Meeting minutes

After about three days of intense meetings, the mind does sort of begin to wander in self-defense.

• Lunch today was (ta-daaaah!) sushi. Yum, yum, yum. Everyone was eager for sushi. Yum! And it was such a nice, pretty sushi place here in Valencia. Yum!

  Except, of course, that my ancestors evolved out of the ocean explicitly to avoid having to eat fish, let alone cold fish of dubious cookingness.

  Ah, well. The sukiyaki was good.

• Dinner was at an Italian place called Sisley. Very, very good pesto pasta. I thought I would be exceedingly clever and order the pesto pasta without chicken, thus saving on plenty of calories, leaving room for dessert.

  I’d forgotten, of course, that pesto sauce (which was both tasty and copious) is basically olive oil with basil for color. Not exactly lo-cal, or even moderate-cal.

  But it was good. And we didn’t have dessert. So I was only a bit over-budget calorie-wise.

• Growing up, Valencia was the spot along I-5 (er, “the 5”) where Magic Mountain (a/k/a “Six Flags Magic Mountain” a/k/a “Six Flags California, Magic Mountian”) sat. The rest of the place was kind of a sun-bleached fringe bedroom community for LA. Food was the smattering of restaurants right outside the park.

  Well, the place has grown up amazingly, and now there’s this big mall/restaurant row/fancy townhouse/retail center in the middle of it, full of lots of good places to eat. Actually, a pretty good place to stay.

  And the boss was quite nice about opening up his house to our meeting. It was very comfortable, well-stocked with coffee and soda, and he’s been a very nice host. So I went to a very nice liquor store a couple of blocks away and picked up a bottle of wine for him.

• Speaking of wine, the original plan was that we’d do some meeting tomorrow, then head on over to the Santa Barbara wine country. But time-wise, particularly with the Friday commute, that seemed pretty sketchy. So, instead, we’ll meet until Noon, then head home.

• My boss says his secret to success in business is: “Find something that’s important for the company, that nobody likes to do, and do it well.”

  My corrollary to that? “If you take meeting notes and annotate the various documents that are being reviewed, and do it well, not only will people appreciate the output, but they’ll appreciate that they didn’t have to do it.”

  And the boss might suggest that everyone owes you a lunch.

  And you might be able to tweak the notes to favor some of the positions you held, too …

And now to do my homework …