Friday night out
It's a day to celebrate. Turned in our group Statistics Team Project today, and the bonus was I actually understood it enough to write a coherent executive summary. Don't get me wrong, the more formula-oriented people in the group actually ran the linear regression. But the good news is that I could help interpret the results. Wa-hoo.
So I decided to celebrate with a night out. Colleagues from work were going out, and I'd not intended to go...it was a leaving do for a girl I'd actually helped out the door. (I'm her manager, and let's just say she'll do much better in her next venture.) So I wasn't exactly sure I was welcome, but I guess I picked out a good leaving gift, so they encouraged me to come along.
We tried a new restaurant here in MK that had been getting good reviews. It's called Silk Road, and they're trying to play that whole pan-Asia fusion thing. The group was small...I'd missed the happy hour because I really needed a stop at the gym to get out some of this post-exam anxiety, so I joined late and got the seat next to the non-work people who were friends from her running club. You can imagine how much I had in common with them. Actually, we'll never really know how much I have in common with them, as I'm not sure they know how much they have in common with each other...they talked only about running. Where do they run in the winter. Where do they run in the summer. Should they buy running shoes. Should they try a marathon. Blah blah blahbity blah. I tried to be interested, I really did. Good lord, I can have a conversation with a turnip if I have to. But they weren't biting.
So I tried to join the conversation of the work colleagues on my other side. But the restaurant had pushed a round table and a rectangle together, and I was in a strange place to participate in their conversation because they were at the rectangle and I was in the dead zone...I had blindspots and couldn't actually see all four of them.
Okay. One conversation is not interesting. I can't actually fully participate in the other. Plus the thai fishcakes sucked. So what did I do? I started smiling and nodding and counting the number of times one woman snorted (12), and the number of times they used a word that would spell with a "z" and they use an "s" (35, but that's assuming that I caught them all 'cause that's actually hard to do.) I watched a guy at the next table chew with his mouth open. I planned my OM report that I'll be writing tomorrow.
And the funny thing is that I don't think anyone noticed.
So now I'm home and watching the TiVo-ed finale of American Idol. I swear that Katherine's father is crying because he can't believe how badly she's singing that horrible destiny song they wrote for her. And she seems to have taken my advice to dance, because she's jerking like a girl having a fit. But her mermaid skirt is hugging her butt, so that should negate the fact that she sounds like a drunk karaoke singer, at least with a subset of the viewers.
Oh my. I'm serious. That was really, really bad. Go find it online. P-U. And Randy jumps in with, "You look amazing." Code for that sucked. She's got to be feeling really bad. I don't like her, and I'm actually feeling kind of bad FOR her.
So it's a bank holiday weekend. I need to mow the little meadow in the back garden, and I need to write 1500 words about our OM project from the beginning of the term, then I'm done for awhile. I have to go to Frankfurt for an industry trade show on Mon/Tues, so my three day weekend is not actually a full three days, but that's fine because I'd taken last Thursday without pay for studying. And I think I'm going rambling on Sunday. Haven't spent time in the fields in awhile, and there's a good walk in the Cotswolds that takes you to a roman villa. Haven't been, have been told to try it out.
Will figure out my camera for the Africa pics, as well...more on that soon.
So I decided to celebrate with a night out. Colleagues from work were going out, and I'd not intended to go...it was a leaving do for a girl I'd actually helped out the door. (I'm her manager, and let's just say she'll do much better in her next venture.) So I wasn't exactly sure I was welcome, but I guess I picked out a good leaving gift, so they encouraged me to come along.
We tried a new restaurant here in MK that had been getting good reviews. It's called Silk Road, and they're trying to play that whole pan-Asia fusion thing. The group was small...I'd missed the happy hour because I really needed a stop at the gym to get out some of this post-exam anxiety, so I joined late and got the seat next to the non-work people who were friends from her running club. You can imagine how much I had in common with them. Actually, we'll never really know how much I have in common with them, as I'm not sure they know how much they have in common with each other...they talked only about running. Where do they run in the winter. Where do they run in the summer. Should they buy running shoes. Should they try a marathon. Blah blah blahbity blah. I tried to be interested, I really did. Good lord, I can have a conversation with a turnip if I have to. But they weren't biting.
So I tried to join the conversation of the work colleagues on my other side. But the restaurant had pushed a round table and a rectangle together, and I was in a strange place to participate in their conversation because they were at the rectangle and I was in the dead zone...I had blindspots and couldn't actually see all four of them.
Okay. One conversation is not interesting. I can't actually fully participate in the other. Plus the thai fishcakes sucked. So what did I do? I started smiling and nodding and counting the number of times one woman snorted (12), and the number of times they used a word that would spell with a "z" and they use an "s" (35, but that's assuming that I caught them all 'cause that's actually hard to do.) I watched a guy at the next table chew with his mouth open. I planned my OM report that I'll be writing tomorrow.
And the funny thing is that I don't think anyone noticed.
So now I'm home and watching the TiVo-ed finale of American Idol. I swear that Katherine's father is crying because he can't believe how badly she's singing that horrible destiny song they wrote for her. And she seems to have taken my advice to dance, because she's jerking like a girl having a fit. But her mermaid skirt is hugging her butt, so that should negate the fact that she sounds like a drunk karaoke singer, at least with a subset of the viewers.
Oh my. I'm serious. That was really, really bad. Go find it online. P-U. And Randy jumps in with, "You look amazing." Code for that sucked. She's got to be feeling really bad. I don't like her, and I'm actually feeling kind of bad FOR her.
So it's a bank holiday weekend. I need to mow the little meadow in the back garden, and I need to write 1500 words about our OM project from the beginning of the term, then I'm done for awhile. I have to go to Frankfurt for an industry trade show on Mon/Tues, so my three day weekend is not actually a full three days, but that's fine because I'd taken last Thursday without pay for studying. And I think I'm going rambling on Sunday. Haven't spent time in the fields in awhile, and there's a good walk in the Cotswolds that takes you to a roman villa. Haven't been, have been told to try it out.
Will figure out my camera for the Africa pics, as well...more on that soon.
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