Today was such a beautiful day - clear, crisp, the sky that certain shade of blue only seen in the fall, maybe because of the contrast with the vivid reds and oranges of the trees changing colours. The house is mostly decorated for Halloween, and I baked an apple pie with some of the heirloom apples from the farmers market. Wonderful wonderful

My sweetie had to work today :( but it did leave me in charge of the house on one of the warmest days we've had so far this year - sunny! on a Saturday! when I can choose to ignore my dissertation! (unlike Sunday). So what did I do? I gardening ( Read more... )

So, I got the promotion. :) I'm no longer the administrative assistant, but am now a marketing research specialist, working on projects that motivate agents to sell our insurance. Yea, I'm now officially encouraged to use 'incent' as a verb. Yea, I still cringe when I do so ( Read more... )

What made this particularly rich was during an interview last week, I was asked what my three core values were. I thought a bit, then answered ( Read more... )

Have you ever had a bad boyfriend? You know, the guy who looked pretty damn good, all cool and edgy, and it started off really well - mutual attraction, approval from your friends and family, seemed like there was a future in store. Sure there were some warning signs: uncertain temper, flirting with other people, super high standards. But you ( Read more... )

Well, it's been a while since I posted. January was kind of a blah month - I know, really? It's just that the thrill of Christmas is over, and this year, the Lunar New Year was late. I had dinner with friends, went to the Korean spa, but mostly just did the daily grind ( Read more... )

I'm super busy at work, what with year-end budgeting, next-year planning, being the head honcho on all things Holiday card, and doing both my department's holiday party and (more stressfully) the president's holiday party ( Read more... )

I'm on the board of an NGO, the Cool Mountain Education Fund, that provides scholarships for minority kids in rural China (Yangjuan, Sichuan - on the edge of the Tibetan plateau) go to middle & high school. These are kids from where I did my anthropology research for my doctorate ( Read more... )

We went to the pumpkin ranch today to get our gourdy-friends.  Poor redmondmenace  didn't quite understand that when I said it was south of IKEA, I mean it (as he put it) the same way that Peru and other countries are south of the US.  In my defense, it was in Kent.  And where I drove around once trying to get back on the freeway after I'd been to IKEA.

Anyhoo, ( Read more... )

redmondmenace and I got back this weekend from our trip to California--visited his family, drove down the coast, saw the village that Murder She Wrote was filmed in (now that I know it was filmed in Mendocino, it's pretty obvious that "Cabot Cove" is not located in Maine--some major flora & fauna differences!), saw the Winchester Mystery House, Mt. Lassen & Mt ( Read more... )