...and it continues to be awesome!
I am not, however, sleepless - in fact, far from it! The jetlag, which appears to have persisted even thus far, has actually been my friend - it's pushed me to go to bed at a reasonable time (something I always struggle with at home!) and prompted me to wake up bright and early - unreasonably so, in fact! - most mornings. So early, actually, that I've been able to take advantage of my apartment building's gym on several occasions. It's definitely been too long since I've done any sort of training - I allowed the euphoria of getting my dream job distract me from other walks of life ("walk" being the operative word!) - but I'm getting back on the treadmill, slowly but surely.
On the topic of exercise, you should all take a few minutes out of your day to go and donate to my sister's half-marathon. Unsurprisingly, for those who know her history, she's supporting Great Ormond Street Hospital. For those who don't know her history, Soph was born with such devastating levels of cancerous tumours that our parents were advised to "enjoy your daughter, because you won't see her first birthday". Needless to say, baby Soph said "screw that", and, with the help of the ludicrously talented and supportive staff at GOSH, she is the picture of health that we are lucky enough to know and love. I honestly cannot imagine how different my life would have been without my Sophie-Doph - she is my best friend and one of the few people who instinctively understands me. She's brought such an absurd level of joy into my life, and I hate the thought that I might never have been blessed enough to know her. Here's hoping that through her (quite frankly, insane) efforts, we can all raise enough money to hope that no brother, sister, mother or father ever has to fear the same.
Back to a lighter note, Seattle continues to be enjoyable and instructive. I've started to get to grips with the AIV stack - I'm sitting in on meetings and "stand-ups", delving deep into code, and asking all those I-feel-stupid questions that, it turns out, aren't that stupid after all. It's quite refreshing to be in a situation where none of the London people have much prior experience - we're all dumb monkeys learning together, so there's no shame in being ignorant as long as you're trying not to be! (Not that there should *ever* be any shame in that, but sometimes you are your own worst judge!)
Friday night some of the guys from the team and I went out to a dive bar for drinks - there's probably a 93% chance it was owned by a gang as a front. They only accepted cash, the barmaid was terrified of the mysterious owner, and, most tellingly of all, it wasn't on FourSquare! After drinks we went to watch Django Unchained which was nearly the epitome of a Tarantino movie. That will mean different things to different people, I'll let you make your own judgements.
Saturday I spent most of the day working on a side-project which I'm not sure is secret or not, so I'll keep it under wraps for now, but it's going to be AWESOME when it's unveiled (probably in a few weeks, I guess). Not only am I getting paid, but I got to sit in a Starbucks with a Macbook Pro - Techno-hipsters, assemble!
Saturday evening I went to a local games store and joined in on their draft game. They were running low on RTR boosters so it was a "Chaos draft" - 1xRTR, 1xM13, 1xDA (years from now, I'll probably have to look up those abbreviations - that's a scary memento mori for you...). All good fun, I met some pretty cool people (including the son of a fantasy author who's into martial arts and is working with Neil Stephenson on a medieval trilogy, complete with blocking out the fight scenes themselves), went 2-0 and won a couple of boosters - not a bad night! Though it is irksome that it was unsanctioned and so I don't get DCI points for playing abroad...yet!
I've started to buy enough food and stuff to make the place feel a bit more like home. I'm making the effort to take sandwiches to work most days in an effort to save money, but everyone else seems determined to spend their per diem on (admittedly, delicious) lunches, and I don't really want to be the anti-social one! That said, the American portion sizes are so big I can nearly get by on a single meal a day!
Can't wait till Laura can fly out and join me for a week's visit - she's so excited about the city, the Space Needle, and all sorts of stuff, it's adorable and I miss her so!
Apologies that this is more of a diary-type entry than a thoughts-and-reflections, review, or anything that anyone else would actually want to read, but I just want to capture this experience in something slightly more substantial than a tweet or a check-in.
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