One more cup of coffee

Weekend update

Random things...

This morning, I went to church for the first time in 5 1/2 years as someone without a single responsibility in the church. June 30 marked my last day as chair (and member) of SPRC (Staff-Parish Relations Committee -- also called PPRC, or Pastor-Parish Relations Committee, in many Methodist churches). And it felt GREAT! I am now officially A Lump in a Pew.

My cell phone is dying. I've had a Sanyo SCP 6200 phone from Sprint for over two years and I've loved it. It's tall, but incredibly thin, making it great to fit into pockets. But about a month ago, the display started to go out. Randomly, it will now either turn a bunch of extra pixels on or a bunch off. Or vertically shift part of the display. Or every other column. Every day, it is harder to read the display. So it's time for a new phone -- but Sprint doesn't really have anything I want. There are some phones coming out in the next couple of months that look very cool, but I'm not sure that this phone will be usable for that long.

Work has been nuts the last couple of weeks. All in all, though, it was a good couple of weeks. My team got a LOT done -- it was definitely one of the better months for the A/V team.

Today, the child we thought we were going to get to adopt turns one month old. It's still sad for us.

Meredith is gone all this week. She, with four other adults from Half Moon Bay, is leading a group of 20 teenagers down to So. Cal for a week-long service project through Sierra Service Project. She left this morning at 6 AM, and gets back on Saturday.

I left my coffee mug in a meeting in Building 1 on Thursday. By the time I realized I had left it, an hour later, it was already gone. I've had that mug since my days at Apple. It was great. So today I bought the exact same model again.

Lakes and the Skin o' the Irish

Today I went out on Stephen's boat on Lake Barryessa. It was me, Stephen, Karen, and Mimi. I promised Meredith that I would think of her, toiling away in the hot desert sun with 50 teenagers, while I was rocking gently on the water. And I did (for all seven minutes or so that Stephen let the boat do anything that an adverb like 'gentle' would remotely apply to).

I had a great time, although my general ineptness at new-things-physical manifested itself when I tried to learn to water-ski. After four attempts, and losing the skis on each and every attempt, I called it quits. Stephen said I was leaning forward, which is the absolute wrong thing to do when water skiing. Ironically, when I first learned to snow ski, my biggest problem was that I kept trying to lean back. Later, Mimi and I took turns being towed on top of a big inflatable tube. No real skill involved; just lots of holding on. That was good fun, even though you inhale a ton of water when you fall off something going 20 MPH.

But now, as I sit at home, I am thinking about how tired I am of being sunburned. My legs are burned. My arms are burned. The tops of my feet are burned. This despite applying sunscreen lotion twice during the five hours we were out on the lake. This always happens to me. Damn Irish skin...

Also, I am exhausted because, in order to meet them at the lake at 8 AM, I had to wake up at 5:30 AM. It's going to be an early bedtime for me tonight.

Back from Vancouver

We made it back from Vancouver last night. We flew up last Monday morning and spent five days there. We had a really good time. The weather was beautiful.

I'll try to post more pictures later.

Juvenile

The IE team started a blog on MSDN. It touched off a firestorm of comments from trolls that make slashdotters look tame. I'd say that the Microsoft-hater camp sounds like a bunch of 14 year olds, but that's insulting to teenagers.