Halloween Dilemma

On Saturday I was headed down to Oxnard for something, and asked Philip (my roommate, just in case you forgot) if he had any use for going down with me. He didn't want to go down, but gave a Walmart gift card he's been hanging onto since graduation. Oxnard (40 miles away) is the closest Walmart to us. Needless to say, he's just been wanting to get this thing used up. We talked about what we could use, but could only come up with one thing: Halloween candy to pass out.

So now we have $20 worth of Halloween candy, which is a considerable amount since Walmart is so cheap. We can't even fit all of it in the gigantic bowl we have. So we are all set to hand out candy to kids tomorrow night.

Here's the dilemma: A friend at Church just invited us to go to a "Harvest" party at their house tomorrow night. Both of us want to go, but that doesn't leave anyone at home to pass out the candy. We talked about it and decided that we would just both go, and not worry about whether or not kids got enough candy. So now we have a giant stash of candy, and I'm not sure what we'll do with it. Based on the rate at which either of us eats candy, it would probably last until Halloween of 2007 with just the two of us eating it. I guess we'll just leave a big bowl out and encourage guests to have at least as much as they want, and preferably more.

Almost Ironic

Yesterday I received a Harvey Mudd College alumni directory in the mail. I flipped through to see if they had gotten my address correct. "Beaverton, OR" - Apparently not.

The doubts started creeping into my mind, did I really give them my new address? I thought I did, but I wasn't sure. Did I have any evidence of giving them my new address? Suddenly it hit me, they mailed it to me at my current address. They must have it. Hence the irony, that they managed to mail a book of addresses to the correct address, without actually putting my address correctly in the book.

The irony factor, however, was dulled when I looked in the front cover to see that they used the addresses they had on April 1, 2005, months before I moved into my current apartment. Oh well.

Is it Really Me?

Every other Friday night there is Swing dancing in Santa Barbara with a live band. Generally I haven't been going, but this week I decided that just dancing on Wednesday night wasn't good enough. I had a great time, but one thing in particular stuck out to me. One woman I danced with thought she remembered me, and she seemed vaguely familiar to me too. Anyway, when I told her my name I got a response I'm not used to, "Are you the really good Phil?"

Now, I consider myself to be a fairly good swing dancer, but not good enough to have a reputation, even in a smaller area like Santa Barbara. Honestly, even though I kind of like the idea of being that good, I suspect there must be some other Philip in Santa Barbara that has this reputation, and I don't think it's my roommate.

Ok, one other memorable thing. One of the women I danced with decided to give me all of her weight when I dipped her at the end of the song. I wasn't expecting it, because that isn't the common way of dipping in social situations. It wasn't graceful, but I managed to keep us from falling. If she had weighed even a little more, that might not have been the case.

Anniversary Post

Yep, that's right. I've been writing on this blog for a year now. Although I have to admit that recently I've slacked quite a bit. Sometimes it is a lack of things that seem worth writing about, but more often I'm just too busy/lazy to write. Here are a few things from the past week that I had wanted to write full posts about, but never got around to:

• Last Friday (October 14th) marked my being back in the United States for four months. That is somewhat significant to me because it means I have now been back for longer than I was away.
• Last weekend my Dad came down from Portland and visited me. I had a great time with him, and was reminded just how lucky I am, and how much I take it for granted that I have a good relationship with my parents.
• Last Sunday I had some conflict with another man at Church. I was pretty upset when I got home. Tuesday night we got together with two other people from Church, and they helped us talk through a lot of it. Things certainly aren't perfect, but they are a lot better, and we couldn't have gotten there just the two of us.

I was also intending to spend some time reflecting on life from the past year, perhaps commenting on some of my favorite posts. Along those same lines, but much lazier, this post is the one that I hear about from other people more than any other. Of the posts that I remember off the top of my head, this is the one that I had the most fun writing. Anyone else out there have some posts that stand out to them out of all my blogging from the last year?

A Bit of Irony

About two minutes after I made my last post, the power in our apartment went out. I don't know how long it was out (at least 15 minutes), but it was back on in the morning.

On an interesting side note, three out of my last five posts have involved the topic of a power outage. I certainly hope that this won't be a long term trend.

Even in Santa Barbara

When I got home from work today (about 7pm), the stop light nearest to my apartment was out. Later, when I went to go swing dancing (about 9:20pm), that light was still out, and I noticed that all the lights in stores and at gas stations surrounding that intersection were out. I hadn't noticed anything else earlier, but at that point it was still dusky. Coming home from dancing (11pm), all of those lights were still out. I was used to power outages like that in Kolkata, but it seems kind of weird in Santa Barbara.

IV in IV

Last Friday night some people from my Church (myself included) went to help out with an IV (InterVarsity) outreach event in IV (Isle Vista). In case you aren't familiar with it, IV is an area near UCSB primarily inhabited by college students. There is a huge drunken party scene there. IV decided to go down there to just bless IV on a Friday night with free doughnuts and root beer floats. It was an interesting night, and certainly gave me some flashbacks to my college days at Mudd. People were all over the map when we talked to them. Some were incredibly thankful. Others didn't trust us at all and figured there had to be something wrong with the doughnuts. I saw a lot of the tugs of peer pressure. There were people that wanted to stop and talk to us, but their friends pulled them away to get to the next party. Here is the conversation I got a real kick out of:

Drunken Woman: What's wrong with these doughnuts?
Me: Nothing, we didn't do anything to them.
Drunken Woman: No really. I just had one, what did you do to them?
Me: Nothing. We're here with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. We're just handing out doughnuts and root beer floats to bless the neighborhood.
Drunken Woman: Oh, ok. Can I have another one?

Another Great Reason to Bike to Work

Time: 6:00pm.

Me: I'm heading out for the day.
Office Mate: Wait! I need some help figuring out what in the world you did to this code. It doesn't make any sense anymore and I need to work with it now.
Me: Geee... I'd love to help you, but I biked to work today, and if I don't head out soon it will be dark before I get home. I don't want to get hit by a car.
Office Mate: Grumble. Fine, you win. It may be expected of engineers to swamp their lives with work, but I can't ask you to trade your life for work... this time. Mark my words, we will meet again... slacker.
Me: So I'll see you tomorrow morning?
Office Mate: Naw, I'm going to ditch work the next two days and enjoy a four day weekend. If anyone wants me, tell them I'm really busy with some project they aren't involved in, and that I may be hard to track down for a bit.
Me: Ummm... Ok.

Alright, so it didn't go quite like that, but the idea was there. Sort of. My office mate wanted help with some code that I had modified, specifically how it interacted with other code that someone else had written. I only took five minutes to help him, so I just explained it to him then. It occurred to me, however, that if it was a more involved problem, then having a bike as my transportation would have given me a strong reason to wait until the morning to deal with the problem.

Changing of the Guard

After a 4.5 year stint as the President of Toyon, our President stepped down because he wanted to get back to his first love, the engineering work. Today was our first working day with the new President (previously a VP). As such, there were plenty of jokes about how things would be with a new president. It only got worse in the afternoon when we had a 30 minute power outage - during which time sirens could be heard nearby.

More Spam Issues

I've been getting more comment spam, and it isn't from "anonymous" posters anymore. In an effort to stop that, I'm turning on Word Verification, the only other protection I'm aware of that's built into Blogger. I know it's a bit of a hassle, but so is having to delete comment spam, which is likely to only get worse with time. On the plus side, I'm turning anonymous comments back on. If I need to, I may end up turning those back off, but I'm hoping I won't have any more trouble...

Ye Olde Vegdahl Family Recipe

I was in charge of bringing after-study dessert. After giving it some thought, I was inspired to use a recipe my Dad sent me back in college when my suite was in charge of snacks for the InterVarsity meeting. We never ended up using it then, so I dug through my old emails and used it now.

It was a recipe for cinnamon rolls, and based on the instructions my Dad gave me, I can tell that they go back at least to his Mother. They took quite a while to prepare, and I did have to make one substitution when I realized I hadn't read the ingredients closely enough when I went shopping, but I think they came out pretty well. As the old saying goes: "Just like... Father... used to make."

Thanks for sending me that recipe two years ago Dad!