Went to a birthday party on Angel Island. Spent the whole day drinking way too much, then I ended up in a bar near Pier 39 with a friend and kept drinking and watching the Giants lose to the Padres. Talked to a guy whose father was in the Battle of the Bulge and who heard Patton speak. Then to another guy from Atlanta who works at Bechtel and is here doing some work.

I forgot how fun it is to talk to random guys in a bar, especially when you've had way too much to drink.

Last night I partially watched the ABC news special with Peter Jennings called "Jesus and Paul -- The Word and the Witness". What a joke that program was for anyone who has seriously studied the origins of the bible. I was offended, and I've only taken a few Sunday morning church sponsored bible classes.

First of all, the main Christian theologians they had on the show were the infamous authors of the "Jesus Seminar", which looked at the origins of the historical Jesus. Marcus Borg, who I wrote about in a earlier post, was his usual icky self. N.T. Wright, who despite all his historical objections about Jesus could only offer up at the end that he couldn't nor can anyone for that matter, expliain how Christianity became such a dominant religion. John Dominic Crossan, who wrote great books, but sounded like a non-believer as well.

Only Luke Timothy Johnson who wrote "The Real Jesus, The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, sounded like he was a Christian. Everyone else sounded so skeptical and so un-Christian.

I mean, how can you explain faith? How can you explain why you believe the way you do. It's such a personal thing, so individual and so wonderfully human. It's such a post-modernist mistake to try to explain faith in scientific terms.

And then that whole thing about Paul. The bit where Peter Jennings is asking people visiting the Vatican if they knew who Paul was, how dumb was that. Paul was a follower of Christ. He never claimed to be the messiah, Yeshua, he was doing his disciple thing and spreading christianity. I think Paul would have been so insulted if he was aware that people knew anything about him.

Paul's main mission was to spread Christianity to the gentile world. And yes, okay, Paul interpreted jewish beliefs through a greek lens so non-jews could understand Jesus' teachings, but so what. That's part of being a messenger of God; interpreting JC's word so it can easily be understood by the people who need to hear his message.

I'm not sure what Peter Jennings was trying to accomplish by comparing JC and Paul. Paul was a messenger of God, and not the messiah. Even Paul knew that.

Saturday was a good day. I sat in a cafe and started on my new book, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland. Then I worked out for an hour, and did half an hour of weights.

Later I went to the mall to check out the sales, and ended up buying a new skirt to wear for easter service and a long rayon skirt that was a steal at $27. It's not a skirt I'd wear to work, but it's a skirt I'd wear to a nice dinner; a dinner skirt.

On Sunday I was bad. I went to Palm Sunday service, and then on whim decided to check out the outlet stores in Petaluma. There's a Coach outlet store there, and I have this horrible habit of buying a new bag every time I start a new job.

I told myself I wasn't going to buy a new purse, and instead pick up a new makeup case for my purse. My current makeup purse is dotted with pen stains and other stains of unknown origins. It's not like I needed another Coach bag because I already own six of them. But old habits die hard, and yes I bought another Coach bag. This new one wasn't as expensive as the last Coach bag I bought, but it wasn't cheap either. And of course, I also bought a new makeup bag.

But the evil god of shopping must have been sitting on my shoulder, because I ended up with several more purchases. Like I really need to buy new clothes when I need to replace my tv so I can buy a DVD player, not to mention I need to replace my cd player because it now won't play some of my cds.

At the Nine West outlet, I ended up trying on a pair of black heels that were so darned comfortable I had to buy them. They're not the best looking shoes I've seen in my life, but for heels they're divinely comfortable.

At the Jones New York outlet store, I bought three skirts for the unbelievable price of $65. The skirts were 1) a knee length plaid skirt in green 2) a linen knee length blend skirt in blue and 3) a knee length denim skirt. Can't beat the price for these pricey clothes.

At the Liz Clairborne outlet, I bought a long blue skirt that I have to lose about 5 pounds to fit into. The print was gorgeous so I had to have it. Then I bought a necklace with matching earrings, and couple more pairs of earrings. Not as good of a deal like at Jones New York, but not too shabby either.

At the Bass outlet, I almost bought a pair of penny loafers. I haven't worn those since college, and they would have looked so cute with the plaid skirt. But they didn't have my size. I ended up buying two t-shirts to wear under sweater for $10 each.

On the way home, I stopped at the Staples store in Novato and bought a new record book for note taking at work. My boss has the same kind of book and I was admiring it. The sucker was not cheap at $34, but it's got 300 pages and it looks so professional. I was taking notes in a steno book, and after 13 days I had filled 75% of it. I take a ton of notes at all those darn meetings that I have to attend.

Wandering around Staples I started to feel twinges of guilt for all the money I had that day, so I bought a box of envelopes to save money and address labels. I was going to buy those nice custom address labels, but decided it was cheaper to print my own. I could print them and put a sticker on them for a decoration.

Then lastly, I went grocery shopping and bought food so I could start bringing my lunch to work 4 days a week to make up for all the money I spent.

Thankfully I cashed in about four weeks of vacation time when I left my old job, so I have some extra money. I was going to use part of that money to buy a new TV, DVD player and stereo, which I'm probably still going to do and then pay some debts off with the remainder.

I love all my purchases because it's so fun to have new work clothes that actually fit. My old work clothes fit, but they're really loose around the hips. That's the reason I keep telling to myself to justify all my clothes shopping.

Like I really need new clothes right now when I'm still trying to lose weight. With my luck, in two months these new clothes will also be too loose on me. That will kind of irritate me a little bit, although the shopaholic part of me can't wait till that day.

Just in case you're confused about my job adventures, here's the scoop.

I applied for this job at this company. They wanted to hire me, but they said I first needed to contract with them for 30 days to see how we would all get along. If at the end of 30 days everything was going well, the company would convert me from contract to permanent full time status.

I started on March 17 and if I was going to convert to FTE status, my official hire date would be April 19.

I was very lucky because the company decided that they liked me, I liked them, and so they offered to convert to full time status two weeks earlier than originally planned and they also gave me more money.

Make sense?

There is good news on the job front. The company I've been contracting with offered me the job two weeks before my planned start date of April 19.

I received an offer letter on Thursday with a little more money than what they originally promised. YEAH!!! I also had to take a take a drug test this morning, but that's standard for most jobs.

I start as a permanent full time employee on Monday. I'm happy because I can relax a little now. Once again I have a permanen t job with benefits and it's a very good thing.

I hope I can now begin to establish an after work routine of writing and working out. I need my extracurricular activities back in my life.

I've been wading through the new company's benefits package tonight. The vision and dental suck! At my last company, the vision and dental benefits were good and the medical benefits were so so. The new company has a bit more benefits than the old one, so I pay a little more.

I have a massage theray benefit, and I'm definitely going to take advantage of it. And they offer flex spending for the costs that the company doesn't offer. The vision plan isn't bad if you visit their eyecare specialists, but I've been going to the same guy since the mid 1990's and I really don't feel like changing. My dentist isn't covered and I have decide if I want to pay more to go see him, or switch to this dentist that my chiropractor in Berkeley is recommending.

I almost feel like changing my PCP as well, because my old PCP was starting to get on my nerves. I really like the PCP I had with the last company, but she's not on this new company's list of doctors.

My boss said I was in some kind of company bonus incentive program, have no idea what this is. I think it probably means that if the company does well, I'll get a bonus equal to the percentage in my offer letter. This is a new thing.