Last winter, on some of the coldest days of the year, we had a power outage. Starting last night, on one of the hottest days of the year, we’re having a power outage. This time, it’s apparently only a few hundred people affected. And it’s looking like the duration will be measured in hours (around twelve), rather than days. Still, with the temperatures as high as they are right now, it’s likely long enough to make us have to throw out a bunch of food again. Yay.

This has not been a good year for my relationship with Puget Sound Energy.

Try as I might to come up with a reasonable excuse for failing to write for so long, I just can’t do it. There is no excuse. It just seems that the longer I wait, the harder it gets (that’s what she said). But I finally forced myself to do it; I hope you can force yourself to read the result.

In early May, we got to go on a nice ten day vacation to Southern California. What? Don’t you always go on vacation a few weeks after starting a new job? Anyway, the original reason for the trip was to go to Herschel and Saghi’s wedding, but we extended it to visit other people, check out some of the sights in the area and enjoy the much better weather. Over the course of the ten days, we stayed at four hotels. The first and best was the Beverly Hilton.

The wedding was at the Skirball Cultural Center in LA and it was beautiful. I helped out by manning one of the video cameras, which was an awesome Panasonic AG-HVX200 HD camcorder. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

Later in the week, after the wedding was over, we went to see Spiderman 3 at the Arclight, which was incredible (the theater more than the movie). Seeing a movie at the Arclight makes it hard to ever go back to a normal movie theater.

The next day we drove to Malibu to check out the beach and the amazing houses.

Next we went south to Orange County to go to Disneyland and visit some friends. When we were there, we stayed at the Disney Grand Californian.

After Orange County, we went to San Diego where we somehow managed to avoid taking any pictures at all. I still don’t know how that happened, but the memory card doesn’t lie (and I don’t remember taking any). When we were there, we stayed at The Sofia Hotel. Finally, we headed back up to LA. This time, we stayed at the Universal Hilton and spent a day at Universal Studios, which I’d never been to. I especially enjoyed seeing Wisteria Lane.

Before we left, we also got to visit Wendy and Jennifer, who are always a blast to be around. It was a really great trip. We got to see a huge number of friends, lots of fun places and more sun than we see in a year in Seattle.

In other news, Improv 300 is over and I just started Improv 400! Level 300 wasn’t my favorite improv experience ever, but 400 is great so far. I feel very lucky to have a great group of classmates who I’ve been with since Improv 100. Having good people to play with makes all the difference in the world.

Last, but not least, we got a new car at the end of last month. Becky’s previous car blew a gasket, which was pretty expensive to fix. After that, we decided we didn’t really want to throw a lot more money into that car, so we went shopping. After hours of research and tons of test drives, we decided to buy a 2007 Audi A6 3.2 Quattro. So far, we’re loving it!

Ok. I think that’s enough for today. I’ll try not to wait two months before blogging again!

I got back yesterday from two weeks of orientation and training at the Googleplex in Mountain View. I’m a full official Googler (and a Noogler) now.

I had a blast in Mountain View, and I got to visit some great friends while I was down there. But two weeks is a long time to be away from home, so I’m happy to back. Sorry I’ve been out of touch and offline so much lately. A new job brings a lot of things to do and learn, and being out of town makes it even harder to keep in touch! Hopefully now that I’m back in town, I’ll be able to catch up a bit.

I also have a bit of improv news. My friend Lisa has organized an improv show to benefit Amigos de las Americas on April 26th. I’ll be in the show, and you’re all invited. I know most of you are from out of town, but I hope you can at least be there in sprit :-)

Yesterday was my last day as an employee of Amazon.com. Monday is my first day as an employee of Google.

Carry on.

I’ve finished uploading the rest of the videos from our improv show. All of the ones I was in were included in my last post, but you can now see the whole improv 200 performance on this YouTube Playlist.

I also uploaded a video of the Improv 500 performance from that show. I wasn’t involved in it, but several of my friends were in it. They did a cool longform improvised film noir. It’s very different from what we did, and I think it’s worth checking out!

Special thanks to Becky for shooting all the video of the 200 show! I’m to blame for any bad camera work in the 500 show. But I have a couple of excuses: I didn’t have a tripod (the camera was just on a monopod), and our lame camcorder can’t zoom out wide enough to get the entire stage all at once. I did my best!