Toadfrogs and Elephants

I can’t believe it’s been nine years since my summer of the Governor Scholar’s Program. Five weeks on a college campus with 349 other students. I had a blast! There were six of us – Dave, Shawn, Edie, Allison, Travis, and me – who did everything together. We hung out in a small valley – hence the name the Valley Club. Don’t we look young?

Over the years we have stayed in touch, at least mostly. I believe this was during our senior year of high school – we met up at the college campus for a small reunion. Sadly Dave and Shawn couldn’t make it.

I got an email last week telling me that Travis, his wife Emilie, and his new daughter Melilla were coming to town. I only got to see them for a little while tonight, but it was so much fun. I love reminiscing about the “good old days.”

Working in the legal department of Scientific Atlanta, we knew something was going on. Things have been crazy busy and none of the lawyers have been in the office for a couple of weeks. We had pieced a few things together and today our guesses were confirmed. Scientific Atlanta has been sold to Cisco. No one knows what this means in terms of our jobs. I’m pretty sure all the engineers are safe, but the legal department? No clue. We have a company wide meeting at 10, but I doubt that will fill in many blanks. Oh well, life goes on.

Since moving away from Midtown, I don’t see Steven as often as I used to. We do chat online quite a bit and decided to get together for dinner tonight. He recently visited Oregon for a job interview and I requested he bring me back a beaver. And he did!

After dinner, we started to play Nintendo – old school Nintendo. Bubble Bobble was the game of choice and we beat 99 levels (with the help of a few continues thrown in). The 100th level was the last and we tried and tried but didn’t quite beat it. I’m going to leave it on in the hopes that we do next time. I remember playing this game with Melissa and the help of the game genie way back when. Too bad I don’t still have that game genie.

Yeah! I finished another test in my EMT class. Now I only have the final to go, which isn’t until December 12th. I have an A in the class and hopefully I will keep it, but I am getting tired of the studying. I’d much rather play! I’ll teach Madison a new trick, watch tv, go out for dinner, cook, read, oh fun!

Evidently Madison has decided to use my blanket as her new pillow. My nice, warm, cuddly, heated blanket. As soon as we walk into the living room she hurries to curl up on top of it – guess I’ll have to be quicker or sneakier.

Madison has entered a chewing phase. She doesn’t chew on people or furniture, but she has been destroying her toys. This is a first for Madison. I have thrown away three toys in the past week, such as the bear below.

One of the best commands we taught Madison was “pillow.” The moment this word is said she runs to her pillow and lays down. It is great if she is getting into things or we have company. The pillow is hers so she often plays with it. Last week it developed a few small holes, which Wade sewed up on Sunday. I usually leave the pillow in the hallway with Madison so I did today while I was gone. This is what I came home to….. I couldn’t do anything but laugh.

Wade took Friday off from work to focus on his portfolio (so he can get a job) and drove to Atlanta Thursday night. I mentioned that I would like a way to rate and comment on books I am reading or have read. Poof! Now I have a new page added my blog. On the right under Main you will now see “Book List“. It shows the current book I am reading and the previous nine I have read.

With my job and class, I don’t have very much time to read. I have slowed down from one book a week to one every couple of weeks. I don’t like my current book so the reading is going even more slowly than usual.

Work was a challenge today – and I didn’t get there until 11:30. I report to a particular patent lawyer, but he is not my boss. The best days are when I don’t have to work with him. I get along with most people, but something about him just isn’t right. He comes off as a very immature forty something year old man. He gets caught up in office gossip and tries to get information out of me. He tells me I shouldn’t “associate” with the admins or people will start to consider me one. However, I like the admins and I don’t care what people think. Then he comments that our boss probably doesn’t like us (meaning the admins and I) talking during the day. (My boss jokes around with us and has never mentioned us talking.) The lawyer’s office is around the corner so I know we aren’t bothering him. Maybe we should sit at our desk and never say a word to anyone? That doesn’t seem healthy.

Okay, but the real point of this is he comes across as stupid. He can be eloquent and is very good with the lawyerese, but as an engineer – I have serious doubts. We can hear the same inventor talk and he gets nothing out of it. We can talk about an invention one day and the next day I have to explain it all again. Today it took me 15 minutes to explain to him why a unicast signal would be faster than a multicast signal. It seems to me anyone who knows what the prefixes “uni” and “multi” mean could figure out the rest. How infuriating!

And since I am on a roll here. The lawyer and his admin got into it over something (beats me what) and it ended up at human resources. The lawyer made a fool of himself (face turning red, knocking over a chair, etc). When he found out he had some information wrong, he went back to HR and apologized. I was so impressed. I started thinking I had him pegged incorrectly. Then he opened his mouth not 15 minutes later. He started complaining about his neighbors. His neighbor’s kid dared to play basketball until 9 at night. Then he explained how his neighbors got their property line confused and planted some shrubs a foot onto his property. He made them move them – he didn’t want to maintain them or be responsible if someone got hurt working on them. I told him the story of the people deeding (at no cost) my mom 9 feet because of a misplaced fence. He laughed and said what a great idea – he could offer the foot of land to his neighbors for $100,000. Wow – what a way to miss the point.

I told my friend Steven that people at work made me mad. This was his perfect response, “holly, i gave you that rubberband rifle for a reason. these would be the reasons.”

Now I am off to study for another test.