Month: October 2009

A friend of mine has season tickets to the Capitals and when her date bailed on her at the last minute, I got to pinch hit (I know, I’m getting all my sports metaphors wrong) and go to the opening game on Saturday night. I do not follow professional sports, generally I find it all a little odd that people spend so much time and energy following wildly well-paid people throw a ball (puck) around. But I’m also a good sport and my friend is insanely excited about hockey and the Caps are coming off an amazing season last year, so I went out and spent $5 on a red T-shirt from Target and booked it to the Verizon center with 18,000 other fans.

The final score was Caps 6 – Maple Leafs 4. I stood up and cheered enthusiastically for each goal and high-fived people I did not know all around me (which was incredibly painful) and it was a lot of fun. I ate the $9 pizza slice, got the Mike Green bobblehead, I learned about many things including all the cheers (C-A-P-S, Caps!, Caps!, Caps!), the horn guy, and that if the Caps score more than 5 goals in a game, one wins 10 free buffalo wings. Oh yeah, I learned a little bit about hockey too.

Metro got me there and back and was filled with people with the red jerseys.

Tonight, it is the Moon Festival. It is a popular harvest festival celebrated by Chinese people, Japanese people (Tsukimi festival in Japanese), Koreans (Chuseok festival in Korean), and Vietnamese people (even though they celebrate it differently), dating back over 3,000 years to moon worship in China’s Shang Dynasty.Of course, there are moon cakes to celebrate. I have never developed liking of these cakes. Besides, I don’t know what’s in it. They stuff a lot of different ingredients that no one can really tell. But, a lot of people love them. Some of these cakes carry an astronomical price tags on it – one bite worth a thousand, therefore, can’t afford [or, not worth :)] a bite.Translations from Chinese are:1) Tonight, you can enjoy reviewing the moon for more than 12 hrs in the whole country (i.e, China)2) Moon Festival in Chinese3) Moon Cakes in Chinese

Well, I will work on 12 hr night shift from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM plus turnover with Rena, starting next Monday (10/5) for 2 weeks. Rena will work from 6:00 AM to 6:00PM plus turnover with me. Really funny, it looks like a family outing affair. And exciting? – maybe 🙂

The federal fiscal year is over. I made it through my two years of being a probationary employee – now I’m a full-fledged federal employee. I passed my certification exam last month and I applied to work from home.

I have mixed feelings about working from home, I love my co-workers, I love going out to lunch with my coworkers, I love going to the on-site gym. I love that I can go up and down the halls and ask “Hey, do you think when they use the word “bonded” that it just means covalent bonds or do you think it includes Van der Waals forces and hydrogen bonding too?” However, I’ve been eating up sick time and vacation time like crazy from doctor appointments/school appointments and various things, I will be happy to be able to just shift my hours a little bit to actually use vacation time for vacation and to see the kiddos a bit more… Also, I think it will help relax the household a little more, I’ll be able to do some more errands during the week, like going to Costo.

For date night, we met at the CVS downtown. The little photo kiosk there is awesome… All set up to print passport photos. We should have done Jeremy’s there as well. 29 cents.

Date night continued in the streets of downtown Bethesda. Bethesda is a little bit fancier than our a little-further-out ‘burb, so the quality of the bicycles parked near the Bethesda Metro stop shot up a price point or two. Jeremy got to ogle them and tell me how totally cool they are…

Batavus bike: price $1028 – has a cool built in lock for the back wheel.

Breezer bike: $1160, cool little headlight setup. Doesn’t it look like is owned by someone who is homeless? What’s with the two duffel bags? This bike also looks to be locked by a very thin cable lock, it would take a thief two seconds to steal this bike. Sigh, maybe nothing gets stolen in Bethesda..