Ok, so I just got back from my first “date” with Potential Friend #1 (or PF1 as she shall henceforth be known).

We met up at the Daily Grind, which worked out because it is sort of centrally located for both of us and they serve food, so we could eat lunch. I went in there a few minutes before our agreed upon meeting time and after I placed my order I was approached by a girl asking if I was, by any chance, Jennifer. I replied that I was indeed, and so we sat down at a table.

She’s cute, friendly, my age, newly married, works from home like me, and of course wanting to meet new people. I think the meeting went well because we wound up talking for like an hour and a half. I think we could’ve talked more, but I didn’t want to stay away from my job any longer. She mentioned that she just joined a book club through the site I posted on, so I think she’s going to email me the details since I stated I might be interested.

She also mentioned that she’d email me from the email she ACTUALLY uses as opposed to the one she uses only occasionally and hence picked to use to answer a personal-type ad placed by a stranger. I can relate, since I did basically the same thing, using a more generic email address that wouldn’t easily be traced to me if the responder was crazy or something.

So anyway, I liked her and the talking wasn’t awkward or anything, which was nice. I guess now I will hope that she wasn’t just pretending to like me, and perhaps I’ll even join that book club as a way to have regular contact with people (as well as the fact that it’s a club for 20-30somethings instead of old retired ladies).

Now I just have to see what happens next!

Posted at 1:21 PM | (2)

Every now and then it comes to my attention that I don’t really have many people to hang out with up here in SB, and that perhaps I should make a few female friends. (Hear that sound? That’s Steve enthusiastically agreeing in the background).

So, the other day I checked out the listings for girls seeking female (platonic) friendships on a Santa Barbara community site and only found a couple that appealed to me. So I emailed those, got one response back, and decided I should post my own to see what happens.

Since posting, I have received a little more than half a dozen responses and I have responded to all of them. Of those that I wrote back, 4 of them have written to me, indicating they would still like to hang out.

So, it now seems that I have agreed to two meetups tomorrow (one lunch, one after work), one Friday, and one the following Friday. I guess I’ll be busy for at least a little bit!

What’s funny is one of the girls eerily has a lot of the same interests. She also eerily lives not too far from me (where exactly, I’m not sure yet, but when she listed her cross streets, they are the same as mine), and we have someone in common. Weird coincidences, so maybe that’ll give us enough to talk about. Although, who doesn’t love awkward silences?!

As for everyone else, I got a lot of responses from people new to town, and almost everyone is married or in a relationship. Anyway, I guess it’s good to know I’m not the only one in this sort of situation, wanting to meet new people, so we’ll see how it goes.

One of the girls looks like she might be more fun than I am, so we’ll how that works out too. At any rate, at least I can say I tried, and it’ll give me something different to do. At the moment I’m not too worried either way, but tomorrow come lunch time I might be wondering what the hell I was thinking as I head off to meet Potential Female Friend #1.

Posted at 6:32 PM | (4)

I think I may need to put in a call to my insurance claims adjuster. She hasn’t called me back with the report from the inspector yet.

Speeding up the process came to mind this morning when I drove my car and it was still wet from the morning marine layer. I couldn’t see out of it because it was wet and I couldn’t use my windshield wipers to wipe it off because the driver’s side wiper doesn’t work! Well, I did turn it on anyway, to see how much it would help (not at all, in case you were wondering). If only we drove on the right side of the vehicle, I wouldn’t have a problem! But, I can’t lean far enough to the right to see where I’m going and still reach the pedals and steer properly. I’m guessing that’s not a good thing.

So, I better get it fixed before the rainy season starts!

Posted at 2:23 PM | (1)

This weekend was nice. On Saturday night, Steve wound up at a party near his house and invited me to join him. The house was quite nice, and even more impressive when you realize they got a great deal on the place by purchasing it over a decade ago (instead of in today’s housing market). Though we didn’t stay there too long, while we were there we drank some wine and sat by a little fire, near the pool, while listening to a live band.

On Sunday morning Steve took me for breakfast, and when we got back we did some things aroud his place to make it look better. I helped him put some stuff away and even offered to iron some new shirts he bought (damn those shirt manufacturers though, for putting 800 pins in the shirts, and folding them in such a way that they are totally unwearable as-is. There’s GOT to be a better way!). It took me a pretty long time to finish since I kept getting distracted by things like showing him kinda dumb videos on YouTube, or other random things like, oh look, shiny object!

In fact, I took so many breaks, and his roommate was in and out of the place so many times, that he was under the impression that I was forced to slave away the entire day ironing. HA. One of my many breaks involved going with Steve to the frame shop to find a suitable accent for a poster he had purchased. When we got back, we hung it up—an easy task thanks to this nifty laser level thing he has. :)

And we were finally able to go to Outback last night. I had promised him since before he left for China that I would take him to dinner, but various things had prevented it until now. So, we went last night. We even got dessert, the chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream, which I think for some reason tasted better than it normally does.

All in all, a good weekend. I did some productive things, ate some good food, and had a nice time just hanging out.

Hmm, I just got word that my windshield is back-ordered, so I guess that won’t be taken care of this week like I had hoped, but there’s no point in switching companies, since the bureaucracy of it all would take just as long. Oh well.

Happy Monday.

Posted at 3:53 PM | (0)

Well, I think I might actually get my windshield replaced soon. And to think, it’s only been 2 weeks. Good grief!

On Tuesday I took my car to get inspected so that I could also replace the windshield wipers, since the driver’s side one doesn’t move anymore. Apparently they required an inspection because I was now claiming more than just the cracked window.

The inspector said I could get the wiper fixed, as well as some minor body work on the hood and some other places where the metal scratched. I wasn’t going to claim those because they were so minor and superficial, but the guy noticed without anyone saying anything.

He suggested I get all the work done at a body shop—I’m not sure if he was including the window with that statement, since I had already contacted a windshield repair place. At any rate, I called my claims adjuster yesterday and she said the windshield costs had been approved so I could go ahead and get that done now. She also said the inspector hadn’t submitted his report yet, so I couldn’t go to the auto body shop until he does because I didn’t receive any sort of estimate. Pain in the ass. If it wasn’t for the fact that this was only going to cost me $100 instead of like $600 or something (I’m kinda just throwing a number out there, but you know auto repair isn’t cheap!) I totally wouldn’t have bothered. But I don’t want to drive with a cracked windshield, and I certainly can’t have a non-operational windshield wiper.

So we’ll see what happens now that I’m going to be going to 2 places instead of one. Not sure how that will work. But, the paint damage is minimal, so at the very least I can probably just get the wiper fixed at the dealer (where the inspection was held) if going to the auto body shop proves to be too much of a hassle (the girl mentioned it MIGHT require another inspection because they’d have to negotiate price with the shop. Good grief.)

So yea, maybe sometime before the rainy season I’ll have a working wiper blade. I certainly hope so!

Posted at 8:48 AM | (0)

Since I am usually sitting on my bed when I work, I tend to lay things on it, as opposed to on the nearby desk. Things like papers, remote controls, USB headsets, and the laptop itself are frequent residents atop Chez Bedspread.

There is one visitor, however, who seems to frequently outstay his welcome. His name? Mr. Black Ink Pen. He’s one of those guests who looks so innocent, so you think there’s no harm in leaving him around. But, you turn your back, and you find that he’s trashed the place, leaving huge stains on your carpet. Well, in my case, it’s not the carpet he’s stained, but rather my bedspread.

You see, I leave said pen on my bed, and then, next thing I know, the pen tip is pressed up against my comforter, happily oozing ink. Oh sure, I evict him, but he always comes back in a moment of carelessness or weakness on my part (I am careless more often than I’d like—I have the spots to prove it!). I have often been so proud of myself—placing the pen on my desk before any damage (for the day, anyway) could befall my comforter. But then I get distracted and find that I’ve somehow picked up the pen, written with it, and then placed it back on the bed, instead of on the desk.

I have two faults here—forgetting to put the pen on the desk, and forgetting to put the cap on the pen when not in use. Either one of those things would save me this grief, and yet….

Sigh. My comforter is blue. The pen is black. Maybe I should just switch to blue pens.

Posted at 7:46 PM | (4)

Overheard just a few minutes ago during our weekly Monday conference call:

Boss: It smells like something’s cooking.
Colleague: Yea, it smells like rubber or something.
Boss: It smells like toast.
Me (to boss): It smells like rubber or toast?! What the hell kind of toast do you eat?!
Boss: Actually it smells like something electronic. Crap, I hope our Dell laptops aren’t on fire!

This is funnier when you realize they actually DO have Dell laptops and that they have been in news lately because there have been reports of the laptop batteries spontaneously catching fire.

And now they are rocking out to some Wolf Mother (which their iPod ALWAYS seems to play on Mondays, and hence Mondays have been declared Wolf Mother Mondays), and paused the conversation to appreciate some awesome drum solo transition.

Happy Monday!

Posted at 10:36 AM | (3)

Because my announcement that all my Europe pictures were going up on flickr relied on people actually clicking on the link regularly to check on my upload progress, and because there weren’t really any other visual cues as to the photos, I have uploaded all of the photos taken by me into my Photolog.

In preperation for this, I have implemented the new tag feature that comes with MT (VERY handy, because you can click on the tags section and get a list of all the tags in use and which entries are associated with it, as well as easily make sure you aren’t duplicating any). Sure, flickr does this too, but since it’s hosted on my site, I get to control everything.

Anyway, all new entries (and some old ones…have to work my way back through all the archives) have been tagged, and you can see which tags are associated with them. If you click on the tag, you will be taken to a list of all other entries with those tags, as well as a list of the other tags associated with those entries. I have also implemented a tag cloud on the left sidebar, so you can get a sense of which tags I’ve used the most.

Anyway, it’s pretty cool, so check it out! I also intend to get a few more, previously-unseen, photos up. When I post those, they will show up on the blog index page like normal (didn’t do that for this batch since they’ve already been seen by many, and I didn’t want my RSS feed and index page to be flooded with the photos).

Posted at 4:28 PM | (0)

Steve got back from his trip to China and South Korea last night. Lucky for him, since he was traveling from Asia and not Europe, he was allowed to keep his cell phone and laptop and stuff with him as carryons.

Anyway, I went over last night to see him and bring some brownies I made for him (I figured he’d need something good to eat after not being a big fan of the Korean cuisine). He had my gifts laid out for me when I arrived. In addition to the authentic bamboo mahjong tiles in a wooden case (which I guess will stay at his place so that we can play it), he also got me a fan and a real pearl necklace with matching earrings! Quite unexpected, but quite cool. I like my gifts a lot. :)

I am glad he is back and that he had a nice time. Now, hopefully he can get rid of the jetlag!

Posted at 8:22 AM | (2)

I am on my way to getting my windshield replaced. I called around to a few places and got quotes. Since in all cases the cost of the glass plus installation amounted to at least a couple hundred bucks, I decided to go ahead and go through my insurance. My particular policy has a $100 comprehensive deductible (which is what non-accident-type freak-act-of-nature things like rocks or, in my case, pieces of metal hitting your windshield while driving on the freeway falls under), which means that no matter where I go to get it fixed, I only pay the $100.

I opted not to go with the insurance company’s recommended service facility, as they were only rated a B by the Better Business Bureau (as opposed to the local shops I checked, which were all rated AAA, a better rating). I also recalled that I used their recommended repair facility when someone rear-ended my sister’s car and the bumper needed replacing. My sister says that not long after I gave it back to her, the bumper started detaching from the car. Needless to say, I am now a bit skeptical. Supposedly if I went through their recommended person, the work is guaranteed. But, all the local places gurarantee their work too, so that doesn’t really matter much.

At any rate, I called the place today to tell them I was ready to replace the glass. The next step is for them to fax my insurance company a quote so that my insurance can verify that the price is reasonable and who the hell knows what. I opted to get OEM glass (as opposed to generic glass) for several reasons: 1) More likely it will fit better and not have problems, 2) I have it in my head that I don’t want some random brand, as if it might be inferior or something because 3) I own the car, not leasing it. But ultimately the real and main reason is 3) It actually wound up being a little cheaper.

Now I just have to hope that the insurance company approves the entire cost from the place I chose. I didn’t go with the cheapest place (because the dude sounded sketchy to me and just assumed I’d want to go with his services even though I said I was only looking for a quote), so I hope the costs are deemed reasonable. Otherwise, I suppose I might have to cancel the work order and pick another place.

All this hurry up and wait stuff because of the insurance kinda sucks, but if it’ll save me a couple hundred bucks, it’s worth it. Still, it’s a big pain in the ass for something so small. And that reminds me, I still have to go buy another wiper blade to replace the brand-new one that flew off. Grr.

Posted at 2:48 PM | (3)

So I was going to write a recap of what I did today; how I went with my mom to pay my grandma a surprise visit, how I went to my grandma’s old house (which is soon to become my sister’s house) and helped tape tarps onto the floor so everything would be ready for the painters, or how I went with my parents to dinner, where we were joined by the daughter of a family friend we have from Austria (she was an au pair for the summer, and we last saw here when we went to Europe back in 2001 when she was 14 years old).

Instead, I will tell you about my drive back to Santa Barbara.

We stayed at the restaurant until almost 8pm, and I didn’t wind up leaving for SB until almost 9:45. Everythng went pretty smoothly—I already had more than enough gas to get back, and I knew traffic would be pretty good at that time of night. And indeed, I managed to go almost 80 the whole way.

When nearing my destination, I decided I wanted to pass a slowish truck that I had been stuck behind for awhile. When the lane next to me opened up, I decided to take the opportunity to go around. Right as I was doing so, at exactly 11:30pm, I see this HUGE piece of metal hurtle towards my windshield, bounce off with a great thud, and fly in a direction unknown.

I have NO idea what it was (though it was large, and I could swear resembled a car hood, and I might also swear that it had an Acura logo?), as it was dark and on a part of the highway not well lit. It was also quite unexpected. As I was in the process of switching lanes, I wasn’t paying attention to the truck anymore, so I am not sure if he swerved to avoid anything, or if he in fact drove over this object and thus was responsible for sending it airborne.

After I got hit, I got back over behind the truck and contemplated what just happened. Since this happened on the unlit freeway while going 80mph, it wasn’t exactly feasible to just stop and see what happened. Everyone else around me continued to drive as though nothing had happened, so that is also what I did. In what light there was (mainly illumination bounced off the truck from my headlights), I could see that the left-most side of my windshield had cracked, and that along most of my windshield there were long vertical scratches, and my left windshield wiper blade had flown up onto the glass in its uppermost position if it had been turned on.

After calling my mom to let her know I arrived safely but that I could not quite say the same for my car, I went out with a flashlight to see how bad it looks. Still hard to tell, but it’s both good and bad. It doesn’t look like the car got my front, top, or back, just the windshield, although it does appear that it may have lightly scratched the part of my hood near the windshield (will have to see in the morning if it’s superficial and can be rubbed out). The scratches may have been caushed by the metal, but they also seem like they might have been caused by the hit windshield wiper, which is now missing its protective rubber coating, and since it was slammed against the glass, may have scratched it, as it traced a path upward.

What pisses me off even more is that, during my oil change/maintenance yesterday, I decided to FINALLY get my wipers replaced, after putting up with my old pair long after they stopped performing adequately. Why, oh why, when they needed replacing for almost 3 years, did I have to replace them one day before I’d break one?

In the morning my mom is supposed to call me with what type of places are good to go to for replacing windshields. I need to do this as soon as possible, as looking at it will just depress me, not to mention it majorly ghettofies the look of the vehicle. The scratches are also quite distracting, as they are all on the driver’s side—I also have no idea what sort of impact it will have driving with the glare of the sun. Plus, if I’m going to take a monetary hit in the sum of a couple hundred bucks, I’d rather just get it over with. I will also have to go replace the windshield wipers AGAIN, since now instead of them working crappily, I can’t use them at all thanks to the one having no rubber coating.

Yes, I suppose I am lucky that nothing happened to me, and that nothing happened to my car beyond a cracked windshield. I was able to talk to Steve for a few minutes from South Korea and he pointed out that it was probably good it didn’t happen during the day. If it had, I might have seen it coming and tried to swerve, and that could’ve been worse. It’s true—I didn’t see it coming until it was far too late, and as a result, I didn’t even react, execpt to get back into the lane I was leaving (as if that would help after the fact, when the danger was already gone, but I digress!). My car merged back over in a normal fashion, however; I didn’t jerk the wheel or swerve.

But I am not so lucky that my car needs to be repaired. I need to go look at it again in the light of day to see how bad it is. I hope it doesn’t make me cry (more). I also hope I can sleep, given how upset I am. I’m not shaken up, I’m just upset my car is broken in a sense. And I’m upset that I just spent a bunch of money on shopping and maintenance and will now pay for something that is only necessary thanks to a total fluke.

I just wish I knew what happened, and I wish it didn’t happen to ME. I’m so sad. :(

Posted at 12:51 AM | (3)

Right now I am laying on the bed in my childhood bedroom. This time yesterday I was in SB dropping off my car for 40,000 mile maintenance and oil change. While I found enough to do yesterday, I figured I’d stop by and see my parents just in case I would’ve gotten bored today.

Yesterday, since they told me the car would take a couple hours, I figured I’d take the opportunity to do some shopping, since I’d have to walk by those stores on my way home anyway. Unfortunately, most stores don’t open until 10:00am and I dropped my car off at 9:00am, so I had to kill some time.

I walked slowly and discovered that the Borders was open at 9, so I browsed the knitting magazines and audio books and ordered a white chocolate mocha (I didn’t see hot chocolate anywhere on their menu!) so that I could drink something to pass the time. The marine layer was also a bit thicker yesterday, so it was a bit chilly outside and the hot drink was nice.

Once it reached 10:00am, I headed back to Paseo Nuevo and went to Victoria’s Secret, since I needed some new bras, and some of my underwear could use replacing as well. After spending tons of money there, I killed some time browsing in other stores until noon. The reason for this is simple—I wanted to visit a scrapbooking store and they didn’t open until noon. I wanted to buy some paper and stickers to use in the scrapbook I’m going to make of my Europe trip (my aunt bought me an album with a travel motif to display pictures of the trip). I also figured I’d buy my mom some stickers and paper, as she is seriously hooked on scrapbooking. As in, it’s totally amazing how much stuff she’s amassed.

Unfortunately, I only decided to order prints for my pictures a few days ago, and so I don’t have them yet. This would’ve been the perfect time to work on the book. Ideally I will come home again to work on the book, as my mom has all the pens, fancy scissors, cut-outs, templates, you name it. Scrapbooking is a HUGE investment, and considering I haven’t worked on my old scrapbook since like 1999, I am not really inclined to spend a bunch of money on things I might not use again any time soon—especially when I have access to that stuff with my mom. I’m sure she won’t mind, as it means I’ll visit again!

And now I am once again killing time until 10am, when my mom and I will go visit my grandma. Even though she isn’t quite the same grandma that I remember, it’ll still be nice to see her, and I’m sure she’ll like the unexpected visit from me.

Posted at 9:14 AM | (0)

Don’t you hate when you think of something cool to post about while you’re lying awake late at night, only to wake up the next morning and have no idea what that thing was?

That’s what has happened to me today. Or, at least, I *think* that’s what’s happened to me. Although I didn’t sleep much, I seem to recall having several dreams. So, maybe I just dreamt that I had something cool to talk about.

Speaking of dreams though, one of my dreams involved a computer that would list all the times a person had a dream—the info displayed included date, time, and a brief description of the dream. Too bad that wasn’t real, because I rarely remember my dreams—a machine like that would be totally useful!

Anyway, time to work. Maybe later I’ll remember whatever awesome thing I think I’m supposed to remember. Or, something like that… :)

Posted at 8:04 AM | (1)

Ok, so I haven’t gone to China, but Steve has. He left this morning (although, his flight to SF was delayed so who knows if he’ll get his luggage when he arrives in China).

Lucky, he managed to convince his company that they needed to send him out to China and South Korea to personally help them learn some aspects of their software. It’s not a cheap trip, so it’s very cool that they agreed. It’s probably the only way he’d go see Asia. I’m sure it will be quite the culture shock though, as he’s not a fan of asian cuisine. We’ll see if he comes back even thinner than he already is. ;)

Maybe I’d go there someday, although it is admittedly further down on my list, after more of Europe, and probably Australia/New Zealand, among others. Tokyo would probably be interesting, but I don’t forsee any large trips for the time being.

He said he might bring me back some mah jong tiles, so that would be cool! He’ll be gone for a week, so I suppose now’s the time to get caught up on my soaps and cleaning around the house! :)

Posted at 1:20 PM | (4)

Woo, I’m ducking out of work early today—pretty shortly actually. This new job kicks ass in that they don’t really mind how much time you take off as long as you get things done. To be fair, I did work late last night and early this morning, and I also worked last Saturday before I went on the trip with my family.

So, it’s not like I’m really shirking too many hours or anything, but it is really nice to have the flexibility. Another bonus is that I just took a major part of our site live using all Movable Type, and it kicks quite a bit of ass, if I do say so myself. My bosses are pretty psyched about it, and that’s always cool.

Anyway, for those of you still stuck at work, I hope the day passes quickly and you have a nice weekend!

Posted at 12:23 PM | (2)

Back from the trip. It was fun, though not especially profitable. Everyone won the last time we went, but apparently it was not meant to be this time.

As usual, I didn’t really play with my own money (only at Stateline where I won a whole $5), but I did manage to lose some of my mom’s and sister’s money. I also managed to lose $30 of some random dude’s money. He was sitting at the table with me, my mom, and my sister, and when I ran out of money he decided to contribute to keep me in the game. I was playing $10 a hand and lost his first two contributions, but did manage to win the third. When he didn’t want the original bet or winnings back, I kept playing, winning a bit more, but eventually giving it all back. Oh well. Not sure what’s up with guys giving me money to bet with—first Matthew Perry, now random nameless guy. Ok, I guess it doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s still pretty cool, especially since it’s fun to get to continue to sit and play at a table.

One nice thing about working today is that it’s not nearly as hot as it was when I left. I did turn on my fan, but not until MUCH later in the day, and I haven’t felt like dying, and my laptop doesn’t feel like it’s going to melt. So yea, good stuff! :)

Posted at 3:51 PM | (1)