Great customer service, too hot for tacos, tomato-clam-Parmesan pasta, & a sign from god to go out..

~Thursday~ I worked from 9:00 until about 10:15 at the Mission Valley Bruegger’s, where in spite of not getting the memo, it turned out to be “Gay Day.” There certainly were more of us there than the purported 10% average in the general population.

I continue to be impressed with the management and staff of this particular Bruegger’s location, and I was so much so this morning that I decided then and there that I would reward them some how. It’ll be a nice change from how often I point out poor customer service. We must reward behavior we want to encourage. Stay tuned.


I had my weekly Google Implementation Team meeting across the street from that Bruegger’s, in the Avent Ferry Technology Center, which I walked to when it was time for the meeting.

My colleague and friend, Libby, was going to pick me up at the end of the meeting, but she was in touch right before it started to say that she was going to pass on our outdoor lunch at the Bulkogi Korean BBQ taco food truck on Centennial Campus, since we were having triple-digit temperatures today. Perfectly understandable.

Instead, I ran home for lunch, since I had my car with me and that area is so close to my house.

Mid-afternoon, I attended our weekly “Working Team Meeting,” along with my boss, Rhonda, and our intern, Vanessa, where Vanessa shared with us her latest great work in pulling together the abundant statistics we’re tracking with regards to our department communications.


With the near record-setting temperature today, the heat was just stifling on the short walk to the Hillsborough Street bus stop, where upon arrival, a lady sitting on one of the seats under the shelter said about the bus she was waiting for to the person standing next to her, “I hope that bus is freezing cold.”

Back on Kaplan Street, I hopped off the bus and into my nearby car, and then stopped by the grocery store on the way home to buy bread and some chopped clams to use in my dinner recipe for this evening.

At home, I threw together a Tomato-Clam-Parmesan pasta dish using a recipe shared with me on Facebook by an old high school friend, using up a bunch of grape tomatoes I had from my colleague Sarah’s garden, and adding the clams, which weren’t in the recipe, but which I wanted.

I stir-fried the sliced grape tomatoes in some extra virgin olive oil that was mixed with some minced garlic, fresh onion, a little basil, oregano, and some “Italian Seasoning” spice, with Parmesan cheese sprinkled on top. And I put all that over some bow-tie pasta.

Tomato-Clam-Parmesan pasta dish


Just as I was leaving my house at 8:50, I got a phone call, which I could see was from my friend Alejandro, but I let it go to voice mail, as I needed to get to K-mart in ten minutes before their pharmacy closed and I didn’t want to get into a conversation right then.

At the K-Mart pharmacy, I snatched up my Nexium prescription, for which I’d had two calls from them about them being ready. “There’s a prescription for someone in your household…”

On the way to the gym, I listened to my voice mail message: “Juanita? This is Alexis. Stefani and I are wondering if you were going to be at the Trailer Park tonight.” I was actually ambivalent about going out tonight before the call, but that made me decide to go.

My late workout started off with 300 (15 sets of 20) ab crunches before moving on to 30 minutes of cardio on the elliptical machine. Toward the end of the workout, and close to 10PM, I was waning a little bit about going out.

However, when I turned on my car, Lady Gaga’s Alejandro was playing on the radio and I took it as a sign from god that I should keep my word and go out. In a complete digression, there are some seriously hot men in that video. If you go for that sort of thing. And I do.

And to digress on that digression ever so briefly, if you haven’t seen Glozell’s two-minute warning to Alejandro that Lady Gaga is “after him,” you might enjoy it.


It was good to catch up with Alex and Steven, and I left shortly after the show started, as I really, really don’t like the emcee that was hosting the show tonight, Charlie Brown, who’s from Atlanta and bills herself as “America’s Ultimate Bitch”—and quite frankly, never fails to deliver.

Since it was after midnight when I got home, I logged into day three of that focus group discussion I’m participating in and responded to the final 12 or 13 questions. All set to collect my $50 now.

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