Mine's bigger

An observation:

Stanley Cup (hockey)
America's Cup (sailing)
Sprint Cup (NASCAR)
Ryder Cup (golf)
World Cup (futbol)(and a lot of other things)

Rose Bowl
Pro Bowl
Super Bowl.

Put me in an ad.

A colleague told me that I was a perfect advertisement for the iPhone 4S. While sitting next to him at the Twins vs. Cubs at Target Field in Minneapolis, I:

Checked in at Target Field on Facebook. Checked the weather so I could report that it was 88 degrees.  Took a photo of the field and uploaded it, too. 
Texted the photo of the field to my brother. 
Used google to find out that the white 1965 flag represented when the Twins won the AL but lost to the Dodgers in the World Series. 
Looked up th capacity of Target Field (39,504) and the new Yankee Stadium (50,291)
Received a call from my dad, who called to tell me he'd run into the younger brother of my high school boyfriend. 
Emailed several times. 
Looked up the most common male names in the U.S. (James)
Updated one of my contacts. 
Found out that the Twins are last in the AL central, 8.5 games back (before they won the game today)
Texted with a friend about the morning's bar mitzvah. 
Took pictures of my group (using the reverse camera) and posted them on Facebook. 
Received a call from my cousin regarding dinner plans. 
Used Shazam to identify the song being played. 
Said "ice cream" to Siri so she could tell me where I could find nearby places to get some. 
Used the mapping feature to get directions back to the hotel. 

Yeah, it was a dull game.

Turning over a new leaf

I seem to be dealing with my breakup by eating a lot of pizza, toast, peanut butter, and ice cream.  So today I went to Berkeley Bowl determined to turn my eating habits around.  Here is the inventory:

• Zucchini
• Crookneck squash
• Tofu
• Tomatoes
• Corn on the cob (midwestern comfort food -- just husking it makes me happy)

• Bananas
• Strawberries
• Blueberries
• Mango

• Orange juice (for the screwdrivers)

I'm promising myself greens, salad fixings, and peaches in the future.

Not that I'm going to stop with the ice cream; I'll just have some healthy stuff in me first.

One of those lists

I'm home, sick today.  Therefore, I think I'll find myself working through this.  I know it's a good list because it has the sneezing panda cub on it.

Things I am taking to beat this cold

1. Zicam
2. Robitussin
3. Sudafed
4. Advair
5. Ibuprofen
6. Ocean nasal spray
   
7. Gelsemium (homeopathic)
8. Chinese herbs (left over from last year's trip)
9. Chicken soup

I think I'm winning.

Sunday, gloomy Sunday

Things to do on a Sunday afternoon when your mood matches the gray November weather:

• Wrap yourself in a wool shawl.
• Turn football on, then turn it off because you don't care about the teams. Repeat every 10 minutes.
• Drink a cup of tea.
• Read design magazines.
• Pay bills.
• Eat half a bag of chocolate chips. Whoops, they are white chocolate, which means they don't contain whatever in chocolate is supposed to be good for your mood.
• Go online to check the temperature outdoors in case it's actually sunny and warm.

Time to wake up

The universe has been shouting at me since that last post: Stop dreaming! "I dream of being active." Get over it! Get out of the house and go work out! Rejoin a hockey league -- you can do it midseason.

And, while I miss hockey, I am certain that if I started playing now I'd injure myself immediately. I mean, I play recreational hockey, but I'm not even at a recreational level of fitness. And that's the problem. I really don't like all that fitness stuff, except for how it makes me feel afterwards. I can walk for hours, given something to look at or listen to, but going to the gym? Sweating? I don't think so.

Things I can do instead of working out:

1. Read
   
2. Nap
   
3. Watch my latest Netflix video
   
4. Do a crossword puzzle
   
5. Do a sudoku
   
6. Knit
   
7. Nap
   
8. Paint my walls
   
9. Go online to play with paint colors on fictitious walls
   
10. Unpack boxes in my extra bedroom
    
11. Clean something
    
12. Write something
13. Get together with friends and sit around and talk
14. Get together with friends and sit around a table and play poker or some other game.

All that time I was working out with a trainer and going to yoga: it was because

• I was bored, and
  
• I had an appointment, had paid money, and appreciated having someone make decisions about what I was going to do next.
  

I'm shaking my fist at the universe right now, shouting, "Um ... well, yeah, you! I ... um...."

Culture shock

Things I miss about China:

• Elevator "door close" buttons that actually close the doors right away.
  
• The pork chop noodle soup from the massage place.
  
• Toothpicks provided with every meal.
  
• More substantial packets of sugar. Packets here seem to have less and less sugar every year.
  
• Prices. The 90 minute massage plus the above pork chop noodle soup plus any other food and drink I wanted at the spa, including on-the-spot squeezed apple-cucumber juice ... cost $15. 
  

Things that are really different here:

• Carbs: Aside from rice noodles, we ate very few carbs. "Chinese food" is not served with rice there. Walking through the grocery store today, I was amazed at how many flour products we have.  
  
  
• Litigation. A number of us noted as we walked through the Forbidden City that there were many ways to trip and hurt yourself on the irregularly-paved surface. That in the US the surface would have been fixed or the intentional variation (such as grooves in the surface) would have been cordoned off so that no one would get hurt. Instead, we had to watch our steps. Kind of liberating. 
  
  
• News. The Kelloggs salmonella recall has been an eye opener. My first thought was actually, "So American. In China there is so much central control that there were no things like food recalls." My second thought was, "Ah, right, control of the news."
  
  
• Inauguration burnout. While I was there, sick in bed, I watched hours of the BBC and CNN. Loving every bit of American political news. But once I returned it took me less than 24 hours to feel that the inauguration preparation is overhyped.
  
  
• Traffic. I feel like I have PTSD from the Chinese traffic. It was remarkably bad. Like nothing I've experienced here, even as a rush-hour commuter. In Shanghai, a three-lane freeway has four lanes because people are trying to take advantage of every spare inch to get ahead. And it's not four lanes of forward motion: it's four lanes of weaving (at one mile an hour), taking advantage of that every inch. A friend rightly pointed out that the traffic would move just fine if people stopped changing lanes. Here, I was driving down San Pablo and was behind about four cars that weren't moving. Perhaps there was a stoplight. My anxiety level went through the roof as I suddenly believed I would be stuck there for hours.
  

... and more

Today:

• A double decker bus to Stanley Market (top level)
• A minibus from Stanley Market (why don't more people take these?)
• The Mid-Level Escalator (all the way to the top this time, then walking down)
• A few taxis.

All I have left is a red minibus (not sure if I can figure those out) and an electronic trolley (tomorrow morning?).

I am a transportation geek.

Hong Kong, high and low

I took four forms of transportation today:
1. The subway
2. The ferry (Star Ferry)
3. The funicular (Peak Tram)
4. The Mid-Levels Escalator

Is Mercury retrograde?

Today I struggled with technology.

• I changed the message of the day on our intranet. After I did, the front page changed entirely -- to a warped version of the page I last saw three years ago in beta and that we never implemented.

• I tried to get on a Google group. I was told I was part of it. I couldn't find it and got lost within that part of the Google universe.

• I was directed by a colleague in very specific terms to a particular website about our travel policy. I just could not find it.
  

• When I got to the gym, there was only one elliptical machine open. I was at this point absolutely certain it was broken. It wasn't ... yet.

• While working out, I went to play a podcast on my iPod, and it crashed. Big time. Normally I can reset my iPod when this happens, but no luck. I worked out to the nearby spin class' music and hoped the iPod would wake up. Fifteen minutes later, I managed to reset it.

• After my workout, I waited for the "workout summary" data to show up on the little display on the elliptical. I find it satisfying to see how ... uh, little or much ... work I've done. Instead of showing me the details, it just said, "workout summary ... workout summary ... workout summary...." No data.

Fly wrangling

I got home to find a lot of flies in my apartment. I'm not a bug squisher, so I wanted to eliminate the flies without handling them. Hoping they would kill themselves in my halogen torchiere was a bit too passive, and my cat had tired of chasing them around. So, of course, I went online.

I found a great discussion of home remedies for houseflies. I decided it was too late for the water-and-a-penny solution, so I went for the milk-vinegar-and-corn-oil solution. They warn that it shouldn't coagulate, and mine did. And the flies ignored it.

Then two thoughts occurred to me:

1. Take off the (faulty) window screens and let them fly free, and
2. Use that information you might have learned if you paid attention to that article about how flies anticipate being swatted. 

The result is my own, personal, patent pending new home remedy for houseflies:

1. Make sure there are no flies in your bedroom.
2. Put the cat in the bedroom and shut the door. (This is to make sure the cat doesn't follow a fly out of a window and to try to preserve any last bits of respect your cat may have for you.)
3. Open all your windows wide.
4. Pick a window with a fly on it and pop the screen out, being careful not to allow the screens to fall three stories to the ground.
5. If the fly(ies) decide not to fly out the window, use swatting knowledge to guide them there.
6. Repeat until you or the flies surrender.
7. Replace the screens, which will inevitably be on the western side of the room, enabling you to be blinded as you try to fit them into the frame.

So I spent about a half hour running around my apartment waving my arms trying to guide flies out windows. It's actually rather satisfying: they look so right and graceful and innocent zooming in an s-curve off into the open air. And you can think, "Ah, one less fly!" For me, at least.
Food for all those spiders I capture and put on the fire escape.

Getting rid of a sofa

Room & Board has called to say my new sofa is ready.  Now, how do I get rid of my old sofa?

1.  Rumor has it that furniture deliverers will, if provided with a generous tip, take away the old sofa.  I called R&B to ask, and of course they officially said no.  How do I find out what the unofficial answer is?  I put a question on Yahoo questions ("Will Room & Board delivery take my old sofa?") and received one answer: Give it to the Salvation Army.

2.  The Salvation Army is a pickup machine.  You dial an 800 number to schedule a pickup.  However, they don't do stairs, and I'm on the third floor.  (Goodwill doesn't do sofas at all.)

3.  Find someone to take my sofa downstairs so the Salvation Army will take it away.  The problem is, who?  I don't want to impose on my friends.  Pick up a couple of day laborers and only give them 10 minutes of work?

4.  Give it for free to someone in my building.  No takers.  (I also asked for volunteers to carry the thing down the stairs so the Salvation Army could take it.)

5.  My neighbor's housekeeper takes used household goods.  However, she didn't want a whole sofa.

6.  My neighbor's Little Sister needed a new sofa.  Once again, not this one at this time.

7.  A colleague is planning to move into her own apartment.  However, that's not for a few more months, and there's nowhere to store it.

8.  Put it on craigslist "free items."

9.  Put it on freecycle.com.

Those last two didn't pan out, but in the process I saw "moving/labor" on craigslist.  Found a dude who said he could do same day pickup and hauling, would charge me $50.  At this point, I'm desperate, so I tell him I'll call him when I get home.
And then I get home and craigslist has paid off (or maybe it was freecycle).  A guy named William had just left me an email about the sofa, proactively pointing out that he has a truck (per the ad, I did require that they bring one). He said he and a buddy would be over in an hour.  A sweet young guy.  It turns out he has a loft in Jack London Square and is throwing a big party; he want somewhere for people to sit and/or sleep.  That's a perfect use for this indestructible but not the most attractive sofa.  He and his buddy were super-pro at negotiating and navigating how to get an enormous sofa out my door and down two flights of stairs.  I complimented him on his comfort with the whole thing, and he said he used to have a band, that he could pack and lift and load anything.  My sofa has the perfect new home.

Losing my mind (well, one-third of it)

I have a lot of ideas, and when I want to express them I create verbal lists, even in everyday conversation. I often say things like, "I have a few thoughts on this. One, I think blah blah.... Two.... Three...." On the way to lunch with a new colleague, I said, "I only know three restaurants in this area: an Indian restaurant, Jupiter, and ..." and it was gone. "... I guess I only know two restaurants in this area." My new colleague cracked up, thinking me a comedian. And it was funny, until later in our lunch I tried to run through another list of three and could only come up with two, which I covered more subtly. And it happened again later.

Sunday I went to the store to get three things. On the way there, I recited them to myself. Except I could only think of two. Thought hard, thought hard ... and remembered the third. And forgot one of the other two. It took me most of the way to the store to get all three to stay in one place in my mind. It was like herding mental cats. Or mentally herding cats.

Where did that third go? Did I learn something that took the brain storage that I needed to remember the third item in a list?