Areas of Unrest

23 November 2003 - Hectic

I spent the week on a business trip to Sunnyvale. My company makes me fly to San Jose via Los Angeles so the travel part is particularly tedious and exhausting. My Tuesday meeting was reasonably informative. The review on Wednesday and Thursday, however, was useful primarily for the conversations during breaks. You know a meeting is going to be bad when the first briefer talks about "establishing paradigms."

As for the socializing, I had dinner with Mary Joan on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Tuesday night was particularly notable, as we went to the Banana Leaf, a favorite restaurant in Milpitas. Their melaka eggplant is simply extraordinary. All of the food was tasty (seafood soup, satay, green curry) but the eggplant is the star. Wednesday night we went to Pasand for masala dosa. The dosa are good, as is the accompanying lentil soup, but the chutneys are less exciting than they could be. Still, it was a nice change of pace.

By the way, I had intended to go to Pasand Monday night (when I was on my own), but it turns out they aren't open Mondays. So I had dinner at Fish Market, which is always reliable, though hardly exciting.

Things ended early enough on Thursday that I was able to get together with my brother. I even took him out for lunch. We were rushed as he had an appointment, so we just had pizza at a place near where he had to sign umpty ump papers for refinancing his mortgage. While he signed, I strolled the upscale shopping area of Los Gatos. I did see some shoes I liked, but nothing I felt the need to shlep back with me.

This sounds far less hectic than it felt, but I was pretty worn out by the time I got home. A lot of that was the time to deal with email and voicemail and so on back at the hotel each evening. And flying is always tiring.

The weekend was spent catching up on household odds and ends - lots of paperwork. I'm still going through the huge stacks of begging letters. I did take time out to see the movie "Love Actually." It had some very funny scenes, but didn't completely hang together, largely because there are just too many stories (very loosely interconnected). My mind was too busy trying to keep all the characters straight to let me care very much about any of them. I still enjoyed it, but I'm preconditioned to like that sort of romantic comedy fare.

Back to the begging letters ...