Fish tank

So my boss tells me I'm allowed to expense up to $150 to "decorate my office area." So I'm going to get a fish tank. Does anyone here have advice about what I should get? Thanks!

Making progress at home

Well, this week has been super busy. Work is coming along nicely, and I have finished the new employee formal training (although there are still weeks and weeks of "to do" lists I have to complete. When I'm not at work, I've been spending 100% of my time painting my room. The walls were rather dingy and cleaning them would have taken an exorbitant amount of time. Instead, with the help of the ever awesome and knowledgeable Andrea K., I painted my room. Derek P. also chipped in. It's looking much better now. I did have to stay up late most nights to finish in time though, because this morning the movers came with my stuff.

Now the house is full of my boxes, but I haven't the energy to do anything about it. The long run this Saturday was 14 miles at 7:40 pace, so I am very tired. I think I'll take a nap in my bed, now that it's finally here. Hooray!

Kicking the tires - 20 miler success!

This weekend Marty and I did 20 consecutive miles... and we survived! This was the longest we ever ran. As usual we did this out at Crystal Springs, at the six mile (one-way) course. We had to meet up at 6:55 in order to put in eight miles before the rest of PARC showed up at 8AM. Kramer ran the remaining 12 miles with us. Sadly it was his last run with PARC for a long while, as he is leaving for freshman orientation at college at Harvey Mudd.

Here's the cool news: we ran the whole thing at 7:47 average pace. Not too shabby! The last two miles kind of sucked, but we made it back in one piece. Besides the accomplishment of actually completing 20 miles, the next thing I am excited about is that I did not wake up stiff the next day. Sure, the remainder of Saturday was crappy (I slept from noon until 3pm) but on the whole, I felt fine. Perhaps sitting in the massage chair at work had something to do with my recovery. ;)

Moving blunders

On Friday I had lunch at work with an employee, JJ, who worked at my previous job, in my previous group. We didn't overlap; we must have missed each other by two months at most. It was fun trading stories about a previous environment we could both relate to. During lunch, my phone rang and it was a number I didn't recognize, so I ignored it. Little did I know what call I was missing:

"Hi Andrew, this is Monica. I have news about your move-in. The good news is, your stuff has arrived in California. But the bad news is.. the trailer in which your stuff is stored is sealed. Actually, it has been quarantined by the California Department of Agriculture. So I'm sorry, but we won't be able to move your stuff in tomorrow. If you have any questions feel free to call. Bye! *click*"

WHAT??!?!! My friends were quick to joke that perhaps I shouldn't have shipped a massive marijuana farm from coast to coast. Ha ha, very funny guys. After some frantic calls to my relocation specialist and to Monica from the moving company, we determined that some other person's stuff that was stored in the container was infested with gypsy moths, and that I was just an innocent bystander. Great.

The end result was that they were going to offer to move my stuff in on Monday, which was useless to me, as I would be at work all day and I couldn't take time off. Monday is the day on which I am supposed to have the "kick off" meeting for the project that I'll be working on. Instead we agreed on a move-in for next Saturday, the 25th. This will be a month and a day after I moved out from Boston. Needless to say I will be happy when it's over :)

And just to get my heart rate up on a Monday morning, the last of the hilarity (I hope) occurred on Monday at 8:40AM, when I was just stepping in to work. I got a call from the moving company informing me that they were at my house and were ready to move in. Shall I repeat my earlier comment? I think so. WHAT??!?!! I was nice to the moving guy, since obviously it wasn't his fault, but I told him that Monica had arranged for a Saturday move-in.

Good times!

Putting in the miles

Well, now that I'm in the groove with the beginners' coursework at work, it is time to focus on putting the miles in. Thus far in the past few weeks I have done long runs with the Palo Alto Running Club (which I officially joined this week! hurray!) I had not, however, put in the day-to-day mileage that was going to be necessary to train for Chicago. So my new friend Marty from PARC sent me his spreadsheet of mileage and planned mileage. I also talked with CRC friend Pradeep about how his training was going. He tells me that he is putting in 40-50 mile weeks no problem. These factors combined led me to map out my own mileage plan.

While I'm sure I'll get more into the details later, the basic idea is for me to do my long weekend run with Marty, which can be anywhere from 10 to 20 miles. The remainder of the week I need to put in enough mileage to sustain a total of 40-50 miles. Fridays will be my rest day.

There's a monday night crowd of runners at work that are super fast. They're running 5-8 miles at 6:15/mile pace or faster. While I tried, there's just no way I can hang on when they're running that kind of sustained pace. It's something to aspire to, for sure. Evidently they've been going around winning several area relay races, and between people in the Mountain View, Seattle, and New York offices, they're assembling teams for various relay races across the US. After this marathon I might try to work on my speed and see if I can be a contributor to these events.. but the thought of being part of a team of runners who put in a sub-6/mile pace for, say, 200 miles, is very intimidating.

So in the past 5 days I've put in 39 miles. I've had a couple of sore spots while running, but largely I feel fine throughout the day after each run. This includes last Saturday, when I ran 14 miles. So I'm going to plow ahead. The real test will be this Saturday, when I run 20 miles, which will increase my longest distance run by a whopping 6 miles. Afterwards I will have to come straight back to my new place, because the movers will be moving in all of my stuff from Boston. No rest for the weary, 'eh?

This weekend will also mark the arrival of three different, non-overlapping sets of friends in the area, one of whom is crashing on my couch. I'm excited! More posts soon..

Bacon Day

Monday marked the grand reopening of a certain cafeteria on the company's campus. Evidently it had been closed down for two months, due to the fact that everyone in the building had been relocated elsewhere, so that it could be renovated. So, to mark the grand reopening.. the theme of the day was... BACON. Yes, that's right; bacon.

Naturally my coworkers were all abuzz about the bacon theme, so two of them joined me in the trek to the cafe (it was about a mile walk.) Along the way we picked up my friend Adam, of ilovebacon.org, who is interning at the company this summer. It just seemed appropriate.

The menu had all sorts of bacony items on it, and they were all super tasty! They even had bacon-themed dessert, no lie. It was a parfait with apricot jelly and a bacon topping. Oddly enough the sweetness of the apricot was the perfect pair to the salty taste of bacon. I am infinitely impressed.

Crazy week

What a crazy week it has been! I get the feeling this is only the first of many to come. As previously mentioned this week was my first at the new job. Right now the learning curve is very, very steep. This week has been (and next week will also be) packed with classes on all facets of the engineering operation. I have stayed late most nights, because I am excited about getting through training and getting on to the real work. I'm absolutely blown away by the complexity and the scale of operations at the new company. Take just about any number you'd use to qualify the scale of the largest server operation you can think of. Now add at least two zeros. (!!!!)

..I think that was the sound of my brain exploding. Wheeeeee

On Wednesday night I played scrabble with Muffin, Andrea, and Carmen. I didn't totally suck so I am pleased. I did, however, suck at life - I managed to leave my keys at work, but I only noticed this after I drove all the way back to Santa Clara from Andrea's. Hilarity (driving from/to Mountain View) ensued.

Speaking of CMU people, tonight I went to a CMU alumni night in San Francisco. It was fun, and I got to meet a few people living in the area.

I'm sorry that my posts have dropped off in the past few days. I will be back in effect this weekend. Till then!

First day at work

Today was my first day at work. Boy was it a long day! I got up at 6AM, and called New York (9AM) to have flowers delivered to two of my friends there who encouraged me during the interview process. Then I reported to work at 8:45AM for new hire orientation. We did all of the things you would expect - set your password, take a photo for your ID badge, sit through presentations about benefits, corporate philosophy and products, the works.

After all of the orientation presentation stuff, I met up with my appointed mentor, who is in the same general group as me. He's been awesome. After a few batches of introductions, it was so late in the day that there wasn't going to be enough time to get much more done.. so instead he invited me to play sheepshead with a random selection of coworkers. This was amusing, because despite Mary McC's efforts to educate me about cards, I am terrible. But my coworkers were kindhearted and after I demonstrated my inability to play cards, I switched to being an observer. We got some time to chat, which was really what it was all about anyway. After cards I also had dinner at work (they serve it around 6:30 every night), and then I stayed until 10pm, reading up on all sorts of fun benefits and internal activities lists. I signed up for the JP Morgan Corporate Challenge in San Francisco, making this the second time this year that I will have run in that race series. I wonder if this company will have decent racing swag (the previous company did a decent job this year.)

I've got a minor cold, which sucks, but I'm so pumped about work that it hasn't held me back. That will probably catch up with me soon enough, so I'm going to watch out for that. Speaking of that, there's a whole lot more I could write about, but I am dog tired and I must get some sleep. Remind me later this week to write about such things as:

• Adventures with my MacBook
  
• Why it probably wasn't a good idea to send flowers to one of my friends in NYC
  
• The food
  
• Motivation for walking/biking/running to work every day
  
• Giant dinosaurs
  

12 miles, Sawyer Camp Trail

Well, I definitely sunburned myself pretty badly on Wednesday's run, so I stayed covered up for this run and everything seems to have worked out fine.

This week's Saturday morning run for the PARC, just like every Saturday morning, was at the Sawyer Camp Trail. This time I stuck with my new running buddies for the whole run, and it was great - I ran it at a faster pace (7:44) than my best half marathon pace (7:50) and it didn't feel like I was running a half marathon!

I'm glad that PARC runners John and Marty (and the rest of the club) have been so welcoming to me. It's great getting to run with them. Marty is one of less than a handful of people from PARC who are training for Chicago, so we both have that goal in mind.

I removed the embedded MapMyRun application from this post, because it was overloading my browser's javascript interpreter.

12 miles along the Guadalupe River Trail

12 miles, 1:43:04, average 8:35 pace. Ignore the distance estimate in the embedded map below; I am experimenting with uploading my GPS watch data into MapMyRun.com and I had to prune the sheer amount of samples the watch output (1 per second) down to something manageable. This had the downside of reducing the supposed mileage.

It was really neat running along the the Guadelupe River Trail. I think I got too much sun though; we'll see tomorrow. At the northern point of the run I came across a neat wetlands area. I'll have to go back.