Epicness

I'm pretty proud of this past week. My life has been lacking in epicness recently, and needed a bit of a booster. Lets start with last weekend. On Friday there was a engineering event at Yelp. This basically meant that we all went out to a bar, chatted, and got rather drunk on the company's bill. After a few excellent hours at the bar I ended up at Pagolac with about 7 other co-workers and had the highly recommended seven course beef (epic!) for dinner. It was *amazing*. Different from most Vietnamese food that I have had before, and even more delicious! Also, it was great getting to hang out with a bunch of awesome people from work ^_^.

After dinner I walked back to the office with 2 others and hung out there for about half an hour. I have to say, it is really fun just chatting with a couple of people after a night of fun in a big, quiet space that you have all to yourself. ^_^ I caught the midnight train home and, after delays due to electrical problems (i.e. train moving at full speed on the tracks, suddenly all the lights and air conditioning go out in the car... actually surprisingly nice and peaceful, if terrifying to think about) I made it home by 1:30AM and was in bed by 2.

Now, you are probably saying to yourself, "well, that sounds like a pretty cool night, but where is the *epic*?". Epic you say? The epic comes when I wake up at 6AM, hit the road by 6:30, and drive 400 miles to my hometown in southern Oregon by 12:30PM (using exact numbers and including breaks I averaged 67.5mph for 6 hours). I then took a 15 minute nap, showered, shaved, put of my-if I do say so myself-spiffy suit, and headed out to a wedding. After a fairly short ceremony and dinner I danced for hours. That is the epic (can you tell I'm proud?) ^_^.

So, the wedding was really awesome, I got to meet some cool new people (saw Bryce Larkin {reference nobody will get}), and caught up with a friend that I was in school with from elementary though high school, but haven't talked to since *high school* graduation!

I then drove back home on Sunday. It was a pretty crazy weekend and set the tone for the week. I had a pretty epic Tuesday night doing work stuff that I don't really want to talk about, but the real epic-ness following this weekend was Wednesday.

I finished work on Wednesday and biked, as usual, to the train station only to discover, after waiting in a crowd for a while, that there was a train crash in San Bruno and the trains were delayed for an unknown length of time. A guy shouted out that he was biking to San Mateo (20 mi away) and invited anyone who wanted to come along. I figured "what the hell" and joined Douglas and Remiko on an adventure!

After the bloody *crazy* hills of SF (I didn't get in my lowest gear for the first one, and barely made it up {when I was *fresh*. And I'm not in *amazing* biking shape, but I'm pretty damn strong. That was a huge fucking hill!}. I partially burned up my brakes trying to stay sane going down them) we had a pretty pleasant ride down the peninsula to San Mateo.

Douglas is a senior architect and explained a whole lot of things to me about how architectural projects are organized (sounds a bit like software with lots of extra rules & regulations and cross-disciplinary stuff), and how incredibly specialized architecture firms are (his firm *only* does medical buildings!). He also had is own practice for about 6 years and I heard a lot about that and the toll that it can take on your personal life. I asked my 'how do you meet people' question and was given the good idea of becoming a regular at a few restaurants and cafes. I explained a bit about startups and stock options to Douglas. Remiko had a pretty strong accent, and I didn't get quite the same conversation with her.

Douglas and Remiko were done once we reached San Mateo, so I biked the next 20 miles home by myself (and I think actually made better time, thought it wasn't as enjoyable). I've actually been pretty thrilled today by how little this destroyed me. My legs were a *bit* tired, and my shoulders are sore (from carrying a backpack with a laptop 40 miles), but other than that I'm pretty much right as rain! Yay for being in shape! Now I just need to climb more than once a week....

Well, that is all the epicness that has been had so far this week. (Though I guess we did have Guiness floats [Guiness + ice cream] today for an (Irish) co-worker's birthday). This weekend promises great epicness in that Scott, Shusta, Caro, Rob, Kris, Sketchy, Jillian, and Jillian's friend are all visiting!

So, with that, goodnight. I wish you epicness (and consistent hyphenation)!

Cheers,
Jason