finishing things up at work. busy day. deciding whether or not to pack up my office...don't know if they will move me while i'm away. i don't want to leave. i want to stay and drink my bubble tea.

feel like i have so much to do before leaving for hong kong tomorrow. seriously need to pack...but then again, maybe not--will probably buy a lot of clothes again in hong kong. this can be a fun or depressing trip. see, the women in hong kong weigh on average like 85lbs. i'm considered a pretty big girl over there. i remember walking into a shop once where they said to me "we don't carry up to your size" (!). i'm nervous to see my cousin who is some hot shot model now and works in a fancy salon. but i can't wait for the warmth...(let's see what i say next week as i'm drowning in the balmy heat) i'll be flying by myself from seattle and meeting my family in tokyo. need to buy books. damn, my discman is fried. may need to make emergency run to best buy or something like that. need music. should i bring running shoes? would be fun to take a morning run around the harbor. i can't believe i've never gone out at night for the amount of times that i've been to hong kong. i'm determined to make it out at least once this time.

hanging out with james again tonight.

wow, so much has happened since my last entry. to recap: reunion was great. the weather turned out to be amazing and a few friends showed up on ivy day that i didn't expect---such as lori and gina. saturday night, i made it to illumination night where they light up the entire campus up with japanese lanterns...and the poofs pulled me up to sing "thank you", which i could barely remember for the life of me. oh well. afterwards, i went out with gina and judy to go dancing at city cafe--never went there while i was at smith..but it was good 'ol fun dancing with my girls again. god, i miss dancing with them. on sunday, i had brunch with judy's family and helped her put her graduation robe on...what memories this bring me. in the afternoon, headed to commencement exercises and watched toni morrison speak about how these new graduates are about to enter the most unpredictable phase in their lives and to not fault themselves if things don't really seem to go the way they plan for it to go...good advice.

back at work on monday. finally ready to devote myself 100% to the new team...things a little crazy. on wednesday, saw a private performance by the cowboy junkies in one of our conference rooms---so so good. that night, saw a special screening of pearl harbor at the cinerama since my entire team launched our project finally last week. unfortunately, the audio kept fading in and out at very key scenes. thought the battle scenes were good...but disappointed that the movie lasted as long as it did (3 hours)..especially since it wasn't necessary. the story continued on at least 4 months after the pearl harbor incident...only so they could bring some sort of resolution to the love story.

thursday night, saw the ben harper concert with eugene, robert and sean. friday night, went out with james and had a wonderful time. we had planned on seeing shrek but all the websites and newspapers' listings were wrong for pacific place cinemas...so we ended up going back to my place to watch The Game. yesterday, took meg out to greenlake and went in-line skating for her first time--she was pretty good. it still feels weird to say "in-line skating" when I really want to say "rollerblading"...but rollerblading is actually referring to the brand rather than the actual sport. interesting how one brand can truly dominate a sport so much that people think that the name of the sport is coined after the actual product name.

and finally, today, went to the pike place market festival with felix where i got a neat-o leo henna tattoo on my back. i hope that's okay. it's going to be there when i'm in hong kong this next weekend. oh yeah--i'm going to hong kong. how random is that? i just found out. anyhow, hope my grandmother doesn't freak out and think i'm a wild child or anything....and then i just got back from seeing "O", a modern adaptation of Othello with Eugene...it was part of the Seattle International Film Festival (which y'all should check out). The director was there and gave a little Q & A afterwards, which was cool....now, I'm off to eat dinner with Jocelyn.

i'm in northampton, ma now....after a long, overnight flight from seattle last night. phoebe & i arrived early in the morning and jumped onto the valley transporter, where we encountered another smithie here for her 10 year reunion. since we were arriving so early, we dropped off our stuff and then just wandered around. it's so sad to see the fine arts center completely torn down...and then to see this temporary engineering building--so ugly compared to the rest of campus. but aside from that, everything's lovely. i chatted briefly with my former econ professor, jim in the morning...and then shopped around town. finally, at 3pm, we were able to check in and found out that we're staying at baldwin house. now i'm in the library as i kill time...i'm supposed to meet julia in half an hour...i'm excited--she's been out of the country so long..it'll be great to catch up with her.

My left eye is a pink nightmare. It definitely got worse over the weekend. Whenever I drank a glass of water, I could feel the compression of air as it came to my face. Sunday morning, it took me 2 hours to be able to look out the window at the light. Everytime my eye caught the light, it felt like someone was stabbing me in the eyeball with their finger. I finally saw my doctor yesterday and then an opthamologist today....and the final analysis is that I've got uveitis--cause is unknown. I've been prescribed 2 hardcore eyedrops: One I have to take every 2 hours, which is essentially steroids for my eyes...and the other I take twice a day, which'll dilate my eyes each time. I'll be wearing sunglasses a lot in this next week or two. Being in front of the computer isn't really good for my eyes...so I didn't go to work today and I won't be going tomorrow either...and after that, I'm heading back to smith for my reunion. it's been interesting trying to find something to do instead of work. I want to do work from home, but looking at the computer screen more than 5 minutes at a time really hurts my eye. [sigh]

i'm tired. my eye hurts. so earlier this week, my eye became bloodshot...i don't know why. i thought it was because i was staring at the computer too much. it occurred after this one night of working until 1:30am (like tonight) and then I woke up the next morning with my eye a little achy. but ever since, my eye's just this bloodshot mess. it's really tired and gives me a headache. i think i'm addicted to eye drops now. i should visit the doctor.

my PM forced me to take the day off on thursday. i didn't know what to do with myself. i just *had* to log on and check email. but i eventually went downtown where i treated myself to highlighting my hair at the salon...even though no one can really tell. she made the color a little bit too warm...blends with my hair too much. oh well. it's not bad...just not very noticeable. and then i went rollerblading for 1.5 hours with felix around green lake. and i ended the evening taking a nice, warm bath.

today was the web dev all hands. all the web developers across the company -- US, JP, UK, DE, FR, etc -- congregated in the 8th floor AV Room of pacmed to talk about all the various groups and future codebase. as exhausting as it was, it was rather interesting meeting everyone and hearing about future implementations.

i have to wake up early and go to work. my eye still hurts.

beautiful sunday, sitting in my office. oh joy. it'll soon be over...i just need to survive for another 2 weeks or so.
let's see..this past week...had dinner with jason on wednesday. haven't seen that boy in awhile--had a great time catching up. he's looking at buying a condo now..how exciting. and on thursday, went to the mariners game with my new team. friday: hung out with felix. made dinner with him & betina--linguini with clams, salad, shrimp cocktail, baked apples, yum. and then we went to a late late showing of The Mummy Returns--haha. pretty neat special effects, storyline still cheesy.

and yesterday was jocelyn's birthday! a few of us went to celebrate at Coastal Kitchen where the featured cuisine was bengali--i had a wedding chicken. dan brought along a friend of his from work, an aussie named James--really cool guy...also into yoga. had a wonderful conversation with him about psychology, spirituality among other things. back at my apartment, he proceeded to show me his favorite yoga position, which involved him immediately going into a headstand, bending his knees, lifting his head up and balancing completely on his forearms. wow. afterwards, we all went over to ryan's cinco de mayo party where we enjoyed margaritas, taquitos & christina's 7 layer dip (which was very good Christina!).

anyhow, i'm sadly at work now and need to get back to it. i'm determined to get as much stuff done before 8pm, when the kickoff for the build into....okay, i'm babbling.