oddgirl’s blog

I just went thru a huge pile of mail, notes, receipts, bills and other crud that should not be cluttering up my 2007… paying things, cleaning up things and generally trying to get a little more organized.

I’ll work on my (somewhat) annual list of new year’s resolutions and stuff later today or tomorrow, but the one thing I did this morning that I’d been thinking about doing, but seem to always forget to when I renew my driver’s license, was registered to be an organ donor. Hope you will think about doing the same.

After another great dinner last night, I headed to the Mint and found two heretofore unintroduced groups of my pals hanging out, singing and cheering each other on. It was one of those times where I looked around and realized how good it is – I’ve got this whole life all around me, filled with these great people who just kinda merge well. More than anything it makes me wish I had a bigger house so I could have a big party …

Great to see the-boy-who-shows-his-butt. I can’t believe he’s a father now. What stories we will tell his daughter when she is old enough.

And H&H – one of the things I’d like to do next year is hang out with you guys more. In my copious spare time that is.

You’d think I’d know by now that only eating a half a sandwich at noon and then drinking a half dozen beers from 4ish to 7 would get me kinda drunk. Dang happy hours! The best part is that getting drunk that quick is basically a truth serum which causes me to try and answer all of (my) life’s big questions. Fun! Usually I’m smart enough to do this only in front of close and trusted confidantes, but yesterday I found myself in this predicament with a relatively new aquaintance. Brilliant!

Later, I mostly avoided indiscriminate drunk txting which I guess is a good thing. I only ever seem to drunk dial the Linguist (she’s more of a phone person) and she’s off in the great cold of the mid-west, so when I woke up this morning I checked my sent messages and found only one txt message in the sent box: to my drinking companion – “Gosh, i was an idiot”. That bodes well, doncha think?

I’ve posted my pics from French Laundry. From the first sip of champagne and the salmon tartare “ice cream cone” in the best tuile cookie I’ve every tasted, everything was delicious and some of it was breathtaking. I’m going to annotate the pictures in the next day or two. I’ve been having interweb problems today, but seemed to have resolved them and can spend some time online now.

Tho I should have been inspired to cook yesterday when I got back from Yountville, I wasn’t particularly hungry, and it resulted in a fairly lackluster attempt at lamb stew and a cooked-a-bit-too-long apple blueberry crumble. All the flavors were fine, but not up to my quality standard and I was a bit disappointed in myself. Makes me wonder if I’d even last a week in a real kitchen again, particularly after the edible artwork I had friday nite.

Fairly lazy day today. Thought about a couple options for ye olde xmas eve, but ultimately decided to stay in. I never celebrated xmas when I was a kid and I don’t really feel that comfortable going to other people’s family xmas parties… it just isn’t my holiday and doesn’t come with the requisite family memories. That’s probably Passover for me… but I’ll likely venture out to one of the orphan parties I’ve been invited to tomorrow.

Every now and then I forget. And then a nice jolt reminds me that we can have an earthquake at any time, with no warning. This one was only a couple miles from the office and it felt kinda like a sonic boom. There was still a handful of people at the office and we were pretty surprised. I sit in the center of the office – a big open dotcom kinda space with exposed brick and wooden beams. scary.

Holiday stuff:

– Someone asked me where I was going for the holidays and I responded Hyrule. If you are a single lesbian in the Bay Area and you get that joke, we should totally be dating.

– I’m going to French Laundry this week. Can. Not. Wait.

– No rest for the wicked. While I won’t be going into the office, it feels likely that I will be working some over the break.

– Up for food, hiking, drinks, movies and/or marathon WoW sessions. Ring me up…

I came out in the mid-80s. Intrinsic to my coming out was Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. My very first girlfriend introduced me to the comic in the local, way-small circulation gay rag and my circle of friends spent (many drunken) hours trying to figure out which of the characters represented us the best (I was two parts Mo and one part early-Lois).

Fast forward to the mid-90s. Starting my brand spankin’ new techno-geek career at PlanetOut, and finding out that my first production assignment was scanning DTWOF and posting it weekly to our website. I could hardly believe my luck – here I was… just a random dyke in SF and all of a sudden I was talking to Alison Bechdel every week about getting her comic up online. This was the pre-dotcom boom and we were all just trying to figure out what worked and didn’t work online. And somehow I managed to score a gig working with a creative genius who I had idolized for years, posting her cartoons online and working on a storefront for our AOL site where we sold coffee mugs and t-shirts with the characters on them. At the time I thought my life could not get more surreal. (I have since discovered that my professional career could take me down slightly more surreal paths… but that’s another story for another day.)

And then, here we are now, close to 20 years after my very first introduction to her indie, underground comics and she’s finally getting her due from the mainstream press. Her current book offering, Fun Home, recently was listed in Time magazine as the #1 book of 2006.

Rock on, Alison.

I thought for sure it was going to be Ozzy, but I guess Yul played the thinking man’s game. The “outwit” game. Ozzy just seemed so cool and so strong – and nice. If Yul had even screwed over one person directly, I think he woulda lost and Ozzy woulda taken it.

And boy, both Sundra and Becky both deserved to get voted off. Like um… weeks ago. Dude. They couldn’t make fire! Sundra couldn’t even make fire with matches! I’m ashamed that I had her in the office pool.

I ended up liking this season even with my reservations about the race thing at the beginning. There were some hotties. And the challenges were pretty cool.

Still the best reality show, IMO.

Life Stuff:
1. I have been a bit avoidant of the mountain of work in front of me. It will not last.
2. I have been a bit avoidant about answering a couple of personal emails. One in particular. I don’t know how long it will last.
3. This week is gonna suck eggs.
4. And then I get a break.
5. Sometimes I wish I didn’t care.

Got my new laptop home last night, and this morning I’m already fully up and running – getting everything from my old computer to the new one was as easy as connecting them with firewire cable and waiting about an hour for the information to transfer. The only application that gave me a problem was VPN for work and even that was solved with a download of the new client that works on intel-based macs. Next up: getting Bootcamp and WinXP runnning and then seeing how the game runs on this bad boy.

I still haven’t managed to sleep through a whole night since I got back – I think I got around 5 hours last night. When I woke up at 5:30 today I got worried that I would oversleep if I went back to sleep so I just got up and started working (and playing with the new toy). My mind is racing and Cheese is not so happy with the rainyness so he has been a crazy, meowing (aka howling) boy. I feel blurry and have an action-packed day ahead. Coffee will be my friend this morning. My best friend.

Flew back to SF yesterday and here I am: jet-laggy and wide awake in the middle of the night. Can you imagine? I did sleep for about 5 hours, but since I’m awake, I posted the pics from my trip. You can check ‘em out on my Flickr page. Looking at the pictures, I wish I had taken more scenic shots, but I actually did so little sightseeing while in Singapore I’d say that proportionally these are a pretty accurate representation of how I spent my time. Ended up skipping the Night Safari to hang out more with the people I met a the conference. Maybe if I go back next year…

I pick up the Cheese boy this afternoon. It’s very odd to be in the house without him. Missed the little hairball.

ok… maybe I could sleep a little more now…

I just finished the last session with my mentorees, my last interview was at around 2pm and I gave another quick 1/2 hour presentation on working with teams at 3 pm. I have one more drinks thing with a bunch of the members of the Singapore government ministry in 20 minutes, and then I’m officially done with the conference. Tonight me and some of the other “internationals” (as we’re called) are going to the Night Safari which I’m really looking forward to. I’ll have a couple hours of free/shopping time in the morning and then I head home. I wish I had decided to stay in Singapore for a couple more days as I would really like to have more time to explore this city. Vibrant, smart, clean. Would love to come back someday.

I’ve had a blast at this conference. I’ve gotten to meet a bunch of university kids trying to make educational games, some pretty cool games industry veterans and a mess of cool Aussies who have solidified my desire to go to Australia on my next vacation.