RossHarmes.net

So, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted. Here’s what’s been going on:

I met my folks in Europe, to see the fam and attend the wedding of my cousin. The weather in England was fairly awful, but we still managed to have a good time, walking around the countryside, and visiting huge gardens and the city of Bath. My role of navigator proved to be extremely challenging, and we got lost at least once a day. Holland was a whirlwind of family visits, drinking, weddings, and more drinking. The strange thing about this trip was the fact that I never really adjusted to the time; I was tired the entire time I was in England, and kept taking long naps in the middle of the day. The new trend in combating jetlag seems to be fasting before a flight, but I don’t really want to fast for any reason, ever. I think if I ever missed eating dinner, I’d be dead by morning.

Two weeks ago Chris, Mariah and Zach flew in, and Nick came up from LA. Despite the fact that I had to work (it being my last two days with Yahoo! Small Business), we managed to eat out a lot, go up to San Francisco, and drink 40s (not me obviously; Nick and Chris drank 40s). Nick had to go back to LA late Friday, but the rest of us (including Ashley, Juile, and Court, who met up with us) went up to Sonoma for the weekend. Saturday was spent at the wineries (they managed to hit an impressive seven wineries, a feat I would not have thought was possible; I’m done after two), with a very nice meal at Meritage afterwards. Sunday was spent at a Nascar race at Infineon Raceway. First, let me give some background. I went because there was an extra ticket, not out of some burning desire to see a Nascar race. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. We got there early and tailgated in the stunningly beautiful and gently rolling hills surrounding the track. We watched the race from fantastic seats at the top of the grand stand (in the shade, no less). And we ended the day at In & Out Burger. Not a bad weekend (I have the photos posted; some of them are pretty good).

One funny story: the entire time they were in town, we were spouting a non-stop string of “That’s what she said”s. I mean that quite literally; Chris, in particular, could string them together so that those were the only words to come out of his mouth for minutes at a time. While eating dinner Saturday night, we agreed that the winner would be the person to first say that in response to something the waitress said. This was a joke, as we obviously didn’t want to get thrown out of the restaurant. At the end of the meal, while we were telling her how great the dessert was, she said, “I love that dessert. I could suck it down in three seconds flat”. Chris, Zach and I made eye contact, each of us struggling to contain the words. I was literally crying with the effort of trying not to laugh. The waitress must have thought it odd that we all started laughing uproariously the second she left the table.

I’ve had a change in job in the last two weeks. I’m still at Yahoo!, but now I’m with a different business unit: Flickr. Small Biz was great, but I’ve been there for two years, and it felt like time to move on. I’ve also always wanted to work at Flickr; they manage to keep themselves very separate from the rest of Yahoo!, and run the place very much like a start-up. I’m surrounded now by enormously talented people, and by talented, I mean that they can complete a full day’s work while still spending significant amounts of time playing ping-pong and Rock Band. If you need a place to put photos online, I highly recommend Flickr; you can see my photos here, and I expect that I’ll be posting a lot there in the future (if you do sign up, be sure to add me as a friend as that I know when you’ve posted new photos).