My New Digs

I started a new job within my company today. New boss, new people, totally new work. It’ll be cool. This big move, of course, involved the ceremonial moving of desks. I packed up all my personal belongings from my drawers, which surprisingly consisted of a lot of candy, bags of microwave popcorn, and hairbrushes, and carted my whole business life over to a new location.

People, I now have a window desk. Granted it’s a window overlooking ghetto east county, but it’s a friekin window. It’s natural light and it rocks.

An IT guy came to move my computer. I was so proud of myself, new job, new and better desk… then the IT guy goes “You look like you’re 16.” Then it was all put back in perspective. Great, I look like I’m 16 and I’m trying to feel important here. It’s a constant struggle with me.
But anyway, back to my new digs and my new job. I’m on the same floor so I can still be buddies with my old co-workers. In fact, they’re taking me out to lunch today to say goodbye. These type of lunches are the highly anticipated department lunches. I picked the place to go. It’s a Brazilian steak place where they bring by meat on a stick for as long as you can take it until you are so full you can just barely get up the strength to reach onto the table and flip over the little knob to red. Meaning, “I’m so done.” Then we proceed to all stumble back to the office, drunk off food, and spend the whole afternoon groaning and feeling incredibly full. It’s great. I’ve been preparing for days and started fasting last night. Seriously, it’s a culinary experience that you can’t take lightly.

Oh, wasn’t I going to talk about my new job? I got a little distracted by the prospect of food. My new job is cool and my department is younger and hipper. It’s more independent type of work, which I think I respond to better then being baby-sat by a boss. I’ll be traveling a little bit too, which I find kind of sexy. Taking a train somewhere to go do work always makes you feel important. I’ll keep you guys updated on my progress.

My new boss I call Mr. Yogurt because I can’t figure out how to pronounce his last name. I guess I should get on that since I’ll be working with him for a while.

I was sad because Yogurt asked me to skip out on a day of this conference I was supposed to go to next week. This conference is the coolest thing, and my old boss signed me up for it months ago. I went to it last year and while it’s two days of rather heavy, boring technical information, the best part is the food. Do I seem a little obsessed with food in this blog? Well, the people that do this conference know that it gets really boring. So there are bags of Skittles and candy and stuff on all the tables. After every break I switch tables to one with the most Skittles, so I’ll never run out. And every two hours, there’s a 30 minute break where they serve some kind of awesome food. The best one last year was the “chocolate parade” where everything was chocolate: chocolate milk, chocolate cookies, chocolate brownies… oh it was heavenly.

And at the end of day one, there’s a sponsored happy hour at the hotel bar. And you guys all know my parents raised me to never turn down a happy hour. So all in all the conference is pretty cool.

My new boss wants me to go work on something with him off-site, so I can’t go to day two of the kick ass conference.

If I miss the chocolate parade there will be words…

Keeping the Faith

After catching up on some of my linked blogs, I realized how interesting my friends are. So I think I’d better spice mine up again and talk about cool things I’m doing. Or at least make them up so people keep reading this blog.
On Friday, one of my old college friends and co-worker stopped by my desk. For weeks now he’s been telling me about this marathon he’s running in October and how I should join. How I suddenly strike him as a marathon runner, I’ll never know. Maybe it was the box of brownies I keep at my desk? Or the Skittles I have in my paperclip holder instead of paperclips? But he’s brought it up incessantly. I’ve known the kid for four years and now he’s on a personal mission to recruit me. My boyfriend is very suspicious of this and only allows me to socialize with him without complaint because this friend is shorter then me. And we all know I have rules about that.
So anyway, he starts emailing the information about their weekly meetings and practices with his running team. I have to stop myself from replying to each one with “I’m sorry, but this would really cut into my lying around time.”
This week he actually piqued my interest by telling me that you could also run a half marathon. OK, 13 miles of torture seems much more achievable then 26. Now I’m officially 10% interested.
But actually, I have started taking an interest in running. I’ve figured out how to run through my cursed family side stitch and have been utilizing my condo’s gym to run on the treadmill ever week. My I-Pod is also well equipped with a “Running” play list, so I’m clearly ready to run.
So my friend tells me that their first official run of the warm up season is on Saturday at 7:30. That would be 7:30 AM. I had to check to see if this time actually did exist on a Saturday morning. It did. And he wanted me to join him and his group in a three mile run at that time to figure out “pace groups.” I kindly explained to him that this ungodly running time would cut into my Friday night out and that at 7:30 AM I planned on stumbling home and falling asleep sideways on my bed with my clothes still on. So I sent him on his way.
It turns out Friday night was a particularly tame one and at 7 AM Saturday morning I woke up feeling fresh as a daisy and thought, “I think I’m going to go run.” The next thing I know I’m running around a lake 20 miles from my house and have made a “pace group” friend and was chugging through the home stretch of my third mile, without breaking a sweat.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I’m officially signed up for the half marathon in October. I’m mostly doing this to compete with Charlie and his efforts to run the San Francisco marathon that I’ve been reading about in his blog. OK, not really, but I thought I’d throw that out there.
After our final stretching and cool down sessions, all the runners gathered around and my work friend said “OK everyone, let’s all say a prayer.” Huh? A what? Oh crap. It all came rushing back to me that my friend is super Catholic. Oh crap, what have I gotten myself into? I just joined a Christian marathon training group! And they already have my registration form! After our prayer circle ended and I uncomfortable lunged for my keys to get the hell out, the leader girl said there were a few more announcement. She showed off that by joining the marathon, we got a fancy tote bag. She added that it was perfect size to fit your Bible. Seriously.
Everyone was really nice to me and they invited me to a meeting on Monday night, in which I can only imagine I would have been officially inducted into their cult. I’m going to have to bring my I-Pod next time and when they start busting out the running prayers, I’ll just cue up some Britney Spears.