. Groups like MxPx were there, also Reel Big Fish, and Hot Hot Heat. We didn't get to see any of the groups that we'd even kind of know. Then we found a playground nearby full of equipment that is no longer used in the US due to frivolous lawsuits. These include monkey-bar type apparatus, and giant springs.
Oh, and the Craig-has-a-twin-brother thing? Totally over it.
The exchange rate isn't good anymore, so a Canadian dollar is pretty much the same thing as an American dollar. Bummer.
We saw some waterfalls that were cool. It was very hot that day, so the mist felt very refreshing. When we got to the very top, we saw this:
More later. I'm tired.
More Updates
http://www.real-kidz.com/meet.html
I saw this link on a website that is an offshoot from EurasianNation, which sadly isn't being updated anymore. At first, I thought, what a good idea! But then it quickly dawned on me that these people have NO idea what they're doing. See- the problem with being mixed is that you never know what you're going to get. It's like sticking your hand into a black bag of Mr.Potato-head parts and pulling out random pieces. There's no way to create a "mixed standard", which is partly why there's no true solidarity amongst mixed individuals. Enough of that though.
My run in yesterday with Chipmunk really motivated me to finally throw my resume together. I had an old version of it from March 05 down here, and the new additions upstairs. It took a while to come up with them, but when I finally did, it looked satisfactory. Now I have three pages of bullshit describing myself in the third person, which is how they want it for some reason. Chipmunk is still trying to orchestrate things. He suffers from a Napoleon complex big time.
After I put it together, I ran into Mr.Wendell (one dollar means a snack for me, but it means a great deal to you) who was decked out in a full suit. "TAKE ME WITH YOU!"
So, enough about work or the lack thereof. In other news, Craig has made great progress in breaking down the parts car. Soon, we will have an entire car minus the body in several cardboard boxes on the shelves. We now have a parking crisis which goes into effect promptly on August 1st thanks to some fuckheads and the condo association. It can be argued that we don't utilize our two car garage properly, or that having five cars between two people is absurd in this area. I'll assert that what we do with our space and money is our business.
First, let me point out that the condo association when it comes to voting requires a majority vote, and three out of the five board members are the builder. It's a giant farce from the get-go. The rest of the community constituency is made up of useless, under-educated, big-mouth, bossy PTA mom type characters. The face of the condo association (one of the above) was MC-ing a summer pool party where we had to guess the flags that represented the diversity of our community. They were printed out and taped to the glass of the clubhouse. "Who can name these flags?", she bellows. "What's this one? It's a country."
A country? I'm pretty sure it's the Puerto Rican flag lady.
Anyway, the real estate market in this area has cooled a bit, and now there are for sale signs everywhere. Several in each community, and at least 4 condos in our neighborhood for sale. The signs stay up for a while since people are still holding out on their super inflated prices. Our home would probably go on the market now for $40k more than I paid for it a year ago. When I was looking then, the market was still hot, but not crazy since it was in the winter. I chose my unit because of the two car garage because it was obvious that parking was going to be an issue, especially since some townhouse units without garages only had ONE assigned parking space per unit. That's absurd.
When the market started cooling and they couldn't turn over the properties fast enough, the builders upped the incentives and increased the amount of closing cost assistance, and made the following asinne mistake: they started offering TWO parking spaces to the units w/o garages.
And of course, the single-assigned-space people noticed, and got all huffy about it. So now, our visitor parking is turning into sticker parking, and only those cars with stickers (meaning, those single-assigned units) can park there overnight from midnight to 6am. Aaaaaaaaand that basically means bye-bye parking.
There were parking meetings that were being held for the past two months, every Tuesday. These meetings were not advertised. And, the builder who is on the condo committee pointed out that there were signs posted for them (albeit same day and last minute). When I asked how many people showed up to their meetings in general, she pointed out that there was a "very good turnout". Define very good. Oh, about fifteen people she said. There are 165 units in the community. Assuming that there's only one person living in the unit, you're talking about less than 10% of the community. How can you possibly qualify that as "good turnout"?
Needless to say, that phone call did not go over well. Unfortunately, sane, intelligent people do not participate in these affairs because they know it's a losing battle orchestrated by a circus of idiots. Plus, their time is way too valuable anyway for that.
In other, other news, our coed summer soccer season got cancelled because of too many rainouts. We have been getting thunderstorms almost every afternoon. And if we're very unlucky, we just get thunder and no rain, but it's enough to shut down outdoor activities. Unless of course, you WANT to get struck by lightning. It won't start up again until mid-August, but that's probably not a bad thing since we'll be in and out of town between now and then. I am leaving tomorrow for Canadia (sounds more exotic than Canada) with Craig's family and this is the first time I'm going on vacation with them so I don't know what to expect. I'm guessing that it'll be a good thing though since I don't have control over anything. I will just be going with the program, and sometimes, that's the best AND easiest thing. I will be there until Tuesday, then back at work on Wednesday. Craig will be returning the Sunday after so I have the whole house to myself! Think of all the healthy cooking and exercising and girls nights in that will happen in those days. And, it will be guilt free too! I feel bad a lot of the times because the girls soccer teams I'm on I enjoy, but in the summer, the schedule is compressed, so there are usually 3 games a week, which equates to three nights, and that's three nights of not hanging out with Craig. And then he plays poker on another night, so you get the picture. Then, the past few weekends, he's been engrossed with the car, so I don't really "see" him then either. This will change come August.
And then there's the family Hawaii vacation in August. I have several different ideas about this, but nothing sanitized enough to post. The less I say, the more there is between the lines.
Random Updates
Today at work, my typical do-nothing workday was pleasantly interrupted by a meeting for an internal project that me and a few friend-coworkers (minus one) were assigned to. It's nothing glamorous really, we're just collecting information from other consultants about the challenges they face in doing normal everyday work due to the restriction on the tools we can use due to our super duper secret environment. I felt like I was immediately transported back to the MBA days.
Our not-friend teammate who has control issues, hates women and pretty much everything else except for white males self selects himself as the group leader. For a mental image, think of a Chipmunk (as in, "We're the Chipmunks!" crossed with a Whack-a-Mole) and make him 4'10". Here's how it went.
Chipmunk
: "We're already behind schedule, we'll NEVER have a questionaire ready by the end of this week."
me: "Why not? It's only Wednesday."
Chipmunk: "We just don't have TIME, we need to start calling people right away and...just ask them questions."
The group stares, wondering if he's serious, while trying to calculate the exact date he's lost his mind.
me: "I don't feel comfortable doing that. We're going to end up making more work for ourselves if we don't come up with some kind of script to follow which helps us bucket the responses. How are we going to compile the results coherently if all the interviews are completely random? Additionally, I don't know what we need to ask these people, and I am NOT going to cold call a busy project manager without having a plan in mind. We need a standard set of leading questions."
Does he HONESTLY think he's going to get anywhere with his stupid-method? Maybe that's why he's working in CM.
Silence. Figeting from the group. Then, engineer Mike announces that he agrees with me and adds some more input counter to Chipmunk's stupid idea. In case I didn't mention it before, in addition to being a control freak, the Chipmunk is always right. This is going to be a loooooooong six weeks. Kara is coaching me on manipulative techniques. Don't get mad. Get even!
Which brings me to the next topic.
Leaving a bunch of idle engineers together cooped up in a tiny office for 40+ hours a week amounts to no good. So, during the week of the 4th, it's pretty dead in the office, and especially since the gov't people never actually work for real, the week before is also pretty dead too. As a contractor, you get the 4th off, and that's it. So we were ALL there on Monday staring at the walls. Some things happened...like, a phone conversation with Craig, then a trip to Costco to buy 1000 square feet of aluminum foil to encapsulate a coworker's entire work-area. This includes file folders, papers on the desk, pens, pen holder, sticky notes, phones, phone cords, chair, and any other posessions we could get our hands on. It took 30 minutes, with three of us working it with two rolls and one tape dispenser. The finished job was brilliant! Unfortunately, I can't take any photos, so our crowning achievement will NOT be on display here, but you can get an idea of it by checking out here.
Our target is yet another short angry man, but he's cool, and super serious about his job. Far more serious than anyone should ever be about work. It's just a job, chill!
We found out he wasn't going to be back on the 5th, so we had to wait an ENTIRE week for the reaction. It's not bad because we got to enjoy it for the entire week too. I had almost everybody stop by my office to commend me on my "good work".
Nobody stops by to commend me on my real work. Oh wait, that's because I don't have any. :)
We had planned on getting in at 7am on Monday morning to be there for the reaction, but of course, with the weekend, nobody's thinking of the foil-desk-arrival-at-7am-Monday-morning as a priority, so we all forgot, and when Mr.Angry came in, he laughed for a second (we were told) then proceeded to tear off all the foil, and dumped it on his officemate's desk, while blaming a colleague across the way.
My cohort has been dubbed the "Axis of Evil". The pranks continue. Later, we stuffed a tiny piece of tin foil over the eye of Mr.Angry's optical mouse. He retaliated by switching me and my officemate's black phone, but hell, who CARES? Nobody calls me on that thing anyway!
Unfortunately, one of our own AoE members put Mr.Angry up to the task, so we needed to retaliate ASAP. It's nothing bad; our motto is "Have fun, Do no harm!" So, there's this one truck in the parking lot owned by some chick who has a *ahem* very provocative vanity plate and surrounding license plate holder. My officemate called his wife who works across the street to call the offender with the following message: "Hi- I found your note on my car. I'm interested, I'll call you back to set up a meeting." Apparently she likes to be spanked or something, or at least, that's what we inferred from the plate. The best part, was when the offender checked his message, and immediately blamed Mr.Angry for it.
One prank that we're still deciding on is whether to saran wrap Mr.Angry's car which he LOVES more than anything. In between one of the layers as we're wrapping, we'll insert a pair of scissors :) Muhuhahaha!
