The Good Stuff
Because I refuse to leave the last negative entry sitting here for three days – a few positive things going on.
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The Free Table
On the top floor of my apartment building, in the laundry room, is a “free table”. It’s an ordinary card table of fake brown wood, pushed up against the wall. There is a sign that is taped to the wall above the table, written out in yellow highlighter on white notebook paper, it reads “free (with an arrow pointing down toward the table)”. Residents who have belongings they no longer need or want, possessions that hold old unwanted memories or unfulfilled dreams, or just plain old junk, leave them on this table for others to take. Most of the items you find on this table are useless junk. But one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and all that crap. What isn’t claimed by residents is then donated to the church next door or trashed (depending on its quality). I have put a half closet worth of clothes on this table over the two years that I have lived here. I have also gotten some pretty cool stuff off this table too:
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This Is A Good Thing
San Francisco is a wonderful city. The weather was perfect. There was nearly no fog. Unfortunately, I only got to spend about 28 hours there. It was definitely a whirlwind. I did however get to spend a little time in China Town, go to the ferry building, and walk around Knob Hill and Downtown. I stayed at the Omni which was a beautiful hotel with all the luxuries. I’ll be back, there is so much more to see.
My presentation went great. I spent most of the day in meetings, groups, and discussions. It all went well. But it was still work.
I got back home last night around 1:00 am. There was a giant hole in my shower wall. This is a good thing. The leak in the bathtub faucets is finally being fixed after getting progressively worse for the last year and a half. A new showerhead has been put on so now I don’t have to squat my knees or bend over to rinse the shampoo off my head (which as small as it may sound, is actually quite a luxury).
Thanks for all your luck, I know it helped.
Brain Candy
I don’t really have much to write about today. After returning my tuxedo last night I got some take-out food and went home to veg on the couch. The remainder of my evening consisted of the most enjoyable brain-candy: For Love Or Money, the new Maxim, and Blind Date.
And because it’s bad enough to watch and read all that lame stuff above (let alone follow those links), and because I really have nothing else to tell you, here are some stimulating and fun links that you should actually visit:
A visual representation of our language
The NASA astronomy picture of the day
A favorite engineering toy: SodaConstructor
Getting My Sport On
It’s been a pretty active week. I’ve been swamped during work lately but getting a lot done. During the days and evenings I’ve been getting my sport on. Over the weekend, for AP’s bachelor party, I played in a golf tournament at Park Hill . It was a four-man scramble and we tied for first. I won a Park Hill baseball cap that is a little too large for me. It was a blast playing though, and definitely my best round so far this summer.
On Monday I had my last Spring League Ultimate tournament. We ended up tying that too. The team that we met in the finals had been our biggest rivals all season. The final game went well into dark and it became impossible to see the frisbee so both teams agreed to stopping at a tied score. This way we remained undefeated and they got to not lose to us again. The final League standings can be found here (I am on team Chachi).
Last night was the first game of Summer league. This league is much, much larger. We’ll never play the same team twice (there are 24 teams), and there is always couple of kegs of beer after each game. It’s a much more social league, and I’m really looking forward to another great summer season.
Book List
Radcliffes List of the 100 best novels
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
41. Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E.M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
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Chair-Hockey
Last night I attended a really fun charity event downtown. A group of about ten of us in my office formed a chair-hockey team and entered as a sponsor/team in the tournament. The benefit was for The Bridge Project. The tournament was located on the vacant, 27th floor, of a high-rise downtown. Two “rinks” were constructed with cube-wall partitions. The floors of these rinks were covered in particle board.
The only two rules were: each player had to remain seated in their office chair during the entire game and no high sticking (one guy lost a tooth within the first 5 minutes of the tournament). Other than that it was absolute chaos for 5 minutes when the period ended. It was tons of fun. Not to mention all the free food and beer or wine that we wanted.
We ended up placing 3rd out of the 16 teams and were awarded with cheesy little metals and a free massage. I just got done with the massage and it was incredible. It was in one of those bizarre chair things (you know where you place your face in that weird cushioned toilet seat like apparatus) not a table massage, but I’ve never had a professional massage before and it felt great. I’m hoping that it helps boost my immune system and helps get rid of this cold I have.
More pictures below.
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Sweet Goodness
I’m still feeling sick. Now I’m starting to get congested but the fever has passed. The mornings are tough, but after I’ve been up for a while I start to feel better. Somebody in our office has recently acquired an account with Otis Spunkmeyer. With the account Otis provided us with an industrial sized cookie baker and a freezer (literally the entire freezer is full) of cookie dough. Now every afternoon the whole office smells like a chocolate chip cookie factory.
But I can’t keep away from the uncooked dough.
I’m not normally a huge fan of sweets. I hate cake, not a big fan of chocolate (I hate that flemmy film that [particularly cheap] chocolate leaves in my throat), will only eat hard candy on rare occasions. I have a pantry full of Whoppers, candy corns, and Oreos. And it will probably stay that way because I won’t eat them. But there are certain things that make my mouth water. I really enjoy ice cream, coke, whipped cream (from the aerosol canister), orange juice concentrate, mousse, and cookie dough.
I’ve come in every morning for the last two weeks and have eaten a chunk of cookie dough the size of two ping-pong balls. And then, sometimes, I have another chunk in the afternoon. This couldn’t be good for me, but I so seldom indulge in sugary sweet goodness that it feels justified. And it tastes ooooohhhhh-so-gooood!
And The Winner Is….
After a very prolonged and heart-pounding week, the suspense is finally over. The much awaited results for the very ballyhooed cholesterol contest have finally arrived.
Before we get to the results, I would like to make a few thank-yous. First to my doctor, without whom the blood-work would never have been processed. I would also like to thank all the doctors who were involved in the process of discovering cholesterol and thus providing us with one more thing to worry about (not to mention discovering one more thing that can kill us). I can’t forget to thank my parents for providing me with the blood, and eggs for providing me with the cholesterol. Oh yeah, I’d also like to thank Jesus because somehow it seems necessary.
The contestants and their respective guesses follow:
The processing of the entries was long and arduous but a definite winner was established. Thanks to everyone who participated. This contest was a raging success and the winner will be thusly awarded. So without further ado, here are the results:
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