Of Lake Tahoe, Fun-Size Alyssa, Malarkey Street, and Hasta La Pearson

Howdy doodle. It's been a turbulent couple of weeks, reader friends. On the upside, recently we went with Alyssa's family to Lake Tahoe, which was generally fun (the only exception being when all 30+ of us were together in one hotel room, if you can imagine). We visited Virginia City; played a rousing game of Frisbee in bum-achingly cold water; went on a mile-long hike to the Vikingsholm "castle" (which sounds pretty spiffy but turned out to be the summer home of some rich lady in the 1930s--hard as it may be to believe, the Vikings never actually made it as far west as Tahoe); and even visited a gallery of Dr. Seuss art. And to top it all off, Alyssa purchased a T-shirt that proudly claims "I'M NOT SHORT, I'M FUN-SIZED." That should make people think twice before messing with that little runt! Oh yeah, and not to forget the high point of the entire trip, which occurred in Winnemucca (see the last picture at the end of this blog entry). And while I'm still on the upside, I should mention that on Friday we went to the Oquirrh Mountain Temple open house, which was pretty gnarly once we actually got inside (we probably spent more than an hour waiting in line to get in). One thing that really struck me was the fact that most of the rooms had WINDOWS. I don't think I've been in a temple with windows before. It was nice having all the natural light.

Okay, downside now. I got laid off. They pulled the plug on the ELLIS software, which was pretty much what I was hired to work on, so ta-ta job. According to the intranet site, however, Edustructures, the other Pearson department on our floor, is looking for a technical writer, so I'm going to talk to them tomorrow. Oh, and I missed out on the 4th of July because I got the flu. Not swine, as far as I know. I haven't started oinking yet. (Har!)