Snow day!

With all the craziness of yesterday's snow on campus, they "closed" campus today! No lobbies open, no shuttle service, no cafeterias open, no food/drink service, all operators on auto-answer, etc. Every meeting of mine was cancelled/postponed (including, sadly, the second half of a conference I was attending that obviously took a lot of work to put together)...so I'm having myself a snow day! Of course, I'm logged in and still doing work from home...but funny to think of having a snow day...from work!

A bit of snow

It started snowing again today. But a bit more than last night--just around 4:30pm, the snow came down and it actually stuck (at least in Redmond it did). Oh boy, that meant bad traffic (and for you folks on the East Coast--this is not even an inch of snow. You'd laugh). After getting out of the meeting I was in at 5:15pm at the MS Conference Center, a coworker (Tony) and I called a shuttle to head back to our building.

5:20pm
Shuttle picks us up

5:42pm
Shuttle drops us off at the same spot after circling around and trying to get out of the driveway of the conference unsuccessfully. Shuttle is stuck and can't take us to the building.

5:44pm
I call Lukasz who works 2 buildings away from where I am. I try to see if I can maybe hitch a ride in his car back to my building since he has an A3 and should be able to make it. I find out that he's just pulled out of the parking garage.

6:01pm
I walk over to 40th St to catch a ride in Lukasz's car. In the 15 minutes it took me to walk over, he's moved about 20 feet. Tony and I get in the car. Lukasz is going to drop Tony off at our building (which is literally less than a mile away)

6:11pm
I call Matt and decide not to go to the ProClub after work and, instead, just hitch a ride with Lukasz back to Capitol Hill.

6:28pm
About 3 blocks from our building (note it took 30 min. to go less than a mile). I call Gabe to see if he wants a ride since we notice that the HOV lane on 520 is open.

6:40pm
Finally cross 40th St. and get to Building 119. Gabe jumps in.

7:28pm
Get back home at last. And that was using the HOV lane which saved us at least half an hour. Whew.

It's snowing

It's actually snowing in Seattle right now. Weird (it rarely snows in Seattle). Man, we should try to hit the slopes soon---Crystal got 69" of snow since last Tuesday. Damn.

Our Thanskgiving weekend

Overall, nice and relaxing Vegas Thanksgiving holiday. Matt and I took off Wednesday afternoon to Vegas to visit my parents. Shortly after arriving, we got some Chinese for dinner and checked out the Red Rock Casino (where Betina & Justin are getting married next year) since it's rather close to my parent's house. By evening, my brother along with my 2 uncles' families had all arrived. One of the more amusing experiences from this weekend was the new karaoke system my dad had bought, already filled with hundreds of English, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese songs. Everyone was belting away including my 80-something year old grandparents, singing some sort of old Chinese song. My dad even convinced Mrs. Chan (Betina's mother) to sing along when she came over for Thanksgiving dinner! I got a lot of great video!




Also--Matt, Aaron and I finally learned to play craps this weekend. We got rather addicted and pretty much only played this game the whole time.

Friday night, I took Matt to check out the Beatles' LOVE show with Cirque du Soleil at the Mirage Hotel. Man, it was a fantastic show. 2 hours of Beatles music and the imagery associated with it, care of the wonderful dancers and acrobats of Cirque. Highly recommend checking this out if you're in Vegas, especially if you're a Beatles fan.




B-List Celebrity Sightings: if you ever watched Hell's Kitchen, then you'd remember that the winner, Heather West, got her own restaurant at the Red Rock Casino. Since we were there, we wanted to check out her restaurant, Terra Rossa. It was closed but as we peered inside, we saw Heather herself prepping for the Saturday night dinner crowd. She turned around and waved to us. Ha! And earlier while at Red Rock, while playing craps, we saw Garrett walking by. Fun stuff.

Hello Hello

Sorry it's been awhile since I've posted. It's like holiday season is here and time just flies by. Matt and I head to Las Vegas tomorrow to spend Thanksgiving with my family--my popo and gung gung are already there: they took the bus from L.A.! How cute is that? And for only $20--it was seriously the Chinatown bus: pick up in Monterey Park and drop off in Chinatown, Vegas. Good deal.

Not much aside from wedding planning and working. I got a bad cold about a week ago that took me out of work for about 3 days. Thing is, it wasn't that bad (I've been more sick in my life) but it was just bad enough to make me uncomfortable and not motivated to work at all. In between, I pulled up enough adrenaline to make it to the Emerald City Swank since I'd been planning on attending that for over a month. Great event again (my 3rd year) with a fun turnout (I got a good 12 people at my table). Didn't get any major live auction items this year but Matt and I scored with a few silent auction items: tickets to see 12 Angry Men, tickets to the opera, and a painting! I got really lucky afterwards as someone dropped a $75 gift certificate to Whole Foods out on the street (which was obviously an auction item): finders keepers!