Family visit!

My family (parents, Phil, Grandma P.) left today after visiting for a week. They got in last Saturday night, late, and then took David and I to brunch on Sunday before I had to work. David then gave them a tour of the Stanford campus. They spent Monday and Tuesday exploring various beaches, San Francisco, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. On Wednesday, since I didn't have to work, we went (of course) to the mall I work at and got my mom and my grandma some lovely outfits. They got semi-matching jackets (the same jacket in red and purple, although the texture shows up more on the purple), as well as shells to go with them (ivory for Grandma and black for my mom).

This is the jacket in purple.

Grandma was concerned that if they wore them together, people would talk about how they were twins.

And this is the jacket in red.

I also convinced my mom to try on these new fabulous wide-leg pants that looked fabulous on her (and she got them in black and khaki). And then I got a beautiful beautiful plum shirt (silk cotton blend, 3/4 length sleeves, boatneck neck with pointelle detail) for my birthday. Yay!

We ate lunch at the Palo Alto Creamery at the mall and as we were ordering, a man walking by commented to my father (who was wearing his University of Wisconsin-Madison dad t-shirt) that he was a Madison alum who was now a professor at Stanford. So we all had a nice little laugh about that.

Then we headed to a beach via Highway 84, which is the most winding and awful highway that ever existed. I was getting sick, my mom was getting sick, my brother was getting sick of the heights, my grandma was getting worried about the curves, but it was just a bad idea. But the beach was really nice when we got there. It had all kinds of cool rock formations that you could climb over to get to the beach. The water was of course very freezing cold but it was fun to run in to the ocean and run out, being chased by the waves.

Then that night, David and I went to their hotel (they got a wonderful two story penthouse with kitchen and two bathrooms for a steal!) to make dinner, which turned out ok. It was a pasta dish where I about tripled the amount of pasta without tripling the sauce. But meh. Now we have leftovers for days.

On Thursday, David and I both had the day off so we took the family to San Francisco to go to Chinatown for dim sum and cheap fun things. That night we also went to Kabul, an Afghan restaurant about 20 minutes away with wonderful food and big servings, so we went home with 5 take-out containers filled with food.

And now they're heading home. It's strange to think that, come Wednesday, I'll be heading home too. I'm not actually that sad about it thinking about it right now, but I'm sure I'll be a mess at the airport. It'll be better than leaving last time, though, since I'm not leaving at night and we've agreed to not draw it out as long as we did before. I'll probably also research flights for David for Thanksgiving, since Stanford gets a week off and we only get Thanksgiving and Friday.

Living with someone else is a rewarding experience, if you're living with the right person. It allows you to see yourself in a different light and learn things about yourself that you may not have seen before. Who knows what the future will bring now? We want to live together again if we can manage it next summer, although preferably in Madison since it's difficult to find cheap apartments in California.

So that's that. I've been avoiding packing, of course, and buying more groceries than we actually need so David will have something to eat when I'm gone. Not that he's not self-sufficient. Just that I feel like I need to take care of him.

Wrapping Up...

Two weeks to the day and I leave....booo. I said the same to David this morning but we promised we wouldn't be all sad and melancholy about it until I actually left. So no melancholy for me!

Work has been fine; we had to undergo mind-numbingly stupid training on Sunday morning (!) for 2 hours. It was rather unfortunate, as the guy who is in charge of training thinks that by reading us the standards by which we are judged, we will pay more and better attention. Frankly, I disagree with some of the standards so it annoys me that they are the ones so arbitrarily judged. Plus, as bonus, we got to watch 2 of the same training videos I watched a month and a half ago when I was hired. And then take quizzes. The whole thing was rather unfortunate since the customers in the training videos are nothing like our actual customers in that real customers are harder to serve.

But I actually do like my job a lot. When you're a file clerk, the sense of accomplishment you get is small because it's something along the lines of "hey, I've finished filing today, good for me" or "hey, I closed 20 files in 40 minutes, good for me". Any job with actual customer interaction is so much different because, if you do your job well, you get positive feedback from the customers you're working with. It makes work very gratifying although I do have to admit that the demographic is challenging at times. Generally, I get along best with the customers that are 50 years old and below. At the same time, I mentioned to my manager yesterday that I feel much more comfortable working with this age group than I would working with my own age group (I'm not cool enough, ha ha).

And I'm glad I have retail experience now. I'm pretty good at sales, especially if I know the goods I'm selling. It's funny; whenever I feel like I could be good at something, I always start planning wild, abstract things for the future: a chain of stores that stock everything from cooking supplies to clothing.

By the way, if anyone wants anything from Coldwater Creek, let me know. We're getting a 50% discount in store now (only on full-priced merchandise, not sale prices). If you check out www.coldwatercreek.com and let me know what you like, I can see if we do have it in store. Unfortunately, the online store has more things than we have in store and not everything in store is online. But let me know and I'll see what I can (40% discount on sale priced items too).

I've also been coordinating with my beautiful roommates for next year, working out things like who is bringing what, when our electricity is getting turned on, and when rent is due. It's really frustrating not being able to go through my things until I get home later but fortunately I have a pretty good idea of what I have so we won't be bringing duplicates of things like vacuums or shower curtains. It will be nice to get back home, although the task of going through the accumulations of the past 19 years of my life in 48 hours is rather daunting.

Happy August!

Today I got a library card at the Palo Alto library and checked out two books - Sarah by Orson Scott Card (it's the first in the Women of Genesis series - I think you might be interested in it, Mom, although I'll let you know how it actually is) and American Islam, which is a collection of non-fiction vignettes about seven Muslims living in America. It should be interesting.

Also, since work is the same as always and the boy is awesome (same as always), time to review some TV shows that I have been watching.

The West Wing (7 seasons, starring Martin Sheen, Allison Janney, Joshua Malina, Bradley Whitford, Richard Schiff, John Spencer) - an excellent series although it can be a bit boring/dense if watched for too long. Chronicles the "behind-the-scenes" of the executive branch and, later in the series, the running of a presidential campaign.

Battlestar Gallactica (3 seasons so far) - currently hosted by the Sci-Fi channel, this series is about the human survivors of an apocalyptic attack by the cylons, essentially human-created robots that rebelled. The individual stories are compelling and the music is either haunting vocals or drums. Although the special effects vary from episode to episode, the overall quality of the series is very good - one that can be watched for a long time.