Thanksgiving

Love Thanksgiving week.  Work from home Mon, Tues, Wed (read extra hour in bed and stay in PJs most of the day) - ignore crazy people who think everything has to be done before Thanksgiving ....because?  Roll outta bed at my leisure on Thanksgiving day; juice, coffee, muesli with fruit and yoghurt, plan my run and what time I need to leave to get to Oakland to have a Thanksgiving feast with Michelle, Marcia, Nancy, Joan and Andreana (J & A just got engaged so double celebration!).  Thanksgiving is one of the loveliest holidays in the US.  So much easier than Xmas because it is only about good food and company - no gifts.  Everyone gets very excited about it and people are always concerned that everyone has somewhere to go.  Going to take the flip camera etc to lunch so I get record the event, if the vid/pics turn out okay I'll share.
What else?  Not long until the mother arrives, Vegas all set to go and Karen and Brice are now coming for part of the adventure (including Xmas day).  Nice restaurant booked (thanks Brice!) and generally looking forward to the whole adventure.  A week in Vegas is plenty of time (none of us are actually gamblers, play the pokies, that's about it, but there is always something interesting going on!).  Got some tentative adventures planned for post Vegas too, some places mum didn't see last time.
Check this out (takes a second to load so hang tight).  I found out Case's dad is quite a famous artist, originally photography and now he does public art using mosaic.  It's pretty fab stuff.  He also included Case in one of the pieces - NY Administration for Children's Services, Case on the left in the Cap (yes when he was a teenager...just).  He also did this very cool Obama mosaic.  Some of his work is in San Jose and one piece at the SF International Airport.

Even I have my limits

So one of the things I am not very good at is nutrition. That's not to say I don't eat well but I'm just not that into cooking (although love good food) and tend to graze more than cook full meals. Well that's not very helpful when you are exercising as much as I am.......apparently! I am shamed by Case who, at 24, has far more commitment to cooking than I will ever have. To help me along the way (and avoid my fainting at training..) he put me onto this book, which is actually really quite excellent and the food sounds yummy. Challenge is there is at least some degree of learning required to get the right balance of nutrients etc and, frankly, it bores me to death. I don't have a scientific bone in my body - I really just want someone to say "here's the shopping list and the menu plan - get on with it". Honestly I believe all the health claims, they don't need to convince me. But, here's the thing I draw the line at, substituting coffee for chicory and dandilion roots, wtf!!!!! No, I've given up drinking (at least for now, in case you are all worried for my mental health), eat very few carbs (none after 5pm), less refined sugar and very few grains (this is all easy - well carbs wasn't - but my favourtie food is sashimi so I get to eat lots more and I love veges and don't have much of a sweet tooth). I am not giving up coffee - I don't even know what chicory is and dandilions are something you blow on to watch the fairies float off in the wind......I'm not drinking them.

Recreation, work and news of the day

Seems the year is flying by!  Yesterday I did a fab 7 mile run through Wilder Ranch. A state park about a mile out of Santa Cruz.  It is a mixture of open meadow and forest, a lovely place to run. Just when you think you might get bored with the hills or forest you round a bend or crest a hill to look out across some very spectacular scenery.  I enjoyed some nice encounters with some folk too.  You can read more about that in On the Run if you are interested.

Work was busy this week.  I had to let one of my folk go, which was a little tough as it wasn't on the plan for this quarter.  Over the past year I've learnt a lot about managing a team (I now have 12 people!!!).  I've also stuck by the idea that I roll them on so I roll them off, letting people go in this economy is a tough call but part of the job.  The job has gotten exponentially bigger and I am going to have to adjust how I manage the team as 12 people working on upwards of 6 different projects makes for a lot of complexity, relationships and politics.  My "favourite" IM of all time is the one that starts "Can you talk"....this usually means "something" is up and I go into management mode.  Things in the workplace seem to move so much faster here than I remember in NZ.  Decisions generally get taken very quickly and need to be acted on equally as fast.  Working in a global environment also means managing very diverse expectations - I've got very thick skinned and figure it's a good day when most of the people are mostly happy (or, at the very least, not complaining too loudly!).

The horror story of the last two weeks for me has been the Fort Hood shootings.  This is terribly sad, not least of which because so many people are now thinking someone somehow should have been able to anticipate it.  Maybe, maybe not, hindsight's always twenty twenty - all not helped by it very nearly coinciding with Veterans day.  The shooter is still alive which will drag the whole thing out for a very long time (hard to think he's going to be considered sane enough to go to a trial).

Running, Thanksgiving and Halloween

Time is flying by!  Two weekends back I did a trial run of the 10k trail run I am doing in December.  It was grand!  The Marin Headlands are right on the coast and, while the first 3.5 miles of the race are all uphill, you get a stunning view of the bay area once you reach the summit, then you get to blast down the otherside (making up for all that slow plodding!).  I can definitely run it within the alloted time (2hrs) so am most relieved.  Given I've never run in a race before I'm sure there will be alot to learn.

Last month I spent so much time training I haven't really done much else (personal trainer three times a week then running on the other days).  Although, despite my reclusiveness, I have been invited with Marcia and Michelle to a Thanks Giving dinner in Oakland, so that will be fun.

Halloween at work was a blast.  We set up a video show with all these great halloween videos the team made highlighting "Nightmare on Change Street"....all set to Michael Jackson's Thriller video.  Igor is from Czechoslovakia so we got him to voice over for Vincent Price. Other folk also put together displays and people came to work dressed up.  It's really quite surreal.....there are photos somewhere, I'll hunt them down and post a few.

Daylight saving is over here so while I get to drive to work in daylight it's pitch black by the time I get home, bleech.