I thought I'd never see it...

My favorite newspaper and all-around ivy-centric New York Times usually limits its coverage of college football to "The Game" and let's just say their sports department doesn't usually bring in the big awards. I was thoroughly impressed to see this one waiting in my inbox:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/sports/ncaafootball/08colleges.html?th&emc=th

Well done Coach Harbaugh. Go Stanford Football.

Yesterday...

So instead of being able to get up at the nice hour of 6:45 tomorrow, I should be on the first baby bullet to the city at 6:23am. Why is that? Oh because all my cold calling for the case has produced pretty much no results this past week, and my supervisor wants me to be in the office early to catch people on west coast time. That means in the office at 7:30am. Yuck! I only hope that I will be able to get a little bit of sleep tonight.

Ming called back today. During lunch tomorrow Darren and I will be signing a new lease for the place in Russian Hill! Woohoo! I probably still won’t sleep there since my bed will still be in storage in Mountain View. But nonetheless, I’ll have a place - within walking distance of the office – to call my own. Bad ass. I guess that means I’ll have to shut down the blog soon. Sad. Oh well, there’s still another week of hotel bumming for me. I can keep writing ‘til then.

Work Work Work...

OK, this one’s too good not to write about. So we went into the office yesterday. No big deal. Work a Sunday, chances are I’m gonna get some other day off later. Plus, I went in with jeans, a t-shirt, sandals, and my Stanford cap. The work wasn’t very rigorous; mostly figuring out our plan of action for the next week before our final presentation to the client. Since it was Sunday and we were all at work instead of at home, our team decided to have a nice dinner at a place called Roy’s on Mission. The food took way too long and cost way too much, but whatever; it was nouveau-Hawaiian fusion, so it had to take a long time and cost too much. But the bad thing is the long dinner didn’t get me out until 9:15 pm. No problem, I saw that the Caltrain schedule had a 10:00pm and 12:00am train that would take me back to PA in no time. But I didn’t read close enough. Turns out those trains only run on Saturday as marked by the ‘SAT ONLY’ marking above those two trains. Crap. So two taxis later I booked it to the hotel where two of the LA people from my case are staying: The Omni. Just to get an idea, one of them is paying half a G per night for this room. Andi was nice enough to let me crash her place with a particularly comfortable roll away. So after a quick Dewers on the rocks, I hit the hay, the two of us falling asleep to some quality “Family Guy” on late night TV. But I was still in my sandals, jeans, and t-shirt. Hardly appropriate dress for Monday at the office! So I got up a little after 5:30am to catch the 6:11am express that got me to Palo Alto at 6:56. Changed, shaved, little deodorant and cologne (“French bath” as some like to call it), tried to manually smooth-out wrinkles from my freshly washed clothes (no luck), and booked it back to the Caltrain station. And right as I got out of the car, the 7:23am baby bullet to SF was pulling up. Now I’m on schedule to be back in the city at 8:04am. I do believe that could be a world record for a round trip to Palo Alto with time to spruce up as well!
The cool thing about my insane life working in the city with no real place to call home is that it really reminds me of my days in Moscow; waking up terribly early, fighting with the public transportation system. Lightning quick changes at home, and best of all, meeting great new people in my life. I might well be exhausted by 11:00am today, but I kinda find this life exhilarating. Maybe I’m just kind of a sleep masochist like that.