managing stress in a fast-paced world

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0922042speed1.html

I ran into an old friend today while on the BART, he was sleeping so I didn’t get to talk to him, but he looks exactly the same. I’m sure everyone always wonders about their old friends and where they are now… I guess that’s what reunions are for.

Oh well, it was nice to see you Chuck X.

This weekend was meant to be a relaxing, low stress type of thing. On saturday I went to go see the Art Car Fest in Downtown San Jose.

Lots of time and energy those people put into their cars. I liken it to a custom car builder, or an import tuner who basically does the same thing. These are just VERY unique.

Someday I’m going to build one for myself, there was one guy who had an orange van, he had solar panels on top and ran out of room in the van so he took a trailer and added it. He spends his days traveling like a vagabond.

After the Art Car Fest, I headed over to the Santa Clara Art & Wine Festival. It was packed, more than I had expected, parking was hard to find, but eventually I found a spot and didn’t have to walk far at all. Mike, Leeya, Mia and I didn’t eat yet and it was already 2pm. I must have spent like $20 on food, it wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great either.

We wandered around, I was quite tired by the end, almost everything I liked there was too expensive. I didn’t buy a glass and tokens either, not much there really caught my eye.

A pretty big group of us celebrated Nelson’s belated birthday, we had actually arrived back in the bay area from Vancouver on his birthday. Anyways, the plan was to have dinner and cake, but the group was too big and the selection of places was limited.

Geoff and I decided to try out Dave & Busters in Milpitas, not such a great idea… we were in The Show Room where it was karaoke night. Afterwards we headed home and had cake there. It was a nice quiet rest of the night, people stayed and played dominos, mahjong, and watched tv.

Later that week I had dinner with my family for Kenny’s birthday, pretty relaxed. We all went to the Cheesecake Factory. I got there early and just walked around the mall. Half of the mall had lost power so that was sort of interesting. Employees were just waiting around for the power to come back on. For the other half it was business as usual.

When I woke up this morning I just knew it, I didn’t want to go but I forced myself out of bed and off to work I went. It was fine for a bit, then I turned on the radio, 880 North my daily commute had been reduced to 1 lane. Eh, I’ll deal with it I told myself, then about 30 minutes later and only 6 miles further, I couldn’t take it anymore, I took 580 as an alternate.

I should have turned around and gone back to Fremont, taken Bart from there, it was free until 9am. Eventually I heard they closed 880 for a bit and then just a few minutes before getting into work they reopened it completely.

What a way to start the day.

The group of us somehow decided that it would be best to just drive home and spend monday relaxing… yea so we spent all day sunday on the road. The canadian border had a line, and we stopped somewhere in Oregon for dinner. I drove the last stretch home, somewhere north of Sac around 2am, and we were home at about the same time we left, just before 5am.

In the end, 96 hours to go from Santa Clara to Vancouver and back…

Vancouver was our actual destination so we planned to stay for 3 days and 2 nights. That first night we walked around downtown, one of the first things we saw were 25 cent peep shows…. anyways, we were on the wrong street, no restaurants and it was getting late. Finally we found a nice italian place, the food was good but the portions small.

Afterwards it was time to go back and rest again from the drive. The hotel was pretty comfortable, the next morning we went looking for fruit. Chinatown was only a few blocks away, but it was a completely different area of town.

We had lunch and bought supposedly $60 of fruit!

What a day so far, I almost didn’t have the energy for Gastown. There was a Concours d’Elegance show there alot of cars, mostly old, some steam powered, kinda surprised to see american muscle cars, but whatever.

Our final destination was Stanley Park. Reminded me alot of Golden Gate Park… we didn’t get to see everything, I was definately tired. I would have liked to see the whales, but when you don’t plan out places to go and things to do, you’re bound to leave something out.

The rest of the night was pretty uneventful, after dinner we tried to go shopping but Future Shop was closed already. We picked up some drinks for the trip home and went back to the hotel. The plan was to leave at 8am, but that somehow turned into 11am.

Seattle and Duvall were nice, we stayed with Mike’s sister, she just bought a new home and moved in just a week before. There was plenty of space for everyone to sleep. After dinner we headed home to rest and the next day said bye to Duvall and hung around in Seattle.

We really only visited 2 places, Pikes Peak Marketplace and the Spaceneedle. Nothing really interesting, just alot of things to see and take in. We headed up to Canada from there and made it into Vancouver just after dark. After calling around for hotels… (we didn’t plan very well) the five of us stayed at the Century Hotel & Spa. Not as nice as we wanted, but it had a total of 2 beds and a sofabed.

I am back from vacation, not much happened. See I got sick the day before I was supposed to leave. How did that happen… well, I have my suspicions. First was the sponge in the sink at work, I washed my tupperware after breakfast and my hands smelled like an old sponge. Who knows what other stuff was on them… then there was the 60 degree server room where I was going in and out all day. I first felt sick around the 10am meeting, by the time I finally got home around 10pm, I was full blown sick.

The next morning I stayed home from work. I called my boss and she couldn’t believe how bad I sounded. We were set to leave later that night. I spent all day in bed resting, it was horrible… later that night I started to feel better, the plan was to leave at 4am for Seattle. Some people were late and some forgot their passports. We didn’t leave until 5am on Thursday morning.

Strangely enough the car ride wasn’t so bad, I did sleep through alot of the drive up. We finally reached our destination at 8pm or so, in the city of Duvall, WA.