Category: nerd

An unbelievable coincidence

On the way to lunch yesterday, I was chatting with a colleague and learnt she’s moving house this Friday to a tiny town I used to live in back in 2004. Pretty soon in the conversation we found out she’s moving exactly in the house I was in! How odd is that?!

I found out that my yucca is still there, healthy, right in front of the living room windows. I had inherited this yucca years ago, in 2000, I think, when a former W3C colleague left for the US and A. This yucca followed me in all the houses I’ve been in since then (5 different houses) and I left it in the garden of this house when I left. It was obviously in an ideal spot. When my ex moved out of the house a few months ago, he didn’t have the heart to unearth the yucca. My colleague will take good care of it, I’m certain.

I also found out that my garden dwarf is still there! Well, it’s now in the basement and she’s more than happy to give it back to me. What a coincidence! I’m still marveling at it.

This dwarf also has a story. I received it as a birthday gift in 2002, a joke that I deeply enjoyed. Actually it’s a birthday gift that I shared with my ex boyfriend and when I left, I left the garden dwarf, Gringoire. I thought he had left the house with him. Gringoire must be far less shiny now and his colours must have worn off a bit. I’ll see soon.

Update 05sep2007: Indeed, far less shiny with worn out colours, but it’s Gringoire, all right!

My garden dwarf and me
My garden dwarf and me

Size matters

At my last visit at the office yesterday, somebody had brought somthing for me from somebody, and gave it to somebody to give to me. She was mysterious about it. “Maybe you lent someone spoons and a t-shirt”.

That didn’t ring any bell. And then I found a plastic bag. Spoons. I saw them and I knew instantly 🙂 I should have known right away, in fact.

Chaals travels so much that one day he showed me a metallic spoon that he had gotten on a plane. Or Maybe it was a mettalic spoon that I had gotten on a plane myself. Anyway, I started to collect them and Chaals is the purveyor of fine metallic spoons. Thanks, my friend.

As to what my colleague referred to as a t-shirt, now. It was far too small to be a t-shirt. I saw a small lump of white fabric and letters “size matters”, and I knew instantly 🙂

Chaals had gotten a boxer short. Not any boxer short. The Opera Mini “size matters” one 🙂 The URI is on the back, with red in it, and the motto is on the front.

Thank you, thank you again!

Where are you travelling, m’ darling?

I was in London, headed to Los Angeles to hop on a flight to San Jose, California. It was a 19 hour trip, with 15 more to go. I stayed in California less than two days. I walked a bit (as a rule, I walk to the meeting venue), I scribed 1.5 day of meeting (a little less than 1200 lines in the IRC logs, a little more than 13000 words), I happily met with a friend and his wife that I hadn’t seen in a while.

The next batch of flights didn’t go so uneventfully. The flight from San Jose to Las Vegas was delayed by almost an hour. A shame since I had a shortish connection to make it to the Boston flight. So we landed mere minutes after the Las Vegas – Boston flight had left. The good thing was that I was were my suitcase was. I spent an hour in the America West customer assistance line, wondering where my legendary luck was and reflecting on how worse it could have been without the said luck. A very helpful lady booked me on a Delta flight to Boston. I had 5 hours to wait.

I walked from the airport to Las Vegas, at dusk, camera in hand. It was interesting. There aren’t a lot of people on their own in Las Vegas. (How mundane is that, for a comment?) I purchased a few gifts that I ended up misplacing on the next day, unfortunately. I took a few photos that turned out blurry; somehow the selector of my camera was on Manual Focus… I had a gourmet dinner at Wendy’s. And I walked back to the airport. It took 45 minutes. Only to find out that the 10:10 pm flight was delayed… “Est. 12:45 am”. Oh well…

I walked through security at 12:15 am. I was selected for further screening. They patted me down (and didn’t find the lighter in my left back pocket). They opened my bags, my computer, ran their sample pads on my jacket, on my shoes, detected explosives, ran some more sample pads on my shoes, x-rayed them again and eventually let me go. I was late by that time. I took the monorail to the gates, ran to gate D41 and boarded at the last minute. It would have been pretty ironic to miss that one. I arrived in Boston 9 hours after schedule. And my suitcase had made it.

I’m back in Boston for 3 months. Yay!