Déjeuner avec Luis et Deena
Dinner with Luis and Deena… good times! It’s hard to beat traveling thousands of miles from home and indulging in the comfort of meeting up with an old friend.
For those that don’t know him, I should introduce Luis. Once described to me as a “the short, foul-mouthed Mexican”, a label which I find does not quite do him justice…
Monsieur Luis Talevera is old-school Microsoft, and without a shadow of a doubt the best and most inspiring guy I have ever worked for. Luis oozes passion for whatever he does in life… be it building great software, or living life to the fullest with his family. My path first crossed with Luis way back in 1993 when he was the inspiration for Outlook Express – codenamed “Athena” back then. I was fresh out of University with barely 6 months of coding under my belt. Luis had a grand but simple plan – to build a PIM (Personal Information Manager) that would rock the world.
Luis did 4 brilliant things that all good managers should do:
1. He believed in my ability to write code far beyond anything I had done before.
2. He dumped a seemingly intractable and hard challenge in my lap and made me accountable for solving it.
3. He knew that I had too much pride not to fail him, and did not want to hear him give me shit for not delivering, and finally
4. He left me and the rest of the team alone to deliver on the mission, giving us all the rope to hang ourselves if we chose to.
The table was set, and the rest was simply up to me… and so launched my career in the field of software engineering.
I still remember the day Luis came into my office – “Here’s the plan: Eric owns the Address Book, and Justin is going to figure out the knarly Calendar stuff, Sung gets the todo list, so that leaves you on the Email Client. Oh – and we demo to BillG in four weeks.” Wholy crap! What do I know about email? That sounds like the hardest piece! “Then figure it out, dick-wad.”, says Luis as he walks out the door again.
OK, enough reminiscing… back to the present… Theresa and I take the metro to the very end – at Ponte St. Cloud, 20 minutes out of Paris. Luis picks us up on the bridge and drives us five minutes back to his home, or perhaps “chateau” would be a more fitting description!
Luis and Deena have a grand home with a beautiful garden. We arrived, cracked open a bottle of red wine and took the conversation outside onto the patio. It was like a warm summer evening in Seattle…
Deena has prepared a feast. For the entrée (appetizer to the American readers) we munched on fresh artichoke with a simple lemon-butter dip. Artichokes are apparently in season in mid-May. For the main course we ate an incredible Persian rice dish (soaked basmati rice, slow cooked in a base of butter – flipped so that the butter-crust ends up on top), French Lamb, lentils and beans. I especially enjoyed the extra thai chilis that were floating in there. J
After we were done, Luis came back with his favourite part – the drippings from the pan that cooked the lamb. And tasty they were! A very concentrated paste – that resembled Marmite in it’s dark saltiness, but with a more meaty flavour. Spread on toast! Fantastique! C’est tres bon!
As if we were not already satisfied with the good wine and fine main course, out came desert. A delicious melee of fresh fruits – Mango, Melon and Strawberries. Not like the flavourless California-grown red-blobs you get in American grocery stores, but real strawberries –like local Washington picked ones or the ones we used to get from Kelsall in the Cheshire country side growing up.
I was both impressed and amused when Luis showed his more sensitive side after dinner. He declared – “I’ll make tea – let me go get some mint from the garden.”. As he returned from foraging the veggie patch, Deena double-checked…. “You didn’t take it from that pot where the dog peed did you?” – “Of course not, I got it from the herb garden over there in the corner”. “There’s no mint over there”, protested Deena, let me see… “Luis… I don’t think Oregano tea will taste very good.” Oh well… he did try. I guess I now know I can send him a book on herbs for Christmas…
The highlight of the evening was simply watching Luis, Deena and their 3 kids (Nikita, Misha, Alyosha) all interact. Deena speaks English to the children, Luis speaks Spanish to them, and they all converse in French. It was an amazing seamless and fluid thing to watch them flow between the languages without effort. I was also inspired by the sense of family and at the same time feeling of respect between them all as they ate dinner and wove between conversations. It shows that they have put a lot of effort into building a solid family and savouring the simpler things in life.
After dinner, they took us on a night-time tour of Paris… it was fun to see the Eiffel Tower do it’s magical sparkling light show on the hour, and see Ponte Neuf lit up at night.
All in all, a great evening. We were so entertained that we completely forgot about our jet lag, and that we hadn’t slept for 30 something hours. All of which made for a good nights sleep and fond memories.
Sorry… no pictures with this post… my big fat camera would have simply been too distracting, so it stayed at home.
May 22nd, 2006 at 12:01 pm
What a great description of the evening. You didn’t need to attach any pictures to this post because it is so easy to visualize everything. Reading about all of the cool things that everyone is doing on this trip has definitely given me the travel bug.