A Cat's guide to moving

Step 1: Load worldly belongings in 15 minutes from friend's parent's basement in haphazard manner filling only 1/3 of truck volume.
Step 2: Find second friend to share driving responsibilities so that important activities such as radio control, hydration & snacking, and blackberry mapping of route can be attended to.
Step 3: Make bathroom break on the New Jersey Turnpike and buy more liquids.
Step 4: Find local friend's parents to stay with the first night in town and then engage Friend #3 to move all worldly belongings into new abode.
Step 5. Slowly push items toward walls and loosely group items by color.
Step 6. Your Cat is now ready to start living a fabulous new life in Philadelphia. Thank you to all my friends - come visit...I may even have a bed by then.

Happy Valentine's Day 2008

There appears to have been some late-night gang signage in Palo Alto, CA.
Catherine and training friends from NY, London, and Johannesburg.
Catherine after going for a run today at lunch but before swimming in the pool...almost made me forget about the 10 hours of class.
Consultants at lunch between training sessions
The Valentine's artwork I surprised the class with this morning (they are MandMs)

First week of work

My first week at a "real" job has not seemed very real: I spent two days in New Jersey learning about benefits and then received my precious new toys: laptop and blackberry. My blackberry (also known as Ping) and I are still in the honeymooon phase. After New Jersey, we headed to Puerto Rico's El Concistador resort for the first year retreat. Above is the view from my balcony the first morning
One of the sets of pools in the side of the cliff the resport is built into
another view
In the distance is a small island I swam to from the larger private island (Palomino) owned by the resort, where the office organized a formal dinner on the beach with dancing and a limbo contest. (I ended up representing my new office)
Here is me after my first day of work with a throat losenge

Cats go to work?

Tomorrow morning I leave my parents' nest again. There will probably be fewer tears than when I was 18, but the transition into a new job (having absolutely nothing to do with what I spent 7.5 years of higher education studying), a new city (which I have heard is much safer than it used to be), and new friends (haha...they don't even know what is about to hit them) will be accompanied by the same exuberant anticipation.

Of course my final week in SF has not been without a few rallies around the adventure-pole and has included:

*acupuncture and Chinese herbs (I don't recognize a single ingredient - it must be awesome!)
*acroyoga: apparently a combination of acrobatics, yoga, and Thai massage
*and a flying trapeze class at the SF circus center

...with these three first-time experiences under my belt (including a long conversation with a young lady in clowning school but who also really interested in contortion), I feel ready for just about anything...even say, sailing catamarans in Puerto Rico on my new job's dime (probably even plural).
ladder up to the flying trapeze platform
another unwitting class-member

Fasting...

Objective:
Try out fasting for 24 h as a way of giving the digestive system a break and cleaning the "tubes"

Disclaimer:
Anyone who knows me, is aware that my emotional and physical balance is sensitive to the regular intake of food (read: When meals are late I often become cranky, snappy, and in extreme instances will lie down on the ground and cry). Taking this into account my fast consisted of half a piece of fruit 4 times during the day and lots of water.

Results:
My energy level was higher all day than usual and I had more free time (since I didn't have to find, prepare and eat food). I also wasn't weak as a result of not having eaten more than 400 calories in total. Nevertheless, I did think about food quite a bit, although I was surprised to find that the craving for food faded through the day - separating this emotional impulse from the feeling of physical hollowness that did persist.

Conclusion:
Not as bad as I had feared. It felt pretty good as eating adventures go, but there was not definite proof of improved cleanliness of the digetive system. I think next time I could manage just water (with lemon juice).

Music as a guide for life

Are some people so in tune with music that they are moved to tearful realizations about the meaning of life? Are whole life philosophies inspired by music? Alternatively, are there people who are genuinely apathetic to all music?

If so...what causes this spectrum of personal meaning derived from music? Are some people just more sensitive to nuanced lyrics or spectacularly funky base lines...or have some of us just not found "our artists"? ...and most importantly: Where am I on this scale - can I be getting more out of my music?

I then set out to understand more about what music means to those around me and the conversations ...:

*Particular songs can be associated with specific times/places/people in our lives. A song may trigger a brief sensory memory related to when you first heard it or emotions so overwhelming that you might vault over a couch and smash your hand on the stereo buttons to avoid listening further.

* Some people listen to music to feel an emotion they are not currently feeling. For example, listening to "Fuel" by Metallica first thing in the morning to get pumped.

* While others may use music to accentuate an emotion they are already experiencing. Like listening to love songs after a break-up.

* Some people like to listen to sad songs to feel an intense emotion, while others go out of their way to avoid sad songs because they don't want to feel unnecessarily sad or unhappy. What benefit do we get out of feeling intense emotions? do they make us feel more alive - more present? or can they result in self-absorption and being less present to the rest of the world?

...still pondering
My father just opened our broken refrigerator as an incentive for us all to go to bed. It smells like a gaint fart in here...geez dad.

What is that?

I was in the fresh fruits and vegitables section of a Chinese grocery store was surprised at how many were completely foreign to me. I picked out the strangest-looking ones and took them home with me...

Rambutans are tasty...very much like leechees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambutan

I made a dish with the lotus root and the black fungus. My family couldn't eat more than a few bites because of how bitter it was...I may have picked the wrong string of bulbous roots or maybe it just needed to be cooked longer...

To be honest, the rest rotted before I did anything with them, but this was fun and I would like to give each the attention they deserve in the future...with the liklyhood of several iterrations.





http://www.recipeland.com/recipe/22672/