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The 2011 work holiday party was at a restaurant literally a few hundred feet from our main buildings across a field.  Most people walked.  The party included workers from field offices and even housekeeping.  I wonder if the food tasted better knowing they’d not have to clean up for once.  The mingling rooms had well-stocked bars and a swarm of servers hustled things on us more aggressively than I’m used to:

Server: Would you like a bacon-wrapped scallop?
Me: No thank you.
Server: Why not?
Me: I don’t like scallops.
Server: These are good, and wrapped in bacon.
Me: No thank you.
Server: All your friends had one.  Are you saying they have bad taste?
Me: No *takes scallop*
Server: Good move.

I still don’t like scallops.  Either that or the taste of douchebag rubbed off on mine.

The crowd shifted like a flock of Arctic Terns identifying surface fish when the main dining room opened.  The line was long enough that it collapsed into a zigzag like we were waiting for a roller coaster.  The line for pasta and the line for seafood line merged despite going opposite directions confusing many vegetarians and forming a human traffic circle in which a few people got stuck.  Someone I passed on the way to the Philly wraps was still there when I returned later for fiesta tacos.  I wonder how long it took for them to realize they had right of way being on the inside of the circle.

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Yesterday was the first day for a new secretary that had caught wind of the bounty I had provided who approached me today:

Her: Terry, the snack room’s empty.  When does it get restocked?
Me: Snack room?
Her: Yes, where all the food was yesterday.
Me: That’s not a snack room, that’s a storage room in the R&D lab.
Her:  And the food?
Me: I brought that in.
Her: Oh… Well, thank you, I guess.

I wonder how many people have a terribly skewed perception of my firm’s work environment based on her retelling of the awesome snack room she encountered on her first day.

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I warned my coworkers that any extra food from my party would be brought into work today.  After five trips from my car, these leftovers made it to our break room.  People seemed happy at the choice offered between cake, cookies, truffles, crackers and cheeses, and chips but the biggest star were the meatballs.  I brought in about four and a half pounds of meatballs and the first meatball sandwich was consumed at around 7:30 AM with the crock pot still cold.  The last meatball was consumed a little bit after 10.  I never considered a meatball sandwich a breakfast food but obviously other more avant garde stomachs had.  I brought this up to boss who had an idea on reflection:

Boss: Meatballs are essentially tiny meatloaves.  Meatloaf is one of the kings of comfort food.  Mondays are stressful and people want release from that and latch to things that most seem like comfort food.

I like that explanation even though I’m pretty sure it’s utter malarkey.

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I chose brownies as my baked good of the week for my return to active employment and sent out my standard 15 recipient email to say they were in.  Later that day, there was still some brownie remaining when I saw a coworker return to his work station with a Doritos grab bag.

Me: Didn’t like the brownies?
Coworker: They’re great, but I didn’t want something as calorie dense.
Me: I think a home-made brownie will stack up well against that chip bag.  *look at nutrition information* I think this bag of chips has as many calories in it as a 2″ x 2″ piece of brownie.
Coworker: Oh, I didn’t know they were that close.  Hey <other coworker>, did you hear what Terry said?  They’re not that bad for you.
Coworker #2 Whose Mouth was Full of Brownie: That’s a plus.

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Instantaneous anger of the esoteric could be considered my bailiwick as I’ve gotten angry over corn napkins, the pronunciation of pagan holidays, photosynthesis and now most recently the discrete nature of most foods. Sticking to “stop eating when you reach a point where you won’t be hungry again for a bit” has helped but has led to some odd portion sizings and today I got mad that I couldn’t have 4.5 chicken strips and 2/3rds of an orange as that would be my target portion size for a lunch. Going from having 21 tater tots to 18 was fine but 12 to 9 was much more noticeable despite being the same absolute gap. I can’t have a 1.5 egg breakfast sandwich but 2 is too much and 1 is too few so I’ve switched from sausage to bacon to pork roll and back to bacon after the chef at work started giving me double slices. I ordered a chicken salad last week and wanted 6 oz of chicken not 5 or 8 and upon going with the 5 had some salad left over as I hadn’t considered that’d I’d receive enough croutons to build a small bunker. Foods more amenable to continuous change tend to be grains that tend to put me to sleep or liquids which leads to weird cases where Max gets 2 of my 12 oz of corn chowder soup.

Strangely, other things ignore this trend as while I can limit myself to 3 Oreos at the end of dinner, I’ve not been able to master only having 4 Fig Newtons. I’m pretty good with having 3 oz of cheese but having 2 oz of corn chips proves elusive. So there is my first-world-problem temper tantrum of the week.

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Scout events and meet-ups share a common thread in that getting everyone together and on the same page is half the fight and as of this morning all the appropriate charges had appeared on my American Express statement so I looked forward to watching the rest of the weekend reveal itself.

During preliminary planning, some people asked what our first activity was going to be, I said lunch at 11:00 am and some thought this to be a waste of a morning.  When it was 10:50 AM and the last person got out of bed and into a car to go to Hofbräuhaus I considered the schedule reasonable.  The restaurant either had a requirement that servers have a C cup or access to a stock of push-up bras that could give an ascetic stripper cleavage and the menu was 50% schnitzel and sausage by total count.  I got a cheese platter that consisted of 2 shot glasses worth of cheese but enough pretzel to construct a life raft and the pair to my left got “Arche Noah der Würste”, the Noah’s Ark of sausage containing two of each of the house specials.  They fought bravely but only finished 2/3rds of it.

Next was the aquarium where prior planning allowed us to skip the main line and the attendant’s disinterest in counting allowed us to slip a non-paying person in.  The first display was on some culturally important African fish which was surrounded by drunks drums which children were playing poorly.  After their parents failed to separate them from the noisemakers I blurt out “I’m from the Internet and you’re doing it wrong”.  That silenced them.  I moved slowly through the aquarium, taking about 2 hours to go from front to back where others completed it in about 40 minutes.  At one point, I saw out of the corner of my eye a light red horizontally striped shirt similar to one worn by a group member.  I turned to say “Hello” but on seeing the wearer was not her, I dropped my jaw and just said “HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” until my higher brain functions returned and I could fake being mildly retarded as any self-respecting person would do.   The frog display had a foot-activated Frogger game and I prize the 30 second video I have of Ken Bateman calmly triumphing in his suspenders and slacks after gaggles of sub-teenagers failed to cross to liberty.  The otters traced an adorable loop about their habitat with consistency that I think they were animatronic and many photons died allowing me to capture some 100 pictures of tropical birds.  My camera and self escaped their cloacal barrage and I chalk this up to having an L-series lens on my camera.

After the aquarium was my favorite part: Bullshitting outside the aquarium.  I feel like a properly arranged meet-up is just a collection of ways of getting people to stand around and talk and the contrast of Floridian Mitch complaining about the 53°F drizzly weather and Minnesotan Peter simply luxuriating in the cooling wind was worth the spot of rain.  I pit my Louie Armstrong impression against Chris Price’s Bill Cosby impression to a draw but was defeated by his Eddie Murphy/Donkey impression.

Dinner was at Pompilios where I got make promotion announcements and take my favorite picture of the trip:

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The Gang of 27

Should no other picture survive or no other memory remain, seeing the above justified the time required to coordinate the trip.

Dinner was followed by tire inflation and moving 15 people to Gameworks, a Dave and Busters-like place owned by Sega.  I thought this would have been more enjoyable, but the combination of dated games and screens whose resolutions were barely a multiple of my phones reminded me why arcades have largely died.  I did get a chance to play some quality pinball and see my team set to work min-maxing the ticket games to find that a properly played game of Operation yielded healthy returns.

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The evening capstone was a fourthmeal of pizza where Ben showed us a project from the weekend.

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Five Intersecting Tetrahedra

I don’t want to say the day went to shit from there as it merely went from awesome to good.  Every group interaction has a honeymoon period where people are able to deliver the facade of their choice and that period ended around 7 PM today.  I don’t think I have a terribly large gap between my online and AFK personas as I think I maintain my candor, penchant for (failed) wordplay, and sly compassion across media but not all do.  Alcohol brought out true feelings and some people who’s social toolboxes weren’t well stocked reverted to form to which others viewed this as some sort of back slide.  You can only be someone else for so long, and there is a reason why very good actors are so well paid.

Some played cards, others cried, I just… talked.

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Yesterday’s party seemed expensive, but as I panned across my table to see the spoils of left overs I grinned.  I had a bag of chips, 1/2 a pound of cheese, 2 boardfeet of crackers, 4 dozen cookies, 5 herb muffins, and lots of cashews.  My original intent was to have a soup to nuts meal, but whereas I chose cashews, it turned out being soup to drupes.  I’m fine with that as a tradition.

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I prepared pork cuts today for dinner for my father and myself but had sized the meal for nine people so I could have some leftovers for the next few days.  It turns out that neither of my housemates had eaten so they joined and there were four of us around the table and things got very quiet.

Housemate 1: The rice is strong.
Housemate 2: Yes, but it is less strong if you mix it with the pork.
Housemate 1: Yes.

—Silence—

Me: How were the rolls?
Housemate 2: Fine, except for the burnt part I had, that was not fine.
Me: Yes, the burnt part was not supposed to be burnt.  Sorry.
Housemate 2: That’s ok.  The rest of it was fine.

—Silence—

My dad: These pork chops were big.
Housemate 1: Yes.
Housemate 2: Yes.
Me: Ok

—Silence—

I think we need to work on our small talk.

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Strawberries were on sale, and I’m a sucker for trying to use seasonal fruit, but strawberry usually means pie not cake, which, by extension requires crust.  I suck at crusts, every attempt I’ve made to fabricate one from close to scratch has exploded or turned into some terrible dessert matzo and today was no exception.  Starting with a biscuit-style crust recipe I mixed and pushed and pulled and did so apparently to sufficient excess that I created a giant… biscuit.  I split that with my house mate.  My next attempt was to use a doughier option but failed to properly dock the crust and got a biscuit pita.  This I split with my dad.  My final attempt involved using the Safeway Brand roll-out pie crusts.  I rolled, I docked, I curled, I crimped, I took a call and I burned it.  This I gave to Max.  Nabisco 4 – Terry 0.

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Before going to bed last night I popped in the ear plugs and I didn’t hear anything from my room mate, even after I took them out.  Seems like we both discovered that his snoring is tied to his posture so what he fell into bed and went to sleep, that was a snore-free position.

My job for the day was PM public events meaning that I ran something on the order of 14-18 8-person events like booster drafts but I had my expectations set high by the fact that the morning crew who arrived at 9 left at 3 after breaks giving me the expectation that I’d have a glorious six hour day.  At around 5:30 I politely asked when the PM crew would be released and the coordinator said “the hall closes at 2 AM but we’ll cut off events at 8 PM”.

Me: So, the morning crew worked 5.5 hours and got a break and we’ll be on for 10 hours or more?
Him: *pause* Yes.

Normally, I’d be mad, but I respected the coordinators look of “this man is right and I can lie now and be hated later or be right now and be hated briefly”.  After a bit of thought I realized that the GPT and PTQ crews would also be hosting long days so I shifted my internal victim to the chorus of internal homunculi mocking the weakness of the AM crew.  The evening plodded on and the tenor of the evening improved when all the uptight judges got punch-drunk and accidentally smiled.  At one point during the PTQ finals a judge I had previously called Sgt. Sunshine broke into a panegyric in praise of the teamwork element of high school basketball and there was a brief discussion of beer prices at different sports complexes.  At around 11 PM I had hit my limit and asked to leave.  The organizer thanked me and asked me to get something for him from the judge area.  I parted the curtains and was met with a feast of Italian takeout.  Few things fight fatigue better than chicken Alfredo with bacon.

Finally, I made peace with an “enemy”.  Yesterday, I asked my car mate to go to dinner, he mentioned that he was going to eat with another judge.

Judge 1: Hey, can I bring someone to eat with us?
Judge 2: Sure, that should be fine, who is it?
Judge 1: Terry.
Judge 2: Oh… We don’t have enough food for him.

Today we talked:

Him: So why does it seem like I’m always insulting you?
Me: Well, say there’s a 1 in 5 chance of you accidentally insulting someone and you define a “bad series of interactions” with 3 mess ups.  There’s a 1 in 125 chance that you’d blow your first meeting with a person.  There were about 60 judges here so it’s a coinflip as to whether or not you’ll alienate someone at a GP.  I just happened to be that person.
Him: That is the most bullshit usage of probability I’ve ever heard.
Me: Thank you.  I’ve been practicing.