Notes from the last week...

(Not even going to try to backdate this time. *waves hands*)

SF Trip the First:

* On the occasion of friend in town!

* Wandering GG Park is always a good, if circular, time

* Random LOL: The kids yelling "I'M ON A BOAT!" while in fact on boats on Stow Lake

* Haight-Ashbury Street Fair was kind of hilarious

* Crazy Hamlet is crazy! Also, there was pie.

SF Trip the Second:

* On the occasion of a work off-site to a baseball game!

* Giants vs. Angels. I refrained from wearing my Dodgers hat but had fun rooting for the winning SoCal team.

* Teaching an Irish coworker about the game, only to have her miss the seventh inning stretch during a bathroom breaks, and getting vacation tips in return.

* Scoreboard fun: LOLtastic "announcement" of our group as a manager's 21st birthday (hah); later, a proposal (aw).
* Stadium gift cards meant endless food and drink, including hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps (omg).
* Walking through the middle of what almost turned into a fight (and watching that instead of the game - oh, bleachers).
* Smug satisfaction at staying through the end, unlike some people who left and missed a near-comeback.

SF Trip the Third:

* On the occasion of co-workers' birthdays!

* Garden party on the patio was lovely

* Sunny day, but unfortunately windy :-(

* Somehow still had energy on getting home to go out for Mexican food, yum

And unrelated to San Francisco, this website.

I will never see mustard the same way again

My company organizes big community service outings every year at this time, and today was the one I and a whole lot of people I work with signed up to do. We went to Half Moon Bay to do beach landscape recovery work. I spent about three hours whacking away at mustard and hemlock with a hoe and ripping ice plant out of the sand. I liked the second part better, although I fear for my back tomorrow.

One part of the day was kind of a bummer. During the hoeing portion, a group discovered a burrow of teeeeeeeeeeeeny baby bunnies! So cute! So were were all jazzed about that, and when three of us (IL, SP, me) were working around a different bush and heard squeaking, we got excited for more cute things. We couldn't see it under the thick growth but were really curious, so we started lifting up branches from different sides to try and figure it out. And, well:

IL: I see it! I think it's a bunny...or a mouse?
Me: Oh yeah! Looks like a bunny.
IL (looking into the darkness at wiggly, twitchy baby bunny): What's it doing?
SP: OMG a snake is eating it!
All of us: WAH! *drop branches and leap back*
Everyone else: WTF?
Me: Yeah, it's a bunny being eaten by a snake.
Everyone else: :-(

Aside from that, we made a good dent in the brush, and it was more fun - mostly - than sitting at my desk.

Maker Faire 2009

LK and I went up to San Mateo on Saturday for Maker Faire, where we saw lots of cool stuff and got really sunburned (who knew a geek faire would be outside?).

Pictures below. Highlights included life-size Moustrap, Coke + Mentos = 'splodey, giant cupcake cars (do want!), and the near-fulfillment of my dream to have a Lego room.