Winter break

The working life is great and all but I sure miss having weeks off for winter break. I took three days off and went home to celebrate the New Year with my family. This visit was really nice - it was lovely to see my brother, my parents fed me yummy food, and I discovered a lot of cool things in Tucson or close by that I hadn't known about or been to before. Our visit to the Pecan Store and farm in Sahuarita revealed all sorts of interesting things on the way - the San Xavier Mission, an old mine, and a railroad. I feel like I saw the city through the eyes of a tourist and I definitely appreciated it more that way. 

Here is a photo of our New Years feast

Alas, after just six days, I had to leave behind sub-$3/gal gasoline prices, beautiful sunsets, and the comfort of being in a familiar place. I'll miss driving around perfectly parallel and perpendicular streets that never flow into other streets, curve unnaturally, or become insurmountable mountains putting strain on my little car. But I'll be back. 

In the last couple weeks of December, I somehow got a lot more work to do and everything is due either the sooner the better or end of January, so work has been kind of busy. 

This weekend in numbers

Times I drove in the city and found parking: 2

Statues of giraffes seen: 5 (on three separate occasions)

Number of unfamiliar items purchased at an Asian supermarket in Richmond: 3

Loads of laundry done: 0

Pounds of buckwheat I bought for my parents: 8

As you can infer from these statistics, I've had a great weekend. Speaking of statistical inference, I've been kind of busy at work. All of a sudden, I have three projects, all of which have deadlines in the next month. I think we newcomers to the team were eased into things slowly and now we're all finally getting the amount of work we're supposed to have. But even in between complaining and overeating the chocolate that my office mate always brings, we still have fun. Also, one of my new projects is more research-y and I get to actually think about what to do and propose metrics to calculate/analyses to conduct. Having this much control over something makes me feel kind of important  but also quite nervous because I feel like I'm back at school trying to BS my way through a research paper, except now, instead of detached professors, my audience is people who know the data 10 times better than I do, so there's not much room for BS-ing. 

Aside from work, things are going great. I hung out with a new friend (a Russian girl!) on Friday night, had shrimp and grits at a delightful Southern cafe with a coworker on Saturday, and spent the rest of Saturday hanging out with an old friend from high school. Including yesterday, I've seen the girl twice in the last 7 years since she moved away, but not much has changed. We spent hours walking around downtown San Mateo, where the giraffe figures kept popping up for no apparent reason, working up an appetite for our Beijing-style (supposedly) dinner and subsequent bubble tea. 

How to know you are officially crazy

Today, I finally got around to making green curry with chicken. I also took my raw meat paranoia to a whole new level because when I used the cold water thaw method of defrosting the two chicken breasts that had stuck together in the freezer, the very middle part where they were adjacent didn't quite defrost. By the time I found out, it was too late to turn back, but I was afraid that those two pieces would be undercooked and would certainly result in a severe case of salmonella poisoning, so after the prescribed cooking time had elapsed, I stood over the stove, with fragrant steam hitting my face, fished out every single cube and stabbed it with my digital thermometer to confirm that it had reached at least 165 degrees. And that's when I realized I may have a problem. But at least it's not of the gastrointestinal variety. 

Best white elephant gift I've ever gotten

Was, at first, actually the worst white elephant gift I've ever gotten. Last week, my team had a holiday party and white elephant gift exchange to get into the holiday spirit. I wasn't sure what I could buy for under $10 that would be useful and not add clutter, so I brought some homemade granola.

I was one of the first people to go and the gift I pulled out of the pile had two DVDs inside - Forrest Gump and Shawshank Redemption. It wasn't something I'd been longing for all year, but I had been wanting to see Shawshank Redemption, so I was content.

Unfortunately, towards the end of the exchange, my office mate stole my DVDs, so I had to choose between pulling out one of the several remaining gifts or stealing someone else's. Since there was nothing I was absolutely wild about that had already been opened, I decided to try my luck with the wrapped gifts. Greedily, I went for the biggest package on the table and opened it to reveal... a bag of firewood. Since I don't have a fireplace or any other possible way to use it, I tried in vain to offer it to someone else. I was very happy when two of my coworkers agreed to take it off my hands to use for camping and relieved me of the responsibility of trying to dispose of twenty pounds of split logs.

Since I hadn't spent much on my gift or even taken the time to pick something out, I didn't really mind the outcome. However, the next morning, one of my teammates showed up with a nicely wrapped package - a backup gift they had prepared in case anyone forgot to bring one - to make up for what I had gotten. The sweetness of the gesture once again reaffirmed my warm feelings about my team and filled me with gratitude for working with them.

But that's not all... Half an hour later, the Toblerone bar and Longest Crossword in the World book on my desk were joined by a lava lamp that another coworker brought in. He had let the guy that brought in the firewood borrow it for a couple of months, but took it away and gave it to me. The crossword book, which I unfolded and pinned to the wall outside our office, has already provided minutes of distraction and entertainment to us and most passerby, as has the lava lamp. Whenever we're stuck on something, we stare blankly at the yellow wax bubbling up to the top, as if that will somehow help. To sum it up, firewood turned out to be the best present after all. :)

Slow day

Last week, I had a discussion about productivity with one of my officemates. He estimated that on a good, productive day, a capable person could write 150 lines of SAS code. I tried to think of my most productive day, and decided it amounted to somewhere between 50 and 100 lines, some of which, I'm pretty sure, later turned out to be incorrect.

Well, today was a 10-line sort of day. I spent all morning basically staring at the same chunk of code and tinkering with it until I had 2/3 of the output I wanted and finally asked my supervisor for some feedback. The good news was he liked my "clean" way of doing it, the bad news was that even he, with 4 years of SAS programming experience, could not immediately come up with a way to get that final 1/3. As I discussed the problem with my other officemate, she gave an example of a case where it was absolutely impossible to get the correct output by using my nice neat method. Oops. Guess I'll start doing it the ugly way tomorrow.

So many good things

As far as weeks in San Francisco go, this past one has been one of the best. I found out that my favorite bus company, Megabus, will be resuming its operations in California and taking me to all sorts of exciting destinations or actually just Sacramento and Sparks, NV for $1 if I time it right. I braved the Bay Bridge again, this time as a passenger, to go to Berkeley for the outdoor patio version of a delightful Ikea table both my housemate and I have been lusting after for weeks and subsequently ate takeout Indian street food at said table like a real person with real furniture. And finally, we hosted a housewarming party with delicious food and drinks. 

My housemate and I each made a drink - mine was a grapefruit mojito and hers a dark 'n stormy - because we're cute hosts like that. I was impressed with the number of people that showed up despite the downpour outside, but not as impressed as I was by the amount of beer that was consumed by the end of the night. 

Today, I had no plans, so after making an unusually cheesy butternut squash and white cheddar soup, I decided to walk to Japantown and explore. The walk took over an hour, during which, I spent a minute chatting with a random couple as we picked through some free books - a significant portion of which had rather provocative titles - that had been left out on the sidewalk. It was nice to see parts of the city I haven't been to, but at some point, I had an unfortunate incident involving my left boot as a result of some dog owner's negligence or laziness. When I finally reached my destination, I nearly bought a tofu cheesecake at a Japanese grocery store but the first ingredient was still cheese, so I felt like it was false advertising and decided against it. 

Laundry day

My first attempt at laundry was a couple weeks ago at a laundromat nearby. Naturally, I had procrastinated for weeks and had accumulated enough things to separate into a light and a dark load. I abandoned that idea two and a half strenuous blocks later, when I saw that each half-hour wash cycle cost $2.75 and stuffed my meticulously separated clothes all into one miserably full front-loading machine. I won't elaborate on the resulting level of cleanliness of my clothes, but I learned that I should probably do a smaller load next time. 

Today, I drove to Daly City to visit the fun laundromat in the huge shopping center with a Target and a Japanese housewares store which sells most of the delightfully miniature items in their inventory for $1.50 each. I could not resist purchasing a mandolin (the blade was sharp!) and a julienne tool. 

The mandolin has already provided me with at least fifteen minutes of entertainment and some thinly sliced test vegetables to munch on. The julienne tool turned out to be no more than a glorified grater, but given that the mandoline has about 5 other functions (scalloped edge cutter, peeler, ginger grater, etc) I still feel like I got my money's worth.