Pumpkins and other fun

This past week was a relatively relaxing week at work. I mean, we're still trying to make a whole lot of deadlines and such but since things weren't imminent, we didn't see the point of staying late.

On Tuesday, I organized a pumpkin carving with the other graduate engineers. Several of us went down to Taste (a supermarket) and bought a couple of pumpkins. Some of us brought some knives from home and we carved them. The knives weren't exactly the right kind, the rinds were very thick, and we didn't have a whole lot of time. But we managed to finish both of them. It was amazing how many people we managed to cram into a tiny meeting room. The company is very fond of glass walls so everyone who walked by did a double-take. My boss used the meeting room after us and he was like, what is going on here??

Thursday turned into a short day with all of us leaving by 7:30pm. It felt really early to me and I walked around my neighborhood and picked up some papayas and shui mai. The papayas were small ones and looked really good. I only wanted one but the lady stuffed three of them into a bag and it was only $10 for all of them. I'm going to make some papaya and banana milkshakes soon! I got back, realized it was still really early, so I got changed and went back out to look for some dinner. There's a place that I've been meaning to try out. They make rice in clay pots. I ordered take out and they said to come back in 15 minutes. So I decided to go shopping for a external hard drive for work. I've been meaning to do this so that I can keep a hard drive at work and have work and personal stuff separated.

I got back and watched part of a movie while eating my take out. The clay pot rice didn't turn out to be as good as I imagined. I thought that the rice would be tastier. Anyway, I saw a place that makes sticky rice. Smelled really good. I'll save that for the next time I get out early, I guess.

I'll admit that I did no work at all Friday afternoon. We had a meeting Friday morning. And then the people who were promoted to Grade 6, Senior Engineer, in the geotech group held a celebration lunch. They booked 8 tables at the dim sum restaurant and we all crammed in there. Some of the people from the site offices even came back for this. After lunch, I went around with my Inner Challenge team to fundraise.

I joined the company's Inner Challenge team where we're hiking for 30km in the mountains. We're supposed to raise funds for the Breakthrough Youth Camp as well. The company sponsors the event and we have several team participating. The youth camp was designed by the company as a charitable activity. This event is somewhat of a tradition at the office so the old timers all know what's going on. It takes a lot of time to walk around the entire office asking people for money. We collected a lot though. People are very nice. It was also interesting to finally walk around our floor and meet more people. I feel like I've never ventured out of our little corner. Getting too comfortable nowadays.

So lunch went until around 2pm. We fund raised for 2 hours. And then we had a foundations design workshop starting from 4pm. The workshop had too many speakers and went an hour over. These workshops always come with food at the end but a lot of people left by the time it ended. There weren't as many people to begin with this time. So there was a lot of leftover food which we brought back downstairs.

A lot of the food actually disappeared overnight. We think that people took them home. Anyway, I was back at the office this afternoon (Saturday) to do some calculations. I feel like I have no time to actually crunch numbers during the working hours. A few of us munched on the huge plate of salad that was still in the fridge. Very healthy lunch.

Lots of submissions on the horizon though. So I'm foreseeing a couple of very busy weeks...!