Special Guest

Work is going well. I'm still finding my way around and my boss was gone most of last week at E3, so I was pretty much on my own. I managed to fill my time, but I had to work to find things to do, read, etc. Hopefully this work will be a bit better. I already have a number of meetings set up to talk to my co-workers to see how we all fit into the bigger picture around here. They should be informative.

As for non-work stuff; Julia went to visit a friend on Friday and stayed overnight with her so they could pal around on Saturday. She had a good time going to a farmers' market and picking through her friend's garden for things to transplant into our new garden.

While she was gone I went to see Hellboy II and took care of some things around the house.

My friend Brian from Tampa came to town in the middle of last week for a conference. It wrapped up on Saturday afternoon, so I picked him up from his hotel, we picked up comics, then we had dinner at Mashiko in West Seattle and went to see Hancock in Factoria. I'll be interested to see the extended version of the movie. I'm sure it will explain a lot more than the theatrical release, but overall I thought it was okay. It sort of lost its way half-way through, but it was still interesting to see a super-hero movie that wasn't constrained by all sorts of comic continuity.

Sunday we had breakfast down at the Farmers' Market downtown, which is always good. Julia wanted to pick up some fresh fruit and veggies for smoothies, too, so it worked out well. Afterward Brian and I went to the Mariners game; they were playing the Cleveland Indians (Brian's home state from growing up). The Mariners lost, but Brian was happy that the Indians won, so we'll call it even. Probably the nicest part of the game was how easy it was to get to and from the stadium from our house: short car ride, handy free parking within a 5 minute walk to the park, and almost no traffic because we didn't have to take any of the main roads. Nice.

After the game we took Brian to see the new house. They're still busy with painting the interior, so a lot of the details were covered up to protect them from paint, but he got a good look at the big picture. Oh, and they'd started on the landscaping, which is pretty exciting. If things go according to plan the house should be done-done in the next couple of weeks, then we check it over to make sure everything's correct (then they change anything that's wrong), and we move in by the end of August.

For dinner we went to a thai place down on Alki. The dinner was decent, but Alki was really hopping. That's not a surprise considering it was a nice, warm, sunny Sunday. It was really a nice capper to the weekend.

I wish I'd been able to spend some of today and tomorrow during the day hanging out with Brian, but fortunatley/unfortunately I have a job. We'll hang out tonight and tomorrow night, then I'll run him to the airport Wednesday morning. One of those nights we're going to see the new Batman movie. I'm looking forward to that.