"work" log - july 8 (why most of today was good)

The weather was soooo beautiful this morning. I got to enjoy it for about 1.5 minutes while walking from the parking spot to the building at work. Take 5 (the cafe at work) always makes a few blends of Starbucks coffee, and this morning included one of my favorites - Cafe Estima. I really have to remember to bring in my mug warmer so I can make it stay warm for hours and hours.

Topics at lunch: cats hunting birds(??) and rabbits (Steve thinks rabbits are cute), squirrels, the new Transformers movie (Jackie and Yuriy liked it a lot and Steve refuses to watch it), and the comparison of heavy metal vocals to Cookie Monster.

Walking in the hall after lunch, Yuriy told me that my hair looked good. I was like "psh this is me being lazy, putting it up and not bothering to blow it dry..." but I did (after a few attempts) manage to braid my bangs (as they are getting longer) and pin them back, which I liked. I really did appreciate and was happy that he said that to me.

In foosball, the other Yuriy and I did respectably against his friend and...I forget who... I think the friend (wish I knew his name) and I may have beaten Yuriy and Shilpa? Then Srini and I made two crazy attempts to beat Yuriy and Shilpa. I'm always laughing and then my eyes start tearing because they do that easily and then I have to clear them out so I can even see to play. I never knew I could love foosball this much. Foosball quote (I believe after Shilpa scored a nice goal): Yuriy says, "You're ready for the playoffs!"; then she hits it backwards towards her own goal and says "Not really!" :)

In the afternoon, Chris came over with Jason and a couple other people. He'd just come from showing my work up on a projector in a meeting and found out no one else knew who I was, so he brought them over for introductions. (err I don't remember any of their names...) Chris recounted how recently Martin(??) had emailed him kind of randomly and asked, "Where's our intern..?" since we had moved from one area to another, across the building. Chris responded that I was down in Row T, and Martin said, "Oh...I thought we forgot her." hahaha. Then I was saying how I'm far away from everyone and don't even know who's in our group or not, so I was walked down to Row J (where Chris and Jason are) and introduced to a few more people who I may or may not remember. Then the company softball league came up, and I said how I'd tried to find out information about joining the team to which we, GTS interns, were directed. I wanted to be on the department team, not play against them, and Chris poked fun at me for my wsj.com friends (since he knows I play foosball with them) - I said "hey I have loyalties here too!" and we laughed. Jason is on a different team though, and kind of just recruited me on the spot. We walked over to the team captain's cube and he'll add me to the email list...

Not long after this little adventure, Martin ((I think)) happened to find me, down in row T. He started up this whole 10-minute chat about finding what you like to do in life (with other things thrown in), and I think I held up a nice little talk.

Towards the end of the day, I ran into an odd problem - I discovered that in the process of working on a page, I had broken an important function of the code. The thing is, I could not figure out how it had originally worked. The method that seemed to be used made no sense. Things like that reel me in, and though a bit frustrating, I want to figure it out and fix it. But that could take hours. At 6:15 or something Yuriy came down and, as he said, we had a real-life little music exchange - I played a few songs on my ipod for him.

A little earlier I had asked Jason if the softball games are held out on that field wayyy in the corner of the property, by where those department picnics were held last year (I want to do that again...). (The conversation, by the way, is courtesy of Microsoft Office Communicator - a business chat program to install which I had to go through a whole online request/approval system haha. It has actually turned out to be helpful so far.) I said I might come by to watch a bit, and he said not to laugh... :) Yuriy, being the good friend that he is, led me driving around to the parking lot that's actually near the field. The weather was still gorgeous by the way, as was the "lake" on the property. I should've attempted a picture even if it was only phone-quality. Anyway, I watched the last few innings of the game. A couple of young guys seemed really into it (interns? dunno) and a few people had cleats and there were some great hits. Watching the game made middle school softball come back to me a little - cheering for people, pitching, calling out the infield play as the next batter comes up. It's been many (in a relative, 21-year-old sense) years since I have really tried to do anything with softball, and I said to Jason afterwards that I felt like I should practice before showing up for next week's game. He told me don't worry, just come and play. I am looking forward to it.

Jason thanked me for coming to spectate. That topped off the evening nicely... aside of forgetting to actually start the car and trying to go somewhere in drive or reverse, I was in a good mood that I didn't totally understand for most of the drive.

"work" log - june 9

The rain told me this morning was made for strong Starbucks coffee, not my tea of the past few days. By the time I got there it was not raining in the Dow Jones complex, so I shed my green nylon high school track jacket and made the parking-lot walk wearing heels rather than my rain shoes. (They actually look just like this except with navy coloring in place of the green.)

During the morning I tried stubbornly to make my kind-of-not-working visual design "work" (which means "look good"). I do think it might be on its way to a state of "possibly usable". We'll see if I can fix it up well enough tomorrow.

In those few hours I waited for a text back and never got it. So I gave over a small piece of my mind to worrying about that. I should remember he's got a life too, though. I didn't know exactly when the guys (my friends from last year) were going to lunch, so I kind of gave up. It can't hurt to catch up on hours by eating at my desk anyway. I took maybe 15 minutes of time doing things not related to work on the computer and hoped no one walked by and asked why I had Twitter on the screen.

Later Yuriy came to my rescue, YAY! I emailed to ask how foosball had gone since I assumed I had missed it. He called me up at my cube and joked that I didn't need Matt's permission to come play. Then he said I must come to the 3pm game session. I was so glad for the break so I wouldn't be at my desk for the entire day straight. When I got upstairs Yuriy told Dimitri and Dean that the most important player was there and we could go...haha, right. They said we were going to play shuffleboard (table version) today and I made a face. I figured I would be no good at it. Yuriy and I lost the first game but totally won the second, with some good rounds. I was excited. In the third game, with Frank(?) in place of Dean, I think all my rounds were 0 or only 1 point. Oh well. Then we just had to play one foosball game although the rods don't spin well at all in the table in that room. I do believe Dimitri and I beat Yuriy and Frank. Yuriy then walked back with me and so now knows my location in the bottom floor corner. Oh right, what were we doing? Yeah, working...

Bonus: At the end of the day I discovered that Jason (the guy I'm working for) used to play DDR and Stepmania - haha awesome. He apologized for being a geek...so funny because there is absolutely no need.

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I need to redesign this blog's design. Eric Fisher told me so.

Foosball is for lovers [1]

Foosball seems a little obscure to me. Or at least, it's a thing of (un)finished basements that host mix-of-family-and-friends birthday gatherings. But I have a couple of personal connections with the game.

Maybe love is obscure these days. I'm not having an easy time of finding it. It's all over books and movies, but as much fun as it is to think so, those aren't real life.

One goes back to...well, I'm not sure if it would be middle or elementary school. My brother and I were the ages when we would play with toys together - Matchbox cars, "farm and construction", Legos/K'Nex, and maybe the horse barn sometimes... Yeah, I was kind of a boy. Oh well.

Playing games, telling stories, making things up. Things you might do when you're talking, smiling, laughing with someone - time to forget the world for the sake of two.

We acquired the foosball table from a family friend - she used to babysit for us, actually. I looked through pages and pages of Google image search results, but could not find any that looked remotely like that secondhand table. It was completely unsturdy on four kind-of-thin metal-tube legs, and the "table" part was a thin board that sagged towards one end. (The sagging probably made it the games a bit unfair, but I don't recall being bothered by that.) The goals were white plastic little crate-like things that stuck out from the ends with a red slider for the score, and oddly enough, the provided plastic ball (a la ping pong ball, but with yellow and red soccer-ball patterning) did not fit through the holes into the goals. We often substituted a "bouncy ball" (whatever happened to those things? 90s fad or something?). Dude I totally remember these two-colored ones! The color pairs were usually kind of ugly...

The beginning. He wasn't there. Funny that would be the case. I got really into it, though I wasn't very good. And then I had to go.

The plastic players were actually little figures - there was the red team and the yellow team, and I was usually yellow, my brother red. Some of the players were cracked across the stomach where the rod went through, and some slid along the rod so you could yank the rod way out from the side of the table. p.s.: The [one] goalie was not able to spin a 360-degree rotation - he hit the end of the table and got stuck. We didn't bother to use him much. :)

Before I left (and before he'd gone for a bit), we were together often. Days, walks, sun. Laughter, and sometimes, a moment.

My brother and I played the craziest games with that foosball table. In a one-on-one game you gotta manage 4 rods of players by yourself, so there's a lot of switching around hands and the ball movement was rather all over the place. (Only now do I see people playing with strategy in two-on-two games.) Since there wasn't much to the table, we'd be jerking it all around. If the ball got stuck in the caved-in corner, we merely gave the table a jump. We spun players like crazy except the goalies who got stuck. Before dropping the ball in after someone scored, we'd take a minute to realign the players who'd gotten inadvertently rotated on their rods during playtime. Oh and we assigned names to the players, but not people's names. We actually named them after names we had given our Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars. My yellow defenders were London (a black London taxi) and Tel. 4 (a yellow cherry picker labeled as belonging to Telephone Company No. 4, I imagine). I think the offense were a few of the race car "gang".

Things really used to drive me crazy, like my shyness, and watching him. Going up to the roof deck, and oh, those touches, because maybe they were nothing, but I liked to think they meant everything. I wondered all the time. I feared we were stuck and the reason was, well, out of our hands. How many times did I imagine?

I think we trashed or gave away that table years ago. We have a new, nice one now. I have hardly touched it for all the years since the games with the old table. All of life was going on for all the years that I didn't really play.

He didn't keep in touch much. I tried more than he did. I figured it was the way he is and mostly let it be that way. All of life was going on, anyway.