one minute i held the key, next the walls were closed on me

This is a four-minute post. I wanted to shoot myself or the occupants of half a dozen other cars on my commute this morning; I actually left home a bit earlier than I thought I needed to, made great progress out of the city...and then hit a snarl through Redwood City and Palo Alto that made me ten minutes late for my 8:30am meeting. Ugh. *Not* a good way to start a Monday, particularly since this week is even more meeting packed than usual. Also, before the snarl, I was having some great ideas for the couple of scenes that I want to add to my book (to the point that I was making notes on a scrap of paper precariously balanced on my steering wheel while I was going sixty miles and hour...probably not smart). But instead of writing the scenes, I had to work, and when I got home tonight, I completely crashed and couldn't think of writing.

But, the day wasn't actually bad -- I had a team-building thing all afternoon with the visiting managers from the other offices I work closely with, and that was good. The first part was personality-test-based, which always makes me feel like a raging bitch, considering that my personality has some rather strong strains around needing to be efficient and get things done and make rational decisions regardless of the emotions of others. The second part was more of a group exercise, taken from Pete's Army background, involving getting three boards, two 25lb buckets of sand, and all your people across a field of burning lava (where 'burning lava' = 'grass'). The exercise is similar to the one that we used to do when recruiting RAs for FloMo, although this one was actually easier since the buckets of sand weren't too difficult -- the FloMo exercise involved balancing the boards on milk crates, whereas this was just setting the boards on the ground.

We followed it up with dinner at La Fiesta in Mountain View, which was delicious. Then I made Pete wait while I stopped at Verde for an earl grey milk tea (sans pearls, since I didn't feel like eating a lot of tapioca balls right after enchiladas), before taking Pete to his apartment in SF and then proceeding to my own.

Four minutes are up, bedtime!