Second Date

She swung by my place after we both got home (she works pretty close to my apartment), and I drove us to Mountain View. Parking was pretty tight around Castro Street, which is unusual in my experience! But we found something, and went to a nice Italian restaurant for dinner. I'd been there before with Trish, and thought it was pretty nice. It's more upscale than Frankie, Johnny and Luigi's, and the food is served in smaller portions, but I think the food is somewhat better, and the variety of dishes is more to my taste (FJL has a lot of seafood dishes, which I don't eat, and I get a bit tired of eating the same thing when I go, even if their cannoli are really good). So this was pretty much exactly what I was hoping for, and Adrienne liked it, too.

I paid. Adrienne was a little reluctant, I can tell. She says she really wants to be independent, to stand on her own two feet, and she's not very good at accepting gifts. (We're somewhat similar in this way. Actually, several of our personal foibles are pretty similar, including our little insecurities. I'm not sure yet what I think of this, though so far it's meant that we seem to understand these facets of each other better than most people might.) I've never dated anyone where there was real parity in our income (excepting Karen, when we were both in grad school), and I'm still not entirely sure how to handle that matter.

Anyway.

We went by Bookbuyers and she bought the book she wanted. I noticed that they had a copy of the Batman: The Dark Knight Archives vol 1 for sale, for $35.00. I thought, "Oh, this isn't a great price for a used copy of this book [note that the price at Amazon is the same], but it's right here and I have plenty of credit in my account."

Well, it turns out that it's a restricted book, and I can only buy it with credit by paying twice as much. So forget it, I said! (Well, I said it nicer than that.) I was kind of miffed, though. I don't think the person pricing their DC Archive Editions (and they had about seven of them) knew what he was doing. Well, I'll pick up a copy sometime later. No rush.

After that we went to Double Rainbow for ice cream, which is always a good choice, I find. Then we sat on the grassy area between Castro Street and the CalTrain station, which despite the cars going by is comfortable and pleasant. (We had a nice but slightly oblique view of the light from the setting sun over the hills, too.) Adrienne payed me the very nice compliment by saying that she thought I was lying when I said I hadn't been on a date in three years, because I certainly seemed to know how to take a girl on a nice one!

I'd had thoughts of us driving up to Shoreline Park before sunset, but by the time we got there the gates had already closed. (Many parks and beaches around the Bay Area are open from sunrise to sunset.) Oh, well; next time! Instead we drove back to my place to talk for a while. It was another nice evening.

Tom is already teasing my by referring to "my woman" and "my girlfriend". I'm not so possessive (but I realize he is only teasing). At what point, if we continue dating, do we become "boyfriend and girlfriend"? I guess at the point that we both feel comfortable saying so.

I know, I worry about little stuff like this way too early.

Work has been hectic lately. One of the managers in our department is leaving, I think partly due to the commute time (he commutes from San Francisco, which is probably an hour or more each way) and partly because he's finding dealing with Apple bureaucracy as a manager to be more difficult or more frustrating or more something than he'd expected. At any rate, this has touched off the frantic reactions you'd expect, as managers leaving always involves shifting people around to cover the vacancy, and I think there's a feeling of a larger-than-usual amount of work on our collective plates anyway.

Still, things are moving forward.

Me, for instance. I'm moving "forward" in the sense that I'll soon be in development, which is where I want to be. (WebObjects treats its testing department and its testers with more respect and authority than many other software houses do [from what I understand], and our manager is really quite excellent. I'm going to miss working under her. But testing is not in my blood; I can do a good job, but development is The Thing for me.)

I've been working on writing a test suite for a particularly vexing slice of our product, which has taken me longer than expected. Originally the "plan" was for me to move into development in early August, but now it seems I will be in testing for a couple more weeks, once I set down with my boss and filled her in on where I am. I told her I'd be willing to stay in testing a little while longer if necessary, since I hadn't really wedded myself to a particular date (the "plan" has always been a little sketchy, I think for just this sort of occurrence). I think she was impressed that I was willing to stick around a little longer, but it's sort of six of one and half a dozen of the other to me, since my next testing project I think will be fairly interesting in its own right.

I will have to raise this point in my favor when review time rolls around. smile

The only downside to this, I think, is that right now happens to be a very convenient "jumping-on" point to move into the development team I'm moving into (WebObjects Tools, which is actually the same group I've done functional testing for). So I regret missing that a little, especially since I think I can contribute to their (our) next development project in useful ways. But probably I will spend some time talking to Tom about it as they work on it, and try to keep up to speed that way. And resist trying to get too involved until it's time for me to do so. That's more of a hassle than anything else.

Exciting stuff, huh? Well, for me it is!

Yesterday at work the mail guy came by my office, and had a package for me from Amazon. I couldn't remember ordering anything from Amazon lately (except for the second, third and fourth Harry Potter books from Amazon UK, which this clearly did not contain). I actually worried that it was some special order I'd placed months ago and forgotten about.

In fact it turned out to be a copy of Baseball Dynasties by Rob Neyer and Eddie Epstein, analyzing the greatest teams in baseball history. It was a gift from Ceej, apparently from my Amazon wish list. I was pleased as punch; it looks like a good read, and it's going on the top of my stack of books to read.

As I mentioned above, I'm not great at accepting gifts. I don't like feeling that I "owe" people, and random gifts like this always throw me off (though they don't really make me uncomfortable). But, considering that I gave CJ a nice photo of Ted Williams which I picked up when I was in Boston, I figure she just thought she'd buy me something (whether it was just to reciprocate or just because it struck her, it doesn't really matter), so I'll take this in that spirit.