Well, first of all, we are very excited we will be having visitors in April (mel and meg)... I told mel tonight that the heroine can help tutor meg in math for her next UIL meet , NOT !! hellooo, how did she get to be such a good and smart girl, its beyond me !! but anyway, I am hoping we can take her to see Berekly when they are here, its such an amazing campus and I think with all those smarts, she can just make that her FIRST choice ! who needs new england winters and all those ivy league snobs !! bah....
anyway, its about time I step up and write our various goings on here in SF....Claude LOVES his trout ! see picture !! still having very warm weather which is of course great except we will have severe drought this coming summer if we don't get more rain....mostly the city is abuzz though, even with the recession finally hitting here, folks are still out and about...talked to a friend who was interviewing for ONE restaurant server position, she had been interviewing people for 2 hours and still have over 200 people left in line to apply...really sad stories of course, lots of people unemployed and now the state is holding back our tax returns...Dana decided she is going to mail the IOU from the state to the Property Tax folks and tell them they can work it out amongst themselves ! Ha !! I have to say though, a recession or not, its not the middle east and today I did NOT have to put my used toilet paper anywhere but where is GOES (P.S. Mother, I remember you telling me that but I had conveniently forgotten for my own peace of mind)
Anyway, I took the boys to the beach today, it was Izzy's first time (jake's little brother) and we stayed an extra hour, they were just so cute !! I could watch them for hours...mr grump (claude) is finally getting used to Izzy and starting to interact with him, so that was fun and then I went for coffee with Randy Hyde who I found out also went to UT after graduating from PN-G and lived in Los Angeles for 7 years before moving to San Francisco ! We met for coffee at Ritual coffee, amazing lattes, and had the best chat...he was going to dinner, so we didn't have long but it was so fun to see him and lament our jr high (he got me my second corsage ever and we went to homecoming in 6th grade) and high school days...
So staying pretty low, cooking alot and Im going to meetings...work has been insane, just keep laying off more and more people but work still keeps coming in, I have been slotted once again to step into a role I know nothing about while a dev manager is in New Zealand for three weeks, its amazing how many areas of my life the program works !! Next right thing, first things first, etc..etc..so I will be working a bit more than usual but thats ok, I haven't had too much overtime the last couple of years and its really good exposure...

We are having a literary dinner weekend after next with one of the managers in my group, her husband and Dennis to discuss the book, "Master and the Margarita" which is famous Russian literature...She has a book list for me of books I read and her husband is a big lawyer, very smart, I mostly will be saying "what are the words coming out of your mouth" but will try to find a Cliffs notes something so I can have something intelligent to say about the book which I did read...anyway, Nelli is her name, she is the one who will be in Israel for a month in April, assuming her father isn't still sick , but anyway, she said the other day that I was the most trainable person to have come into that group ever and what a good job I was doing, which was HIGH PRAISE from her, she is very tough and hard, so it really felt like the last two years of learning and doing whatever they asked really has paid off, I do know the tiniest bit about data warehousing and Visa, so its really rewarding to have someone notice !! in these economic times, I am grateful for a job and that I can pay my mortgage, so its all lagniappe !!
So I also got the big painting today from that gallery in Houston, 6 months later and alot of drama but its beautiful, I posted a picture on Facebook, Mr Claude had secured his spot on the blanket right below it of course !! we're going to put it where dana's grandfathers WWII picture is, its really the only spot big enough...and I got a little card thing that was hand calligraphy from Paris framed last week too, its going in the downstairs bedroom, I will post a picture when we get it...Dana just informed me Claude has repositioned himself by the painting again...ha !! he's too funny !!