Now that I have cats again you can bet I’ll be once again stuffing these entries with pics that have nothing to do with what I’m writing about.
A couple weeks back some friends invited me out to bar trivia. We didn’t do so hot the first round, but we actually won the second, much to our shock. Won a $20 gift card, split four ways.
They’re learning.
Surveying her domain of destruction.
It’s been uncharacteristically warm lately so I went on a stroll around the neighborhood on Saturday. Found myself in a very exclusive neighborhood, looking entirely out of place. As I was walking up a hill towards a dead end a couple drove past me, then turned around and drove past in the opposite direction, then parked their car askew so as to block me in. As I headed back towards them they got out of their car and asked, “Hey, you look like you’re looking for something.” Without breaking stride I replied, “Nope, just out for a walk.” “Ah, sorry to be nosy.” “It’s all good, you probably don’t get too many people walking around up here. See ya!” Edged around the car and kept on walking. The wife didn’t look too happy, but I wasn’t looking for a repeat of the Pecan Place incident.
The views up there were amazing. Pics didn’t do it justice. Maybe when y’all are back we can go again and look less suspicious than one bearded dude by himself.
New $1mm houses that just went in across the street.
Still more under construction.
Pic doesn’t do it justice but Mount Rainier looks fantastic from this vantage point.
Ah nostalgia.
Someone brought an RC boat.
Those instructions look pretty intimidating.
This last week I’ve been on an extended trip down to headquarters. These trips tend to be hyper-productive, full of good meetings, so that’s nice. The downside is I also tend to get incredibly stressed about how gosh darned much stuff we have to get done this year.
She didn’t want me to leave.
This conference room has an honest-to-goodness Rube Goldberg contraption built in. Defunct, unfortunately.
Allll the parking. We’re incredibly cramped in our Kirkland office.
One fun thing I got to do this trip was tour Google X, the secretive lab where we do self-driving cars and balloon-based Internet, among other projects. The building is a converted mall, so it’s kind of trippy walking around in there. No pics of course, unfortunately.
Regular employees can’t just go in whenever they want; a team member traveling with me used to work there and arranged for one of his old coworkers to have us over for lunch. We had to wear guest badges and everything, so I got to feel what it’s like whenever I take one of you through. And it was funny, although I’ve eaten at countless Google cafes before, wearing the badge and having it be new and exciting made me feel just like a guest again.
Tomorrow I get to go to church at the Stanford singles ward, always a treat. I head back on Tuesday night, then off to Utah Friday night. Can’t wait to see y’all!
A bit over a week ago I attended a friend-of-a-friend’s birthday party. There was this awesome party game going on where one player had to come up with a cohesive story while each player took it in turns to provide a word to the “it” player that they’d have to work into their story, one sentence at a time. If the other players don’t like your story or don’t think it’s self-consistent they vote you out. I immediately knew it’d be just up my alley. Had to partner with another player since there weren’t any open slots, so we’d be alternating who came up with the sentence. When it got to our turn I started off strong but then the first sentence my partner came up with just threw everyone off so we got immediately voted out. Fooey.
Ended up playing the game What’s In Your Milk, which is where the “it” player selects an answer to the question “what’s in your milk” – it can be a totally random answer: bugs, a scarf, chocolate, whatever. Then all other players take turns asking the “it” player questions, and that player must respond with the answer already selected; the goal is to get them to laugh. Good late-night game.
Random cat picture #1.
The next day I hosted a double birthday party. My friend in the ward was turning one year older, and as it happened she’d been chatting with an old mission buddy for a good while, who decided to pay her a visit for her big day. It was great catching up with him, swapping stories and funny mission videos.
Properly prepared vegemite isn’t half bad.
The next morning I had him over at Google for a tour and breakfast before he shot off for the airport.
A rare sighting of a Waymo self-driving test vehicle.
That evening I decided to go check out the Single Adults FHE for kicks and giggles. It was a game night and we ended up playing Coup and Castle Panic. We barely won the day.
That night Cleo actually warmed up to me!
Had to put them in time-out when they got in the way of brushing my teeth.
On Wednesday I got invited out to Mox Boarding House for a game night – Code Names, picture edition.
Really fun-looking tabletop games going on – I think Warhammer but who knows.
On Thursday I had to rush out early from work to help Michael get his place put together before the wedding the next day. They’re gearing up to live in a newly-renovated house while working as caregivers for mentally challenged adults. Gonna be an interesting experience, but the house is super nice.
A bit subtle if you ask me.
This new carpet was really nice.
Drove from there to a date in Fremont. Met her outside the Google office buildings there, then settled on a random place to eat and headed off walking. Good conversation. Ended up back at the office where we played pinball and ping pong.
Some randoms back in the day decided that this specific street corner was mathematically the center of the universe. Makes sense to me.
Then it was Friday, the big day. The sealing was short and to the point, no advice monologues, a nice change. Pictures afterwards, then the groomsmen went to lunch at a burger place before making our way to the chapel for a reception.
Groomsmen hard at work preparing.
Lookin’ classy during cleanup.
So a successful send-off all around.
This post could also be called Welcome to the Hotel Andersen or something. A buddy of mine flew in from Hawaii to see the wedding, and crashed at my place Friday night. The next morning he left super early to go up skiing. I wanted to go so badly, but was too paranoid about my back, so I sat it out. My buddy would be out that entire day and night, and come back to stay at my place Sunday night.
Mid-morning on Saturday I got a Facebook message from an old friend from my BYU days. His flight out of SeaTac had been cancelled and he was wondering if I had a place for him to stay that night. Well it was just his luck, the spare room was open that single night. I drove down to pick him up and dropped him at my place. It was a bit awkward since he didn’t have transportation or anything, so I left him there when I went out for a few errands.
The errand I went off to was actually one of the first meetings of a local indie game developer group spear-headed by a friend in the ward. Looked interesting from the event description so I thought I’d come sit in even though I had no interest in actually contributing to whatever game they ended up creating. Thought I could at least act as a sounding board or an ideas person or something.
The group consisted of graphics designers, programmers, 3D modelers, and (my friend) a composer. We spent the time airing different game ideas and settling on a mechanic to try and make real, a puzzle-based game having to do with a tree and root systems.
The group met in a very “Seattle” coffee house.
Pretty exciting vibe by the end of it.
From the meet-up I drove to Costco to do some shopping, and failed miserably. Arrived at 5:50, figured I’d grab some food and chill before it closed at 6:30. Didn’t have much to get so I let it get to like 6:15. The food court was in-doors, so I walked out to the entrance and only then noticed that the entrance door had completely closed. I made a move to head back in, since I hadn’t completely left yet and figured I could get past the registers or something, but an attendant called me out and said Sorry, you’re not allowed to go inside. No it closes at 6, not 6:30. I didn’t have it together enough to explain that I’d just come from inside and I dunno, forgot my wallet or something. No instead I just walked out and fumed for a bit. It was ok though, I had plenty of frozen food.
From there I drove down to a friend’s house for a Bollywood movie night. We watched “3 Idiots”, a really nice movie that I think people at home will enjoy.
This morning I drove my college friend off to the airport, then gave a couple of ward members rides to church, who didn’t have licenses. It was my turn to arrange for Third Sunday teachers this week, when our Sunday School consists of small tables with one teacher each. Half our teachers couldn’t make it, a couple people called in sick, but we made it work. Great food afterwards.
After church I had a few friends over to play Tales of the Arabian Nights. It was a bit of a marathon – the thing started at 5 and it finished up a bit after 10. I’ll definitely be bringing it back home for some fun, it doesn’t necessarily need to be played for that long.
These past few weeks I’ve been watching the latest season of Young Justice. This is an animated show that centers around the side-kicks in the DC universe – Robin, Aqualad, Kid Flash, etcetera. This show was kicked off the air almost six years ago. Rumor has it that the show was performing too well in the female demographic and wasn’t selling as many toys to young boys as the network would’ve liked, so they yanked it.
After all these years the show is back, this time being streamed online through the new DC Universe service. Yet another silo’d service, competing with Netflix. Nonetheless I subscribed, cause I could afford it and wanted to do my part to show DC that Young Justice was worth keeping around.
Well it turns out that there are some side-effects to being a stream-only show. Without the broadcasters there’s little standing in the way of the showrunners introducing some really gritty elements. The series has gotten incredibly dark, and though I’ve waited six years for this I don’t think I’ll continue watching much longer.
To illustrate – one of the (many) new characters they introduced is named Halo. Among her many abilities are regeneration and even resurrection. Unfortunately the showrunners seem to have written her in for the purpose of showing off gruesome death sequences without having to burn through characters. Every week they find new ways to kill her, only to bring her back with a bit of resurrection magic. I’ll spare the details.
The main premise of the season involves Earth kids getting abducted, given super-powers, trafficked to off-world buyers, and used in combat. Again I’ll spare the details.
I decided to cancel my subscription to the service, as the whole reason I got it in the first place was to support the show, and I don’t think I can do that in its current form. It’ll mean I can’t podcast on the show much longer, but that’s ok. I’ll just replace it with Star Trek Discovery episodes, should be much cheerier.
I guess I’m sort of like Georges Hautecort these days.
My back is still in as awesome a shape as ever.Sometimes I have to wear glasses for the day.And I get excited when I hear cats around the place.
But I’ll rewind first since it’s been a while.
Well, actually the first thing isn’t that far off topic. For the first week I was back I didn’t venture into my back yard; arrived back from work while it was too dark to see anything, left without peeking back there. But on Thursday I noticed this little doo-dad just chilling.
How long had she been there? What was her purpose? These thoughts consumed me until I got it out of Mary that it had been her, Beth, and Annabel who’d picked her up from a thrift store while out on a night on the town, over the holiday break. Pranksters all. I think I’ll name it Clarence or Chessie. And yes it’s still out there.
On Saturday last week I hosted my old roommate’s bachelor party. We’d laid careful plans to surprise him when he walked up thinking it was just gonna be a chill dinner with me, but half the groomsmen didn’t show up on time. Wasn’t that big a deal though, since the groom himself showed up almost an hour later than he should’ve, so whatevs.
On Sunday I woke up and checked Facebook to see it was the first Sunday School of the New World Order, and I had neglected to arrange for anyone to teach. Oopsie. I slapped together a lesson plan, which came together fabulously thanks to some great audience participation. Even got thanked in the closing prayer for all the time I’d put into preparing the lesson 🙂
Ran into one of Mattie’s old TAs, who’s up here starting a job at Microsoft. She may end up taking my old couch off my hands.
That evening was a nice dinner with friends I hadn’t caught up with in a while.
On Monday we had the first of our quarterly “Sam Valley Talks”, mini-TED-talks by members of the ward on whatever they’re passionate about. We heard about behavioral psychology, curing cancer with modified T-cells, and I gave a picture-laden talk on how the Internet works. Good fun.
On Tuesday I went to a local gun range as a good-bye party of sorts for a friend from work who’s heading out to Utah to work for a start-up that offers Internet-connected baby monitoring solutions, including a sock that monitors heart-rate and other metrics. She’s the one whose cats I had over a few months ago.
It was Ladies’ Night, so her rentals were free. Gotta keep that in mind for later.
And given that she doesn’t yet have long-term accommodations arranged in Utah yet, she’s elected to leave her cats up here while she scouts ahead. I volunteered to take care of them again. They’re still adjusting, but they aren’t cowering in fear like last time so I think they recognize the house layout, even if they haven’t yet recognized me.
Clearly still adjusting.
I wasn’t feeling too charitable after a few bats to my face.
I don’t think I’ll be keeping them terribly long, maybe a couple weeks or so. Just enough time for them to settle in before being shipped off to Timbuktu Lehi.
