My friend, Wil, in Baghdad---he's coming back to the states next week!

This is sad. It's 8:01pm, July 3rd and I'm probably the only one in this entires stinkin' building still sitting behind my desk in my dark office. What a rough day.

I'm so excited---the National Do Not Call Registry finally opened up---telemarketers will be subject to a fine of up to $11,000 if they call any number on this list after October 1, 2003.



I watched an awful movie last night--28 Days Later. The premise of the story is that some virus spreads across the earth quickly, causing human beings to turn into these crazed plagued blood-sucking zombies. The main guy wakes up from a coma to find Earth in this state and seeks to find the answer to infection among other survivors. Going into it, I thought it had potential...but god, it was bad. The story went nowhere & changed mid-stream. It didn't make sense. The end was horrible--suddenly everyone is happy and free. It wasn't even that scary (and I get scared pretty easily).

blogger recently changed their entire UI...much cleaner-looking and overall pretty spiffy. but damn it, my archive page is still messed up. it doesn't link to anything beyond last year...even though I have postings up til now. if you want to see any archive postings in the last 7 months, you have to just hardcode the url.



i'm so happy with misha. each day he gets more and more comfortable. i took him to the vet last week and got him checked him...he has a bit of drippage in one eye so i have to feed him some medicine via mouth every day for 3 weeks. boy, this is tough. have any of you ever tried shooting a bunch of fluid up a cat's throat? it's tough. at first, i tried to pick him up and keep him on his back and hold his mouth open from behind..but that really required the aid of pierre. yesterday; however, we discovered a better technique...holding him down on the floor and then grabbing the mouth to shoot the liquid in. man, i feel so bad. but really, it's no big deal. as much as he hates it, right afterwards, he acts as if nothing happens.



went down to portland this last weekend to watch pierre race in the regional regatta in vancouver, wa. it was actually quite exciting seeing everyone so pumped up. sadly, his 8-person boat fell in last place due to an equipment problem. 200 meters into the race, the rigger broke for the guy in the bow of the boat--so he pretty much couldn't row because there was nothing keeping his oar in place. that in turn threw their entire boat off balance, losing control and losing speed. so many weeks of practice to have something like that happen at race time. ah well.



portland was really a big little city. population-wise and land-mass-wise, it's much larger than seattle...but it felt so much more quaint. i loved walking along NE 23rd street where there are little boutique shops next to each other. there's nothing like that at all in seattle, really. there's no one single place where you can find lots of cute, little unique boutique shops for several blocks down the street. and the fact that there's no sales tax wasn't too bad either....



but back to work for another hellish week. it's been tough lately as i've started working on my next 2 projects concurrently with the one i'm working on now. the 3 combined is a bit much to handle...but i'm just hanging in. i'm not sure what keeps me going anymore aside from the fact that it's super challenging and i get a thrill off of things like that...but my overall love of what I do is slowly dwindling. at the end of the day, i just feel like there are much more meaningful things i could do with my life. i just don't know what. i love the team i'm on--they're all rockin' people. they definitely keep me going. it's just hard to do what i'm doing now...i'm constantly the middleman, the messenger. while one person may be happy, the other person is bitching...in the end, someone's always not happy with me. ugh. but that's the way the job goes, really.



anyhow, it's late. i need to sleep.

Oh man, I've been working a lot...and killing my health too. My officemate, after a couple months off, came back earlier this week only to pick up her stuff and leave the company. The stress of the job was getting to the point where it was taking a negative toll on her health....something I worry about doing to myself often. Too many times in this past month I ate lunch after 3pm or dinner after 10pm. I don't know why...but I really need to watch out for myself.



For a couple of weeks now, I've been looking for a cat. I thought it was about time that I took responsibility of another small life. Plus, selfishly, I wanted to really have a good reason to want to leave work and be home early. I looked in several shelters...and last weekend, I found a cat! He's probably about 1.5-2 years old, grey with white paws and a white belly. Came with the name Smokey but I've renamed him Misha....and he's so beautiful. He has the most gorgeously silky coat of fur and is so fun to pet. He's been using the litterbox like a champ and been so well behaved. Yay! so so cute....



The Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) just passed. All in all, I saw 5 movies: Valentin, Musa the Warrior, Infernal Affairs (which I just found out was picked up for American adaptation with Brad Pitt to star), Ping Pong, and Traces of the Dragon: Jackie Chan and His Lost Family. I really want to somehow get a copy of the last documentary (on Jackie Chan) and send it to my grandparents to watch. It was truly fascinating to get a better sense of what they perhaps went through, having lived in China and fleeing to Hong Kong after the Sino-Japanese war. They sometimes talk about some "lost" brothers and sisters in China..and this documentary makes me want to learn more.



I need a vacation. Hmm.



Pierre's racing at Regionals this weekend---can't wait as this'll be my first time seeing him row!



I have the condo bug again. Should I?

A friend of mine sent this over to me yesterday--- the new Honda Accord commercial, which is so fascinating to watch. It's even more fascinating once you understand the engineering feat it took by reading this article.



After almost 4 years of living in Seattle, I've never traveled up to the San Juan Islands--for shame. Today, I will finally do so---Pierre and I are just heading up to Orcas Island for a day to get away from the city and check out island life...really looking forward to it.



Went to a party last night at Stephane's Spanish teacher's place, whose roommate is the belly dancer in the group, Children of the Revolution--most of the group was there. It was such a fun party to be at--with such creative, musical people---there was live music, belly dancing, flamenco dancing, shisha going--Pierre was in heaven!

Damn, it's been a long time since I've written in here. And so much has happened: We've had a war, I witnessed a friend getting shot in Iraq on Fox News, my project slipped by a month, I got a paycut, then got a payraise so that I would make as much as I did last year, got food poisoning from one of my favorite Malaysian restaurants, flew home to surprise mom for Mother's Day, discovered that I'm taking salsa classes with one of the conductors of the Seattle Symphony, Kansas lost to Syracuse at the National Championships (boo hoo), a tornado hit my hometown for the first time in over 20 years, found out a childhood friend is now engaged (congratulations Becky), exercised my stock options for the first time...the list goes on. It's been a busy month...mainly because of work. Most of my friends (especially Phoebe) have wondered what has happened to me. I'm really trying to get that work/life balance going right so that I don't go crazy. It was pretty bad last month.



I'm not sure why I'm up right now. It's late. I'm just thinking a bunch. Specifically, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship I'm in and the happiness it sometimes brings me. I know something's there when, no matter how angry I can get with him, it all goes away when I hear his kind, gentle voice again. It's just hard. Relationships are hard.



I'm also at that weird point when I'm thinking about what I want to do with my life. See, my lease is up in a few months...and I'm once again debating whether or not to buy a condo. Naturally, in contemplating such a major move, I've been thinking about how much longer I want to be at Amazon..and in Seattle...and how happy I am in my job. It's no doubt a very challenging job...and that is the main reason why I've stayed here. But I've no idea what it is like elsewhere....or what it would be like to just do something totally different....like arts management or setting up my own small business---two things I talk about often.



I need to sleep.