A very good friend of mine laughed at me when I told her I spent most of 2006 mourning breaking up with M-Square. She said "You had a crush on someone while you were supposedly dating, you lined someone up right before you broke up because you hate hard landings and then, and then three months later you were hot for MBA guy at work."

So here's the real truth.

1) Yes, I kind of had a crush on this guy at work while things were hot and heavy with M-Square. I don't know how it happened, but we were talking on the phone and we connected. Nothing happened, but I did feel bad about it. And now we're working together a ton which is great because he is so cool to work with.

2) And yes, I am one of those who believes that if things start heading south, get a "lifeboat". I never break up a relationship without a new guy in the wings. And if my intuition is working right, I line a new guy up just before a guy decides to dump me. A girl's got to have something else to think about besides the breakup of a relationship. I did kind of of have an "possible lifeboat" in the wings when things went bad with M-Square. It was too soon to do that, but old habits die hard. My lifeboat guy gave me a soft landing instead of a hard one, and it was wonderful for a few months to have it.

3) MBA guy at work just happened out of the blue. I wasn't expecting it. I went to the guy's welcome party and didn't feel connected. But when we started talking and couldn't stop, I knew the guy was a soul mate. I just don't talk for hours to a guy without us having some past life connection. And it was a good connection too because we just got along so well and there was no weirdness between us. And MBA guy at work went from May and is kind of actually still going, although it's not as intense anymore. I did talk to MBA guy before Christmas at a division party, but it was short and he apologized for not spending more time with me because he's been like totally swamped with work. I totally love MBA guy but as friend I think, and not as boyfriend material. We've been there and done that in our past ives and made it work, so we don't have to do it again. That's kind of a nice thought isn't it? I had a past life where my relationship worked so well that there wasn't any karma to carry over.

Okay, so I didn't really mourn M-Square and I'm sure the boy is not mourning our breakup either. I wanted to mourn but the fates kept sending me guys to fall in love with, so what's a girl to do?

At home today cleaning up and getting a huge pile of stuff to take to the Salvation Army for my year-end charity deduction.

I'm so psyched Barry Zito is going to stay in the SF Bay Area and play for the SF Giants. He'll have to hit the ball now, because in American League they have designated hitters for pitchers.

Watched the body of Gerald Ford pull up at the church in Palm Desert. Betty Ford looked so old. It was kind of sad because I think he was a nice guy who just happened to be President of the US at such an interesting time. Talk about being in the right place at the right time.

The news channels have been speculating for hours about when Sadam Hussein is going to be hanged. How weird. I had no idea that there's a state that lets you choose between lethal injection and hanging. If the hanging is videotaped, you know it will show up on YouTube eventually. The man was a butcher like Hitler and Stalin, and I don't understand why people are making such a fuss over him. Talk about America trying to impose their moral standards on the world. In Hussein's part of the world, they execute people all the time. The same people who love multiculturalism are saying he shouldn't be executed. Isn't that hypocritical? I mean, they hate that America exports its values around the world, but I guess it's okay that we export our value of no execution. I don't get it. Multicultuarlism isn't selective.

I saw "Night at the Museum", and liked it despite the fact that the first half of the movie was just not very enjoyable for me. The Ben Stiller character is not sympathetic, and he came off almost too pathetic. But half way through the movie, it got better and I laughed. I saw the moview with about 30 kids and they didn't laugh during the first half of the movie either.

The movie has some great special effects, and it made me want to revisit the Natural History Museum in New York.

I also saw "Curse of the Golden Flower" directed by Zhang Yimou. I loved his movie "Raise the Red Lantern", and loved the spectacle of "Hero" with Jet Li.

The movie was beautiful and slow going, and ends with the typical cloying chinese song at the end. I couldn't help but think of Quentin Tarantino's movies "Kill Bill, Parts 1 and 2". Quentin Tarantino sure does know the kung fu movie genre. And yes there were lots of good fighting scenes. I saw chinese grandma types with their daughters there, which I thought was so cute. My grandma would have loved this movie, and I wish she was alive so I could take here to a theatre so we could watch the movie together.

I saw "Curse of the Golden Flower" at the Sony Metreon, which was a little strange because it's not like they show a lot of Hong Kong kung fu action flicks, but I liked that a very mainstream SF movie theatre was willing to have it there.

Who knew that if you see a movie before 12 noon at Sony Metreon theatres the cost of the ticket is $6. Talk about a bargain! After 12 noon, it goes up to $8.50 and after 6 pm, it's regular price.

Would love to see "Happy Feet", "Dream Girls" and "Children of Men", since I read the PD James book. A friend was raving about "The Departed" recently as well "The Queen".

So around 10:30 pm on my Christmas vacation, I am editing a newsletter that I have to email to my boss before the end of the year. I got way behind on my weekly industry updates and have been putting them off, but I can't put them off any longer.

What a life, huh?

I went to see the Titanic exhibit, but it wasn't cheap. The ticket cost $22 and $5 more if you wanted the audio. There were a lot of artifacts, and I did get to touch a piece of the hull of the Titanic but still. A friend recommended I go because she liked it, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you're into the Titanic.

It was only fun because of the movie, and it would have been more interesting if they had included some of the movie props and the real stuff.

But oh well. I paid for a ticket and an audio, and I'm glad I got to see it.

It's day after Christmas and I know I should be at the mall checking out the discounts on xmas decs and seeing what else is on sale, but I hate crowds!

I really am very shopped out right now. I don't think I could buy one more thing unless it was totally cheap as dirt and I absolutely had to have it.

Besides it's supposed to rain and it's too cold to be out. I am out all week from work. This is the second year I've take the off the week between christmas and New Years. I kind of like it. This year we got Christmas and the day after christmas off, so it was a short week anyway.

It's probably the best time to be in the office because it would be so quiet, but I'd rather stay at home and be lazy. I am going to try to do some movie watching this week, and hopefully if the weather gets better check out Angel Island. I've been to Angel Island a few times for parties, but I've never seen the whole island. Angel Island was the west coast version of Ellis Island in New York.

But then again, it would be nice to just hang at home and go through my stuff so I can do some year-end charity donations.

Merry Christmas everyone! Wow, I finally got some useful presents this year, which is a first for me.

I needed a new wall calendar for my bedroom and I got a big calendar and a smaller calendar for work.

I have one of those home fragrance burner things from The Body Shop, which I've been wanting for awhile now.

A friend gave me an astrocartography reading with San Francisco, London and Bombay India as the chosen places to check out. I've lived everywhere where there is a line; interesting huh? I don't think I'm supposed to be living in San Francisco, which I've known for about two years now. Check this out - Las Vegas is supposed to be a good place for me to live. I can't imagine living there because I have to live near an ocean and I don't like to gamble.

And my cousin sent me Joel Osteen's newest books. I love that man's sermons.

Speaking of pastors, Rick Warren has been on TV a ton and I really, really like him. I love his book "The Purpose Driven Life".

We had christmas pudding for dessert. We doused it with brandy and lit the baby on fire. You gotta love food that burns. We also had french brioche in the shape of loaves, which was fattening and divine, for appetizers, and I made braised chard with garlic from a recipe that was in the San Francisco Chronicle. I love chard! The recipe is definitely a keeper.

Okay, one last post. It's freezing here! I wake up every morning and my car is covered with white stuff. It's not snow, but the dew is frozen and white on my car.

I just bought a new parka from LL Bean that is wind proof, and I am very grateful for it with this freezing weather. The parka is warm, maybe too warm, but that's fine with me. The parka also has thinsulate in the body which is nice.

I decided to get rid of books I'm reading on the left side bar. It's too hard to keep up with because I read a book a week. This year however has been a bad year for reading. I thought I would increase the number of books I read this year, but I didn't.

My movie watching has also been abysmal. I hardly went to the movies this year, and now that I use Netflix insetad of Blockbuster I don't rent as many movies either. With Blockbuster I was forced to watch my movies in a week. With Netflix, my movies sit around for months on end before I watch them. There is no urgency at all for me with Netflix.

I have to decide if I should go back to Blockbuster only because I did like the serendipity of going to the store and seeing what was available. I ended up discovering many good movies this way. Netflix is good for renting movies that are hard to find, especially the classic old movies. But that's about it.

I saw the movie "Apocalypto" at the new Century theatre in Union Square that is part of the new mall with Bloomingdales. The theatre has leather seats and they were big and roomy.

I really liked "Apocalypto" and am glad I saw it on the big screen. Some of the cinematography was so beautiful. I went to the Mayan exhibit that were here last year, and it was fascinating to see how the Mayans were depicted.

I didn't think the story was a bad as the reviewers said, and I loved the violence. However if you're not into violence then I wouldn't watch it. The amount of violence kind of reminded me of a porn movie. In a good porn movie, there's like a sex scene every five minutes or less. In "Apocalypto", there's a violent scene every five minutes which was fine with me. I mean, HELLO! It was a period piece and back then life and living was hard and violent. People killed animals and ate them. They didn't go to the butcher to buy meat.

I wasn't sure about the ending, only because I think I wasn't expecting it. But it makes sense. So I don't know what is the big deal about this movie. I loved that it depicted a non-white culture, and a culture there are so few movies about.

I had two work gift exchanges this year and there were completely different experiences.

The first gift exchange I went to was "funny" gift exchange. You had to buy a funny gift up to $15. Talk about a dumb idea. The gifts were so dumb, like a farting Santa, Homer Simpson slippers, etc. $15 is a lot of money to spend on a funny gift. And it wasn't fun at all because who wanted to steal stupid gifts. I rebelled and bought a $10 Walgreens card. It's kind of funny to me because you would normally expect to get a gift card from an expensive store. It would have been more funny I suppose, if I had a McDonalds gift card but I didn't think about it until I saw the commercials on TV.

The second gift exchange was much better and the limit was still $15. The gift were really great like a mini fondu maker, a 1 gig memory stick, expensive chocolates, etc. I was in the middel of the draw and picked a bottle of wine. My bottle of wine was immediately stolen, so I opened another present and got a mini fondu maker. I was so excited, but of course as is my karma, my boss steals my fondu maker, so I stole back my bottle of wine. It's so much more fun to steal gifts if the gifts are worth stealing.

The 1 gig memory stick was stolen three times. So was the fondu maker. But thank god I was able to hold on to my wine. At the first gift exchange, I ended up with a bunch of self-help books. I was a little upset, but the books are at least ones I wanted to read but didn't want to spend the money to buy.

But it is so not fun to steal a "stupid" gift. No one wants a farting Santa!

There's too much white space on my blog, so I am going to post the picture that was desktop background for a year.

Okay, I fixed the archiving problem and now they're back. Apparently I had code that was older than two years. Whatever!

I am all shopped out, except that I have to buy one more gift to buy because a friend of mine gave me more present than I was planning to give her. I was only planning to give her an ornament, but she gave me a calendar and an ornament.

I spent way too much money this year, more than I was planning to spend. I even took back a gift because a friend told me I was giving too much. That was hard but I did it. It was just a stocking stuffer anyway and not the real gift.

Somehow my archives disappeared and now I have to figure out how to get them back.

The woman, who made my current job miserable since the first month I started, was escorted out of our building yesterday. The HR person didn’t even give her time to pack up the pictures of her children that are in her office, and an hour later the lock to her office was changed.

Life changes quickly. At noon, we were all in a staff meeting and she came but left after an hour. At around 3 pm, we were all called into the director’s office and told that she had “resigned effective as of today and if we needed to contact her about work issues, we need to go through him.” A friend who has seen this kind of thing happen before said she was terminated, otherwise why would they have escorted her out of the building like that without even time to gather her personal things.

I never liked the woman, but I felt compassion for her. They wouldn’t even let her take her kids’ pictures with her. That is cruel. The woman totally deserved it, but still.

I guess I am sucker for rock music ballads because I love the new song "Lips of an Angel" by Hinder.

I bought the whole season of Heroes from iTunes and I just found out I can't copy them. What a bummer. And who knew downloaded tv shows would cost me 5 gigs of disk space! Yikes! That's what it says on iTunes on my laptop. I should buy a DVD recorder and record the shows I want to watch instead of buying them! What a drag!

I'm probably going to catch total flak for doing this, but I declined to participate in buying a gift for the director of our group. This is the first department I've worked in where the employees buy presents for the boss instead of the boss buying gifts for the employees. In the 2.5 years I've worked at this company, I have never received a gift from my immediate boss for christmas or for my birthday.

I see other bosses giving their employees gifts in other departments, but not ours. Oh no. We, the employees who are getting paid less than the director of the group, are shelling out money to buy a gift for the director who gets paid way more than us. That is so weird. I mean, I can understand buying a gift for your boss if they're getting married or having a child, but not Christmas. That is so odd!

I'm sure my fellow employees are going to talk about me, but I don't care. I really need to get another job. This place is so strange. It's calmed down for now, so I stopped looking for a job, but I know it's just going to get bad again. I don't fit here, I never will and I keep denying it to myself because every time I start looking for a job, something happens in my life that makes me want to stay.

But this christmas gift giving to the boss is I think the last straw for me. It's always the little things for me that decide a course of action for me, never the big things. I thought with this new director things would change, but obviously they haven't. It's a new person, but the weirdness in the department still exists.