Prangster in Chicago

If you are busy at work, do not download this Gmail theme

The Gmail theme I speak of is "Tea House" and your productivity at the office will plummet severely, believe me. You'll be completely preoccupied, checking up on our little foxy friend at least a couple times every hour because he is so cute and he does different things throughout the day. Like he entertains his monkey friend in his Chinese pagoda in the afternoons. And he prunes his chrysanthemum plants very early in the mornings.

He also does things like sweep his verandah, do taichi at dawn (with a rabbit on either side of him), wash his pet birds in the bird bath, and practice Chinese calligraphy. My guess is he's either in Chinese rehab or he's 80 years old because he gets up so damn early and doesn't watch TV or use the Internet.

Will you please go insane over the little flip-flops he wears on his feetsies when he's outside? Ahhhhh!

Chicago Bulls game: check

The Bulls vs. Nets game last night was pretty great. Brinky and I sat in first row seats right behind the Nets players (thanks Jess!) so we got to see the game at eye level and were on TV for pretty much half the time. It was such a close game. The score was tied up until the last three minutes when the Bulls broke away and won 113-104. Brink was sitting next to some Nets supporters in fancy rich suits who were so enraged they scrunched up the stat sheets in their hands and slapped themselves on the knee when the Nets missed their shots. (No, they weren't laughing at the same time.) The really tall guy next to her also burped onions. Ewwwww. I expected him to burp the smell of cold hard cash.

It's tiring being born

This is a photo of the crazy huge model train set at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago. I went there for the first time this past weekend with Ry, a developer who used to work on my team. Man, people seriously loved that train set. They loved it so much they were taking video footage of the trains going by. They were also taking lots of photos, which made me feel like I should've been taking photos. So I did. Voila.

I didn't care much for the train sets to be honest -- psshhtttt, train sets -- but I found the baby chick incubators completely fascinating. They had one for baby chicks a few weeks old and another for eggs that are about to hatch. Oh man, those baby chicks were cute. All fluffy and yellow and hopping around. The eggs were less interesting. Only two out of a dozen or so had hatched and the newborn chicks looked kinda dead. Wet and sort of regurgitated-like. They looked so sickly that I asked aloud to Ry, "Are they dead or alive?" Before he could answer, a mother next to us said to her little boy, "It's tired! It's tiring being born!"

Oh, right. I must have forgotten. It's tiring being born. Yeah.

If you want, you can see a chick hatching in this time lapse video from the museum web site. It does look pretty tiring. Lots of squirming and slime. If you watch the whole thing, you'll notice a second chick comes into the picture towards the end and they're almost rough-housing or something.

Old boots, new door

You'd think moving one block away would be a no-brainer, but I totally f-ed it up. I'll give you the highlights: it was the first day of real snow this winter, so it was -1 degrees celsius outside. Not my doing, but my bad luck. I locked myself out of my old apartment after two trips with the suitcases. Yes, the first time I lock myself out of that apartment is the day I'm moving out. Argh, I want to punch irony in the face! And get this: KB got a flat tire. We ended up walking everything over, then making a last ditch taxi run so we'd be finished by midnight. Trust me when I say my entryway didn't look like that photo by the time we were done. Man, to think back to how it looked before...I start to get the shakes.

But it's already been a week. I've unpacked and cleaned and I really like my new place. I wake up to light in my room in the mornings. The internet is free. And I'm so comfortable with the standard of the kitchen appliances that I used the oven this weekend to bake some frozen crinkle cut chips. Oh, frozen crinkle cut chips, you taste like home.

One last thing about the milk and fruit at work: we got a delivery today. False alarm. Woops.

Then we came to the end...almost

One random Monday last month, 15 people were laid off from my company. No one from my department, but 15 people total from the Chicago office. That's a chunky proportion considering there were about 130 or so of us. On the same day as the lay-offs, an e-mail was sent out saying the upcoming holiday party had been canceled and replaced with a holiday lunch. It's totally not the time for finger food and open bar cheer, so most of us simply reacted with shrugs.

Despite the gloominess that day, I don't think it's affected us on the interactive side very much. We're all still here. Most of us are still busy. Today Brinky is organizing Secret Santa for our team. Things are more or less the same.

Then this week, the milk didn't come. Specifically, the dairy creamer that I use for my tea called "half and half." Usually, (or I guess, previously) we'd get a delivery of skim milk, two percent fat milk and "half and half" for our teas and coffees. A bottle of each was enough to help keep us caffeinated for a week. They would appear in the fridge every Monday without fail.

Now we don't know what the hell we're drinking. The coffee is bad and no milk makes it worse. I can't drink Earl Grey or English Breakfast without any "half and half" to help it go down. People are using the espresso drink maker and its "creamy topping" as a milk substitute. I had a hot chocolate this morning, for crying out loud.

If you can't already tell, this news has hit me hard.

And along with the milk no-show, the fresh fruit didn't come this week either. No oranges. No red or green apples. No grapes. No grapefruit. No bananas. Seriously, not one banana. We still have the newspapers, but I guess that's by subscription. Who knows if we'll still get them in '09...

All of this is so "Then We Came to the End" it's not even funny anymore. And just for some perspective (cause you know I have a little of that), the front page headline on the New York Times today: Jobless rate soars to 6.7% in November.

The next Monday: Nevermind. We got a delivery of milk and fruit today. I feel stoopid.

Where I was the night the world fell back in love with America

Hello tomorrow

I haven't blogged in ages, I know. Please don't hate me. The stupidest excuse I can give you is that it's been sort of busy lately in a boring kind of way. Lots of work. A cluster of work trips. It's been getting colder...

The exciting news is tomorrow is finally election day! And tomorrow night there's going to be a huge rally in Grant Park here in Chicago with Obama and Biden (and their wives) attending. Millions are expected to turn out. The weather will actually be lovely (high of 22 celcius, low of 9) so I'm excited to get out there after work and mingle with the American peoples.

I won't be out too late though. Have another work trip this week to upstate New York and I'll be flying out early on Wednesday morning. My professional clothes are getting slammed this month.

Will post more soon-ish!

Then I went to Albany

A couple of days after the work trip to Indiana, I found out I'd be heading to Albany in upstate New York to the client's research headquarters for an event about batteries. Yes, batteries. So hot! Myself and a couple of coworkers flew out on Tuesday afternoon and we got back Friday morning. The photo above is the desk of Thomas Edison, which they keep in the lobby of the research center in front of a huge and hideous potted plant.

The battery event actually turned out to be interesting. A speaker from a company called Better Place really blew my mind. I had no idea fully electric cars were already on the streets in Israel and Denmark! People pay month-by-month for access to "battery stations" where they can swap out for a fresh battery. Apparently it works in a similar way to how yearly mobile phone plans work.

The cool thing is that just this week, Better Place announced it's signed up Australia, which will make it the third country in the world to have an electric car network. It should be running by 2012 and link up Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane with more than 250,000 charging stations. Awesome.

Of course there are some people out there poking holes in the idea, but overall, most people believe it's a big step in the right direction. The model probably wouldn't translate to every American city, but certainly in denser cities like NYC and Chicago where car share companies like Zipcar (which is in over 20 cities) and i-Go (which is non-profit and Chicago based) are popular, I think it could work.

If you wanna read more about Better Place, here's an article from the August issue of Wired.

I went to Indiana, whatever that is

Let me check what state it's in for my international readers. Oh, Indiana is a state. Nevermind. How about I sit with a Year 3 class and actually learn U.S. geography already? It's like when I offered to fly to Chicago for a job interview without even knowing where Chicago actually is.

So yes, I went to a new state. I got back tonight from two days in Indiana. It was a work thing at Notre Dame University, so not particularly thrilling. I went with two coworkers and we stayed overnight at the campus hotel. This means I got to sleep on a bed and watch cable TV until 1:30am. I have to admit, those bits were thrilling.

Above are some cookies from today's catered lunch. We brought them back to Chicago for the team. They look "on brand" but taste terrible. Hugh, help yourself!

Below is the camera our in-house photographer used to cover the event. Between shots he just left it on the floor like so. The body is worth $8,000 and that lens is $1,700...

At the Millers' for Obama v. McCain and homemade lasagna

My camera phone says sorry about the fuzz. Mr. and Mrs. Miller usually look sharp.