Tales and Tailwinds

[hrj]

Working at the Big B has given me some new and interesting workplace experiences. This is the first context in which I’ve found myself doing the “going out to a bar with the co-workers after work” thing. It ends up happening about once a month, irregularly (and sometimes it even goes on someone’s expense account if we’re celebrating something official). This time it was a send-off for a couple people in QA who were leaving the group for other jobs. Now, I’m not exactly a “hang out in bars” type of person, but we generally end up in fairly pleasant places (this one even had pool tables) and there’s something to be said for strengthening the social contacts and all that. It still feels a bit odd. I was comparing notes with one of the co-workers about what we did with our friends in our free time, and even without going into the whole SCA/fandom thing, we didn’t have a lot of points of overlap. When I got to the example of, “And sometimes we hang out and do programming or work on our web pages together,” she threw up her hands in despair. (hee hee)

Speaking of which, spent Saturday with SK – the essential plan was to see Pirates, which was pretty much what all the critics said it would be. (As far as I can tell, the critics all say pretty much the same things about it – they simply differ in whether they consider it to have delivered on the promised experience or whether they mistakenly thought it was going to be Great Art.) You pay for an E-ticket ride, you get an E-ticket ride. (Boy is that expression dating me!) In this case, you can even keep a score-card on which settings and tableaus are going to be in the literal Disneyland ride.

Turning on my phone coming out of the theater, I had a message from the youngest brother saying he’s missed his connection in Newark (on the way back from England) and would be getting in at 10pm rather than 7pm, so I relaxed the day’s schedule a bit. So there SK and I were hanging out in her living room chatting about our exercise routines and she pointed out that if we were really virtuous, we’d set out on a nice long walk while chatting about our exercise routines, so we wandered the maze of Los Altos for a bit and ended up ducking under 280 to the county park and getting in about 4 miles worth. (Memo to self: if there is any possibility of going for long walks in Los Altos in the summer, bring hat, decent walking shoes, and water bottles.) Then we brainstormed on what sort of dinner would thematically accompany PotC and decided on a nice little Italian place with an absolutely heavenly calamari appetizer. (We get a lot of mileage out of coming up with appropriate movie-cuisine pairings.)

Round about 9pm I checked the Continental website to see whether the 10pm arrival had been delayed only to discover that the plane was getting in 40 minutes ahead of schedule. Not a problem, as it turned out – the YB was still waiting for luggage when I arrived. He wisely crashed at my place for the night before the drive home.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The "Big B" is my employer -- a certain international pharmaceutical company known for their aspirin. I generally try to avoid using the real name in posts just as a plausible deniability thing in case I accidentally say something indiscrete (and to avoid search engines). I'm not all that paranoid about it -- it's more a matter of following the LJ conventions of not using real names.

Re: PotC rides -- My understanding is that they're redesigning/updating the ride to go with the movies. I haven't actually been to Disneyland in ages -- maybe 15 years?

[vesilehti.livejournal.com]

I expect there is a limit as to how much tentacle goodness they can implement in Disneyland. (No, we haven't seen the movie yet, I've just heard things.)

[goldenstag.livejournal.com]

We were there in February, and were told that the next week (it was the end of the month) they were shutting down Pirates until just before the second movie, so they could update it to include elements from the first two Pirates movies ... I imagine they'll stick Jack Sparrow on the ship, that kind of thing. Otherwise, couldn't say for sure what they'll do.