So it’s Wednesday afternoon at work, just before a four-day weekend, which is just before my flight to NYC. And I’ve lost my phone. So, not ideal. I walked around every room I’d been in that day, carrying my laptop and using the Android equivalent of Find My iPhone to get it to ring remotely. No joy. In fact, although I could see a rough GPS fix centered on my office, I saw that someone was cancelling the ring part-way through. Disturbing.

I dropped by Lost & Found and they didn’t have any reports of a phone turning up that day. A few more rounds of back-and-forth, eyeing suspicious individuals sitting near where I’d though I’d lost it, and I was getting desperate. One more trip to Lost & Found, only this time I happened to have my laptop on me. “No sir, no phones turned in today.” I idly tapped the button to make it ring, just to be sure. A ditty started emanating from the closet. Sure enough there it was. Thanks very much.

New York was major fun!

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The flight home was interesting. We were supposed to land at 1:30am, but there were a couple problems:

• The captain was a no-show, so we waited for an hour for his on-call replacement to arrive.
• We taxi’d a bit out to our runway, but then there was a medical issue with one of the passengers, so we had to to taxi on back. Turned out to be fine.
• The engines had been running for so long that the fuel was now imbalanced, so we had to stay at the gate while they rustled up a fuel pump to get us on our way.

So we ended up landing at 3:30am. Not sure why, but our friend in Seattle who’d agreed to pick us up was a-okay with the new itinerary. Major props.

Work has been pretty good. Been tutoring folks in a couple of capacities. First, because we just had several new hires join our team, and it’s been fun getting them brought up to speed, hosting presentations and informal discussions on what all our team gets up to.

Second, because our site is hosting a bunch of high schoolers for a few weeks, and I signed up to volunteer as a tutor during afternoons. Did the same last year for a couple days and it was neat. This time around the organizers asked for tutors who would be able to come in each day for a week, to help build rapport. So it was fun and gratifying, but kind of hard since I was losing my afternoons the week after getting back from New York. I’d been extra vigilant in not checking emails on that trip, but my reward was about 250 unread emails, and that was after filtering had probably removed twice that number.

In other news, prep work for our Fall recruiting trip to BYU has begun. We won’t have any funding from Google Recruiting this year, so we’ll have to pay for everything out of our own cost centers. Got the go-ahead from my director to participate, cashing in on some brownie points. So that’ll be fun.

I saw two trailers this week, and my reactions to both can be summed up in two halves of the same gif.

You can tell which one I’ll be seeing.

So on a Friday I attended a reception of a good friend.

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It was quite classy.

Dropped Hayden off at his office the morning of his flight, sporting an awesome ‘stache.

On Friday I went down with Mary to check out downtown Kirkland; unbeknownst to me there was a weekend-long summer fest thinger.

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On Saturday I attended a board meeting in the afternoon at the Kirkland library. There’s been some contention between board members and neighbors and it’s been… interesting to deal with and watch unfold. Trying to stay on everyone’s side 🙂

That evening Mary and I went to a pet shelter just for fun, got ice cream afterwards.

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Today after church I went to Mary’s to read aloud another chapter of a book – The Memory of Earth, by Orson Scott Card – and from there we went to another good friend’s “second wedding”, where they re-exchanged vows, after having been married in Kentucky where she’s from.

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And that’s a wrap! Hayden gets back this week, and then Mom arrives Thursday and leaves Tuesday, then Hayden and I depart Thursday for Alaska and return on Monday. Then we’re all heading to the cabin a few weeks after that. Busy summer!