I would like to start off this week's blog with a conversation I had with my manager Mark recently who is from Scotland. I told him that after our hike last week, we had lunch at the golf course and that I was talking to another Scottish guy, Cameron, who has also been living in California working in Internal Audit at National for several years. I told Mark that you could see that Cameron really liked being here in California and Mark just answered: 'Well, what's not to like?'

This statement very much sums up what I feel about this whole area right now including not only the weather but all the people I have met so far and continues where I left off with my last blog post. Futhermore, there is so much to do in your free time. For instance, one aspect only is that there are many restaurants around here that will give you the chance to have a different culinary experience each time you want to go for lunch or dinner. There are a lot of places where you can get Italian, French, Mexican, British, Irish, Spanish, South American, German, Japanese food and the list goes on and on. For instance, yesterday me and Kieran wanted to go for Italian food but unfortunately that place was already shut so we came across an Indian restaurant which offered adequately spiced food at a very reasonable price. Today then, we went to a Greek restaurant for our lunch break. I know that this in itself is not so special for some, but here you don't have to go very far to find a restaurant of your choice and at a price level you feel comfortable with.

What else has been happening? Well, I have worked with people in different departments that needed some help with some of their projects. I do a lot of ad-hoc tasks and some of them are automatically done by me on a specific day. Most of last week, I was working on the metrics of National's scrappage scheme that allows National to sell more parts to distributors and in turn offering them to 'recycle' their older parts in their inventories to a specialist distributor who stocks them for people that need a specific older part for their circuit board configuration. This cycle needs to be checked in order that all the numbers in inventories and scrapped parts add up thus avoiding major discrepancies. Just recently, I worked on another task that involves account reconciliation and making sure that money spent on a specific project is adequately capitalised and accounted for. This week apparently is going to be quite busy because it is close week and all the financials are being wrapped up for the second period of National's financial year which ended last week.

In terms of leisure activities, on Saturday, we went to Santa Cruz at the Pacific Ocean to go to the beach. In order to get there, we had to take the Highway 17 bus that follows said highway from San Jose until it ends at the coast in Santa Cruz. The bus journey took slightly longer than planned because there was a huge amount of traffic around San Jose at that time as everybody was trying to get somewhere nice for the weekend which in a lot of cases was also Santa Cruz. Once we finally arrived, the plan was just to lie on the beach and just chill out. Santa Cruz is very much a holiday resort and there is an amusement park directly at the waterfront and many places to eat dinner. It was a really good day because it was not too hot and not too cold. We also took a walk on the pier on which cars were also allowed on and had a look into the various shops. Nearly at the end, there were holes built into the pier where you could watch the sea lions that were just lazing around but making sure that they would also be noticed by barking loudly.  On Sunday we spent the time just to 'rest' from the previous day's adventure which meant doing some laundry and doing some shopping in Downtown San Jose.

That'll be all for now. 'Tune in' next week for more news from the Bay Area.