Seemingly (and mostly) Unrelated Paragraphs

I had lunch today with the fabulous Andrea, a friend I've known since our Once Upon A Mattress days in high school, who just happens to work about 15 minutes away from Google. I just love lunch with her; it's like the best combination of blast-from-the-past and gabbing-with-a-girlfriend and I was looking forward to it all morning. And then at lunch she confessed that she reads this here blog (total readership: 9?), and I figured I'd throw in a little shout out. So, HI ANDREA! I WANT TO EAT LUNCH WITH YOU EVERY DAY!

It was raining this morning, and I wore my rainboots (or Wellies, as some fabulous people [cough cough Andrea cough cough] call them. I am not cool enough to call them Wellies.) for the first time all year. My rainboots are awesome. I got them a few years ago from Land's End, and they look like this, except they're light blue with a grayish darker blue trim. Also, they're not for kids. Or ARE THEY??? I also kind of love these kids ones, because who doesn't want their feet to look like strawberries?? Oh come on, you know I do. Let it be known that I love these (b&w AND "multi"), these (love me some watermelon!), and these (I could SO rock the pink argyle!). I think these are the ugliest things ever (from the "old lady loves to garden" collection, I suppose. color = vegetable???), and I detest these for some reason (though I'm sure they're both very popular). And I can't decide if this pair is cute or atrocious. Kind of like a child's scribbling gone bad.

My friend Dina posted about this in her blog, and I had to re-post here because it is so fabulously awesome. It belongs to the category of things I think are SNL sketches until I find out they're real. Ladies and Gents, please check out Business Bib at your earliest convenience. Warning: the pictures in their flickr photoset are kind of freaky. Either way, I kind of want to forward it to all of my managers. And, um, scratch that, I just did. And, um, also? I just clicked on a random piece in the "showroom" to look at (I thought the name was funny), and it was this one. Spooky...

I love the way the "mom" character on that vacuum commercial (how vague can I be?) says "spooky." It makes me giggle every time.

The videos on this Gmail Blog post made me a little smiley inside. I'm not having kids for a long time, but when I do, I kind of want to steal this guy's email journal idea.

I don't read Jon Carroll in the SF Gate all that much, but I frequently like what I do read. For example, this post about money and how we use it and how weird and silly it all is. I tend to have thoughts like this a lot, about how we're all movin' along in our little world, taking care of our day to day schleppings (just made up that word, oh YEAH i did!) and not thinking about things like how silly it is, for example, that we hear a strangely distorted version of a popular song, press a button on a plastic device, and have a conversation with our friends in the Netherlands from our sofas in Berkeley. Or how we open our laptops and click "print," and our managers receive boarding passes printed to their desks in another state. Technology sometimes freaks me out.

Our holiday bonuses have been announced, and that means I will soon be the proud owner of TiVo. I can't freaking wait. If I had TiVo yesterday, I could have logged on to my TiVo account and set it to record the channel 5 news yesterday evening, and I wouldn't have missed seeing a .1412412135 second clip of me wrapping presents for underprivileged children. Glory! It shall be mine! (more on those kids later)

Also, with my bonus, I might just have to purchase THIS GLORIOUS PIECE OF WORK. I fell in love with it here when I saw it on dooce, and I fell in love with it again when it was a decoration at the Google Holiday Party, and I am just so in love with it that I feel like it already belongs in my home, and I am just going to be disappointed each time I look at the empty space on my wall where it will someday hang. My god, I love it so much, and it would be so perfect on the wall above my TV. Also, this piece (which I also saw on dooce) is on sale, and thus, I might have to get both. But we'll see. Let's not go crazy, here.

I bought a tent from a guy at work today for $15. I figure it's a good investment, since I wished I had one this past summer, and I definitely plan on taking multiple weekend camping trips once it gets warm outside again (ha! It's mid-December and I'm already thinking about summer!)

So, yesterday I spent 2 hours at a warehouse in Milpitas, CA checking and wrapping gifts as a volunteer project with Family Giving Tree. Google sent a bunch of us over there, and I'm really glad they did. This is really a worthy project, and if you have a second, you should take a look at their website. It started as a school project at San Jose State, and has blossomed into a truly fabulous organization that provides gifts to over 75,000 kids each year. I'm proud to have been a volunteer elf here this year, and I hope to be able to do it again (and maybe for more than 2 hours, which just wasn't enough time!!!) next year.

This weekend, I will attempt to ski for the first time with The Boy's family (for the first time, ever, not just with his family. just to clarify.). It should be interesting, and fun, and all that, and I'm excited to finally become a big girl and strap on a pair, but mostly, I'm excited for SNOW. We don't have snow back where I come from (oh, Los Angeles, with your 1 inch of snow every 25 years, maybe), and I'm SO STOKED to experience winter. And we're doing it at Timberline Lodge which just looks like the perfect place to do it. As The Boy said, it will be a "good introduction to winter." I never knew people actually needed to be introduced to winter, but hey, you learn something new every day I guess. So, I'm very excited, especially since, as this is a 4-day work week for me, the week is almost over! The downside? I still haven't unpacked from my 5-day excursion home last week, so between tonight and Thursday night, I have to unpack, put away laundry, wrap presents, re-pack for snow, and clean my apartment (it was a disaster zone when I came home late Sunday night, and I do NOT want to experience that again).

Only a few hours left of work, and then I'm off to Project Get Ready For Vacation, Part II! YEAH!

Rockin' the ALL CAPS,
Kim