Cats! Fish! Marriage!

After much contemplation we have decided that our cat is good at all the things bad about felines, and bad at all the things good. She wins in the "I'm ignoring you" and "Do what I say" and sucks at such things as grace and being able to control her claws. You would figure after 14 years with claws she would have figured them out.

A fellow on my soccer team was kind enough to bring back some Ahi from his fishing tour and share it with the team. When he said he was going to bring some fish I wasn't expecting the sheer size and amount of Ahi steaks he was going to provide. I grabbed a large frozen fillet from him after the game and figured Kat would make something lovely out of it.

Which reminds me, Kat has been watching an awful lot of the Food Network lately. It's the default channel now when the television is turned on. I can see the appeal of the shows like Iron Chef, the chefs have to be quick thinkers and have a vast knowledge of how to prepare things. Sadly there are the standard reality shows that make you shake your head in despair. Cupcake Wars being one of them. I watched five minutes of it and couldn't stand it any more.

So there was no surprise after I came back from the game, showered, had a bite to eat and sat down on the couch, that Kat was watching the food network. It wasn't until someone on the show pulled out a large steak that I remembered I had fish sitting in my bag, in the garage, in with my soccer stuff. Happily it was still mostly frozen and the next day Kat made it in to some *very* good pistachio encrusted seared Ahi. Yum!

My project is moving forward. Now that it has stopped being theoretical and we've started doing coding a lot of people have stepped up to demand that it integrate with their systems. Those would be systems we hadn't been told about when we did the initial requirements definition. I'm also getting people trying to put new capabilities in to our system that don't fit, such as them wanting our system to automatically create documentation for them. That's got nothing to with what our system is supposed to do so I'm saying a lot of "That is a great idea! No, we won't do it.". Well, I'm more politically correct than that.

My friend Todd and I got our asses out of bed Friday morning to head down to the beach again. I had read the waves were going to be small (1 - 3 feet) so I brought the surfboard in hopes of using it. By the time I arrived Todd was standing on the shore in shorts and a T-shirt, shivering. He announced that it was far too cold to go in, plus it had rained the last couple of days and the bacteria count would be up, plus there was nobody else in the water, and wasn't that strange?
My standard battle between Ocean=Good, Cold Water=Bad turned in to a rout and we didn't go in. Kind of sad how quickly I gave up.

One of my co-workers is going back to India over the X-mas break to get married. I believe it is the standard arranged marriage, since it isn't like he has spent a lot of time in India to meet women. He also isn't very excited about it, it is his duty and he's going to do it. We were talking about it before a meeting and I guess it'll be a large wedding, since they invariably are in India (if you can afford it). The father of the bride is paying.

I joked that the only reason to have a large wedding is for the money, and did they give money in India for weddings? With feedback from the other three Indian ex-pats in the room I found out that not only do you give money at the wedding, you give it to a person whose job is to collect it and keep track of who gave how much. Turns out you track that because if you're invited to their wedding in the future you are expected to give an equal amount to them.

I bet some smart coder in India has already found a way to write an app that plugs in to the social network applications to keep track of these things. They could also integrate with online payments and act as wedding-payment brokers with easy to print out lists and online reminders ... they could even 'hold' the money before the wedding and make interest off it or provide micro-loans if you haven't the funds to give a lot, but expect to invite them to your upcoming wedding and bet they'll give you more than you gave them. Hmm, I'd better take out patent on that.