A few weeks back I was browsing Craigslist for a new puppy (don’t tell Brendan). All I could find were pitbull mixes so my eye wandered over to the jobs section. I clicked on the Film category and found an interesting job listing for a Film Fest coordinator for Palo Alto. This piqued my interest so I sent them my resume. About a week later they responded and asked me to come in for an interview.

To my great surprise the Palo Alto Institute was only 3 blocks from our house. I hopped on my bike and rode over. It was a really warm humid day and when I got off the bike and climbed the stairs to the office I was a bit disheveled and out of breath. As I looked for the bathroom to freshen up, someone opened the door to the office and I had no other option but to get the interview started. All eyes in the room immediately went straight to my huge belly. So in order to ease the awkwardness in the room, I said, “Hi, I am Alex and I am 8 months pregnant and out of breath.”

The interview went really well and they asked me back to meet the remaining board members a few days later. I walked this time, giving myself enough time to get there so I didn’t appear frazzled like before. I walked into the conference room and every chair was taken by a middle aged man in a suit – about 15 of them and one woman. Everyone had a chance to introduce themselves. Apparently they were all investors from Palo Alto Investors, the company that is solely funding the Palo Alto Institute. Each introduction was peppered with Standford, MIT, Harvard, PhD, MBA… Palo Alto Institute is the organization that will be starting the Palo Alto Film Festival. Palo Alto Investors was started by William Edwards whose father was one of the founding venture capitalists of Silicon Valley. They were the guys behind Apple, Intel, Cisco, Genetech, Atari, Tandem, and many others. Wow, ok, sign me up! The interview lasted almost 3 hours and was a brain storming session on just about everything. I left there thinking, “What just happened?”

Two days ago they asked me to come back and offered me a job. For the remainder of the year, we will be building the foundations of the organization. My responsibilities will include building the website, iPhone applications, video library and database applications. Starting in 2010, we will be starting the Film Festival. How exciting to be on the ground floor and with an organization backed by a powerhouse of a corporation.

I guess I was too afraid of looking for a new job and being so pregnant, who would hire someone that late in the pregnancy game? Yes, this is going to be a huge challenge when our little one is born. But it seems too good to let this one pass me by. We will figure it out!

I haven’t been able to find any good mountain biking yet, so I have taken to getting on the road by taking Alex’s bike, squeezing into some Lycra and riding west.

Palo Alto is impressively setup for road cyclists. There are plenty of bike lanes. The traffic lights can sense bikes waiting, and the Santa Cruz mountains between here and the coast have a multitude of low traffic cycling loops. I have a couple ridden and mapped out:

and

I plan to join a group ride at 6:30am tomorrow morning. (Now that I’ve posted it, I have to do it, right?) The pros may laugh at my borrowed girl’s bike, mountain-bike apparel and lack of peleton savvy, but when it comes to that first climb…