Hurricane Katrina

I'm like most people where you think these kinds of things would never effect you. Well, this week I've been down in Miami for work and will be here for next week too. I was suppose to fly home on the weekend but decided to stay to check out south beach and maybe even the MTV Music Awards. Well, panic struck when we were at our clients on Thursday and they were like "we're leaving at 2pm today and we won't be in tomorrow". How do you react to something like that...but they keep telling us, it's nothing...just a tropical storm. Could we believe them? I didn't think too much of it...I figured, just get back to the hotel and we should be fine.

On the way back to the hotel, the winds are blowing hard and it's raining. We're watching palm tree branches fall all over the road. Till just before we have to turn off to our hotel. Yup...one of the branches hits the roof of our car. Ok...don't panic...at least it didn't hit the window or anything. Is there damage? Nope...didn't see any...we pull up to the hotel and notice a dinner buffet is being offered cause all the restaurants are closed down already.

Nothing bad yet...go to the buffet and back to my room to watch the rest of Season 2 on DVD. The lights flicker a little, my laptop dims. Not bad yet. Then the fire alarm goes off. What to do now? Should I go down...I bet it's just a false alarm. But what if...damn it. I pick up the phone to call the front desk...but of course, no line. Ok, I hear people in the hall...they are going downstairs...I should go too...so I take my purse and Dim Sum and am ready to go. We start walking down the stairs (thank God the hotel is only 5 floors). Towards the lower levels, the stairwell has water all over the floor...it's starting to flood. Great. We get to the bottom and realize that there is no exit...great. We walk back up to the second floor where we get out and gather around the elevators. Yup it's a false alarm...people are coming up the elevator saying, it's false. So I finally get back to my room and the alarm is still sounding. It goes on and off for the night until finally at 11pm it turns off for good.

I wake up in the morning and look out the window...yah!! The rain has stopped and it's just windy. I take Dim Sum for a walk and it's trees everywhere and even some signs of business' are on the ground. Wow that's so bad. I turn on the news...tv's still out.

I finally got to watch the news today and realize that it's pretty bad in some areas of Miami...boy was I lucky. Some places have no electricity and are still flooded. People lost or dead. That's not a pleasant site. I'm so glad Dim Sum and I didn't have it so bad!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050826/ts_nm/weather_katrina_dc

Pet Friendly Hotels

Now that I’m traveling for 10 weeks, I need to find pet friendly hotels for Dim Sum…the problem that I encountered on my first location (Miami) is that they don’t expect you to leave your dog in the room on it’s own…oh no…what am I to do. That’s all I could do so I guess I’ll just have to wait to see if Dim Sum makes too much noise while I’m gone and they might kick me out. That’s really sad cause the hotel that we finally found (Omni) is really nice but it’s really far from my client’s location. I thought it would be closer but it wasn’t. I cost me $42 to cab here this morning and that sucked. I’d stay in a closer hotel but unfortunately most of the closer ones don’t allow dogs. I’m going to have to figure out what I’m going to do here. You’d think that now a days you shouldn’t have problems finding at least one pet friendly hotel in each area especially since so many people have pets these days. This is really stressful. I should have left her with my parents in Vancouver but then I don’t know if I could live without her for so long. This really makes me rethink my traveling for work!

Narcolepsy

I used to laugh when my friend told me she was narcoleptic. She’d fall asleep at clubs standing up. Now I don’t think I’m narcoleptic but I am tired all the time and feel like I can fall asleep anywhere and everywhere I want. Like right now, I’m sitting here at the clients, after sleeping a good amount on the weekend and I feel like I can’t keep my eyes open. It could also be the fact that I don’t really have anything to do cause I’m waiting on my team to arrive here in Miami. There is no internet access right this moment as the client is scrambling to try to find an access code for us and the phone line sucks and I can’t make long distance outgoing calls. I can’t really start my work cause I wasn’t at training last week and am waiting for my team to show up to brief me on exactly what we are suppose to do. It’s great just sitting here doing nothing and trying to keep myself from falling asleep. I guess it’s coffee I need but the coffee that they gave us must not be very strong cause I still feel like falling asleep.

Air Conditioners

I’m not sure what it is…but I think Air Conditioning makes me physically sick. Every time I’m in a room that has air conditioning, I start to get the sniffles. No matter how hot it is out. It feels great for the first ½ hour or so but after that, I get a running nose and feel cold. I think it’s all that cold air blowing out at me. I’d much rather have a fan on to circulate the air than the air conditioner on. I think it’s also that air conditioners don’t really have a temperature setting it’s cold or really cold. Must be something with artificial air that makes me sick…is that possible? I’m sitting here at the client’s in Miami and thinking, God it’s so hot outside but here I am trying to play with the air conditioning unit to make it just right. Especially since I’m out of town on a client engagement, I don’t want to be sick since this is my first of many travels for the next 10 weeks. We’ll just have to see how I feel at the end of the day or tomorrow.

Roles Royce of Mattress

So I decided to get a new mattress on Saturday cause the one I had was really firm and I don't like it at all. Well, I go into the mattress store (Sleepy's) thinking...well it should be like $500-600...not that big of a deal. Boy was I wrong. First off, they had this machine to determine what mattress type they think you are. From that they show you that type of mattress so that it's good for your back. Three hours and 6 mattress' later, I end up back on the first mattress I was on. This was the best by far but the most expensive that I've been on...so the question goes..."is this the most expensive mattress in the store?"

"No, there is a $5k mattress...that's considered the Roles Royce of Mattress' "

Wow...so of course, we had to go and try it. I didn't find it that great...it was nice but come on...$5k for a mattress? And this is just for a mattress, no boxspring. I thought mine was extreme...but in the end, it's all worth it cause I got 0% financing for 2 years and a lifetime warranty...so I'll never have to buy a mattress again. It was slightly more than I wanted to spend since I've made all these other big purchases lately but who can give up 2 years 0% financing? I am the typical Consumer Sucker!

To top it off...one of my other friends that came with me in the store ended up buying a new mattress and box spring and she wasn't even looking for one.

White Vs. Dark Meat

We were sitting around talking when one of my friends asked me, "do you know the difference between white and dark meat?". I sat there thinking it was a trick question and thought about it more and said "yah". Then he goes on to say, "if you're cooking something at home and the recipe asks for white meat what do you use?" "Umm...chicken breast?" So of course I need to know why he's asking all these questions so I probe about it and realize that he only recently (about a year ago) found out the difference between White and Dark meat. He had this conversation with some other guy and didn't think it was weird that he didn't know the difference. He thought it was normal not to know the difference. I guess the question came up one day when he was ordering fried chicken and he asked the question since the prices are different. The guy asked him the same question of "what do you put in your recipes when it asks for white meat". His answer was "Thighs". Then he goes on to tell us that he's always known that people separate White and Dark meat at Thanksgiving but he never knew why. This one has kept us amused for weeks and I'm sure he'll never hear the end of it.

Teapot

I don't know how the conversation got brought up but a friend of mine was talking about making tea in a teapot...I think we were talking about buying a teapot. Anyways, he was talking about how his fire on his gas stove is too big for the teapot...I'm sitting going..."you put your teapot on your stove?" He's like yah...why not. I'm like..."is it a kettle?" "No...it's like hte teapots from restaurants with a tea strainer and a small plastic handle". I'm like..."I don't think that goes on the stove...you poor hot water into it...not boil the water in it." So I got him to look up a picture of the teapot for me...he then goes on to say..."yah...it was frustrating making sure the handle stays up so it doesn't get too hot". I just shake my head.

Ten Story Walk Up

Sitting in our cramped room, we have a great view of Bryant Park. On the other side of Bryant Park we can see this building that looks like pretty decent. We stare at the top floor and it looks like it has this really nice deck but the building looks really old and run down from the outside. We've been talking about this building for 2 weeks now and wondering if we think it's a walk up or not. My vote was that it was since it was run down and it was only ten stories. The others said no. I guess there probably isn't such thing as a ten story walk up here. I'm not sure...I never really looked at walk ups when I was looking at apartments. Anyways, we've been trying to tell people to walk by in the morning to figure out if it was a walk up or not. So last night we finally did it...we walked through the park and it was clearly not a walk up at all...the lobby was nicely renovated and they'd be crazy to have the inside that nice and not have an elevator in that building. I guess we'll have to find something else to talk about in the day now that we know it's not a walk up.

Working Environment

So I've been at this one client for 3 weeks now. Lots of work to do but very little motivation to do it now. We're split into teams at this client and at the beginning there were 5 of us. Then it grew to 8, then 10, down to 3 and now we're back up to 7. Now the room situation...We were in 1 room (now these are just offices) then moved into 2 rooms and back into 1 room. There is 6 of us in this one room!!!! It's crazy. I'm working on a small rolling filing cabinet table and it's just cramped quarters. Well, with so many of us in the room...we have many interesting conversations.

The best is when you're working with some people and you think "What the F... are you thinking when you do that?" This one guy who is no longer in our group was in charge of putting together some binders and file paperwork away in them. We had asked him to flag the paperwork with different color post its so that it would be easy to flip through we people are looking for things. So he left our group and we're sitting there wondering...how do we know what each color post it means? Well we find him down the hall and ask him..."oh, I made a legend". We're like "great! Where is it?" He comes into the room to find the original post it dispensers that he was working with and shows us the legend. The legend was on each individual post it dispenser as to what the color meant! What the hell?

Well, I guess the upside to it is that he at least made a legend.

Time to go to Dinner!

So I'm sitting here at work...been here for 11 hours now and I'm brain dead. A bunch of us have agreed to go out for sushi for dinner since we're so sick of eating the food that they bring in. I feel like such a slacker cause I'm the only one that is constantly asking..."when we leaving?". But the thing is, I've finished what I wanted to today and don't want to start on a new project till tomorrow. What to do? Blog...yah, this is a boring blog...but I'm bored out of my mind and don't know what to do since we're not leaving yet.

God you would think that we could leave already but I guess since everyone else gets in over an hour after me, they probably aren't as brain dead.

Jessica Simpson

So I'm not really a fan...actually I don't even know what she sings...but there is a free concert in the park right across the street from my clients at 7am this morning. So we figured, ok we'll go at 6:30am and check it out since we are here...why not.

I get up this morning...so hard to wake up at 5:30...snooze..."Dim Sum, stop licking me...ok, ok...I'm up!" Get to the park at 6:30....line up wrapped around the park..."oh no, are we even going to see". We get into the park at 7am...not so bad, pretty decent spot..can see the stage fine. Didnt' realize the park was so big. Standing there, we hear one of the people working there say that she's not showing up till 8:30am...we listen in on the conversation..."yah, they do sound check, other entertainment things and then she shows up" Damn them....I got up early for this...we finally decide, I'm not standing around to watch a 1 hour advertising for Dukes of Hazzard.

So now we're standing in the office looking out of the window from the 18th floor (window does not open, but we can hear the music and cheering) waiting for Jessica to show up.

We see an SUV pull up, some people get out...a guy in a green shirt holding a dog...is it Nick? Who knows...but we're saying it is...haha.

Hope she's on soon! Gotta love NYC.

TV Delivery

So I asked my ex-subletter to sit in my apartment to wait for my TV to arrive between the window of 11am to 4pm. Ok..that's kinda a big window but I guess that's how they do stuff in NYC.

So I call at 11am...nope no TV.
I call at 3pm...nope no TV.
I call at 5pm...nope no TV...he's got to go.

Oh no...what to do now. I call the Delivery company (they outsourced the delivery) and they check on the driver and they tell me he's stuck in traffic and won't get to my place till 6:30pm.

"Well, I'm at work can you have him call me 1/2 hour before he gets there" Ok they say. So I rush home and 6:30...no call...I'm thinking...should I leave to walk Dim Sum...wait a little longer...no call.

6:50pm...I get a call..."where are you located exactly?"

"Are you close?"
"Yah...I'll be there in 5 min"

Well after all that...he arrives, he's really nice and I'm sure he hears yelling all day so I'm just like..."well can you put the stand and TV together for me?" He does it and he's off....gosh I got to remind myself that they are always late on deliveries!!!!