12 free contact cases, and a Mesh-tacular evening

Mesh - Last night Em and I had a wonderful dinner out at a local restaurant called Mesh. Its owners and head chefs are a couple of famous local chefs and restaurateurs. The place is fairly non-descript outside but very modern and chic inside. Both Em's and my first thoughts were that we weren't quite cool enough to be in here ... but we were ;). Great atmosphere, lively crowd but not too loud and great service. The prices were up there (its a very nice restaurant with equivalent prices) but luckily at our Sark Christmas party I won a $100 gift certificate so we ended up having by far the best $20-$30 meal ever! ;)

We started the meal with a couple drinks. Em had a delicious Mango Mojito Martini while I had my staple, a Manhattan. We thought about getting an appetizer but decided that we would save room for their famous deserts. While waiting for our entrees, we each received these little hor'dourve like things (the waiter had some fancy name for what they were) that were fancy spoons on a small plate with a shrimp salad-esque thing topped with small fried wantons on top and a something-oil. Mmm Mmm. Very Top-Chef.

For our entrees, Em had the Diver scallops (pan seared scallops set on top of spinach risotto and tomato bruele). I can only assume that Em loved them since there wasn't anything (even any sauce) left on the plate ;). For my dinner, Em forced me to go all out. The special of the night was Copper River Salmon pan seared over ribboned zucchini, squash and carrots, topped with a snow pea and artichoke garnish and a red currant and truffle vinaigrette. It was amazing! According to our waiter, and Google (here, and here) ... Copper River Salmon are supposed to be some of the best in the world and can only be caught and found a few weeks of the year. Well, it was by far the best Salmon I had ever had. Soooo good.

Finally, for desert Em and I split the chocolate Bailey's cheesecake cake. It was so rich ... no wonder it was voted "Best Restaurant Dessert" in America by USA today. :) The perfect way to end a great meal.

Dodgeball / Darts - Back to back dodgeball games yesterday. We lost the first and won the second but both were good games. My arm is actually ok this time which was a nice change. Darts on Thursday was the last for the season (and probably my last for a while). Unfortunately we ended up losing, but played well throughout. I actually had one of my more consistent matches ever. The real problem was the fact that we started late, our opponents seemingly constant smoke breaks and a lot of talking combined to make our match last till almost midnight. Getting up for the bus the next day was very hard.

Contact Cases / Free Cereal - The good folks over at DealHack.com provide an interesting RSS feed with their daily scoops on good deals from various online and brick and mortar stores. They also, occasionally give links to free offers of samples and the like. Two such links have produced a free box of Kashi brand cereal and 12 free contact lens cases along with the worlds smallest bottle of eye drops from Bausch & Lomb. Yep 12. What will I do with 12 cases? No idea, but I got that part of life covered for the next few years :)

First Unit Meeting - My new company had its first "Quarterly Unit Meeting" since the buyout and boy was it a meeting. Compared to our monthly unit meetings that used to have about 30-40 people ... this was 200+ in a huge banquet room. The meeting was very long, a mixup resulted in them not having enough food, the bar stayed open a bit too long and I ended up getting an award. The award was for a project I worked on (briefly, and did very little work on) at GE in the fall of last year. A coworker of mine was given it to give to me back in February time frame but kept forgetting to bring it to me until now. So, in front of 200+ people I was given the award (not just a piece of paper, but more of a plaque thing) for project I was barely on, from last November. It was fairly bizarre.

Training / Interviewing my replacement - Next week I will be working with my client and our sales team to figure out what all I have worked on since January, how I can transfer my knowledge to other people on the team, what that knowledge needs to be, and how I can help interview possible replacements from the client and Sogeti perspective. Should be interesting.