Off Day

Spent a vacation day hanging out with Mary Beth yesterday. It's a little funny, I guess, 'cuz I did go in to work but only for lunch as they were having the Diwali celebration and it's always been the best of Indian food! So I took Mary Beth along for a weird free lunch date. It's gotten much bigger this year. It's been embraced company-wide, where it'd started off as a potluck for the qa team. So it was in the atrium and people from all over both companies were there to the buffet. It was either catered or the people working on it cooked up in big batches. Before, it used to be a bunch of people brought in one dish and there were tons of different dishes so you could get a little bit of all these different things, homecooked (in family-sized batches). Now there was more food but less variety, a lot of a few different dishes. It was really good, don't get me wrong, but the variety and intimacy of previous years was something I missed. Mary Beth enjoyed seeing the people dressed in saris and dhotis. After that we went up to the Lichterman Nature Center, which we'd never been to. It was a little cold but there was some nice fall-ness about. We walked around the lake, over the bridges, looked at some animals (I liked the rescued pigeon a lot), finished by venturing into the woods with what little time we had left. Lots of geese. A bit of goose shit (even stepped in some on the bridge, yay). Then we went and perused a bit at Winchester Market. Back home we watched Lost in Translation (it's been a very long time since I'd seen it and Mary Beth never had). Now it's a new day and a new morning and it's only just now the "real" weekend! Woo.