I kinda felt like writing here. It's been a good day. My Sup called me to inform mi that I'd received a rise (shit, I still keep mixing up "rise" with "raise"), so now I'm a little less poor... or a bit richer, if you want. Not that I'm earning lots more. Actually, of all the possibilities, the rise was the minimum amount I'd expected. I'm still to improve my productivity, so I guess it's OK.

After last week's pseudo-Big Brother work days at the office, more money sounds promising. Let me elaborate: One of our clients (a big fish in the movie industry) had an emergency so we were all commited to work for as long as it took to get the job done. In my case, that was a 15-hour shift on Thursday and a 11-hour shift on Friday. I'm still trying to recover from that. At some points it did feel like BB, all of us locked up in the office, eating there, and even contemplating the possibility of sleeping there if need be. Well, at least we could go out, not like the BB people. Anyways, I also made some big bucks with all that OT. (I can see two lovely plane tickets in our future... no further comments).

Changing subjects, Nightboat is back to practices. We're working on a bunch of new songs we're very optimistic about. Also, we're getting a lot of "air play" in YouTube (watch our vids...and leave comments!!), and we've reached over 2000 plays in our website. Yay!

OK, that's all for now.

To go...

We were staying at a hotel in San Diego whose name included the word "Sea" but which I don't remember exactly. I do remember it was on Prospect St., though, in front of a Vons supermarket. It was 1989. I was 9 years old. I'd only been learning English for 2 years at the time, and though I could handle the Present and Past tenses quite well, I hadn't quite grasped the idea of what it meant to be able to actually speak to somebody in a foreign language.

So there we were in our nice hotel on Prospect St. and one morning my mum had this brilliant idea and said to me: "Why don't you go to that café across the street to get us a cup of coffee and a cup of tea and bring it back here?"

I initially freaked out (Who in their right mind sends a 9-year-old alone to buy coffee and tea in a foreign country? Yeah, my mum).

And so there I went, all by myself, to the café. I approached the counter and asked one of the guys there in my then rusty English: "One tea and one coffee, please." So far, so good. The guy seemed to have understood what I wanted. And then came the dreadful reply:

"To go?"

What?? What did he just say?? Honest, I had no idea. The guy stared at me and must have repeated those devilish words like 5 times... I panicked. I didn't know how to react. But suddenly... something clicked inside my head: Yeah, right! To go! To take it away!!

"Yes, yes. To go!"

And so he handed me the paper bag containing two plastic cups, one with coffee and one with tea. I paid the bill and I left. I got back to the hotel. My mum was proud of me.

That was the very first time I spoke English in a daily-life situation and for actual communication.

P.