"Live a life less ordinary
Live a life extrodinary with me"
Carbon Leaf

What a wonderful weekend!

Friday I took Cara on my benchmark date. This is a date that I eventually take everyone I've ever dated in Seattle on. It consists of dinner somewhere downtown, a show, and then dancing at The Pampas Room. Dinner is all about conversation, the show is all about a shared experience, and dancing is all about... well, dancing, but also how she does when I get her out of her comfort zone.

How did Cara measure up? Flying colors. A new high score as it were. She's an exceptional person in every way and I'm so such a lucky fool to have a chance with her. There's good stuff in the midst of all this life stuff if you've got the patience to make it through the rough patches.

Had my annual review on Firday. Blessedly there were no surprises. The things I feel I need to work on my manager noted and made suggestions for how to improve, the things that I feel are my strengths he recognizes and thanked me for my contributions. I hear a lot of horrow stories about monsterous managers at Microsoft so I consider myself very lucky to work for such a great guy,

What else did I do? Went and saw RENT with Ted: god I love that show. I also heard a girl say one of the ten stupidest things I have ever heard in my entire life. I detail it later.

Oh! And I finally found a frisbee golf coarse. It was... underwhelming: chaotic, short, boring, and FILLED WITH DIRTY HIPPEES! It was like Hempfest south.

Anyway, its a new week. Ever forward.

"In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles
In laughter, in strife"
    RENT, Seasons of Love

And we're back! It turns out that turning on the Windows firewall prevents your computer from serving up web pages unless you explicitly enable it to. oops!

Speaking of which... any of you who are running Windows XP should get your cyberbutts out to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and get SP2! This will also turn on your firewalls, and you'll be safer for it.

I'm doing well. Spend last weekend and Vegas at a friends bachelor party. No stories: what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Things with Cara are really going well, and its really nice to have some happiness in that sphere for a change.

Finally, after a perfect summer the rains have returned to the Emerald City. Its still warm, but the best bits are defintily behind us. I used to be one of those that really looked forward to fall and winter, but Summer in Seattle is a tough act to follow.

"I want my waffle Sunday....
Give me my carbs."
Foamy, 'Neuroticly Yours'

So I found this really funny online cartoon about a squirrel called Foamy. However, its really crass and pretty vulgar so if you're offended by a lot of dirty words then you don't want to have anything to do with it. Otherwise: http://www.illwillpress.com/vault.html

Other news: had a date tonight with Cara, a truly fabulous girl that I was positive wanted to have nothing to do with me. Thankfully I was completly wrong. Perhaps I should be a little less neurotic about this whole dating thing. However, I am learning to be a little more cautious about how excited I let myself get. What I'd like to do is figure out what it is about me or what I'm doing to get filed under friend so quickly, but until I do that I guess I'll just have to do a better job of keeping perspective. Its only dating, right?

By the way... when the heck did it get to be August?!? I feel like I'm being cheated out of my Summer! No that's not true: I'm having a wonderful time. This weekend was the Seattle Lindy Exchange (http://seal.org). I only hit a couple of the events (and NO late night), but it was a fabulous time all the same. My favorite part was this afternoon when we were all dancing in Westlake plaza in the middle of downtown Seattle (this would be the same dance where I first asked out Lisa two years ago). It was a gorgeous sunny day, the dancing was superbu, and in the words of Van Morrison "And the people passing by just stare with wide-eyed wonder"

Fabulous.

"Nothing to do, it's up to you
I've got noting to say but it's O.K."
The Beatles, Good Morning Good Morning

I really don't have much to say. Here are the bare-bones details:

Good stuff
-Met my big deadline a couple of weeks ago
-Been playing a fair amount of beach volleyball
-Going to Vegas in a few weeks
-Seeing 'RENT' the week after that

Bad News
-I'm so far behind at work I may never get out of the hole I'm in
-Cecilia has demoted me to 'friend'

And still life goes on...