Electric Ladyland

Buddy time

Friday could not have come any sooner.  I wish it had.  In short, this month has sucked terribly with the exception of a few fun moments here and there.  Wednesday night after work in D.C. I got treated to a wonderful dinner and rooftop wine-and-dessert spectacular courtesy of my good friend Mike (Holla!  Thank you!) and of course a few weeks back it was great to hang out with my aunts, uncles and cousins at the ranch near Santa Cruz... but otherwise it's been rough, rough, rough.

I think I'm taking it too hard.  Maybe I need to take a step back and reconnect with the inner slacker I know is lying dormant.  She's there somewhere, just need to coax her to come out with a bag of chips or something.  It would be good to bring some balance to the force, so to speak.

Today was another hard one.  I felt like I was backsliding, getting dragged down in quicksand.  Got a couple of things crossed off my list but I had to fight for them, like it was a struggle.  The stress was a bit much.  Luckily I had plans to hang out with a close friend from work after we finished for the day.  We blew out of the office at about 3 (that was our pact) and headed out to get mani-pedis at a place a couple of doors down.  I got fire engine red polish on my fingernails and toenails.  When I left "Sexyback" was playing.  Naturally.  Then we hit up Tir na Nog for some Irish-style unwinding (a pint of Guinness and fish and chips... yum!), then went to see Superbad.  The verdict?  Funny in parts but not as gut-busting hilarious as we expected.  Still, it was fun.  The night air was refreshing so we walked from the 34th Street Loews over to Grand Central and sidled up to a bar there for drinks (she had a cosmo, I had a martini) before heading our separate ways.

By the end of the evening I didn't even feel like I had a job anymore.  That was kind of the whole point.  You need some distance sometimes, not to take things all too seriously.  That's not wise.  A little levity in everything is good.

So I've got this weekend coming up and there is the possibility of poker and college football with one friend tomorrow, then a night out to a new raw foods restaurant the next night and lunch in Astoria with another friend Monday.  I've got some fun in the mix here and I can't wait just to hang out and relax with my buddies.

If this is Wednesday it must be D.C.

It's always good to find the humor inherent in any situation.  I was fairly amused at myself this morning as I rolled out of bed at 4, got ready for the day while it was still pitch black outside despite the fact that my bed was still issuing a strong siren call, and left early to meet the car that was waiting to take me to Penn Station.  Got there well in advance of the 6AM departure time and so I made a beeline for my favorite coffee shop to square away a large mocha, some OJ and a bagel with lox and cream cheese.

Now I'm on the Acela to D.C.  Got business to attend to and I'll be there on time, early even.  As dawn lightens the sky outside I still see a bright pearl of a moon shining above Jersey.  I figured out how to tether my Cingular 8525 to my Mac so I could pull down a decent Internet connection while on the road today.  I figured it would come in handy and yep, it sure is coming in handy.  Pretty fly.  Now I won't have any withdrawal issues.

As a crunchy nonprofit granola type I'm not used to being around all these suits.  Rihanna is keeping it groovy on my earphones ("Boy let me let me...").  If it weren't bad form in business class I'd shake somethin.  Think I'm going to write up some planning notes as we zoom toward the capital so I feel ready to rock by the time we get there.  And of course, looking forward to some down time with my friend Mike tonight! 

Time off

The weekend was a slice of all right.  Boy did I need that.

Went to the Green Market on Saturday and bought peaches, tomatoes, a ginger snap cookie, a hanging rosemary plant and a smoked duck.  I also had a sweet interlude when I went up to a gruff old farmer to buy some zinnias.  The guy looked a little off-putting but I was drawn to his stand of zinnias -- they were arranged in different color groups spanning the spectrum and if there's a constant about me, it's that I like variety and interesting patterns.  So I found it satisfying to pick ten flowers from the bunch, looking back and forth from one bucket to the next to see which color might go well with the others I'd already selected.  It took a little while but when I presented the final bouquet to him so he could calculate the charge, he had a wide smile on his face.  It's hard not to smile when someone finds wonder in something.  I'll have to go back to Mr. (Supposedly) Gruff Farmer Guy and buy some more over the coming weekend.  The zinnias I bought on Saturday are still radiating happiness on my kitchen table.  And they're flanked by fossil rocks from our ranch beach, which completes the aesthetic.  It reminds me of home and family.

What else... well, Saturday I spent mostly writing and doing errands.  Getting on the ball with "me" things.  Finally emailed that professor who's an expert in Obaku calligraphy to ask for his thoughts on my future plans.  Also posted for a roommate.  Laughed at how all the French people who replied picked up on my foodie references and confessed to me their obsession for food right off the bat.  Some ethnic stereotypes have a basis in reality.  It's all good to me because I'm French and I'm obsessed with food too so we understand each other.

Sunday I went to my first GRE prep class and took a diagnostic test.  Killed the verbal.  Finished in 15 minutes even though they allotted us 30.  I was really surprised at how easy it was.  I was also surprised at how I was able to work out the math problems fairly well despite not having done a problem in 13 years or so.  But I am feeling really good... if that's the sort of verbal section I'm dealing with then I'm gonna be more than all right.  One of our homework assignments was to separate Kaplan vocabulary flash cards into two piles:  Words I Know and Everything Else.  I did that last night and it was pretty funny seeing this huge Words I Know pile stacked up next to the itty bitty Everything Else pile.  I wonder how many English words I know.  It occurred to me that I'm already going to have a quote-unquote edge on this test because it's in my native language.  I'm a lot more fluent in English than in Japanese, obviously, but I didn't have a quantitative sense of that until now.

Today was good... took a much needed comp day.  Slept late and woke up to a call from a college friend.  Said he'd been expecting it to go to voice mail since he assumed I was at work, but I said "Nope, comp day."  Turned out he was in the neighborhood on business so we went to a local Italian cafe for lunch and had panini sandwiches.  I had bresaola with arugula and parmesan with a lemon aioli dressing.  We both had cupcakes after that.  Good times.

After that I did a couple of errands and then Dad showed up.  We hung around and gossiped in the kitchen, then eventually made our way out to dinner.  Hit up Cavo and sat in the backyard garden.  With tonight's beautiful summer weather it was a meal to remember.  Highlights included salmon and tuna tartare, lamb and filet mignon.  There was a muscat dessert wine that impressed me too. 

Now I'm looking ahead to a busy week.  Got work tomorrow, then I'm up with the roosters to board an early train to D.C. for business.  That'll be hectic but I love D.C. and I get to meet up with my friend Mike for dinner at an Ethiopian place afterward so that should be fun!  Then Thursday's roommate interviews and Friday holds the promise of corned beef and hash for breakfast with Fred, then some work, then dinner with Valeta followed by Superbad, a movie I've wanting to see, like, super bad.

I have a feeling this week is going to go super fast...

Roughed up

Watching this video of an epic Jet Li throwdown will give you a sense of what my week was like.  See, we in IT don't get action shots of our battles scored with cool soundtracks and posted to YouTube.  We have to borrow outside sources to illustrate what it's like behind the scenes.

In all fairness, I am not quite as destroyed as the guy Jet Li takes down.  But I've been feeling really beat up lately to say the least.  Worked my @*#! off Monday for the office move in San Francisco, then spent the whole day flying home Tuesday (and troubleshooting a voice mail server conk-out 20 minutes before boarding my plane back East... high drama... at least I got an Anchor Steam on draft at the pub while handling the tech support).  Didn't get home until 1 AM.

Had originally planned on a comp day Wednesday but a series of meetings depended on my being there so I took one for the team.  Good thing I did because not only was that important to do but our mail server decided to shut down in the middle of the day.  To state the patently obvious, I hate mail server shutdowns or unplanned downtime of any kind.  And it instantly fries me.  All in all we handled it well -- just over one hour of downtime total and that's the first time we've had a real conk-out like that in a year and a half so I should count my blessings. 

But no sooner had we tackled that problem then a consulting firm that does some web stuff for us laid another one of their classic eggs -- the "our developer's going on vacation today so we really really really need outbound SMTP access nownownownownow" routine.  They've done this before.  And as before, when push came to shove we found that "nownownownownow" really translated to "Oh, well, tomorrow or the next day would be fine."

@*#(^&!

That worked out fine in the end.  But yeesh.  On a normal day it wouldn't be a big deal but of course it had to be the day our mail server freaked out.

All that drama in the middle of the day of meetings plus a very important meeting at the end of the day left me more drained than I've been in a long time.  I went home, padded my tired little feet directly into the kitchen, tossed my purse on the floor, sat down and stared at the wall for a good five minutes.  Then an idea floated into my head.  I stood up, took a chilled pint glass out of the freezer, put it down, opened a bottle of Brooklyn Lager, poured it into the glass, sat down and proceeded to drink the beer while thinking about nothing -- or everything -- in particular.  Just let my scattered thoughts roam where they wanted to roam.

About half an hour of this unstructured time in my quiet, cosy kitchen with soft lighting did me some good.  All the stress melted away.  I felt much better and could enjoy my evening.

But the stress returned again Thursday as we hustled to prepare for a very sudden event important to the profile of our organization the next day.  A lot of people had to drop everything to pull it off and we were right in there too.  Got it done and done well considering the short notice, but it was just one more thing on top of all the things we'd been dealing with during the week.  And through all of this I've been contending with a separate issue that cropped up early in the week, essentially non-technical in nature ("an analog problem" as one of my colleagues would put it) involving someone who really crossed the line.  That took some time to resolve in a positive way and we're probably on the right track now -- I'm making a good faith effort at least -- but doing so is going to involve committing me, right now, to yet another ginormous project.  How many of these am I tasked with right now anyway?  Oh yeah, there's a meeting about that on Tuesday. 

Yeesh.  So given everything I just recounted, maybe my experience is not really all that far from having my ass kicked by Jet Li. 

Uncle.

On a side note, the other day I laughed when I noticed that a friend of mine had joined the "A Chief Export of Chuck Norris is Pain" group on FaceBook and that led me to the Chuck Norris Facts site, where I've since spent a good amount of time reading and chuckling over some cute entries ("They were going to release a Chuck Norris edition of Clue, but the answer always turns out to be "Chuck Norris. In The Library. With a Roundhouse Kick").  How comes they don't have an equivalent site for Jet Li?  For crying out loud, that man is all kinds of badass.

Exploring Fog City

Things are continuing to go well here in San Francisco.  It's actually quite a luxury having all this quiet time to focus on our work.  And our off hours have been fun -- saw The Bourne Ultimatum on Tuesday night (awesome fight scenes) and wandered over to Chinatown last night.  As I was browsing in a store there my mom called and started listing off some recommendations for places to shop and eat in San Francisco since she used to live here once upon a time. 

Kan's Restaurant was the first place Mom went out to eat as a wide-eyed 14-year old, having just moved here with her mother from Texas.  As she mentioned that eatery my coworker and I arrived directly underneath it by chance.  We had to go.  I had the Mongolian Beef and a couple of Tsing Taos;  my colleague enjoyed an excellent sea bass with black bean sauce.  It was a lovely meal and the atmosphere looked like it hadn't changed much since the 1960s anyway, so it was kind of like being caught in a time warp back to the era when Mom was living here as a kid.  A little weird, but mostly fun.  On a side note, I noticed a couple of places where I could do some serious damage to my bank account shopping for calligraphy supplies.  Sensei had recommended that I look into buying some things here and I was surprised at the time that he'd said so, but now I understand.  I'll go back there when I have some free time and relieve myself of some cash.

Today I took my lunch break at the Ferry Building again.  Picked up a soft shell crab po boy from the San Francisco Fish Company and then stopped by Out The Door for spring rolls, Vietnamese iced coffee and some iced lychee tea.  Ohhhh yes was that good.  That Ferry Building is a little slice of foodie heaven.  I'll be back there tomorrow without a doubt. 

The weekend is coming too.  I want to visit North Beach and Telegraph Hill, maybe the Haight-Ashbury and Castro Districts.  We'll see -- that may be a full plate.  Both Mom and the telco broker recommended taking the ferry to Sausalito and hanging out there for a bit too.  Whatever I end up doing I think it'll be fun.

Our memories

Things got just a little better over these last few days.

I spent some quality time at the ranch with my family sleeping, catching up on what my kin are up to, and hearing some funny stories over beer and good food.  It was really great to see everyone again after so long, especially my (formerly) little cousins.  They've matured into wonderful people.

On Sunday Dad and I enjoyed a perfect day in San Francisco, starting with a fantastic breakfast at a real old diner (buttered sourdough... yum!) and continuing on to AT&T Park, where we saw ol' Barry Bonds and some other guys playing baseball in a beautiful park.  We walked along the water by the piers towards Fisherman's Wharf and got pleasantly delayed by foodie distractions at the Ferry Building.  We hung out with some guys fishing for rock crab by the water and tried to help them strategize on how best to snare a few.  Then it was on for a brief interlude of oysters on the half shell.

We enjoyed a splendid Sicilian seafood dinner at Alioto's with a full view of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.  Dad ordered a martini and later on I ordered a dirty martini because he'd never heard of that before (isn't it funny when your parent doesn't know something that you do?).  They were both top notch.  Our waiter was even more so.  Dad said he'd only done the stand-and-eat thing at Fisherman's Wharf with his family before and had never dined out there.  A first time for everything.  We have a lovely memory of that place now.

He's back on the East Coast and here I am getting started on work, which is going swimmingly well for Day 1.  I find it interesting being in a city that is new to me but has a lot of history for my family.  From my hotel window I can see the location where my great-great-grandfather went to work every day.  As we were walking the streets of San Francisco on Sunday, Dad pointed out the area where my grandmother grew up.  And now I've learned that my grandfather reported to his job as company president at an office south of Market Street.  Mom and Dad met here in San Francisco too, as young conservatory students.

My dad's old family home, which is no more, used to be located just across the bridge in Marin County.  I do remember that wonderful place, where Granny's garden flourished alongside stone pathways that Grandpa put together by hand.  I wonder what happened to those beautiful stones.  I used to laugh at Grandpa when he'd break out into a huge grin after having discovered a new rock, but now I've continued the tradition in a way:  I picked up a few new rocks at the ranch this past weekend for my own collection.

So here I am in San Francisco on business, discovering a little personal history at the same time.  The work is going quite well and that's a blessing given how horribly wrong it was going.  I've still got my guard up because with jobs like these you never know when the other shoe is going to drop -- or if the cosmic boot with the steel toe is going to klonk you upside the head.  But so far it all seems to be coming together.  More later!

Come hell or high water

This week has been very unforgiving.  I have literally not had a moment of vacation since the week started and have been working full time on the most aggravating of problems in order to set up our regional office that is relocating this month.  I thought it couldn't get worse but today it did.  I got woken up with a phone call telling me our T1 had in fact not been installed (I'd been told a week ago it had) and it was up in the air as to when we would get it installed.  Over the course of this whole project we've had badly timed vacations, hospitalizations, tornadoes, people throwing out their back, people dropping the ball, telcos really dropping the ball, people trying frantically to pick up said ball...  I had people calling me left and right today.  Got a call when I was in the shower.  Every bad Murphy's Law thing that could happen today happened.  It was like a very bad movie.

My favorite moment, if you can call it that, of this whole project involves a certain general contractor.  Nobody had been able to get him to respond to emails or phone calls.  I politely emailed him twice last week asking for confirmation on the final dimensions of our IT closet.  No response.  It started holding things up and people started screaming at him to return my calls/emails this Monday.  He called my office line and missed me, left some message about how oh, guess he missed me but everything should be fine by the time I got back from vacation.  Really out to lunch, this one.

I called him right back and he said "Oh, I thought you were on vacation from your message." 
"I was supposed to be but not anymore" I responded. 
"Why?" he asked. 
"Because of this." I answered.
"Oh, bummer" he said.

I really wanted to harm him at that moment.  It's a miracle I didn't blow up at the guy especially since I found out in the same call that he'd totally screwed up the IT closet.  Had already finished building it with the wrong dimensions while I'd been frantically trying to get in touch with him to make sure that wouldn't happen.  He was real confused and protested that he didn't know we needed those dimensions until I referred to the diagram which called them out clear as day and then he was like "Oh, my bad... I'll have to do it over." 

You're damn right you'll do it over.  See, this is what I've been dealing with.   It helps to read things sometimes.   I'm just saying.

Anyway, miraculously enough and thanks to a major save from one of my colleagues for which I am hugely grateful we are probably in the clear.  But I am drawing the line here -- I am getting on the plane tomorrow, flying to California to see my family, and what happens in the meantime happens.  I'm handing this over to my backup.  I was literally interrupted every five minutes as I tried to get pre-trip shopping done in Manhattan today, an excursion that itself wasn't so great due to the ridiculous humidity and screwed up trains (due to the storm that spawned the tornado...).  Tomorrow I will have a lot to get ready before blasting off for California and time's up, folks, there is an actual thing called vacation and I am going on it. 

As I told my friend the network engineer, at some point I will laugh about this over a beer and it'll be one of my IT war stories, like the time Verizon screwed us over with a port request and we had to quickly run risers between floors to patch PRIs together to keep everything working during our huge office move.  Ahem.  This is right up there with that story already.  I sure hope it doesn't get any worse for crying out loud.

I'm not back for a while.  Blessedly I'll be arriving in San Francisco just over 24 hours from now and from there I will be in the good care of my family.  We'll laugh about this over beers and some good artichoke bread and some other yummy things.  I'm bringing them special treats from some gourmet shops in Manhattan.  Oh, it'll be a party with my aunts, uncles and cousins and we will really be out of range -- no cell phone reception where I'm going.  Can't wait to get there.

Oh frack!

So although I'm nominally on vacation, it's as I feared.  I'm working about as much as I might usually be working except in a more comfortable environment.  Was very frustrated yesterday but am trying to look on the bright side of things.  Watching the original Battlestar Galactica off Netflix's streaming video service on my flat panel makes things more fun.  Those Cylons are pretty fearsome even when presented with 70s schlock production values.  Run for cover, people!  Oh, and Richard Hatch circa 1970-whatever is dreaaamy.

Kinda funny.  This is not the BSG I'm familiar with since I only started watching the new series first.  This explains some of the backstory, though, and it's interesting to see how some characters are different, Starbuck in particular.  I like the contemporary Starbuck much better -- she kicks ass.  Adama doesn't seem as decisive or as experienced somehow in the original version.  Hard to put  a finger on it.  So far I like Edward James Olmos's Adama better both in terms of the way he's written and the way he's performed.

Of course, since the original BSG looks so much like Star Wars it's inherently enjoyable.  The writing is better than I thought it would be even though it can't really compare to the current BSG in that regard (hard to when you've got Ron Moore in charge of a production -- he rocks).  So even though I'm working right now (boo) at least there are some fringe benefits (yay) to make it a little more fun.  Being able to get some house chores done and skip down the block for a tasty bagel and frappe help too.  And the day after tomorrow I'll be off to California...

Rakugo and yakiniku over the weekend

Sunday was just for fun.  All this all work and no play thing was getting pretty old.  Given the amount of stress I've been under an outing to see some comedy seemed like just what the doctor ordered.

So a fellow JET alumna and I went to see a rakugo (Japanese "punchline" comedic storytelling) performance by Katsura Koharudanji!  Despite having lived in Japan neither of us had seen it before except in snippets on the national NHK channel, so this was something new and interesting.  They had live English subtitles that were themselves pretty hilarious at times although they did seem to alternate between British and American vernacular, which had a slightly different feel for us native English speakers of the American persuasion. 

Katsura Koharudanji's delivery was incredible as he physically inhabited a wide range of characters with ease, from a posh aristocratic woman with effeminate gestures to a stammering drunk man right on to a cow.  The stories were hilarious and bridged the cultural gap quite effortlessly, which is pretty impressive given how culturally specific humor tends to be (I was thinking this as I saw the Simpsons movie on Saturday night -- how much of that translates?).  I was able to pick up on some things the subtitles didn't, but the Osaka dialect was strong to the point where I had to take a stab at what was being said and piece it together with the help of the subtitles.  Sometimes the subtitles had more going on than Katsura himself was saying and they poked fun of the whole situation kind of like the bullet points in The Colbert Report or the traffic sign in L.A. Story, teasing at the end of the performance that Katsura had actually been delivering a lecture on nuclear physics. 

I would definitely attend another rakugo performance in the future and highly recommend it to anyone whether or not they've lived in Japan.  It's just plain funny and definitely worth checking out.

After the show my friend and I hit up Gyu-Kaku in Midtown for an early dinner.  That was, incidentally, also what the doctor ordered:  lots of grilled meat, a pitcher of sake sangria, and great conversation.  We indulged in a healthy portion of girl talk and I was feeling pretty good toward the end of our dinner what with the sangria and all.  It was nice to have some relief from all the stress I've been under these past several weeks (months?) and just joke around with a friend or air what was on my mind.  Listening to what was on her mind also helped ground me anew in the understanding that there is much more going on in the world than what's happening in my own little life.  That in itself is a good reason to get out and keep socializing even while grappling with your own issues.

As you can see above, we grilled up some ahi tuna as well as an assortment of vegetables.  Each of us had a bowl of rice to go with all our yummies including slices of kalbi and harami, also an assortment of grilled tofu accompanied with a yuzu dipping sauce.  The food was delicious and the 2nd floor location was spacious and airy with all the windows bringing in sunlight, reminding us of some restaurants we'd been to in Japan.  Natsukashikute oishikatta.

The vacation of no vacation

All right, so I'm officially on vacation but there's a lot of work happening due to this regional office move that's comfortably far off into the future so I can relax practically tomorrow.  I need to feel like I'm on top of things -- woke up thinking about network jack layout and DFS server setup, for chrissakes -- so I came into the office rather than sit around and watch movies or something while actually still thinking about work.  Time off is only fun if you're thinking about fun things.

Here I am only a few hours later after rolling into the office and I'm feeling a lot more on top of things.  Actually kind of feeling like I might rock out with this, which is where I want to be.  Still more planning to do to make sure it goes well, however.  Nobody is in the office today besides me, which means I can come in wearing street clothes and blare my rock and hip hop.  With good music I can do anything -- that's just how I'm wired and I guess it comes from having music in my life from an early age what with those musician parents. 

Having time to think betters the quality of the thinking.  No interruptions, no noise except for the music which I like.  Not only is planning for this relocation project going well but I'm catching up on  a bunch of other things which I might not have noticed had I not had the time and space.  They're important too. 

Goofing off = also important.  In a couple of hours I'm off to see The Simpsons with some buddies and with a clearer mind I think I'm gonna have more fun than I otherwise would.  All that all work and no play thing don't fly.  With that philosophy in mind I leave you with another wonderful geeky video forwarded courtesy of my friend the network engineer.  He found Human Pong!