Taaahho!

Natural beauty,
Plastic and metal speed, both
Part of big weekends.

Cramming 12 college kids into a passenger van for a three day weekend lends itself to a lot of fun. We managed to get a sweet cabin just off Lake Tahoe (Nevada side). From it, we could see the mountains, the lake, the stars... oh, it was amazing.

For the 4th, we bummed around the beach. We got schooled in volleyball, threw a Frisbee, kicked a soccer ball, barbecued (which was super exciting for me, since we got free-range chicken! yum-o!), and watched the fireworks. Woot!

The next day, we managed to leave the house by 2:30 (pathetic, I know) and get to Tahoe City to rent jetskis and a motorboat. Evan and I showed everyone how it was done. :P The bruise hasn't showed up on my hip yet, but when it does...

More barbecue that night, and then a trip to Reno. I feel I deserve a medal of some kind for driving that damn van through the mountains. But anyway, we scoped the casino scene (ca-scene-o?) and then meandered (read: slowly moved to the car and had Valkyrie and Garrett drive for 45 minutes through intense mountains at 2 in the morning) back to the cabin at Incline Village.

It was truly a star-gazing, jetskiing, barbecuing, volleyballing, van-driving, swimming, casinoing, hiking, picture-taking, boating, wandering, chattering, not-enough-sleeping, chess-playing, billiardsing good time. :D

Glassy-Eyed

Hidden in gardens
Sparkles something amazing.
Google and elsewhere.

I got the special treat of listening to Dale Chihuly at a tech talk today. He showed videos of installations he's done in places like Jerusalem, which is way awesome. I wish that I knew how to blow glass...

The intern lunch was yesterday! It wasn't so much of a success as I'd hoped for, but definitely everyone seemed to have fun, and the Cool People mailing list and calendar got publicized, and I met a couple new interns. The conference bike races were AMAZING. I think the blue bike is a little faster. There's a video of the race someplace around here... Taejin (the other knol intern; he works with the team in Korea, actually) took one, I believe.

Oh! Right! Google Serve! I went to San Bruno Mountain and helped keep control of invasive plants (i.e. I pulled weeds) for an afternoon. That was a lot of fun. Plus I got another t-shirt. I think I'm up to 7 now. And one guy who I was weeding with said that I can have one of his Google shirts, which is amazing. The shirt in question? All it says is "I have root @ Google". Badass.

New interns came on Tuesday to the farm area that I work in. One of them named his host Jimi. As in Hendrix. He has very much potential to be cool. ;)

Anyway, I think that this little deviation from my regularly scheduled work has gone on long enough. There will be more to post after this weekend, for sure.

And happy 21st birthday to both Pat and Mehul this week!