delusions of vacation...

so i can't sleep all night. stare at the wall. get up out of bed a couple of times, try again. stare at the clock. Five o'clock passes in tall red letters. Six o'clock. I miss Seven come on the clock because I guess I'm staring at the wall again. Wind is whipping against the side of my building. Get up out of bed again and screw around with the windowshade. No helping the fact that it's daylight. Eight and I'm starting to get worried I will never sleep again. Now we're pushing Nine and I think I'm going to have a heart attack by 30 at this rate. Heartbeat so loud it's ringing in my ears. Think I can't possibly sleep with all this noise.

And then, for a minute - a blissful wonderful moment sometime after Nine, it all stops, and peace comes. Sleep is sweet like the coldest lemonade on the hottest summer day and for a change I'm not thinking about beta builds or plane trips.

Ten A.M. Forty minutes of bliss remaining til the alarm goes off and I have to get up and finish the mad final dash of packing and get off to the airport.... and my phone rings.

"What's the download path for the beta setup.exe?"

I stall for a couple of minutes, while I try and string each word together. It's a friendly voice. They aren't looking for Guido. Who does it belong to? It must be someone from work... it's not Mike. Oh, it's Moe! I repeat back the question - my dream-frozen brain is slow - I can understand each word individually, but this sentence doesn't register. I'm working as hard as I can to figure it out - there must be someone else we can call who will be able to decode this sentence, but who? By the time my brain has thawed enough to understand what's going on, it seems like the voice on the phone has come up with the same idea: there has to be somebody else who can answer this question - maybe even someone with verifiable neurological activity.

I really hope he found that person, somewhere, because this morning, that someone was definitely not me.

posted by Lorna Brown at 10:39 AM

A few weeks ago, one of the Picasa consultants was onsite in LA. Brian has two daughters, the older one is four years old, and a brand new baby. We got to talking, and I realized that I had forgotten the really great thing about parents of four year olds - they always know about all the cool new art supplies. Stuff's changed from when I was little. I'm in the know enough to be hip to Sculpey, but Brian told me all about this great thing from Crayola: a kit to make stained-glass-looking window clings. So after work tonight I finally cracked open my set - Mike helped - and we created colorful fish and bugs to decorate the windows of our new LA Lifescape office. Not a bad way to spend an evening.

posted by Lorna Brown at 2:58 AM

Happiness is:

Finding exactly the sofa I wanted, haggling the price down by $600 (but not before starting to walk out of the store once), making plans for it to be delivered tomorrow afternoon, eating great Thai food, and then topping off the day with sharing dessert (a fabulous flourless chocolate cake) with a random pile of assorted cool people.

posted by Lorna Brown at 2:01 AM