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I was just thinking today that it’s nice that the stock market crashed. Yes, I lost money, but this really is the best time to lose money. I had enough vested to feel real pain from this on going episode, but this helps me to appreciate the dollar better by tightening my budget and changing my investment plans. If I had close to nothing invested (like during the dot com bubble crash), I would be just as frivolous as before when it’s all over.
With that said, I’m really aching to go out and make some impulse purchases.

Our most recent member of the research group is like the third wheel on a bicycle. He is lazy and impertinent and I really wish he would just go away. I don’t think he had any idea how much time this would take and joined for the money. It’s absurd… because if there was money to be made, I would have started researching years ago.

I spent the whole day in 50.59 training. Whoever wrote the slides for the training has a real sense of humor. One of the slides had a clip art of an open calendar with a date circled, next to the calendar was a prancing woman. The clip art was probably about the menstrual cycle or keeping a date for pap smear. The title of the slide is “Evaluating Accident Frequency Increases”. Another slide with the title “Changing to a High Class Accident” showed a picture of a hut next to a picture of a mansion. A few slides over there was a picture of a pair of scissors superimposed on a runner’s hand, the title of which read “Malfunction Likelihood”. Maybe I found those amusing only because the class was so boring.

WE WON!!

Jennifer was telling me the other day that people with high stress jobs have lower white blood cell count. I don’t have a high stress job, but I do get stressed out for no good reason.
For example, this morning I thought I lost my watch. I take my watch off whenever I type on the computer and I’ve left it in the office overnight before. But we’ve just moved and there were tons of people hanging around the cubes this past weekend. In the end, I found it tucked under my cardigan (which I also leave around in the office).
In addition to the watch issue, I had to deal with AT&T’s customer service and read about 30 new papers. I also got worked up over the book I’m reading. I just got to the diamond necklace part in Fraser’s Marie Antoinette. Reading about Marie Antoinette is like watching the Titanic sink, but I get so ANGRY about the necklace affair. I guess that’s one part I can relate: being asked to pay for things you didn’t buy.

Spent a weekend in Ohio with Pam. We met Pam’s cousin, who has a picture of him and Obama on his laptop. I’m sooooooooooooo jealous!!
On the way back, I must have passed about 30 dead deers. In Ohio, there was at least one every 10 miles. Must be mating season.

Our office is moving, from the first floor of the building to the second floor. Bechtel hired a moving company who provided us with boxes. We have to pack and unpack our own things and IT and movers will come tonight to put take our phones, computers, chairs, and boxes to the new location. This amuses me to no end since we’re not moving to a bigger or smaller area, just from the first floor to the second floor. It seems like such a waste of resources just to elevate a whole wing of office workers, but then again I’m not Riley Bechtel.

I got two books from the library today, Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser and The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.
I was just congratulating myself on finding two titles that I’m interested in when I had the strange feeling that I’ve read these books before. In the first chapter of Fraser’s book, she wrote of “the smallest arch dutchess” and how Marie-Therese worked through her labor, and I was so positive that I must have borrowed the same book twice. Then I started on Bryson’s book, and he talked about how words like “pig” and “cow” are English but “pork” and “beef” are French, which I also read somewhere before.
I checked my book list and realized that I haven’t read either of these books. I have read, however, To the Scaffold by Carolly Erickson and Great Tales from English History by Robert Lacey. I wonder if it’s worth reading different books on the same subjects…

I was listening to BCC yesterday and they interrupted their original program to talk about this piece of news: A college girl at the dormitory wanted go out with a boy at the same school after curfew. As a way of sneaking out, she jumped off the 2nd floor window, supposedly into the open arms of the boy. The boy ducked instead and the girl ended up breaking both of her legs.
This prompted a lot of discussions. The window in question was not very high, around 10 to 12 feet, but anyone going to college should know that weight + g-force = nothing an Asian guy can handle. Still, it depends on who the guy is I suppose… There are guys worth breaking two legs for.
I was sitting there, imagining a scene involving slightly stoned Romeo and Juliet, when a listener called in the radio and explained the situation: There were more than just a boy and a girl. There were a bunch of girls on the 2nd floor and a group of guys who were passing the dormitory. The girl who jumped had a crush on one of the guys and wanted to go see the sunrise with him. All her roommates told her that she should jump. And so she did, yelling “catch me below.” None of the boys had any idea what was happening and her poor crush had to pay for half of her medical fees.

A co-worker asked if I would like to go to dinner with him. This guy normally works at Watts Bar, but for a few weeks he’s back at the main office. I told him that I had leftover in the fridge and declined his offer.
This is the second time I’ve been asked out to dinner by a near stranger. The first person was a MIT professor turned failure analysis expert who gave a lecture a couple of years ago at Cook. I agreed to have dinner with him mainly because he went to NTU, like my parents.
Both were men, both were Asians, both were around my dad’s age, and both were spending the night at a hotel… I’m starting to see a trend here…
I really resent being asked out like that. The most I get out of the bargain is a free dinner at a cheap restaurant. In return, I have to sit there and listen to the guy telling me how much he’s achieved over his miserable life. He can then go to bed thinking that it’s okay for him to be alone and sleeping in a hotel because his greatness can always attract some girl to smile and nod at him over dinner. Some day he may even be able to get an erection again. Oh joy, just the type of men I’ve been looking for all my life.
I can’t imagine how full of it you need to be to think that I’d be interested in the offer.

Last Wednesday, I had lunch with the new girl. Let’s call her Lu.
The thing about Chinese is that you can never tell how old they really are. Lu looks to be my age, but that just means she is probably in her twenties. It turned out that she has a Ph. D. from Cornell and is married for 6 years. I would have guessed that she was single and just got out of school with her masters degree. Wow, how wrong I was. I guess my age was equally puzzling to Lu though, since the first thing she asked was why my title is senior engineer.
We started talking about siblings. After telling her that I have a sister and a brother, I asked if she had any. Lu said no because of the one child policy. This surprised me, because Harry, who is also close to my age, has a brother. I stopped Harry later that day and asked him about it, and he said he was lucky because he was born before the policy began.
I always thought that the one child policy is a very recent thing. When I looked it up on Wikipedia, it went into effect in 1979. If my family lived a few miles to the west, I would have been an only child too.
I’m sure most people thought about this already, but it just occurred to me that Chinese people won’t even have aunts/uncles/nieces/nephews in a generation or so. That is absolutely amazing, since we’re so particular about our family titles; mother’s sister is called differently than father’s sister, father’s older brother is called differently than father’s younger brother… etc. All those titles will go on the wasteside in a few years… and people won’t understand jokes about rich uncles anymore…

A couple of days ago, I turned on my computer and it failed. After about 20 hours of diagnostics, I was told by the troubleshooting program that blocks of my hard drive were unreadable.
I rarely back up stuff on my computer, but I don’t think I lost much. All the photos are online and Jennifer had picked through my mp3 collection. My taste in music is so bad that it’d be an improvement if I just used her iPod library instead.
Two days, one new hard drive, and countless embarrassments later, my computer is up and running again.