We moved at work. From the second floor to the first floor. There goes my daily stairs workout. Anyway, now I have a window office so I was able to get my plants back. My office is pretty jungley now. I finally feel at home again.

I spent all day today wondering what to do. Here’s the deal: tomorrow, we have a work trip up to Napa. usually don’t like these company-sponsored activities but I was actually excited about this one. We had different choices of things to do during the day and I had picked the spa to get a facial and a massage. Then yesterday I was feeling sick and stayed home. Today I was better but still not 100%.

Then I casually started mapping out the day tomorrow:
6:30 am wake up
6:55 am leave for work to catch the bus to Napa
7:15 bus leaves Mountain View, stops is San Mateo, San Francisco and then heads up to Calistoga
10:00ish we arrive in Calistoga
10:01 until 12:00 walk down Main Street and check out shops
12:00 till 1:30 get facial and massage
1:31 until 5:15 walk down Main Street again
5:15 either take bus back to Mountain View (option 1) or stay for dinner at the Culinary Institute (option 2)
5:16 go for option 1
8:00 get back to parking lot where we picked up the bus
8:20 get home
With Option 2, I probably wouldn’t have been home until 11:30 PM.

So as appealing as a spa treatment and a dinner at the CIA seemed, I decided to skip the trip. I think the deal breaker was realizing that I would have to depend on this bus and that I would be stranded in Calistoga with no way of getting back if all of a sudden I felt very sick or very bored. That scared me.

Some strange things are happening lately. I got a message on my cell phone from some pervert. It went something like this:”Oooh honey, oooh I’m so horny, ooooh sweetheart, oooh please come get me”. I kid you not; every third word was “oooh”.

Then I got a strange message on my voicemail at work. Although that one just sounded like someone calling me from his/her pocket. What I mean is that they probably unknowingly dialed my number from their cell phone and the cell phone happened to be in his/her pocket.

Finally, I came in to work today (I usually work from home on Fridays) to find several Chiclets on the floor. How did that happen? I have a container with Chiclets on a bookcase across from my desk. The Chiclets were on the floor under my desk. Upon closer inspection of the shelf that houses the Chiclets container, I found a post-it note all crumpled up. I had thrown that post-it note on the garbage yesterday.

It’s all very strange.

I’m not as amused by Google’s graphics as Jenny.

Allow me to explain. Last year, when I was looking for a job, our search expert left Kaiser and went to Google. He was a great guy and he knew that I wanted to leave so he told me they had an opening at Google. I was a little confused and wondered why they would need a designer. I mean, look at their site. But they had a chef who cooked all their meals so, I said, what the heck! I had a phone interview with the VP of Marketing. I was driving home from the East Bay and I was on my cell phone, being interviewed by this person.

This is how she described the job: “We need a graphic artist (I HATE being called that) who can work with Marketing on this ongoing project. This is still just in the planning stages but basically, we need someone who can “dress up” our logo on a seasonal basis”. What? “For example, during Christmas, we may want to hang some Christmas light on the Google logo. For Easter, we could have eggs and bunnies around the logo”.

Needless to say, I never bothered to schedule a second interview. No chef-prepared meals would be enticing enough for me to make a career out of this. Was it a bad career decision? Maybe a bad financial decision. As far as my career, definitely not.

About 3 years ago, while I was still at Kodak, our group decided to buy Safe-T Man. Several of us chipped in, including our CMO, and for a while, we couldn’t get enough of Safe-T Man. We called him Art Vandelay, made him a Kodak badge and business cards and dressed him in stylin’ outfits. I think that his interest factor had already faded when someone dressed him in a woman’s suit, making him look like the Church Lady.

A couple of years later, I was working at Kaiser here in California, and we tried to get my Kodak friends to ship Safe-T Man over here. In return, we’d ship them a replacement. We waited and waited but Safe-T never showed up. Tired of waiting, Heidi and I decided to adopt an air conditioning duct that had been sitting in the hallway for months. DuctMan was born! He was fun to dress up and I personally think we did a good job. I also liked the fact that he could stand up, unlike Safe-T Man. A few months later, Heidi and I left that job and we haven’t seen or heard from DuctMan ever since.

That’s Heidi kissing DuctMan in the picture above.