But enough about you

Someone just canceled a 90-minute meeting. so I have an unexpected chunk of free time. Since I don't seem to make time to post here under normal circumstances, I'll take advantage of this boon by posting now.

Life has generally been really good lately.

Work: I've been at Google a little over a year now and I'm still thoroughly enjoying it. I'm continuing to learn at a rapid clip and I'm a lot more useful to my team with each passing quarter. I can't do justice to describing what a paradise it is for an engineer to work at Google - not because of all the nice perks, as welcome as yesterday's massage was - but because of the incredible infrastructure and tools we have available to help us do our jobs. Google gives you a fulcrum and a really big lever and then asks you to move the world - and you do!

I usually get to work between 8:30 and 9:30am, and leave at about 5:30pm. I eat breakfast and lunch at work. So with the time at work and the 15-minute commute, there goes 45 hours of my week. I'm really happy when I'm at work. If the rest of my life were less interesting, I'd spend more time here.

Family: Jon and I are doing really well. I don't like to use my blog as a platform for dissecting partner relationships, so I'm not going to go into any details about what's working and what isn't, but it's mostly working and we're pretty happy. Jon is obsessed with playing go and spends one night a week at the Go Center, as well as playing lunchtime games at work and playing online with people around the world.

Elliott is three and a half and getting to be a pretty interesting little person. He finished his first year of preschool and will go to preschool for two more years before starting kindergarten. We're thinking he'll probably go to private school but that's not decided yet. He's reading lots of books, playing lots of "soccer" in the back yard with Jon, taking swimming lessons with Laura, going to summer camp, getting skinned knees, refusing to eat 80% of the foods he meets (but eating the other 20% voraciously), forgetting to ask nicely, building forts, requesting extra snuggles, considering stopping sucking his thumb, playing computer games, and making really dumb jokes over and over again. He's a good kid. I have a bunch of pictures stacked up that I keep not posting to elliottcook.com - I'll try to get to that soon.

My Dad is biking a lot, trying not to spend too much time at work, and enjoying the hot summer days. My Mom is recovering from a long-term vision problem and doing some genealogy research.

Myself: I don't have a ton of free time during the week. I come home, make dinner, hang out with Elliott and put him to bed, and by then it's 8:30pm and Jon wants to play go. :) Sometimes we do that or watch a TV show on DVD. I'm trying to read more this year than I did last year, so some evenings I do that. I've recently taken up beadwork again and I'll be going to a wire wrapping class at a local bead store next week. I've played too much Eschalon (a single-player RPG with a Mac version) lately. I'm still slogging through paperwork associated with my divorce, which is not quite complete yet. And of course, I like to hang out with friends, when I get a chance, which is not often enough.

So that's why I never update this blog any more.

And what about you, dear readers? What are you up to lately?

Just spent seven hours at work on a Saturday playing Rock Band. I'm mostly lead guitar, but by the end my hands were tired so I tried out drumming and singing as well. The singing was not as much of a disaster as I feared.

I'm now solid on guitar at the medium level, and shaky but ok on hard.

Why is it that whenever you pick a mystery set list, it includes Green Grass and High Tides?

I've got a new hobby/addiction. Rojonoir, I know you play. Anybody else out there willing to play go with a total beginner? I've been playing against Jon, but he's still winning handily even with a 9-stone handicap - and he claims he's not that good. So I'm easy pickings. :)

The best party game I've played lately is Pictureword. I'm going to describe it here so that I can remember how it works when I need it. I was introduced to this game at Johanna's wedding earlier this month.

You need a group of about 8-12 people. Everybody sits in a circle. You also need a huge stack of scratch paper -- a quarter of a sheet of 8.5x11 is a good size. Everybody gets a stack of paper -- one sheet for each person in the group. So if you have 10 people, everybody gets 10 sheets of paper in their stack. Also, everybody gets a pen.

Now, everyone thinks of a word or phrase and writes it on the top sheet of their stack. When everyone is done, everyone passes their stack to the person on their right. Each person looks at the word on the stack they just received and then puts that sheet on the bottom of the stack. Then they draw a picture of that word or phrase.

When ready, everybody passes to the right again. This time, each person looks at the drawing on the stack they just received and then puts that sheet on the bottom of the stack. Then they write the word or phrase the drawing represents.

Keep passing the stacks, alternating drawing and writing words, until all the paper is used up. At that point you should get back the stack that you initiated. Now you can look through all the words and pictures and laugh at how the concept drifted as it went around the circle.

This game is great for generating refrigerator art.

I've been craving a good RTS lately. I used to buy every new version of Age of Empires and all the expansions.

Travian doesn't quite scratch the itch to click-click-click my way to frenzied victory, but it's an interesting take on the genre. I'm still in the "beginner protection" phase of the game until early tomorrow morning. After that, I will probably get rushed by more advanced players and be clobbered, but I've had fun so far.

Anyone else want to start up a village and make an alliance with me?

I ascended this weekend, for the fourth time ever, and for the first time as a barbarian. I was hoping this would mean the end of the recent obsession, but no. I'm continuing to start new random games, even though the RNG is frowning on me lately... for example, I just started a caveman who stepped on a magic trap first turn. I was blinded and surrounded by grid bugs, and I didn't want to hit Slasher by mistake, so I just had to sit there and get zapped until he dispatched them for me. I survived that with a few HP to spare. What will happen next? Why do I still care?

Ascended: two Valkyries, a Wizard, and now a Barbarian. Someday I'll complete the set. I hope I don't do it all in 2007 since that would imply that I'll have lost my job, my family, all my friends, and everything else while I stared bleary-eyed at the 80x24 window of nethack-y goodness.

So far today:

• I slept in.
  
• I played nethack on my laptop in bed.
  
• My loving husband brought me breakfast in bed.
  
• We went out for brunch with King/Alts, but there was a long wait for a table, so Kristin and I browsed at a music store while the Dads took the kids to the playground.
  
• Brunch was delicious and the lines for the buffet tables were a lot shorter than last year.
  
• The kids behaved themselves!
  
• Elliott and I made homemade play-doh.
  
• I'm listening to my new music and it's almost nap time.
  

So far, best Mother's Day ever!

Happy Mother's Day to my Mom, Chris' Mom Cyndy, Nonny, and all the other mommies I know! I hope you're having a good day.