Sacred Heart and a Toaster

Working with people in multiple timezones means that I'm often working from home on conference calls at 6:00am or in the evening. This goes with the territory, but it does mean that the 40+ hours in a normal work week can be made up in a variety of ways other than being in the office for eight hours a day. So on Friday afternoon the five of us (the whole team) left the office for something a little different. We had lunch at the Palace BBQ Buffet in Sunnyvale, which is a Korean barbeque. What this means is that once you've been seated, you go to a buffet counter and pick up some starters, vegetables, and a big pile of marinated raw meat, and take them back to your table. The center of the table is a mini gas barbeque, so someone takes 'Chef' duties and the meat gets cooked at the table. As with most barbeques, I ate a lot more meat than I should have. Very tasty, though. Then we went to the Sacred Heart community service to do some volunteer work, which is something that Mel had organized for us. I spent the first part of the afternoon sorting through food donations and shifting boxes around. Then most of my afternoon (along with two other adult volunteers and a couple of girls from a local high school) was spent sorting eggs. They get donations of boxes of eggs which supermarkets can't sell because one or more eggs has broken. We were taking all the good eggs and sorting them into half-dozen sets... although the boxes themselves didn't come in half-dozen sizes, so we were making half-dozen boxes out of the good parts of larger boxes, in a Blue Peter stylee. Much more enjoyable than I'd expected. The people - both volunteers and staff - were all really friendly and a lot of fun. In other news... we received our medical cards for the proper company medical scheme, so we can now come off the temporary cover we've been on for the last month. Also, I finally got paid. So five weeks of living on the money we transferred over from the UK has come to an end. This is fortunate, because we're only in the corporate housing (which is funded by the company) until the end of next week. So we'll be paying rent and utility bills soon. We pick up the keys to our rental house later this morning. In preparation for that, we went out yesterday to buy some things that have been provided in the corporate housing that we won't have in the rental - like a toaster and a coffee machine. The coffee machine is made by "Mr. Coffee" which just makes me smile. It seems like the response from a slightly indignant coffee machine if you didn't give it the respect it deserves. We can't be without toast and coffee.