out of my head

yesterday officially was the start of the discussions for the face-to-face and our discussions started early around 9am among wendy, viera, jessica & myself only. the current plan right now is just to have the four of us in the face-to-face with ccsd. i wasn't actually quite feeling active that day so i wasn't my usual chatty self - i did ask questions or gave inputs but i just wasn't feeling the love that time. i realized in the afternoon session when there were more participants that i don't like mapdays so much - its hard i guess to contribute to planning projects when you're not involved in a lot of them and i like understanding details so i can piece the big picture together. i guess add to that, i don't necessarily agree with how we are approaching some of the changes. i looked at the room and realized i was the only asian in the group and somehow that sort of puts undue pressure to show that i was part of that group for a reason. maybe tomorrow i'd have more interest in the discussions and have better inputs.

we had a scheduled dinner/teambuilding event after and decided on z-tejas which was a mexican/southwestern bar/resto down in ray and i-10. jessica dragged me to banana republic to go with her shopping and i ended up buying two shirts. i like banana republic, more if i'm looking for something more formal to wear, but i think the styles are quite conservative. the two shirts looked chic though so hurray. the crowd at z-tejas turns out to be part of the mesozoic period (aka slightly gursi) but the food selection was actually quite good. mindy and i, being the evil twins that we were decided to pick the most expensive items on the menu. she having beef tenderloins with added crabmeat (for an extra $4) and i having a 14oz new york strip. the steak would have gone well with some red wine but two tall glasses of bud light was fine. after z-tejas, we met up with mindy (who left earlier), arjun, leo and morgan and later on papeco joined us. morgan gained quite a following when he dissed out that really upfront, bite-your-ass, in-your-face email to latoya. morgan is based in portland and he's actually quite goodlooking. i had fun chatting with viera and everybody while sipping on two margaritas but i decided to take off around 11pm or so - having had no decent sleep in the past two weeks. i was feeling woozy when i got to the hotel and i knew when i went to bed that i was gonna have a headache. i woke up around 3am and felt some pain on my head, it wasn't the "please kill me now" kind of headache i've grown accustomed to back home whenever we had our drinking sessions but it was enough reason for me to pop two advils.

there's 3 more days left in my trip and i'm getting excited to go home. we're going out on friday to scottsdale for my send-off party. hopefully i get to take some pictures while i'm still sober.