Getting2Work

It’s been over a month since I posted.  Why?  No more long commutes?  No, not really … but maybe some day and hopefully it’s will be by choice.

So the reason for not posted was because of a lot of overtime at work.  Instead of a 4/10 workweek, it was more like a 6/10.  So that was a bit tiring but at least for our team it was only for a short period.  Other teams had been working the same overtime hours for months and had just recently stopped.

Then I took a couple of weeks off and spent about a week up in San Francisco with friends and family.  We really took it easy partly because my Mom was with us and she really can’t do a lot of walking anymore.  After the first day I could really tell that she was too tired out.  So we did the San Francisco 49 Miles Scenic drive and stopped at various spots and walk a bit and took lots of pictures.

We didn’t stopped at all the places recommended.  But it was actually quite a nice and relaxing time.  Here’s the link to the map of the Sf 49 Miles Scenic Drive I downloaded (Scroll down to the bottom of the linked page and there is the download button for the pdf file.

We also spent time with friends at their place up in the wine country.

While we were there, my friend’s husband and her brother was making a market run and asked if anyone else wanted to go along.  We all figured it’s just to the super market and we all declined except for my Mom.  She went along just to hang out with them.  They were gone for a good long time and we were starting to wonder what happened to them.  We found out that they had taken a side trip of wine tasting.  My Mom who does not drink actually sampled a few.  From the way she was talking about her first wine tasting experience, I think she really enjoyed herself.  I am sure it helped because she had gone with 2 people who know and enjoy wine.  If she had gone with us who do not drink and know nothing about wine, she would not be that excited after she came back.

So right after my 2 weeks of vacation, I had to go on jury duty.  My first experience as a juror and I have to say it was quite interesting.  I know a lot of people really try hard to get out of it for whatever the reason.  I can see financial hardship or a true extremest being a couple good reasons to be excused.  But some of them you can really tell that they were making things up.  The one that I thought was unreasonable was the lady who had been here for 20 years and used English as her second language as the excuse.  I am not saying that the length of time being in this country automatically made it a bad excuse.  She was chatting just fine while we were waiting to get into the court room.  One good thing about working for a bigger corporations is that they do pay for the jury duty.  So I really did not have minded it so much.  After answering a standard list of questions which included occupation (engineer) and few of the other questions that the prosecutor posted regarding what I do (testing), I can tell that the prosecutor did not want me on the panel.  It’s one thing seeing it on TV how the lawyer “set the stage” to sway the jurors to see things their way but seeing it done in a real court is something else.  It made me feel that I should be more careful not to be bias.  I thought I could do a pretty good job.  Whatever the reasons and they don’t tell you that and sure enough, the prosecutor lady dismissed me right away.  The juror selection had dragged out to 2 days.

So this week’s commute was only 1 day.  Yippee … until next week.  But really should not complain with this economy, budget cuts everywhere and all the layoffs.  I am glad I still have a job to go to.  We’ve had layoffs in our area too.  Missed being cut last round but I hear there is more coming.  Yikes!!!!