I spent most of last weekend helping out at “The Game”, a weekend intern event where fourteen teams of 6-8 interns go all over Western Washington solving puzzles, each of which leads to another puzzle. Puzzles come in the form of cryptography, word, serialized, and a final meta puzzle. This event is legendary and has been featured in Rolling Stone.

This year, we started by having the teams drive up their vans downtown to our valet stand outside the Seattle Courthouse, where we took them aside for a quick briefing and plot kickoff. When they walked out of the briefing, both valet and vans were nowhere to be found. Several hours, a bus ride, and three puzzles later, they found our valet chilling in downtown Tacoma, holding their keys and asking them what took them so long. And the race was on, taking teams on a route that went around Tacoma, down to Lakewood, Olympia, Centralia, Lakewood, Puyallup, Sumner, Enumclaw, Federal Way, and back up to Redmond.

The Game kicked off at 7a on Saturday morning and the last team rolled in two minutes shy of midnight on Sunday–over 40 hours straight without sleep!

Despite only minor contributions, I had a killer time on staff. I’m definitely looking forward to taking a bigger role next year.

Tonight was also this week’s “Visit a Café in Seattle.” We hit up Bauhaus on Capital Hill. Attendance has been increasing steadily. This week we hit 15, sitting on the sidewalk outside Bauhaus with a beautiful view of the Space Needle and chatting until nearly 11. Good friends, good place, and good drinks. My highlight of the week.

In a stroke of complete and utter randomness, I spent my evening tonight singing the infamous choral work of Carmina Burana.

Am I a choral singer? Heck no. But there’s a first time for everything right?

I went with some friends of mine to the Seattle Symphony’s Summer Sings, where a conductor comes in and teaches you (along with the Seattle Symphony Chorale) a choral work in 2 hours. Actually, you get taught the piece in about 40 minutes, because performing the piece takes a full hour.

Total blast. I’m still no choral singer, but hey—Carmina Burana. That was hot.

I’m going to have to wait another two years for the ending????

After missing the parties on Friday because I was out hiking at midnight and gone my entire Saturday in Vancouver, B.C., I was seriously worried that Costco would be out of the stock of the The Book by the time I made it there at noon today.

But then…there it was. Sitting amongst hundreds of it’s brothers and sisters, marked with the perfect price of $15.99.

I own The Book! Just reading the inside cover shot quivers of trepidation down my spine.

Am already 110 pages in and I’ve only read for about an hour. Outside. In the wonderful weather we had today.

I’ve long held that the essence of Seattle is in its cafés. As the city that started the whole café culture across America, the various local coffee joints and small eateries are a major part of the heart and soul of the city. They’re the beginning and end points of the sub-culture. In the cafës, events are advertised, friends are met, art is displayed, and work is accomplished. I love it. I couldn’t have gotten through college without it.

I had dinner with some MS Interns last Friday and someone mentioned how they had never gone to a café in Seattle outside of Starbucks. I was appalled! As a full-timer I’d refrained from putting together any intern events this summer and would occassionally show up to some dinners and things, but this was simply too far! Partly based on some of the great experiences I had with locals in their cities around the world, I decided to share Seattle with my friends who were totally missing out.

I took a group of 9 people tonight, a mix of both interns and new full-timers, to B&O Espresso, my classic Capital Hill hangout for friends, dessert, and drinks. Majed, the owner, has been in the same spot on Capital Hill for 22 years and comes from a long line of bakers and chefs. After giving my usual tour of the dessert case, my friends quickly just relegated the tasks of picking out dessert to my experience. Tonight’s dessert menu turned out to be (and I know this is going to make a lot of you jealous):

• Sourcream Lemon Pie
• Chocolate Rasberry Torte
• Greek Custard
• Le Poire Rouge
• Peanut Butter Mousse
• Chocolate Espresso Cake
• Strawberry Pie

Mmmmm. That was amazing. I’ve never had B&O dessert devoured that fast. I upheld my traditions, where everyone at the table takes their first bite of dessert at the same time. After an especially tense wait, made worse by one extremely hyperactive, sweet-crazy Russian girl, we all took our bites of bliss. Then everyone proceeded to rush their forks into the seven plates around the table. I imagine that if the world’s food supply was down to the contents of these seven plates, the rush would have been comparable. By the time the plates were cleared off, we were all joyful, happy, and making great conversation. A successful evening!

Next week: Trabant Chai Lounge!

Can’t believe that it’s already been over a week since I last posted.

I only worked four days last week, but was completely slammed, resulting in one night that required me to stay up until 3 in the morning writing a spec. Guess that’s why they put me on salary. Thankfully, late nights are not the norm for my job, even if it is Microsoft. In comparison, this week my workload is relatively light, thanks in large part to pushing hard last week and a major conference that has a good chunk of the office out in Atlanta.

Last weekend was spent at the annual Lu Family reunion, which took place this year at the remote Kah-Nee-Ta resort near Warm Springs, OR. 21 miles out from the main highway and nestled in a desert canyon. Perfect for some well-deserved R&R time.

Kah-Nee-Ta was also the first chance I’ve gotten to study Spanish since I’ve gotten back. As some of you know, I was hit with this bolt of inspiration in China about languages and decided that since I was going to Uruguay, I should learn some Spanish. At that time, I was planning on going in October/November, and would have plenty of time to learn before I got down there.

Being China, I was a little short on resources. In Hong Kong’s airport, right before I was about to take off westward towards Dubai and then Cairo, I found a Lonely Planet Spanish Phrasebook. It wasn’t much, but there was a great section at the beginning with numbers, days of the week, months of the year, etc. Plowing through that didn’t take me too much time, so one day I decided that I should start writing.

With the help of the mini-dictionaries in the back of two phrase books, a pair of girls I met at the hostel in Venice, and some good hearted guesswork, I was able to compose what I now know as a horrifically bad postcard written in a wacky combination of Spanish, Italian, and French.

Modest beginnings, though I wasn’t deterred. Realizing my need for a quality dictionary, I began to scour the bookstores of Italy for a quality English-Spanish dictionary. As you might imagine, this was not easy. Deliverance finally came in Split, Croatia, where I was surprised to find that they spoke loads of English and had bookstores with a respectable selection of English books—including a Longman’s ingles-espanol/espanol-ingles diccionario. Writing improved and Lisa started to write me emails in Spanish, which I would print out and spend hours translating and disseminating the grammar bits, then spend more time composing a reply in Really Bad Spanish.

With a constant hunger for source material, I went to another bookstore and bought a novel—something that looked fairly recent. Reading progressed very slowly at first—looking up every other word was not an understatement. But with time, things started speeding up, although I got more puzzled with each passing sentence. I was hearing bits about candy bars, weight, clothes, makeup, etc. When I finally looked at the title I understood why, “Loca por las compras en Manhattan,” or “Crazy about shopping in Manhattan.” Turns out it’s actually a novel translated from English, which a surprising amount of people have actually heard of, “Shopaholic Abroad.”

Definitely not a novel targeted at a male audience. Well, whatever. This novel was doing wonders for improving mi vocabulario. When I made the decision to go to Uruguay at the end of my trip, I stopped trying to understand grammar and just concentrated on the vocabulary.

It worked well. I’ve already told the story of how I made it from the airport to Lisa’s apartment exclusively in Spanish. I also had a couple of nights where Sandra (Lisa’s roommate) and I swapped stories in Spanish. Granted, it was definitely one of those “gist of the conversation” type things and we had my dictionary between us at all times, ready to be swiped off the table the moment we didn’t know a word, but I got by! And it was super exciting.

Since I’ve gotten back I’ve been getting help in unexpected places. Amy L, who’s studied Spanish for something like 10 years, has been teaching me some of the finer points of grammar and IMing with me in Spanish, which is absolutely awesome. My singing (my way of practicing pronunciation privately without making a complete fool of myself) isn’t doing too bad. I can get the gist of most things I read and can even say a half-decent prayer.

The only thing that’s really, really bad—listening and speaking.

Yikes. That’s a scary one.