Personal – Fascination Place

Hotel Life

The other big development – other than all the cat news from my last entry – is that the time arrived this spring for me to take over my Dad’s finances, much as I did for my Mom 14 years ago. So I spent a week and a half in the Boston area at the beginning of May. Dad moved into assisted living several years ago and has settled in pretty well (that’s what this trip was about though I didn’t mention it at the time), but he’s in his 90s now and it was just time. Fortunately, he agrees, which is good because he is a hard person to argue with if his mind is set to the contrary.

Anyway, while we have a family vacation home on the south shore I could have stayed at, I was pretty sure that doing that drive every day would kill me, so instead I stayed at a hotel 15 minutes from Dad’s place. Good call, although hotels in the Boston area are not cheap. (On the bright side, rental cars in early May are cheap.) The hotel was a solid three stars, though: Close to things, very friendly front desk staff, lots of parking, reliable wi-fi, and a “business center” that I used to print some things.

I arrived on Saturday night and DoorDashed food for the first time ever. Somehow in addition to my food I ended up ordering two Diet Cokes from two different places delivered by two different drivers, so I screwed something up there, but otherwise it went fine.

Sunday through Thursday I had a pretty regular routine: Get up, go downstairs and get coffee and a pastry for breakfast, do some stuff in the room in the morning, have lunch, then spend the afternoon with Dad making calls, logging onto accounts and generally taking care of business. In the evening I’d go find dinner, then usually crash and watch television for the evening before going to sleep. The main exception was that Monday I went to his bank to add my Power of Attorney to his account, which they wanted my physical presence for.

Things generally went smoothly, though I ended up with a few loose ends I’ve been working on since the trip. But by the end of the week I had gotten through a lot of my to-do list and felt pretty accomplished, if exhausted. (Making phone calls is exhausting for me.) The one advantage to doing a lot of stuff which is largely financial is that by 5 pm most places have closed and I can stop because I can’t get in touch with people until the next day.

The main way that this differed from doing it for my Mom a decade ago was that with my Mom I stayed at my Dad’s house, had breakfast with him, and every evening after I was done Dad and I would go out for dinner. This time, after I was done I would go back to my hotel by myself. But I did take the opportunity to go out to dinner a lot, including to a couple of new-to-me restaurants. So that was nice. I also made a lot of Dunkin runs.

One of the odder moments came when I wanted to ship some stuff home, and I saw there was a FedEx ship center near the hotel. So I went there to get a box, and it turned out they didn’t take cash, and they didn’t take tap-to-pay, they only took swiped cards. This seemed pretty sketchy to me, as swiping cards is how numbers get skimmed, and tapping is way more secure. So I ended up passing and going to a Staples to buy boxes instead. (And I shipped from a FedEx office center elsewhere instead.) It was just weird.

Friday I checked out of the hotel, spent a couple of hours with Dad, and then – you may have guessed it already – went down to that vacation home I mentioned. As I was driving through the woods from the highway I felt myself relax, looking forward to a weekend of doing absolutely nothing.

Which is pretty close to what I did. I went out to dinner several times (Mother’s Day dinner was a little crazy, but being a single diner sped things up a bit), went for some walks, but spent a lot of time just sitting on the couch and watching TV. Saturday it rained in the afternoon. Sunday my sisters-in-law came to visit for several hours, which was fun. Monday night I watched Wake Up Dead Man after spending the afternoon with Dad again.

Debbi, by the way, stayed home. Considering Jackson’s condition, it was comforting for me to know that she was home taking care of everything.

I flew out Tuesday afternoon (flight options from the Bay Area to Boston are few these days – only JetBlue has nonstop flights). Fortunately all my flights went smoothly – dealing with long delays on top of everything else would have been a lot.

This was in some ways easier than it was for Mom, in large part because we handled a number of things for Dad when he moved into assisted living several years ago (such as selling his house and car), and his finances are generally simpler – or at least more organized – than Mom’s were. A big difference, though, is that lots of stuff is online now, whereas it was still on paper in 2012. This has pluses and minuses, mainly that a lot of accounts have 2-factor-authentication tied to Dad’s phone number turned on, and changing billing addresses and such can be more of a hassle. To some extent it was easier when everything was on paper and I could just change all the paper bills to come to me.

Once everything squared away, it will just be a few additional bills I have to pay every month, as well as having his taxes done every spring.

Anyway, this is one of those things we do for our parents, much as they did for us when we were kids. I’m fortunate that my parents were financially secure when this day arrived.

But as always, it was good to come home.

Cat Digest

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve written much here, hasn’t it? But it’s been a busy year, so I’ll try to write a bit about what’s been going on.

Let’s start with the cats.

Last November we noticed Edison was licking his nether regions and looking pretty uncomfortable. A trip to the vet later he was diagnosed as having crystals in his bladder, which resulted in him – and consequently his brothers as well – being put on urinary food. Fortunately the switch was pretty smooth, and everyone likes the food well enough (which is good because it’s prescription and thus more expensive than their previous food). I am a little bummed that I can’t mix in some oral care kibble as I think that really helped keep their teeth in good shape, but apparently keeping his food pretty pure is the key to controlling the crystals. He still gets a little chicken and wet food as a treat, but otherwise this is their food now.

Then in April Jackson had a couple of problems: First he started peeing in some unusual locations, which led to a vet trip where he was diagnosed with a bladder infection. This was easy to treat – he got a shot of antibiotics – but the vet was more concerned with his weight loss. He’d been a big cat – 16 pounds at his peak – but he’d lost over 4 pounds.

A few days later we noticed he was limping, too, which I think was from getting startled when I stopped on Simon’s paw and jumping down awkwardly from where he was sleeping. This turned out to be not serious, but he did get worked over about his weight loss. Eventually it seemed that it probably wasn’t the big C, but was most likely irritable bowel syndrome. The treatment for this is a B-12 shot every week for 2 months, then backing off to once a month, and a steroid pill every evening. Additionally he’s getting a probiotic every night mixed with some wet food.

Superficially the results of this have been okay: The big plus is that he had been throwing up 2-to-3 times a week for quite a few months, and that has now basically stopped. But he hasn’t really gained the weight back, and he’s lost some muscle mass and has slowed down a lot. He does love getting the wet food, though, and his new favorite treat is whipped cream. He’s going to be 14 in the fall, and he seems like he’s aging early, but hopefully he has a few good years left.

Finally last month Edison started throwing up over the weekend. He is super-pathetic when he throws up, walking around meowing pitifully until he does. He got another vet trip, but the best they could figure is that he had some inflammation in his stomach. They have him a shot of an anti-nausea drug. He had one more hork a few days later and has been fine since. My best guess is that he either had a little too much chicken, or he ate something that didn’t agree with him.

So this has definitely been more cat excitement of the negative kind than we’d wanted this year. If there’s a positive, it’s that Jackson has been less antagonistic towards the dog, so there’s been a little less barking. But I do wish he could bounce back just a little more. He’s going in for another check-up in a week or so and we’ll see what the tests say then.

Simon has been our little feline rock through all of this, snuggling with Jackson and trotting around the house meowing his little head off as he plays by himself. He and Edison still mix it up from time to time. Simon is a little roly-poly guy with big lovable eyes, only not so little since I think he weighs more than either of the other two now.

Domino, the aforementioned dog, has been doing well too. We’ve had him for almost four years, and he’s settled into a routine of walking, sleeping, and playing. A year ago we replaced our back porch with one with a roof, and he enjoyed being able to sit outside in the winter even while it was raining. I recently discovered that throwing a ball onto the roof and letting it roll off is a great game which engages his body and his mind. It would be nice if his prey drive didn’t kick in when he saw the cats, but at this point he is what he is.

Three cats lying in a sunbeam on a gray blanket: Simon, a brown tabby, Edison, a black cat, and Jackson, a gray tabby with white highlights.

Barbie Day at the Shark Tank

My sister Katy and her son Ivan came out to visit for the last half a week. They are big fans of the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, and their main goal was to see them play the San Jose Sharks here on Saturday.

Katy says she’s only flown once since COVID, and Ivan not at all. Fortunately their flight went smoothly and even landed early. Unfortunately I somehow got confused by the signage at San Francisco Airport and ended up waiting for them at the wrong terminal. I left short term parking to pick them up at their baggage claim, and found that the turnaround from the airport exit to the entrance is closed, so I had to leave the airport and come back in to get them. Frankly it would have been faster to just move to the other side of short term parking, had I known that! But I did eventually get them and we made it home safely.

They happened to arrived at the leading edge of a historic heat wave, with temperatures breaking 90°F regularly through Friday, breaking temperature records and melting much of the Sierra snow pack which supplies California with a lot of its summertime water. We do have air conditioning at home and left it running the whole time they were here, but it made for a slightly sticky week. I’m also recovering from a cold I had almost two weeks ago and the cough on this one has been lingering.

Thursday Debbi and I took them to our latest favorite breakfast place, Holder’s Country Inn, where we’ve been meeting friends regularly for brunch, and have even gone to for dinner a couple of times (their breakfast is much better – and is served all day!). We also went by the romance bookstore A Novel Affair, which Katy was interested in given her nascent writing career. In the afternoon we visited our friends the Hoffmans, mainly for an exchange of information between generations about different careers. But also to visit the dogs, including our dog, Domino, who was vacationing with them so he wouldn’t bark his head off at the interlopers in his house. Afterwards we went to Vive Sol, which was the main place Katy mentioned she’d like to go for dinner.

The Golden Gate Bridge, as seen from Battery East on the San Francisco side

Friday we had breakfast at Hobee’s, and then made the trip into the city, where we stopped by Ocean Beach, then the Golden Gate Bridge, and then Ghirardelli Square, before stopping by the Nike store on Union Square. (Parking under Union Square was a lot cheaper than at Ghirardelli!) We got several nice pictures, especially the one below of a raven and a fish head taken by Katy.

A raven and a desiccated fish head on a concrete wall by Ocean Beach, San Francisco

Saturday was game day. I’ve never been to a hockey game! The sport has never really been my thing. But Katy and Ivan had us covered in explaining what was going on. And we got to see a lot of stuff:

A fight, which Katy thought had been prearranged as it happened less than 2 minutes into the game.
Another fight, definitely not prearranged!
Several other fights which were quickly broken up by the refs.
Barbie Game Day! (Guy sitting behind us to his friends: “I didn’t know it was Barbie Game Day when I bought the tickets. So, you’re welcome.”)
Flyers score on the power play.
Flyers score 2 goals in the last 3 minutes when the Sharks pulled their goalie to try to tie the game.

The game did seem very similar to soccer, only, you know, on ice and with sticks. And zambonis. And fighting.

The ice at the SAP center prior to the game

Final score Flyers 4, Sharks 1. The teams were both a little over .500 going into the game, so I don’t think we were seeing the cream of the league playing here. Katy said both teams are pretty chaotic which adds to the uncertainty.

I think the thing I was most surprised about was that most players only play about half the game, and that while they announce the starting line-up for both teams, they don’t announce any personnel changes. It would be nice if the big board above the arena would periodically show who’s on the ice.

(Katy, to me after the game: “So far you’ve called it a field and a court.” Me: “Park?”)

We had considered going to see the Bay FC women’s soccer game afterwards, but we (or at least I) had had enough, so we went home. (Maybe a good thing, since Bay lost 3-1.) For dinner we went to another recent restaurant find of ours, the Redwood Grill.

And then this morning I took them back to the airport for their flight home. It was good to see them, and hopefully we’ll see Katy, at least, this summer when we head back east. But hopefully it won’t be another ten years before they come out here to visit us!

Memorial in Florida

Debbi and I are back from a trip to Florida for her father’s interment and memorial.

Her father Jerry was diagnosed with cancer back in 2013. She went back to help out him and her stepmother back then, which I vaguely mentioned at the time. Then in late 2015 we went out to visit them, expecting that it might well be the last time we saw him in person. And it was, but I don’t think anyone would expect he’d make it another nine years. While he was in assisted living for the second half of that span, it sounds like his quality of life was decent for most of it. He had a fair amount of memory loss, but seemed to remember the important things. He passed away earlier this winter.

Anyway, people have been offering condolences when I mention it, which is certainly nice, but I think both Debbi and I had come to recognize that this day was not far off, so while it was sad, it was far from a shock.

We flew Alaska Airlines on a Thursday from San Francisco to Orlando. We’d never flown Alaska before, and we bought first class tickets because for whatever reason they were not that much more expensive than the other options. So it was a pretty nice trip, even though we had to get up at 3:30 am to get up to SFO for a 7:15 am flight. (Traveling stressed me out generally, but packing up and leaving when it’s still dark out especially does. I am super-careful to do a nose count on the cats before heading out the door.)

We’ve had some dodgy times with flying in the last couple of years, but our flights this time went perfectly smoothly: On-time departures, early landings up by to 45 minutes each direction, and the meals were tasty. I even fell asleep before take-off on the flight out and woke up an hour later.

It’s a pretty long drive from Orlando to her parents’ place, so it was a long day for us. We rented a Chevrolet Malibu sedan, which was a perfectly cromulent car. Not something I’m jumping to want to buy myself, but it was easy to figure out, and had CarPlay.

Debbi reserved a house through Airbnb for us, her two sisters, and her two nieces and nephew. It was a really good experience! The host let everyone else get in a couple of hours early since they arrived well before us, and the place was spacious, clean, had a hot tub in back which others enjoyed, and a comfy couch. If anything, the only thing we’d have liked were more pillows.

(Yes, I know Airbnb is a problematic company as its co-founder is a shitty human being supporting Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s fascism. They did look at Vrbo but this place was more convenient and cheaper.)

The interment happened the next day at a VA cemetery, as Jerry had served in the Navy during Vietnam (and didn’t like to talk about it). They had a military salute (6 guns fired 3 times, if I counted correctly), and then we went back to the retirement community for a banquet gathering of family and friends. I got a meet a number of Debbi’s relatives (at least a couple of whom said “I recognize you from Facebook!”), including her one step-brother I hadn’t met – except that I actually had 20 years ago, but didn’t remember him, as it was very brief.

On Saturday we went back to hang out with everyone and take advantage of the pool, where several of us came away with sunburns of various degrees (mine was pretty mild, fortunately). In the evening I watched the season 2 finale of Severance, which I should write about sometime.

Some folks left on Saturday, and the rest of our household left early Sunday morning. Debbi and I had a little extra time to combobulate ourselves, and then we drove back to Orlando where we spent a couple of days at Walt Disney World.

We stayed at the Caribbean Beach Resort, where we had a room conveniently in short walking distance to the Skyliner, a fun and handy way to get to Hollywood Studios and EPCOT, the two parks we visited. We got to eat a bunch of food (some of which would have been 400% better had it been better heated), stand in a bunch of lines, and ride a bunch of rides. The current trend in Disney rides is rotating carriages, as Rise of the Resistance, Ratatouille and Guardians of the Galaxy all feature these vehicles. Guardians was as great as advertised, but maybe not great enough to be worth a 90-minute wait. We did get to do Star Tours twice as it had a short wait, and the second time was definitely worth it as I hadn’t seen the sky whale world before. (The Wookiee world was also pretty great.)

Tuesday we just spent the morning at Disney Springs before driving back to the airport and flying home. We were certainly glad for the early landing on the flight back as it meant we were in bed by around 11 pm (or, 2 am on the east coast).

So all things considered it was a good trip. Some closure for some people, I think. And good to see some people we otherwise wouldn’t see. A bit hectic to have such a trip pop up on fairly short notice, but these things happen when you get to this point in your life.

Fifty-Six

A day late posting this. I had a pretty quiet day yesterday. Decided not to take the day off from work and save the vacation day for the future.

I got to go to coffee with a long-time colleague whom I haven’t seen much in recent years, so that was nice. Catching up on the various things we’ve been up to.

January 2025 has been pretty tumultuous so far, what with Trump, Gaiman, David Lynch, Bob Uecker, the Los Angeles wildfires, the looming thread of the H5N1 bird flu, and so forth. Naturally we’re all concerned that it will get a lot worse once we (somehow) inaugurate the most racist President in over a century on Martin Luther King Day, who is also so ignorant and incompetent that he thinks foreign countries pay for tariffs America places on their imports.

The weather has been unseasonably warm. Usually we’re having some sub-freezing lows in January, but I don’t think we’ve gotten below 35°F. And we’re regularly having highs in the 60s. I’m glad we got all that rain in December or we might be dealing with something like LA is now.

Have I talked about running lately? I can’t recall. Back in fall 2023 I was having foot and knee problems and took a chunk of the fall off from running. I think it was because I didn’t have great sandals for everyday use, and it was cascading to impacting my running (and even my walking). Since buying some better sandals (because I really don’t want to wear sneakers all year long, although I bet the day is coming some years down the road) things have been much better. I’m at the point that I’m running a 5k three days a week, and have gotten my average mile down by almost a minute. So that’s been nice. I still have at least another minute to shave off to get to my fastest mile, and I might never get there again, but I’m not planning on winning any races.

Tomorrow we’re going off to our traditional birthday dinner for me, which I always enjoy, but nothing particularly special planned for the new year.

Onwards to another year!

RIP FJL

When I first moved here in 1999, one of the restaurants everyone loved was Frankie Johnny and Luigi Too! They were a traditional Italian restaurant which at the time had a few different locations, but their oldest and primary location was in a cute old building in Mountain View. They had three dining rooms plus the kitchen/counter/bar area. It felt cozy and was always busy. Parking was sometimes a challenge, but I went often enough that I knew a bunch of tricks.

I guess they’d been there since the 50s, serving pasta and pizza. In the time I’d gone there, they remodeled one of the dining rooms to have an expanded bar, but otherwise it stayed mostly the same. Back when I was playing ultimate frisbee, Subrata and I would sometimes go there afterwards since they were one of the few restaurants open later than 9 pm on a weeknight. Debbi and I went there at least once a month for dinner and drinks for years. We got to know their bartender reasonably well.

In late 2020 they closed to demolish their building and build a new one. (That article has a photo of their old building’s front.) The new building was completed and opened in 2024, rebranding as Giorgio’s, which name the owner was using at a couple of other locations.

And, as you can probably guess, it’s not the same.

Their new building is mostly a pair of memory care facilities, and the restaurant itself has maybe six indoor tables, a bar, and some outdoor tables (which are much less appealing in cold or rainy weather). They decided to focus on their take-out business, which the second article above says “that’s kind of what was happening at this location before we closed it”. (Obviously that was true in 2020, but before that we would often go for dinner and have a decent wait for a table.)

We’ve gone in person once, sitting outside during a pretty chilly, windy evening, and then last night we ordered take-out. The dine-in experience is definitely gone, and frankly the food is not as good. I understand they’re using the same menus, but there’s something off about it, the two main dishes I’ve had were just not as flavorful. And frankly I’m not really a big fan of pasta as a take-out dish (and their pizza is not really the kind I prefer). Maybe most sad to me, I’ve been pretty disappointed in their sausage bread appetizer since reopening.

When I picked up last night, their indoor tables were full, the bar had a couple of people, and the outdoors had several people. So apparently they’re doing decent sit-down business. But for me it has moved way down my list of local restaurants to patronize.

It really feels like the end of an era.

2024 was Certainly a Year

I haven’t been writing much here lately. So much so that I wonder what percentage of my posts lead off with some version of “I haven’t been writing much here lately”.

So my 2024, such as it was, has largely been chronicled on social media, mainly Mastodon and Bluesky.

We did a little more traveling in 2024. In addition to two trips back east to visit family, we also met with Debbi’s friend Andrew and his family in Newport Beach (which I did write about), and we went to Las Vegas in November to meet with some other friends. Vegas is one of those “every time we go it’s changed, yet it’s exactly the same” types of places. We hadn’t been in almost a decade, and I don’t think it’s quite our kind of place anymore, but nice to visit once in a while. Our friends Karen and Conrad also visited us over the summer, which was fun.

Otherwise it’s been mostly the same things: Work, books, comics, television (though less of this as time goes on), cats and dog. I’ve done some little upgrades around the house, such as replacing the ancient iMac, the dead blu-ray player, and the outdoor accent lights.

As far as books go, I think the best novel I read last year was The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. It’s a Holmes-and-Watson style mystery in a clever and well-thought-out fantasy world. I felt like I was reading an absolute master at assembling the pieces of a complex story. I will probably go tackle his back catalog before too long, but the sequel comes out this spring so probably that one first.

The end of the year was kinda rough, of course, as the United States elected a convicted felon who is a bigoted narcissistic grifter as President, and elected his fellow bigots to control of both houses of Congress, never mind that six fellow bigots and fascists currently control the Supreme Court. Even if we optimistically assume that this doesn’t mark the end of America as a democratic state, it’s going to be a generation or more before the nation recovers from what they’re going to do, and likely many thousands – if not millions – of people will not survive it, both here and abroad. I’ll probably be dead before we get there, if we do.

So, here we go into 2025. The last year of the first quarter of the 21st century. I’ll probably make it to the end of the second quarter, but if the Republicans tear down Social Security and Medicare and continue their war on science, then that becomes less clear.

Not the cheeriest of conclusions, but I think what happiness we get for the foreseeable future will be on a much smaller scale than the national or global.

My Walkman

Being Generation X, I’ve owned music and video on a lot of media formats, and owned a lot of playback equipment. Sometimes I think of writing a post about my opinions on various media formats (spoiler: I loathe vinyl records and always have), but today I’m talking about the first Sony Walkman I ever owned.

I had to spend a while looking at images of various Walkman models – there were a lot of them! – to figure out which one I owned. Actually I owned multiple through the 80s and 90s, but the first one was the one I loved, a red WM-30. It’s actually redder than I remembered, I recall it being mostly silver with red trim. But it was almost 40 years ago, as the WM-30 came out in 1985. I imagine it was a Christmas or birthday gift, so I would have one it during junior and maybe senior years of high school.

The remarkable thing about it, to me as a high school student in the early-to-mid 1980s, was how small it was. I remember once comparing it to an audiocassette case, and as best I could tell it was exactly the same size, not counting the protrusions of the buttons. The electronics were mostly in a half-inch-thin strip at the top of the case (i.e., the side the door to insert the cassette opened from), including where you inserted the battery. The case itself expanded about half an inch downwards to accommodate the cassette, which was a pretty cool design. It sounds a bit janky, but I don’t recall ever having a problem with the door opening unintentionally and the cassette flying out. It seemed like an engineering marvel at the time, and in hindsight, for its time, it still seems like it today.

It could play audiocassettes, of course, and also FM radio. (I don’t remember about AM.) I think it was my first player with headphones that weren’t over- or on-ear, but they weren’t quite in-ear as we think about it today. But maybe close enough. Of course I hadn’t owned a player before this one, so I had no standard to measure it against.

Here’s a video showing it in action, including several of the characteristics I describe.

It felt very futuristic at the time, and I brought it to school most days so my friends and I could share listening to tapes.

This little recollection has a sad end, though: One day I left it in my bag in a locker during gym class, and someone came in and broke into all the lockers and stole my beloved Walkman. Never to be seen (by me) again.

I bought a new Walkman pretty quickly, but it was a bulkier model, over twice as thick as the WM-30, and also simple black. I think it had padded on-ear headphones, and the pads were kind of fragile. I think I owned it into college, and then replaced it at some point – maybe with other brands – and later moving on to a Discman (what a disappointment those were), and then, of course, iPods and iPhones as MP3 replaced physical music media.

But I’m still kinda sad about losing that Walkman.

(This post was inspired by this episode of the podcast The Memory Palace.)

Newport Beach

We’re back from a short trip down to Newport Beach – a little south of Los Angeles – to visit with some friends of Debbi’s who were visiting from the east coast.

Andrew is a college friend of Debbi’s, and he and his wife Mary had gotten a time share by the coast for spring break, but the plans of people they’d expected to spend it with had gotten upset, so they asked if we’d like to come down for a few days to hang out. So after dropping the doggo off at his “vacation resort” (a.k.a. his former foster family) on Tuesday, we flew down to Orange County on Wednesday. Our flight went smoothly and Andrew picked us up in his rented Tesla.

It was a pretty relaxed trip, with us spending a bunch of time around the room talking, and making a couple of trips to the pool and hot tub. Our main outing was to Crystal Cove State Park by shuttle. Although it was a little chilly that day, it’s a picturesque beach with a number of scenic coastal cottages. We had brunch at The Beachcomber, and boy was it yummy. The French toast looked a little too sweet for me, but the coconut macadamia pancakes were great. I guess I wouldn’t usually expect a lot from a restaurant in a state park, but this was definitely worth it. (Many of the other dishes we saw go by looked great, too.)

Okay, it was a pretty food-oriented trip. We had dinner one night at Foretti’s, a pretty good Italian place, and the other at Ruby’s Diner in Laguna Beach.

But mostly it was a chance for Debbi to catch up with Andrew and Mary. I hadn’t seen Andrew since we met up at the Franklin Institute when we visited Philadelphia in 2001 for my sister’s wedding. Debbi had seen him once since then, but she hadn’t seen Mary since before then. That’s a long time! Lots of things that have happened to all of us in that span.

The only downside for me is that I’ve been struggling with a muscle knot in my back which I think is impinging on a nerve, which has left me in moderate pain on and off for a week or so. It’s happened before so I expect it will go away, but it’s something I’ll bring up at my next doctor visit.

We flew back on Friday, landing at the end of a big rain storm, and forgetting where we’d parked (we only had to circle the parking garage floor once, at least). We had a quiet evening last night, had breakfast at the Pancake House this morning, and then picked up Domino. It sounds like he spent almost the whole time playing with our friends’ current foster puppy, which is great. And he was pooped and has been sleeping most of the day.

Even though we didn’t spend a lot of time sightseeing, it felt like a pretty packed trip. I guess when you spend nine hours traveling in three days – what with getting to and from the airport with perhaps more lead time than is necessary – it’s gonna feel that way.

But it was a good trip. Even if it’s a little weird to fly to Orange County and not go to Disneyland!

Crystal Cove cottages. The Beachcomber restaurant is behind the light blue house.

The Warmest Winter

Woo, a month and a half since my last post here! I’ve been slacking!

It’s been pretty quiet here, really. As you may have heard, this has been the warmest winter on record in the United States, and we’ve noticed this here in NorCal. Since Halloween the lowest overnight low in San Jose, CA was 37°F (Nov 25, Dec 10, Jan 8, Jan 12), and we’ve had a number of days with highs in the low 70s, which has resulted in me wearing shorts in February and March!

By contrast, let’s just pick 10 years ago, the 2013-14 winter. Most of December had lows under 40°F, with many mornings under 37° and an overall lowest-low of 27‡F on Dec 9. January had 2 weeks of warm highs around 70°, but lows still below 40°. Things warmed up in February and March.

The warming global climate has resulted in warmer temperatures overall, and extreme heat in some places, but it’s the unpredictable weather which is a bigger problem. From forest fires to drought to storms. On Feb 4 we had a big storm which knocked out our power for 15 hours, and for hundreds of thousands of people around the Bay Area as well. We’ve had big wind storms several times in the last few years, two of which have blown over sections of our fences. (Next time maybe I’ll spring for treated wood when we get the posts replaced.) Having 3 sections of fence go down with a dog who spends much of his time in the yard is a bit of an issue.

We did learn in the previous power outage that using our laptops to charge our phones makes power outages more bearable.

During the power outage, I was about a third of the way through Annalee Newitz’s novel The Terraformers (which is excellent, by the way) when I realized that it was missing about 30 pages between the end of part 1 and the beginning of part 2. Fortunately I had bought it from out local Books Inc., so I checked that they had power – which they did – and went down and exchanged it for a complete copy.

We’ve been lucky that we’ve been getting a fair bit of rain during this warm winter. Warm air does hold more water, so it’s probably up to the air currents and the jet stream whether we get doused or drought in any given year. I don’t think there have been many catastrophic incidents from the storms this year, although I think the coast has gotten socked a couple of times. But here in the valley it’s been just watering the plants, I think.

Meanwhile my sister drove up to Boston to visit our father for his birthday, and ended up heading home early ahead of a predicted huge storm – which ended up being a big nothing. From over a foot predicted to maybe a few inches. Not long after, storms took out a protective artificial sand dune on the north coast of Massachusetts. (I’d bet a fair bit of money that they went with a sand done and not something more durable because the coastal commission for the town wouldn’t let them do more due to the environmental impact.)

Anyway. No doubt things are just going to be a roller coaster ride from here on out. Has the polar vortex socked the Midwest and Texas yet this year, or is that on tap for next winter?

Amidst all this, I hit my 25 year anniversary both of living in California and of working at Apple. I can’t say it feels like yesterday that I started, but time does seem to be whizzing by lately.

Oh, and the San Francisco 49ers lost the Super Bowl. But we did watch the new BayFC women’s pro soccer team win their inaugural game on Saturday. (Mainly I think soccer broadcasting could do a lot more than it does to help viewers learn the names of and identify with the players. I think I know exactly 3 BayFC players after that game.)

So that’s the roundup from here. Heading into spring I have more house chores to take care of, in particular having someone come in to fix up issues with our lawn sprinkler system. (Yeah yeah, I could probably do it myself, but I don’t wanna.)