I just cleaned up the last two entries from last week and put them up, and in doing so was bemused to realise that I didn't write on Thursday & Friday. I did mean to, but I wanted to get my stylesheets working first, which never happened. I spent hours intermittently flailing at them, and even got Kit to help me, all to no avail -- despite being syntactically correct they just don't work. I seem to recall that this happened last time I tried playing with stylesheets too. Maybe I just have strange karma when it comes to advances in web technology?

So anyway, there was a Thursday & a Friday. I spent them mostly hanging out with coworkers, talking a bit about the present doom but mostly just talking about whatever came to our minds. I heard a lot of stories from the early days of the company, which was really nice but made me a bit wistful for everything I've missed. Now it's all going to change into something else entirely -- maybe something nice, but with so many people vanishing it's hard to say. My real hope is that one of the people leaving will go off to do something wonderful and I'll have a chance to get into that. I'd love the chance to be involved in something exciting towards the beginning, when it's more about how to do things right and less about how to stay afloat. Especially now that I'm becoming more confident about my skills.

The weekend was far too full and busy, although it started off peacefully; I went to Shabbat services at Beth Am Friday night for the first time ever and really enjoyed myself despite some resentment about having to spend the time on it when I feel like I have so little time for myself lately. I ended up sitting with these four sisters who were there together because it was the fourth anniversary of their father's death. Watching their reactions when their father's name was read was very moving, and the women were all incredibly lovely and welcoming to me; it seemed amazing that they would be able to be so warm when they were there for their own specific reasons.

Saturday was Amber High School, which was mostly fun, and then Sunday Jim & I went over to Temple Square to help Chrisber move. This was something of an adventure; he hadn't moved in years and wasn't really prepared to have people swoop down on him, but we were both extremely forceful about getting things packed and put into vehicles and all of that stuff, whether or not Chrisber felt ready. I had to leave at 5 to go to Berkeley, but Jim reported that they got pretty much everything, aside from some cleaning stuff which needed to stay behind anyway.

My drive to Berkeley was beautiful; the sun was setting over the bay as I drove across the Dumbarton bridge, and once I was headed north-west on 880 I had an amazing view of all the red & gold & orange & yellow streaks framed by mountains on the bottom and shades of dark blue sky everywhere else. I was in a good mood when I got to group; the beauty of the drive and the fun of listening to my new Marmalade Boy CDs had worn away all the frustration I was feeling about the move. Group itself turned out to be pretty exciting; we had two new people starting, and almost all of the current members there, and it was really neat to talk to the new people about how we operated and what our vision was. Somehow I ended up doing most of the talking, which surprised me a little; when I first joined the group I was pretty quiet all of the time, and even the last few weeks I was feeling sort of uninterested in talking a lot. It compares interestingly to my experience at Imparto, when I think about it; during the last four months I was there I was very active in meetings, very concerned about making myself heard in projects, etc. By the time I got to SocialNet, though, I'd lost all of that comfort and was back to being silent again. I wonder if I can speed up the getting-comfortable process so that I can start participating actively in things inside of six months instead of two years?