Cruising

Another weekend dawns and I am flabbergasted. What have I achieved all week? We have been in the US almost 10 months and in that time, what have I accomplished? Was it worth the expenses and efforts to bring us here?

I have struggled to break through the well that my workteam has dug themselves into. Have I made any inroads? Hard to judge when you are right in the center of it all. How would someone looking in from the outside rate my performance? Have to speed things up a bit but so so hard...

Monday after a few hours of interviews to select a new employee, I will be off to Texas for a project at one of our plants. It should be an interesting experience.

My camera is giving up its ghost. I don't know what happened. We used it last at Half Moon Bay and it was just dandy. Sigh, just after I got the 2GB SD card too. The lens seems to have stopped communicating with the engine - the screen is just a patch of white and if you cover the lens and peer hard enough, you can just make out the words and graphics that tell you how many shots you have made, how much battery life is left. etc. I tried to resuscitate it by unscrewing the chasis to see if I can figure out if any part has broken loose (like I fixed my laptop external hard drive) but the screws were too tight and I did not have the proper tools.

Found out the camera was sick on Monday when we decided to go for a long drive down Pacific Highway 1. Put paid to my hopes of getting shots of this very scenic route that goes all the way from San Francisco to Monterey Bay. Long, beautiful coastline with picturesque scenes of waves from the Pacific Ocean crashing and foaming against cliffs, boulders and rocks and isolated pockets of beaches and of cypress trees bending in defiance against the onslaught of cold winds. We had lunch at Half Moon Bay and drove all the way to Santa Cruz. Didn't even realised we had reached Santa Cruz until we saw the street signs. Tried to get to the Boardwalk but traffic was moving at snail speed and parking was horrific so we went to main street downtown instead and just window shopped. Well we window shopped but Nic had to spend at a Gap store. She is getting to be a shopaholic. Not a week goes by without her bugging me to tears with demands for money or shopping trips. In reality though, her shopping is limited. At least she knows where to draw the line. Hope the money sense continues to grow in her.

We took the shorter route home, relying on our trusty Garmin to bring us along windy Highway 17 to Fremont where we picked up some groceries at Ranch 99 and had yummy hot spicy Szechuan dinner at a small and very reasonably priced restaurant right next door. I love the food there - oily spicy and oh so good and cheap.

With the days getting warmer and longer with each passing day, it was still light when we returned from Fremont

Today, we are supposed to go to Nik and Keng's home for some kind of event. Not sure what it is but Nic has some Physics project with her classmate, Arin, and so here I am blogging instead of tucking into lunch with our new friends. Hope the two of them finish up quickly. I am hungry!