awards and dates

more personal posting- i’m still trying to catch up from monday. so this post is about two strangely inter-related things… i received an award at work this week and i have a date tonight with someone i met on the internet. how could these things possibly be connected? apparently in random meg-land these things are more than possible.

on monday, i received an award at work for a project i completed a year and a half ago. i really didn’t want to make a big deal about it (awards – hokey and stupid, right?) but i have to admit that being recognized for three years of work in some formal way is pretty nice. i now have a strange-statue thing to grace the top of the bookshelf in my office and a certificate to hang on the wall. i keep meaning to take a picture to post to this blog, but haven’t got around to that yet. my friend george came in from chilliwack to be my “guest” at the ceremony which i really appreciated, and one of the directors who sponsored the award-request was also there and very pleased about the whole thing. interestingly, i was the only individual woman to receive an award, and only seven other women (out of fifty-one people to get awards in total) received awards as part of group projects. in all, i was happy to be recognized in such a way and at the very least i now have a solid statue that would a good throwing projectile if times should get dire.

as for the second part of this story – back on the weekend, i received a “wink” from a decent-seeming fellow on the georgia straight personals network… so respond i did on monday morning when i came into work, before i went out of the office for the day (i was working at library square in the morning and at the awards ceremony in the afternoon). this fellow describes himself as socially-conscious, into indy-culture, vegetarian and nature loving… all attributes which interest me of course… enough to promise some interesting email conversation at least. yesterday, i received a response to my email, which contained some interesting factoids (he lives on a sailboat, he lived on digby island for many years, etc.) but the one that stood out for me was where he works. which is (you saw this coming right?), for the same federal government department that i do – though not in the same building, and in a different capacity altogether. so ha ha, i thought, that’s a funny coincidence – i emailed him back and said – “guess what” just a brief note because i was almost laughing outloud from it. ha ha, he writes back, that’s funny – i was just downtown yesterday at the awards ceremony with some of the guys from work…… yup, and turns out he remembers me getting my award (i was the first one to be called up, hard to forget).

in a subsequent email he asked me to dinner at the foundation (one of my favourite east van veggie restaurants) but because of schedules and timing and ferries we are meeting tonight in horseshoe bay instead. normally i wouldn’t agree to anything like this so quickly, but he is a co-worker so the “stranger danger” factor is diminished somewhat. so there it is, an award and a date with a stranger….. plus george took me out for dinner last night – i can only think some goddess is smiling down on me this week…..