MY favorite pic :)

Tim Hardy this one's for you brother!

A favorite pic!

A fabulous surprise!

So, last Friday was a normal day like any other. I got up early, drove to work, worked all day, and drove home in the evening. I finally got in touch with Rochelle after weeks of phone tag, so she kept me entertained most of my drive home with stories of the Chan babies, etc. It was so good to finally catch up with her that I sat in my car for an extra 15-20 minutes in front of my sister's house just talking away, until Laura and Tay-Tay finally came out on the porch and told me that Tay needed some Auntie time. I went inside and hung out in the kitchen, chatting with Laura and Sacha about the day until Sach finally said, "Hey, we're hungry and want to go out to eat! Will you go get changed so we can go?" I walked upstairs, turned into my room, and there was BARAK! I screamed so hard it made his ears ring, threw my purse at him and fell on the floor in shock... the good kind of shock! It was such a great surprise that he planned this whole weekend trip to visit me without me even suspecting a thing! Turns out he called Sacha the day before to find out a good time to come visit and they said, "Come tomorrow!" And he did! We couldn't have planned it out better if we tried. My sister Suzanne and her husband Andrew were visiting the same weekend, so it ended up being a gigantic, fun event with family and friends all weekend long! Here are some pictures of my moment of shock (or shortly thereafter), dinner with the Lindekens gang, and other family times from last weekend.

My very own office space...

I've never worked in the corporate world before. Well, technically that's not true. When I first moved to L.A. I was a temp for four months at a large company. Basically I sat in a little cubicle for eight hours a day listening to my head phones and performing the world's most mundane data entry as fast as I could. It required very little brain power, and thus I had very little responsibility or investment. But other than that my main jobs throughout life have been in churches and photography studios.

However, all that has changed recently. I'm now the very proud occupant of my own cubicle space at my new job in Charlotte! And yes, it's already brought with it several little adventures of its own.

For the first several weeks, I slowly became less and less able to tune out the daily rantings of the man who sat across from me. While I couldn't see his face due to the cubicle partitions, I spent my days hearing about all the food he ate at the lunch buffet, stories of his ex-wife's fake dummy that allowed her to drive in the car pool lane, and nagging juicy cough he just couldn't get rid of, and which he often demonstrated directly into the phone receiver and into a potential client's ear.

Then there's the "funsies" - the group that adopted me into their weekly lunches and like to e-mail pictures of David Hasselhoff to select staff members, forward messages about being the winner of a new Ford Explorer directly into voicemail boxes (one day I won 6!) and send out mass e-mails repeating every office-wide intercom announcement. They definitely live up to their nickname.

And of course, there are the funny things that happen in a large office that are out of our control. Like the day that the mysterious controller of the bathroom music (kind of like the Wizard of Oz of our office building, I think) decided to blast miscellaneous international kid music in the restrooms. I relieved myself to the instrumental theme song from "Monsters, Inc." and "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" in what I think was Jamaican. My friend reported peeing to the "Mickey Mouse" song in Spanish. Or there was the morning after daylight savings hit when everyone's access cards were deactivated and a group of us ended up stuck in the lobby, unable to actually get to our desks to work.

I definitely work for a great company though - one that bought everyone mini iPods for Christmas last year and allows us to celebrate our impending name change by cutting out of work early for games and drinks at Jillian's. And my job is a blast. I often laugh at the end of the day when I think about the variety of tasks I worked on that day. For example, so far this week, I've spent time on official construction contracts, communicating with subcontractors regarding MWDBE usage, composing memos to CEOs, organizing an event for 100 business executives and top city officials, while at the same time, I've also worked on ordering personalized M&M's, searching for hunting apparel online that can be stitched with our new logo along the safety orange patches, booking an RV for a hunting trip, and coordinating spa treatments during the Master's golf tournament for the wives of some of our business partners. So, yes, my job definitely keeps me busy but it's also a lot of fun!

I'm loving my cubicle life thus far. Stay tuned for more stories from the cube...but don't even think about touching my stapler!