QOTD: "The man of upright soul and humour placid / needs no blunt instrument nor prussic acid." - Dorothy L. Sayers
Reading: Gene Weingarten, The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death.
Listening to: nothing
Decluttering accomplishments: uh, I unpacked from my business trip.
I went on my first business trip in a couple of months this week. When Kelly mentioned the meeting to me, he said, "you don't have to go if it's too much trouble." But, as I pointed out to him, it's warm in California and I was happy to get a reprieve from winter. The flight schedules meant that I had a free afternoon and I used it to do a Volksmarch. In this case, it was the year-round walk in Foster City. I'm convinced they underestimated the distance, because it took me just an hour and forty-five minutes for the 10 kilometers, which works out to just over 3.5 miles per hour. Given that I haven't been walking much (except, of course, to and from the metro station at each end of my commute), that seems unlikely. At any rate, it was a nice suburban walk, with a good view of the San Mateo Bridge at one point. And it was an excellent way to recover from the long flight.
As for the meetings I went to, the first day was reasonably interesting, while the second was more tedious. I hate it that they don't schedule breaks in the agenda. Not that I have any problem with getting up and taking a break when I need it, but it makes it harder to track down people for side discussions.
In the food pornography vein, I had dinner at Sue's, a very good Indian restaurant in Mountain View one night. Their onion pakoras are notable, as is the vegetable curry. An even more spectacular meal, though, was at Korea House in Santa Clara. The person who suggested it has been going there for years and we got amazing treatment. The bulgoki (grilled beef) is supposedly the main feature, but the real highlight is all the side dishes that come with it. Amazing cucumber kimchi, cabbage kimchi, bean thread noodles with vegetables, some sort of fried tofu dish, and another dozen things I can't think of offhand. They kept bringing more and more of the side dishes and refilling what was there. And, in the end, even with a very good tip, it was only $20 a head. Definitely a place to go back to.
On the trip back, I read the novel, Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. If you like word play, you should go out and get this and read it this very instant. The premise involves a country that is founded around the sentence, "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." As tiles with letters from the sentence fall from the statue of its author, their use is banned. Finally, there's a challenge to come up with a shorter pangram (a sentence containing all the letters of the alphabet) in order to overturn the harsh laws associated with the use of forbidden letters. It's very cleverly done and I smiled throughout the whole book.
Copyright 2003 Miriam H. Nadel