Monday, November 23, 2009

Playtime and alpacas and sculptures, oh my!

We had a fun weekend this weekend. On Friday night Dina had a scrapbooking event, so I got to hang out with the boys, and I also had a chance to play around with recording a bass part in GarageBand for a little while. I also watched an episode of Fringe, which I am totally hooked on after watching the first four episodes.

On Saturday morning Caden and Rohan woke me up early, so I got up with them and did the morning routine. When Dina got up a little while later, we all hung out for a while, then Dina left to run a bunch of errands while I took the boys out to a park to play. Gotta enjoy these days of fairly nice weather while we have them!

That night Dina's mom and our niece babysat the boys while Dina and I had a date night. We went to our friend Kamini's place for wine, food, and fun. There's a group of friends that has a "wine night" once a month at a different person's house each time, and although we don't make it every month, we like to attend when we can, because it's always a good time! Dina and I even did karaoke for a song, which is unheard of for us. (The song was "California Dreamin'", if you were wondering.) It was past midnight when we got home, so we thanked our babysitters and got some sleep.

The next day we got together with Dina's mom, her brother and his wife, daughter, and in-laws, and went to the open house of Spirit Song Alpacas, an alpaca farm near Lindstrom, MN.

Alapacas are pretty cool creatures. They're very docile, and very social, much like sheep, but are much more intelligent than sheep. The kids absolutely loved getting close to and touching the alpacas, who say hello by touching noses. I think someone got a couple pictures of kids touching noses with alpacas, which I'm sure are cute enough to be nearly illegal. This farm actually spins the fiber shorn from the alpacas into their own yarn, so they showed that process as well. Pretty cool.

After checking out that place, we went down the road to Sunrise River Alpacas. Another alpaca farm, as you probably guessed. This place had more alpacas, but wasn't as welcoming, so we didn't stay too long.

From there we drove to the Franconia Sculpture Park in Franconia, MN. That place is very cool. It's a free outdoor sculpture garden on a large chunk of land, so some of the pieces of art are really quite massive. Some of the pieces were your typical modern art head-scratchers...


...but there were also some that were very cool:


By the time we were done there it was dark (which is happening pretty early these days) so we headed home for dinner and the bedtime routine.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Big Thing #1 That I Haven't Blogged About

The three of you that actually read this blog probably already know this, but I really should blog it for future reference in case I forget the details. :-) I traveled to London recently! I've slowly been writing the blog entry, and now I'm finally done, so up it goes!

From October 25 - 28 I took a business trip to London. I presented at a transfer of information conference for our EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Asia) services and sales people. My purpose was to present the tech details of the new release of the software I've been working on.

DAY ONE:
I flew out on Saturday night (left at 10:30 pm), and was sitting next to a guy who was on the first flight of his life, traveling from Louisiana to the UK to marry a woman he met playing Second Life. Yeah, really. He was a nice guy, but didn't let me sleep as much as I'd have liked. (Side note: he was an inspector for water treatment facilities, and he said that he'd NEVER drink the water that is processed by those places.)

I arrived at Heathrow airport in London at about noon. Three of my coworkers were on the same flight, so we met up to head to our hotel, the Hilton London Metropole. We took a train to Paddington Station and walked about six blocks from there to our hotel.

After getting settled in the other guys were going out to a rugby match with some other Oracle folks that night, but I went to visit my friend Tony and his family up in Milton Keynes, so I took the tube to Euston Square station, then a train from Euston to Milton Keynes, about a 45 minute train ride. Did I mention that public transportation in the UK is awesome? I had dinner with Tony, his wonderful wife Kate, and their fun little 6-month-old Jack. We chatted for a while, then it was back to the train station and back to London. I was pretty tired by then, and at one point I thought I'd gotten on the train headed AWAY from London rather than toward it. Luckily I was wrong, and I arrived back at Euston with no problems. I made my way back to my hotel room and crashed.

DAY TWO:
I woke early on Monday morning to meet the other Oracle guys for breakfast in the hotel. The breakfast was fantastic - a buffet of English breakfast food, plus a bunch of fruit and breads of various sorts. After eating we took a commuter train out to Reading, about a half-hour train ride, which was where the Oracle office was actually located. A 20 minute bus ride from the train stop brought us to the front door of the office. I didn't actually present that day, so I spent the day talking to other people I knew and putting some polish on my presentation.

After the conference was done, we took the train back to Paddington and got changed to go out to eat. One of the senior sales guys who lives in London took about a dozen of us out to Maroush Gardens, a Lebanese restaurant. I'd never eaten Lebanese, but it was awesome. It's very similar to Greek food. The sales guy knows the owner of this place, so they kept bringing piles and piles of delicious food and bottles of tasty wine. It was nearly midnight by the time we got back to the hotel, and I was absolutely stuffed. Some of the guys wanted to go hit a pub, but I was too bushed, so I headed to my room and crashed after catching up on some email and voice mail.

DAY THREE:
Tuesday turned out to be the big day of the trip. The morning started out much like Monday, breakfast at the hotel, train and bus to the office. I didn't do much that morning, but I presented for a few hours that afternoon, and the presentation went great! There were lots of great questions, and people seemed really excited with some of the features in our new version.

After the conference was done I headed back to the hotel with Steven, one of the guys that works on the same product I do. We decided to head over to Piccadilly Circus, because he wanted to go to this store called Fortnum & Mason. I'd never been to a store like this. It's basically an upper-crust department store, with departments varying from grocery to stationery to crystal, all of it very high-end product. Apparently the Royal Family does a lot of shopping at this store. I bought a box of imported Iranian saffron for my wife.

After that, we stopped at a bookstore; I wanted to pick up a copy of The Gathering Storm, but alas, it was sold out. I should have expected that. So Steven and I wandered up to Soho, and ended up at a great little pub called The Golden Lion. We had a couple of pints of beer and split a beef pub pie, which was pretty good. Then we got a text from another group of Oracle guys. They had reservations at a place called Gaucho, an Argentinian steakhouse. This was just a few blocks away, back near Piccadilly, so we walked over there.

Wow, what a meal. We started out with ceviche appetizers, moved to samplers of four big cuts of steak with a bunch of sides, and then had the ice cream dessert. The wine and cocktails were flowing, and we had a cute and friendly waitress, so it was a fun time. We were there until the place closed at 11pm, and then we decided to hit the streets since it was our last night there. We tried to go to the nearby Absolut Ice Bar, but it was closed. While we wandered we were approached by people trying to lure us into "private parties" at certain clubs, which was pretty funny. We ended up going to a club called Tiger Tiger, a place with very loud but not horrible music. There were six of us, and we each bought a round of either drinks or shots, so...yeah...a lot of alcohol. It was about 2:30 am when we finally stumbled out of the place and found taxis home. I vaguely remember haggling with the taxi driver about how much we'd have to pay to get back to our hotel...I think I got a good deal. :-)

It was 3:00 by the time I was back in my room, and I knew the next morning was going to be rough, because I had a 9:30 am flight back to the US. So I packed as much of my stuff as I could, laid out the clothes I'd wear the next morning, set my alarm for 5:30, and hit the pillow hard.

DAY FOUR:
I woke slowly with a slight hangover with the light coming in the window seeming too bright. Far too bright, in fact. Looking at the alarm clock, it showed 7:30 am! I had overslept by TWO HOURS and was in very real danger of missing my flight. I jumped out of bed, threw on my clothes, tossed the rest of my stuff into my suitcase, and headed out. Luckily I could do the express hotel checkout, so that didn't slow me down. I ran down to Paddington station to get my train to Heathrow. I bought my ticket and jumped on the train, and finally had a chance to sit down and take a breath. When I got to Heathrow I checked in and made my way through security. On my way to my gate I saw a bookstore - and they had a copy of The Gathering Storm! I picked that up and headed to my gate just in time; they were just finishing boarding. If ANYTHING had gone wrong on my way to the plane, I would have missed it.

After we were in the air they brought us a breakfast meal, which was actually pretty good. With food in my stomach, I succumbed to the residual alcohol in my system and lack of sleep, and totally crashed. A few hours later I woke up and chatted with the guy next to me, an older man who turned out to be a wealth advisor for ultra-rich clients in Europe and the Middle East. (He was in coach only because he had to get a last-minute ticket to the States to attend a Bollywood movie premiere in New York for a client of his.) Pretty interesting guy. I tried to watch Transformers 2 on the plane, but it was so bad I turned it off...instead I watched an episode of Fringe to see what that show was like. Turns out it's damn good, and I'll have to watch the rest of the episodes.

I arrived in Detroit and went through customs, then went to my gate for my connecting flight to Minneapolis. After a short wait it was announced that the flight was delayed by TWO HOURS. Sigh. I talked to my wife on the phone for a while and read some of The Gathering Storm while I waited. Finally it was time to board, and I was off to home.

I was pretty exhausted by the time I got home, but it was worth it. London is a really fun place to visit, and I definitely plan on returning. At the same time, being gone reminded me how much I love my family and the place I live, so I was glad to be home.

Coming Soon: Big Thing #2 That I Haven't Blogged About...