March 20, 1992
Dear Everyone:
Aren’t birthdays wonderful?
And root canals. Don't
you just love them?
Seriously, thank you to everyone for the Birthday
Cards and Calls.
“Jeannie” and I celebrated my birthday early, on
the Saturday before, since the actual day landed on a (shudder) Monday
this year. We started out with a
shopping spree at
Penneys where I had one of those
25%-off-everything-you-buy-in-one-day-certificates.
My current pair of jeans was
about to disintegrate and I needed some new "casual" clothes, now that
at least one day per week is a "casual day" in the office.
It may change to two days per
week because of our work on Quality Improvement.
Evidently, people can better
improve the quality of their work if they’re more comfortably dressed.
We started out looking at jeans, which now come in
"petite" sizes for people who were not born to play basketball for a
living. No more cutting a foot
off the bottom and re-hemming the legs.
The sales lady graciously offered to hold the jeans
at the cashier’s station while we looked around some more.
“Jeannie” gets credit for finding
the denim skirt, which was on the clearance rack.
(For some reason the word
"clearance" has an effect on “Jeannie” similar to the one that magnets
have on iron-fillings.) But I get
credit for realizing that the skirt was miles too big for me, even
though it was the same "size" as the jeans, and finding another that was
two sizes smaller, which fit much better.
(Look, Ma! I've dropped two dress sizes!)
Add the skirt to the growing pile on the cashier's
desk and go out hunting for more. The
final toll was: 2 pairs of jeans;
one denim skirt; 8 tops, of various styles and colors; and 3 pairs of
socks for “Jeannie”, who snuck them into the pile while I wasn't
looking. All for
less than $180 (in America,
it's not how much you spend, it's how much you "save" that counts.)
And, contrary to what someone told “Alice”, it is
not illegal to buy more than one pair of jeans at a time.
Of course, we did not limit our shopping to
Pennies. That was just the first
stop. Next, we visited a shop
called Hold Everything.
It's full of things to hold
things. Boxes, racks, cupboards.
Stuff for the closet; stuff for
the bathrooms; high-density, vertical storage for earrings.
In short, an organizer’s
paradise.
We hit a few more places before heading to
Blackhawk Plaza. This is a
gorgeous "outdoor" mall, the place, according to “Jeannie”, where
"mallies" go when they die. It's
full of hilariously expensive shops, lots of marble, restaurants where
you couldn't afford to buy a cup of coffee, and a truly beautiful series
of interconnecting fountains and streams.
It also has a museum and theater group.
We like to go there for the
movies because a) movies before 6:00 pm cost $3.00 and b) the popcorn
and soft drinks are also cheaper than anywhere else in the Bay Area.
We watched Stephen King’s
The Lawnmower Man. On a
plus/delta scale, where pluses are good and deltas are not-so-good, the
graphics were a plus, the plot was a delta.
Good popcorn, though.
We finished up with a Prime Rib
dinner at a restaurant overlooking the San Ramon Valley, which is very
pretty at night.
On Monday, my "real" birthday, I brought goodies
into the office. This is a
"tradition", going into its second year, that the birthday person
provides the birthday goodies. Last
week, I overheard some people on our floor, talking about how, now that
everyone is so health-conscious, even when they get free doughnuts, they
can't really enjoy them because they keep thinking about how many grams
of fat there are in one and how much sugar and so on.
So I racked my brains all weekend (when I wasn't
actively shopping) to come up with a "treat" that people can enjoy but
that isn't full of stuff we shouldn't be putting into our bodies.
I finally had a brainstorm and,
Monday morning, I set out an aluminum tray with Easter "grass".
On top of the "grass", I placed
fresh apples, oranges, pears, tangelos, bananas, and a small bunch of
grapes. Just in case someone
objected to "health food" as a treat, I also picked up some shamrock
cookies at the Safeway
bakery.
We had two meetings scheduled for that morning, one
from 8:00-9:00 and another from 9:30 to 11:00.
During the first meeting, people
passed around the plate of cookies. Each
person took exactly one cookie. I looked at the
fruit tray and thought, "Well,
that went over like a lead balloon."
But then, after a break between meetings, I noticed
citrus peels in front of one person… And another had cut an apple up
into wedges and was consuming them easily.
And “Scott”, who had come into
the City from Company Park to demonstrate a new computer system for us,
kept digging in the "grass" for grapes as he talked.
By afternoon, there were a
mackintosh apple and one pear left. At
the end of the day, I noticed a visitor in the conference room, waiting
for “Melanie” and “Ken”… And munching on the pear.
So the fruit idea went okay.
Feel free to use it any time.
Love, as always,
Pete
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