Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:38:30 -0700I'm back in the present, which is where I prefer to be, which is what home feels like. I passed Peter in the hall yesterday, and somehow in the middle of asking him to schedule a talk for me about my latest project he opened the supply closet, full of t-shirts and jam jars emblazoned with the Google logo and the leather jackets left over from Mission Control -- the program by which I joined SRE, these 2.5 years ago -- I ended up not only with a VC-enabled room scheduled for my talk, but a Mason jar or two, onto which I pasted my name with jtr's label-maker, so that no one would accidentally take it when it was filled with beer like its identical cousins. And with Lucas having recently resupplied the keg, there I was on a Wednesday afternoon, jam jar of Racer 5, sitting between a giant screen displaying queries-per-second, a cooler full of bottles of beer we should have drunk a month ago, and the desks of the n00bs. Have I mentioned (no, I haven't; I haven't said anything in a month) how good it is to be back in my milieu? Christ: The vegetables alone! -- I knew I'd be arriving from Europe back into tomato season, but I couldn't have planned it better: At the same time as the annual fog creeps in from the coast over the demi-mountains, across the causeway of the 101 next to the Bay, the heirlooms ripened, came into season, so that each Thursday now for several weeks I've had bursting brown paper bags of yellow, green-shot, juicy red tomatoes to chop up (I resort to my serrated bread knife, to lose as little sap as possible) and to douse with the latest bottle of Arlequin red I've opened for the lazy man's version of my mother's tomato sauce: fifteen minutes on the stove, rather than her hour of sautéeing and careful herbing. Those tomatoes; this fog: This is the July I dreamed of from Dublin. I'm taking stock, going down a to-do list (checkboxes on endless post-it notes stuck to my computer, littered across my desk at work). I picked up my room, sweeping small eddies of playa dust into the trash and lining up my fabulous boots into rows. I was oncall Monday to Monday for a week solid, and though it probably increased the number of grey follicles that will burst forth as soon as I turn 30 in a few months, I nonetheless dealt with a network outage from the shuttle one bleary morning: ahh, a linecard? Fuck it. No drains yet. I'm answering questions for our long-awaited n00bs; I am (it's so feminine; turns out I'm a girl) reminding myself that I have a lot to teach, all this in- and and external arcana by which the internet is kept afloat. I could go all night -- and sometimes I do, paged awake at 1:40am; sometimes I peter out earlier, a few glasses of Portuguese red in -- and still have a to-do list longer that Q3. Cigars on the balcony; peaches, tomatoes, and basil. Hello, home -- I missed you. |