After work I was up to Los Altos to just pop in to the library for a California tax form. An hour and a half later I was outside again, that interval being occupied with fun talking to a 23-year-old Euro traveler, who asked me about a bus route map and one thing led to another. She's in the states until the end of the month, is just back from Hawaii and would like to visit Arizona before heading down to San Diego to catch her plane back to Switzerland (via Cincinnati). I agreed to post a "travel companion wanted" notice to Usenet for her; perhaps she can connect with someone compatible in time, who's heading in that direction. We'll probably see each other again before she leaves - hope so! She was neat.

At work these two guys from New Jersey are starting to get on my nerves. They're in our office/trailer for several days to upgrade our LAN & etc, and they seem quite competent. However, despite their friendliness and good natures, the one is a raspy smoker who's all the time coughing, while the other is the worst - ever singing, whistling atonally, finger-tapping, making oral noises while sucking an endless stream of Tic Tacs - his is an avuncular, oblivious form of nervousness which I find extremely distracting and annoying. As I write this he's just two feet away; we're separated only by a flimsy cubical partition. In that slightly quavery, poser voice young men use when they're emulating their rock heroes, he's singing along with his Walkman as he performs some lengthy install. He was going to remove our less-than-legitimate copy of PhotoShop and replace it with an Adobe package containing Photoshop Lite; fortunately some smooth yet minimal comments from your man on-scene convinced him to do otherwise.

Called my travel agent and arranged another long-weekend jaunt up to Vancouver - I like it there! Plus I need just a few hundred more frequent flyer miles to get a free ticket to Europe, a trip I plan for the Fall. This Pacific Northwest return will occur in three weeks.