Welcome

I had a lot of fun this summer and was quite busy therefore very limited blog posts.

Here are some photos I posted on facebook. You should be able to access them even without a facebook account. http://indiana.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2279767&l=5d6ff&id=6852332
http://indiana.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2303510&l=e7ca7&id=6852332

After Yosemite Steve and I visited Sonoma where we spent two days going to different wineries in the area. I bought 5 bottles of wine. One I gave to my roommate when I moved out, she was really nice to me. The other Steve and I drank one night and the rest are now in the wine rack of my apartment.

Our next trip was Gilroy Garlic Festival/Carmel and Monterey. The garlic festival was a bit of a let down I was expecting more for $12 per person. We saw it and that is about all we can say about it. Carmel was nice the main attraction was a shopping area. We had a nice lunch at a small Italian bistro. Most of the shops were a little out of our current price range. It was still fun to look at the galleries and shops in the area.

From there we visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium which I thought was pretty fun. We saw all sorts of sea life displayed in a really nice way. That sounds odd to say but zoos and aquariums are all about displaying the animals properly and in an interesting manner. I posted some of the cool jellyfish photos I took at the aquarium.

Our final trip was Las Vegas. We left the day after finishing our internships. We stayed at Treasure Island. It was a nice hotel nothing fancy but also not a crazy place like Circus Circus. We saw a few shows including Penn and Teller and Blue Man Group. We were disappointed with the Blue Man Group show since I had seen essentially the same show in Boston and Steve had seen many of the acts on a dvd.

Besides shows we did a little gambling. I lost two dollars and Steve won over a hundred. We also saw a lot of the hotels on the strip. If I were to go back I would probably stay at Paris. I liked the way the hotel looked. Funny thing about Paris and New York, New York. Both have fake streets inside that are supposed to replicate city streets from their respective cities. In NY,NY the bottom floor is normal scale but the upper floors are squished. You sort of feel off walking through these "streets". Paris has everything on a decent scale where you don't feel weird.

The weekends we were not out of town which were pretty few we spent exploring San Francisco. I feel like I a good feel for the city. I lived in the Marina and spent time in many of the different neighborhoods.

I really loved the city. The only thing I didn't like was how cold it was.

All in all I had a great summer and got to see more of California than most of the other people I know who were out there for the summer.

This morning somewhere around 4 am I was sleeping soundly in my bed in San Francisco. All of the sudden the bed started to shake then I heard the shutters on my window flapping and the door squeeking. At first I didn't know what was going on then when I woke up fully I realized it was an earthquake. I stayed in bed till the room stopped shaking and then got up and wondered if I should do something. I listened for my roommate to get up but she just rolled over and went back to sleep. No lights went on in my building everyone acted almost as if this was normal.

I talked to a few people this morning who didn't even feel the quake in the city. It was an odd experience but luckily all is still well here.

Yeah I have been a bit busy so I haven't posted in a while.

What have I been up to you wonder well I have been spending most of my weekend exploring different areas of California.

To catch up from my last post I moved into the Marina area of San Fransisco and it is pretty nice. I have a view of the Golden Gate bridge from the roof. This was also nice for fireworks last week since they shoot them from barges on the bay. I had a great view of the fireworks and apparently one of the warmest 4ths in many years.

A few weekends ago we went to Lake Tahoe. There was a group of about 6 interns and me as the only female. It reminded me a bit of the Smokies experience. :) The first day we had breakfast in downtown Tahoe City, we then went and rented water toys. Steve, one of the other interns, and I rented a canoe which was very difficult to keep from being blown out to the center of the lake due to the high winds. We had a few moments where we had to paddle really hard just to stay close to shore. Steve also lost his balance and we almost ended up in the cold lake, fortunately he was able to regain his balance so we didn't tip. We had rented things for an hour but only made it half an hour.

The next day we decided to take on a hike. The visitors center recommended the eagle lake hike on the south side of the lake. This seemed to work out since we could use an alternate route to get home that would leave from that side of the lake. The trail went past a waterfall and then to a small mountain lake. After hiking to the lake we spent a little time there and then turned around to head back to the cars.

As we got to the trail head we saw strange clouds over the lake. We realized these were not clouds but smoke from a fire. We hurried to get on the road so we could make it out before the fire spread and closed roads. The traffic crawled along the road around the lake and fire trucks kept whizzing past us toward the blaze. We continued with our plan to use the alternate highway to get home but when we got to the split to get on it a sign told us the highway was closed due to the fire. We had to take an alternate route which added a significant amount of time to our trip.

The weekend before last Steve and I went to Yosemite. We wanted to go before the waterfalls were completely gone and it got too hot to hike. Google maps gave us some crazy directions down this two lane road through the middle of nowhere. We got a little turned around a few times and lost a lot of time that we would have spent in the park that day. When we did get to the park we were fighting darkness to see things. We did get to see pretty much everything we wanted to see in the Yosemite valley.

That night we drove through the park to the other side near Nevada to spend the night. We stayed in a small hotel in the same room John Wayne stayed in. http://virginiacreeksettlement.com/motel.html The next day we went to visit the ghost town of Bodie, CA, http://www.bodie.com/. I was pretty interesting many of the homes still had furniture and other interesting items still inside. The town is being preserved as a state park.

After grabbing a quick snack we headed back into Yosemite to hike a few more trails and then head back to San Fransisco. That day we got in at a more reasonable hour.

We are planning a few more trips this summer which I will hopefully recount the stories from sooner rather than later.

PayPal is an interesting place to work, much different from the New York Times Co. The dress code is jeans and a nice shirt/sweater etc. I think they call it office casual.

The buildings on both the eBay and PayPal campuses have themes. I am in the music building so the conference rooms on each of the floors are named after composers and rock bands. We have our weekly staff meeting in a room called Metallica.

The lobby of building I work in is decorated with all sorts of random things like lunch boxes, pez dispensers, board games and other random things. One of the other buildings is fashion themed. That building has skirts, belts and shoes on the walls. The conference rooms have different designer themes. The funniest conference room was the Brooks Brothers room which has full suits on the wall.

On each of the floors there is a different type of snack food that is free for the taking. The top floor is cereal and milk, the second floor is Chex mix, pretzels and trail mix, the first floor is fruit. All of the floors have free soda, water and juice. They also all have espresso machines on each floor. The top floor has a coffee machine that dispenses different kinds of flavored coffees as well as hot chocolate also for free.

We don't get free lunch like Google but the eBay cafe has pretty good food and it is average price for restaurants nearby.

I have been tossed around a bit with desks. They have someone new starting tomorrow so they took the first desk I was working at to give to him. It makes sense since he is a full time person. So I am temporarily sitting in another desk until I move with the risk group that I am working with right now.

They are apparently going to move all of the UI teams into the new building when it is finished early next year. That is why they are getting pushed around a bit right now.

Last Friday was big eBay Co. summer festival on the soccer fields at the PayPal campus. They had a live band, lots of food and games. They played the eBay song by Weird Al that I hadn't heard before. It was funny. Here is a video that someone made of it. The second photo of a building with the eBay sign in front is the one I work in.