Daily Life: Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup

Okay, lunch was a Vietnamese Chicken Noodle soup. Except, uh, I have no clue what made it Vietnamese. It was chicken and noodles and vegetables. It looked like ordinary chicken noodle soup. It tasted like ordinary chicken noodle soup. Maybe there was magic in it that I just didn't see. Maybe naming it Vietnamese soup was a calculated marketing ploy. I guess it is just hard to say. It was good soup though and that is what matters.

My brain was refusing to settle into anything specific this morning. It was mostly just merrily jumping from topic to topic to topic, all with minimal intervention from me. I am going to blame a good night sleep, a vividly visual dream, and an early awakening into a beautiful California dawn.

I find that I often use the word beautiful to describe the weather here. I largely do that because it is true. This area has just astounding weather. Even our bad weather is beautiful. We have a tight and temperate weather range here, with the only real variation being the occasional hot spell and the occasional long drenching winter storms. Between the two of them though they probably only account for about two months of weather, maybe less. That leaves us with ten other months where, for one reason of the other, it's beautiful. It is a terrible burden, but I like to think we bear it with grace.

I came into work early this morning with the intention of leaving early and running a few small errands. I had planned on running them last night, but once I got home I came to the conclusion that I was done for the day and spent a very nice and very quiet evening at home. It was one of those evenings where I scarcely bothered to turn on the television and never turned on the stereo. I read deeply into "Royal Assassin" by Robin Hobb. I had a great telephone call with TR. Then I drifted deeply into sleep and dreamed the very vivid and visual dream.

I've been turning something over in my mind for the last couple of days. I am thinking about "telling other people's stories". Often, in my journal, I restrict the stories I tell to my own stories, in part because I am not really comfortable taking other people's business "onto the street". What people I know are experiencing or have experienced are some pretty great stories. I encourage them to tell them, to write them down, to surrender them to the world, but most folks decline for one reason or the other. What I have been thinking about and mulling over and may write more on later is this - is it appropriate to tell someone else's story? If so, what are the parameters within which it is appropriate? What are the protocols for telling other people's stories? I don't have any answer today, just mulling the thought around.

Daily Life: A Beautiful Friday

Today was simply a beautiful day. I woke to a beautiful dawn and the symphony of birds, all riding on a cool breeze. I moved smoothly through the day. I lounged in the morning. I went to lunch and a movie (the new Star Trek - very good, I was actually impressed), then a light dinner with my nephew. A quiet evening at home, a simple phone call, then an episode of Myth Busters I had stored on the DVD. I am going to watch Doll House in about twenty minutes and then curl up with a book and read into the night. I am planning on heading up to Sacramento tomorrow AM, then back to San Jose in the mid to late afternoon, with a planned dinner with friends on Saturday night. The weather is perfectly beautiful California spring here in San Jose and the night is equally as beautiful. I love this kind of day.

Daily Life: My Restive Mood Continues

I woke this morning in that same restive mode that I ended yesterday in. It dawned on me this morning that there may be a correlation with the weather. Over the last four days our temperature here has gone from 95 (Monday) to low 47 last night (Wednesday). That is a pretty impressive 48 degree temperature swing. According to the weather channel we are going to spend the next couple of days, through the weekend, in the high sixties and low seventies, but with sunshine.

I wrote extensively about Sunday earlier in the week - that was just a dang good day, all in all. I think that day has cast a shadow that is flowing across the entire week (in a good way). My restive mood is not a bad mood, it is just a restive mood and I can just roll with that. I think part of what may have fueled the mood as well was the deliberate decision on my part to not do very much as we moved through the heat wave. In life I have certainly learned that you do not fight the weather - you roll with the weather, you respect the weather, you accept the weather. The weather is the tiger and you are the tail as far as that relationship goes.

My thoughts were wondering all over the place as I started the morning and made that commute in. I drove down Williams and stopped at the coffee shop near Williams and Moorpark and saw a near collision between a big white truck and a small car. The small car was moving along at a good clip and the truck make a turn into a parking lot, but the driver of the truck made the turn without hitting his brakes - he just kind of slowed down in the lane and let the truck roll down to a slow enough speed to make the turn and the small car never noticed until they were right on the truck and then they did a hard brake and a sharp jolt to the side to dodge it. It would have been one of those pointless accidents where both drivers contributed. The truck driver should have signaled and the car driver should have been paying more attention.

I got my coffee and headed up Lawrence Expressway, listening to NPR for part of the while (the troubles of the auto industry), and then I switched over to the CD player and started listening to the Indigo Girls new album "Poseidon and the Bitter Bug" (which was released a few weeks ago - March 24, 2009). I really like it. I have listened through it a couple of times and plan on plugging in the ear phones and listening to it some more when the morning meetings pass by and the afternoon calm settles in. The commute in was mostly smooth, but my mind was all over the place, for a wide variety of reasons, having imaginary conversations, musing on things that often had nothing to do with nothing.

There was one particularly beautiful sight this morning. As I came up Lawrence (which runs north-south) I could see the mountains to the north-east of San Jose. They had clouds spilling over them in dark shades of gray. It was quite striking.

Then, just past Lawrence and 101 there was a three car accident that had traffic a little tangled. Once I got past the accident I got stuck behind a mosquito fighter of a car that was leaving a wonderful blue trail of gasoline smelling smoke behind it. Then I drove by the Sunnyvale dump, with the wondrous scent of methane filling the air. It was a short tour of bad smells!

I am spending most of the morning in teleconferences (of the type that I refer to as "listen meetings") where my primary role is to listen to the teleconference and keep an ear out for any interconnecting pieces that might impact my operations and to serve as an information resource if any questions in my sphere of influence arise. I am going to spend some time today (and perhaps tonight) exploring this restive mood I am in. Though I suspect the primary drivers behind it are the physical restrictions due to the bad foot and the changes in weather, there may be something else underlying it. Either way, it is a good excuse to be introspective today.

Daily Life: It Was Hot, Real Hot

Yesterdays temperature hit 95 in San Jose, breaking a 103 year old
record high. Do we get a prize?

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Daily Life: Wild Mushroom Soup

It's a quiet and productive day here at work. The morning was a four
hour set of back to back meetings that went fairly well. The afternoon
calendar is clear of meetings so I will spend most of it working on
the project that so engrossed me yesterday afternoon.

It's slated to be another hot day here, with temps up in the low
nineties in San Jose. Lunch was a particularly good wild mushroom and
rice soup, washed down with a bottle of Pelegrino. Then, a little time
to write this entry and I am going to read the Mercury News on my
Kindle. Techno-Boy!

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