Friday morning at IPAC was a bit surreal. At about 10am, Shelly (the secretary at the “main” desk, although that “main” desk is buried in the middle of the IPAC labyrinth) came bustling through the hallways, urging everyone to read their e-mail from Kathy (the MSC secretary).

Said e-mail didn’t materialize after a few minutes, and when I spotted Shelly heading back the other way I asked what it would be about. Apparently, Kathy had entered IPAC into an “office of the day” drawing at KRTH (oldies radio station), and won! They were on their way to the office with snacks and coffee, and were bringing someone who’d be “serenading” us as well – all the conference rooms were booked already, so we’d have to squeeze into the kitchen.

The ipac-staff mailing list was still taking it’s slow time actually delivering Kathy’s mail, so a few of us helped Shelly make the rounds and fill everyone in on what was about to go down in the kitchen. It turns out that not that many people are in their offices at 10am on a Friday morning, but we managed to get a fairly respectable crowd (mostly women, for some reason) in there by the time the KRTH van pulled up out back:

They brought in several boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts, some coffee – and a mexican acoustic guitar player, Miguel Rivera, who did in fact proceed to serenade us, mostly hamming it up to the ladies in the crowd. He was actually quite good, even!

Miguel and Kathy:

Everyone got into the silly spirit of things, getting autographs and snapping pictures. For some reason, the men didn’t seem quite as interested in joining the fun:

Fun way to start a Friday!