She wore an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini

If I haven't mentioned it before, I have been working on converting movies my mom recorded with her camcorder from VHS to DVD format. In one such movie, we are visiting my aunt on a hot summer day, and the sprinkler is on in the front yard. All of us kids are in our swim suits, running and playing. Except for me. By this time, I was to cool to run around in a sprinkler, so I am laying on town "sun bathing". Thus begins my quest to be tan.
When I was in high school, we had a pool in our backyard. The summer before I turned 16, I didn't have a job, so I spent the summer laying out by the pool and rotating myself at precise times so I would tan evenly. It was a fantastic summer. And I did get tan, probably one of the only times in my life I was tan.
I have always enjoyed going to the beach. Most of my life I have had a black bathing suit. I was of the philosophy that a black bathing suit was like a little black dress, it made you look nice and thin, and because it was black, you looked tanner in it. For a couple of years I wore a speedo, but then I realized that was not a "lounge around looking great" suit, it was a "ride the waves, do laps" suit.
Several summers ago my family was going to the beach, and I needed a new swimming suit. Swim suit shopping is the most traumatic type of shopping imaginable. I tried to avoid it by ordering Lands End modest tankini's online, only to find out they didn't fit. So I decided to go to the mall and try to find a bathing suit. You all know the drill..... flourescent lighting, your pasty white winter skin, and the spandex-y material that is hard to pull on. In the store all I could find was a lime green suit. The sales lady convinced me it made me look fantastic. So I bought it. Later that week, I convinced my sister to go swim suit shopping at the same store. Of course she finds a fantastic maroon swim suit that was not lime green. Yes, I was totally jealous.
This summer I am going to Duck beach with friends for Memorial Day weekend. I have been reluctant to try on the suit I bought after the lime green one because it has been a couple of years, and bathing suits don't tend to hold up well over the years. I finally tried it on, and it was not pretty. So I called my sister because a year or two ago the maroon one didn't fit her, so I had given her the lime green one. She mailed me the maroon one, which fit great. So we are getting good use out of the expensive swim suits :)
My goal this weekend is to not get sunburnt.... wish me luck!

I brought you flowers

I can't find the clip on youtube, but in You've Got Mail, she gets sick with a cold, and he brings her flowers and says, "I brought you flowers", and she is so stuffy, she says, "Oughhhh... thank you" and she says, aren't daisies the friendliest flowers?

I feel like that right now. A friend sent me flowers with daisies and tulips in white and yellow to celebrate the Chief Programmer promotion. Very beautiful. And then, I got a cold/sinus infection, and my voice has gone all funky (it sounds like death warmed over... just ask the people I was on conference calls with). And so all I want to do is walk around my house collecting the tissues that are strewn about in an overcoat and say, "daisies are the friendliest flowers".

Thank you all for the congrats.

You can call me Al

Not really.

What you can call me is Chief, or CP for short because I am now the Chief Programmer for my product. For those of you who are not familiar with the Company and it's titles, Chief Programmer means I manage the entire technical aspect of the release of the product, which involves setting direction, managing schedules and people, etc etc. Basically, on technical things, the buck stops here.

(But I still can't fix your computer at home)

If you can't tell, I am super duper excited about this. Chief Programmer is like..... the last title you will have that means you still do technical stuff. After that, it is all architecture and pie in the sky. It is the pinnacle of achievement. Ok, people may argue with that, and say STSM (Senior Technical Staff Member) or DE (Distinguished Engineer) is the pinnacle of achievement, but hey.... this is as awesome as the time I became a CSM at Wal-Mart at age 18, which is like, the youngest age you can have that title. I am probably not the youngest CP in the Company's history.... but it sure is nice to have a bit of achievement before I descend over the hill into my 30s!

Ah..... and now that the glow is over, I better get back to work! Because of course this means I will spend the summer essentially doing two jobs, the one I have now while it transitions to someone else, and the Chief Programmer one. And I have to learn more about the product, because I have been focused on install, and don't really know how it works once it is installed.

Glamorous

They shutdown the highway to film a movie, Main Street with Orlando Bloom, and I got to see a truck wrecked!

Save Second Base

It started out nice and simple, volunteer for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. This is a two day event where people walk 39 miles and raise money for the cause. My roommate has participated by being on the "Crew", hauling bags and tents around for the walkers. It sounded cool, so I signed up to do this in Washington D.C. May 2-3.

I had planned to take Friday off because we were driving up to DC and needed to check in and go to a Crew meeting. Of course at work things were crazy, with two drivers to put out, and nothing went well, so I worked Friday morning. Then I realized I had left my camera with a friend from the last weekend, so I arranged to pick it up on my way to my roommates' work location, where we would leave a car and just drive one up to DC (it was more convenient than having her drive back home).

The drive was uneventful, but it has been a long time since I have driven into DC, and seeing the monuments again was fantastic! Then we went through some downtown neighborhoods, and the architecture is awesome! I was loving it. The crew meeting was fairly bland, but we got t-shirts that say "Crew" on them to wear during the event. Then we went and hung out at my roommates' friends house. It was a really cute townhouse in Alexandria, and they had a really nice dinner for us.

Then we woke up at 3:30 AM to get to the event! It was crazy early. And very dark. And we couldn't find the parking garage, because the GPS device didn't know what L'Efant was... it doesn't have an apostrophe key. But then we finally did find the parking gargage. So we got to the tidal basin, across from Lincoln Memorial, and decorated our truck and put out signs and started taking people's bags and loading the truck. It is amazing how hungry you get by 5 AM even though you usually are asleep and haven't eaten breakfast.

Then opening ceremony started, so we walked over to see that. It was amazing, it really put the whole event in perspective because they had a couple of survivors briefly tell their story, and a couple of kids who lost their mom who were working on the Youth Crew tell their story.

Then as other people on our truck drove it over to the Wellness Village (where the walkers stay overnight), we rode the shuttle over there. It was in a state park that was really nice. We got there in time to watch one of the trucks run over a tent and smash a folding table! Nice..... Then we unloaded the tent and set up the bags in order, and then we got some tarp to cover the bags since it looked like rain. Just as we covered the last bag, it started to rain. So we hung out in the back of the truck watching the rain come down. Then we waited, took a nap, walked around the vendor stands, got a foot massage from one of those machine things, and started setting up tents. As the walkers came in, we would help them find their bags, carry them to their allocated tent spot, and help them pop up the tent.

Speaking of the allocated tent spot.... this was really amazing. The entire field was marked with markers for rows of tents, exactly spaced so that each tent was right next to each other with a two foot aisle in between a row..... quite the precision. After about 5 tents, I was getting pretty efficient at setting them up. So we did that until about 8:30 at night when the last walkers came in. Then we got some dinner. I never ate so much in one meal! It tasted really good. They had an evening program, Project Walkway, where they modeled clothes made out of materials found around the camp site in an imitation Project Runway. It reminded me alot of girls camp, the tents, tons of women, funny evening programs.

Then we slept in the truck because it rained that night. The next morning we were up at 4:30 AM to eat breakfast before the walkers got up. The walkers then gave us their gear, took down the tents and got back on the walk. It was pretty rainy all day, so we got a bit damp loading the truck up again. This one woman came back and said she wanted her bag out of the truck after it was half full. We said there was no way we could find one bag in that pile, and that she should pick it back up at closing ceremony. She said she couldn't do that, and said it was a bag with a baseball bat. Well, I remembered that bag, so I climbed on the pile of bags in the truck because it was back against the back wall of the truck and up at the top of the pile. Let me tell you, being on top of a pile of bags that hold sweaty clothes from walkers is like being on top of a trash heap. It was stinky! Once we had all the bags loaded, we went to take the shuttle back to closing ceremony so we could unload the bags before the walkers arrived. But the shuttle didn't leave for two hours, so by the time we got there, the bags were already unloaded. Then we had to return the truck to the "download" place, where they take them back to the rental office, and ride the shuttle back, and then ride the shuttle back to the parking gargage. So essentially, Sunday was mostly riding shuttles around, which wasn't as much fun as Saturday.

We got back to roommates' friends house, took a shower and changed into dry clothes, and hit the road. Because it was so late, we decided to go to sleep instead of picking up my car at her office.

So this morning, my roommate and I left the house, and I locked the door, and she drove me to work. Then she came and picked me up, and we proceeded to drive back to her office to pick up my car. But I decided to check my purse really quick for my keys.... and they weren't there. So we went back to my office.... They weren't there, and they weren't in the parking lot. So I laid out my purse and my computer bag. No keys. So we drove back to the house. No keys in the house. No keys outside of the house. No keys in the parking lot in front of the house. No keys....... I did have a spare car key at the house, so we could go get the car. But since we both remembered I had locked the front door (because it was locked when we got home), we decided I must have dropped them somewhere outside near the house, and probably someone picked them up, which makes me paranoid that they know what house they go to. So I went to Lowes and got new door locks and new keys. One of the sponsors of the Avon Walk is Tommy Tools, which makes pink tool sets. So as I installed the new door locks this evening, I was thinking how fun it would be to have a pink tool belt :)

Even though some things didn't go according to plan, I really enjoyed the weekend, and maybe I will become a walker for next year. I just need to think of a clever name and tshirt slogan.