Day 3

New job. New routine. Quick Impressions:

• Love the commute. Two train stops with a 15 minute bike ride. As I pump hard to catch the train at the end of the day it feels like being a little kid running home from school. Much more thrilling than a car ride. Especially since I have to cross the track before the train to make it.
• Everyone at work seems to view my bike riding as an eccentricity of the highest order.
• Still enjoying the people. Very multi-ethnic in an Asian/Caucasian sense. At lunch time, the Indian IT crowd takes over the break room and different elements of the branding department wander forth to the cafeteria or nearby Asian restaurants for lunch. We’ve got a Korean woman married to a Chinese Vietnamese man, my boss is Chinese married to a Korean, my project manager is Chinese married to a white man. It looks like we’ve hired a new project manager whose last name seems Japanese. But, given the rate thus far, she’s probably white.
• It’s my very first ‘real’ cubicle experience. Fortunately, I have a big one, with a Mac G5, and cinema screen monitor. On Day 1 they gave me an Office Max catalog and told me to order what I need. Do you think an order for an Aeron chair will be ok?
• The design work is all immediate turn-around and not that exciting. The longest any designer has lasted so far is 9 months.

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• OTRdad is still here (Day 9 of a 12 day visit). We’ve done Palo Alto/Stanford and the San Francisco Modern Art Museum. He claims I (and my bro in Seattle) keep dragging him out for forced death marches (since we seem to have trouble finding the bus stops…).
• On Sunday we set forth with OTRdad to go on a whale watch trip with folk from Jrex’s lab. It was, in fact, supposed to be a day for bonding with other labs. Before we left, I told my Dad, “Here’s the persona for you today: dignified older gentleman. We can’t embarrass Jrex with our usual antics.” He nodded and asked, “Can I talk to people?” I laughed, “Only if you listen as much as you talk.” His persona was never tested. The Subaru we received back on Friday started whining and smoking as we hit the mountains. We turned around and spent the afternoon hiking to the Dish on Stanford’s campus instead. Turns out the whale boat never made it out of the bay. Even within the bay, people threw up due to high seas. They ended up hugging the shore and watching the seals. On our end, the Subaru was fixed within one day on Monday (they’d installed a faulty Power Steering Pump). No charge. Phew!
  

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One final item that sounds far worse than it is. I mentioned swimming in my last email. Well, I get to pay the piper for all that. I’ve already had a benign mole removed from my forehead. Since then, I’ve been good about my annual skin checks. The Menlo dermatologist removed two moles from my back two weeks ago. The 9 mm (!) mole was normal, but the 6 mm one has irregular cells. Thankfully, it’s not melanoma. They’re sending the path report to the house so my own private oncologist (I love him!) can check it out. I have an appointment in March to get it further excised. Sun-block, sun-block, sun-block, people! And hats! And gloves!