musical chairs

I had an excellent day, despite taking one standardized test at work and attempting to study (poorly) for the second one tomorrow. I made it to work by 8am, where I loaded up on breakfast and crammed for another hour before taking the test; my nerves were apparently for naught, since I passed with a 95% (10% higher than the pass cutoff). Tomorrow's test is supposed to be harder, but some of the content overlaps with today's test, and the cutoff is 80% instead of 85%, so I'm cautiously optimistic that I will pass if I go in early tomorrow and cram for an hour beforehand again.

So the test went well, and then I slogged the rest of the day. I tried to study for the second test this afternoon, but I inadvertently dozed off on my couch in my office - only for fifteen minutes, and I was facing away from the door, so hopefully no one saw me. I threw in the towel on studying and instead wrote some stuff for the big boss, since I'm trying to wrap up some projects before the holidays.

I managed to escape around 4:30, and I met up with Claudia (aka Claude the Fraude) in downtown Mountain View so that I could drive her to the evil city for some extreme family time. We had some quality time in the car, since the drive to the city took an hour and twenty minutes, and so we were ten minutes late to dinner. But, dinner was riotously fun; the dinner was originally just supposed to be Adit and Vidya, but I invited myself, then invited Claude, and then Adit added John and Katrina. We had pizza in Glen Park, an SF neighborhood that I have never been to before; the pizza was quite good, but of course it could not outshine the company. It tried pretty hard, though -- Adit ordered an egg on one of the pizzas, and unfortunately they screwed up and put it on the bacon and potato pizza instead of the vegetarian pizza, so John, Claude and I had to eat the egg. It was delicious; of course, eggs go well with bacon and potatoes, and they just cracked the whole egg on top of the middle of the pizza so that it could sort of sunny-side-up, which meant you could dip your crust in the yolk. Yummy!

We reminisced quite a bit about the fact that Adit, John, Claude and I have now been friends for ten years, which is impossible to believe. Sadly, Adit had to leave to catch a flight back to the east coast (goodbye roommate!), but Claude, John and Vidya came over to my place to hang out for another hour and a half. Sadly I have absolutely no food (except one frozen pizza, useless after eating pizza at a restaurant) and only half a bottle of Odwalla single-serve orange juice and a couple of mini champagnes in the fridge, so I felt like a terrible hostess. We had a good time nonetheless, with much discussion of PhDs, jobs, my new phone, and a variety of other tings.

After I booted them all from the apartment, I studied for an hour, but I'm too tired to keep going. I'll get up in the morning to read the final few sections, and then I will just hope for the best. Wish me luck - in twenty-four hours I will be on my way to the airport and bound for home!