I Don't Need to Buy Any Cats...

...because I'm engaged!

I'm as a Loss for Witty Titles

I should be working on a strategy midterm right now, and I should be writing an ethics paper. But instead, I figured that I would write a blog entry. Why can't they grade me on this instead?

Can someone explain to me how it became April? There's one more month of school left, which means that in less than 30 days, I will be done with my first year of business school. It's definitely been a fun and rocky journey so far. I'm not sure that I'm any closer to really knowing what I want to do when I grow up. I do know that I will be spending the summer in the Bay Area working at a fabulous summer internship. I'm a bit sad that I won't be going back to Chicago for the summer, but I'll be back there more than enough for an overwhelming number of weddings this summer and early fall.

Since I should be saving all my prose for my assignments, I'll leave you all with some pictures of Law McGraw and I in Vegas, where we spent an extended weekend and came home minutely richer than when we left. And contrary to popular belief, we did not get married in Vegas. :)

A True "Shaky" Californian

After living in the Bay Area for the past 7 months, I can finally say that I'm a true California girl. At 8:40pm PST tonight, I felt my first earthquake. The news reported that it was a 4.3 on the Richter scale, but as this Midwestern girl will tell you, it felt a lot stronger than that. I saw my entire apartment sway from side to side for about 15 seconds, and some of my belongings even shifted. Now I know why there are no skyscrapers out here.

So after living through this "light" earthquake, I think that I'm ready to move back to Chicago. Even though there's snow there and it's cold for about 9 months out of the year, the ground is flat and it never moves. Not even a slight tremor of any kind. I might need to analyze the tradeoffs between sunshine and snow, but Chicago has the edge at the moment.

Skipped a Beat

Despite the rain, I spent the weekend down in Pebble Beach at the Pro-Am Tournament. As we can all see, my ability to do schoolwork is fairly non-existent this semester, which is somewhat of a problem, because there's so much of it this time around.

Anyway, I've never watched a golf tournament before, and sadly, I have to admit that watching paint dry would probably be more interesting. Fortunately, I did see several celebrities, including Bill Murray, Emmitt Smith, Kevin James, Peter Gallagher (from the OC), Kevin Costner, Michael Bolton, and Ray Romano. The highlight of the weekend was when I saw Tom Brady. My heart definitely skipped a beat. I was an arm's length away from all 6'5" of him. I would post pictures, but there were strict rules against cameras.

And sadly, I'm now back in Berkeley for another week of classes. Why again did I decide to come back to school?

My Own Worst Nightmare

I made the big switch today and became what I never wanted to become -- a corporate whore. Not that I wasn't a corporate whore back in the day, but today, I bought a PDA/Smartphone. Back in the day when I was working, my company bought us all Palm Pilots. Then at my next job, we were all given Blackberrys. Mine never left my desk. But now, I actually went out and bought one for myself. With my recent schedule, my calendar was starting to explode and I knew that I needed something more to organize my life than my current pile of post-it notes and scraps of paper.

So today, he became my new best friend. I haven't quite decided what I want to name him yet. Any suggestions? My only issue now is the fact that I need to figure out how to transfer my pictures of Michael Vartan from my old phone onto my new phone.

Bankruptcy

So I found out today that the company I worked at straight out of undergrad has closed its doors. Bankruptcy. None of the remaining workers get to keep their jobs. Not even a Chapter 11 "reorganization" filing, but a Chapter 7 "we're done -- throw the towel in" filing.

Hearing this news, I can't decide whether I'm happy or I'm sad. This was, after all, my first job out of undergrad. The place where I was promoted twice and given a lot of responsibility for someone in their early twenties. It was the first place where I felt like I was making a real impact in people's lives. From traveling around the world to meeting high profile nephrologists and patients, I grew to think of it as home. I had the opportunity to work with some of the brightest biomedical engineers and the chance to make some lifelong friends. I even had the chance to meet Dean Kamen and to test drive a Segway.

But at the same time, this was the same place that laid me off. This was the same place that had vice presidents who could barely type emails. Sometimes, I'm surprised that we even had a product out there in the market, when we could barely handle the design issues we faced in-house. Part of me thinks that they had this coming the entire time.

But overall, I think that I am sad. I'm sad for all the patients out there who were using our product. From the numerous patients that I visited during my career, I knew that all of our long nights and weekends were not for naught. Peoples' lives improved with our product, and now we're taking it away from them. Fortunately, we have some very successful competitors out there who will just pick up where we left off.

I didn't think that I would be filled with so much emotion upon hearing this news, but I guess that the company will always be part of my history. It forever holds both a place in my heart and on my resume.

Merry Christmas