Bout Ready to Come Home Now

Was walking back to my room from the "gatehouse" (where the reception desk and pool area is at the residence I'm staying at), and from behind me, from the car park, came the familiar rumble of a car engine. It was so familiar that I, at first, didn't even turn around. I smiled and thought, wow, that sounds like a BMW, one of the ones with the modified rumble. Like the one I used to have, the one that gave me whiplash the first time I heard it start up on the car yard.

Slowly, as it sharked over the hotel carpark, looking for a home for the night, it passed me. A black, 320i sedan. Just like the one I had. Like the one that my Girls admonished me for for trading in, because one of their favorite sounds was daddy rumbling up the driveway at the end of the day.

The context, and why seeing the car was such a yang-yang;

I got back to the hotel after a day in a training session here in San Ramon. The town is pretty much a corporate town. The campus office buildings are home to some fairly huge corporations, including the one I work for, and all are global in their operations. So a place like San Ramon is going to process a constant churn of incomings, as folks are transferred into the centre of their employers respective universes. Much like Singapore. And so this wee hotel, made up of mainly apartments and studio suites, reminds so much of Greatworld. Not in its physical appearance, far from it. It's a complex of two storey buidlings, built around a central car park, sandwiched between the campus block of Bishop Ranch 1 and a modest shopping centre. But its feel and function is very Greatworld-esque.

I walk past the pool on the way to my suite, from the campus at BR1. And, just like Greatworld, the pool is a late afternoon gathering point for wives-awaiting-husbands, and the kids-making-friends.

When I got back to the room, and was greeted by the Click, I immediately decided that I wasn't going to waste the last hour and a half of daylight in the room. So I changed and went and picked up my laundry, got a free copy of Newsweek, put my headphones on the blackberry, and sat down at the pool with a coffee. I was in dappled shade, so I wasn't exactly soaking up the sun, but I did emmerse myself in the moment.

Mar-mmy, mar-mmy, watch me swim, as a little four or five old splashed her way across the pool. Marco. Polo. Marco. Polo. Oohs and Ahhs as a mum arrived with her smallest. Shrieks and giggles and splashes. Goggles on the pool side. Little bodies walking quickly and stiffly around the blueness, coz mar-mmy said not to run.

The Girls would be very happy splashing away in this world.

In my ears, blackberry music. Because it's on my blackberry, it's my favorites. Coldplay, Sting, Seal; all comfortable, soothing. A nice accompaniment to the saturation cover-to-cover verbage of McCain-Obama on the pages of Newsweek (that's a whole nother blog on its own - the phenomenon is intruiging). And then U2 comes into the ear buds, the first few bars of Beautiful Day. That was it. Time to go. It'd rather deal with the Click. So I hurriedly pack up my stuff, push back my deck chair so hard that I send it rattling across the poolside. Loudly. Sheepishly pick it up, put it back, and slink out of the pool area, into the car park and on the way back to the room.

Which is where we came in. Rumble.

Can I go home now?

Please.