When I got up yesterday morning, it was foggy and cool - I might have been back in San Francisco. The view from the balcony is mostly of a big freeway intersection, with a busy road running right over the freeway, and the confluence of the traffic running at high speed reminded me of the traffic scenes on "The Phantom Menace".

Work today was the most satisfying since I joined the company. I haven't done any real work since mid June, and I was feeling a little rusty. I've become too much a man of leisure, I guess, for me to jump right in :) I kept getting distracted by my newspaper, or by checking the CNN website to find the progress of Hurricane Floyd. But as lunch approached, I started to make progress. It's really not a very challenging project, and it's not at all the kind of work I was hired to do. But I'm working with one of the stars of the company, a very bright Turkish woman, who speaks like a true intellectual, with her sentences jamming one into the other and finally disappearing into the back of her mouth.

Quite a large group of people from the office went to lunch together, and, by accident, I sat next to a guy from Boston. After he made comments about how all the heavy people in our Maryland office could set up sympathetic vibrations leading to a catastrophic earthquake, I made a private bet to myself that he was another intellectual. And sure enough, he revealed that he had a PhD in statistics. I had a great time chatting with him and it made me realize that the big difference between the Irvine office and my own is that there are some really bright people here in the Irvine office. Not to say anything against the sales people in my own office, but I guess I'm more used to being around smart-alec overgrown graduate students, and I miss that.

After work, the late sunshine was beguiling, and I really wanted to go running. But as I drove in search of a place to park next to the path along the "river", I recognized that I felt way too run down to go running. So I decided just to scout out where I'd go running tomorrow. There is a river, of sorts, called the San Diego Channel (I believe - no doubt someone will write in and correct me if I'm wrong - they always do :). Once I'd clambered down to the banks, it was difficult to believe I was only a few hundred yards from the business park and the San Diego Freeway. There was even some sort of pelican on the river!