Category: Personal

I went back to the gym this morning for the first time since… well, since last March. That’s misleading, though, since I switch to biking to work in April once Daylight Savings Time starts (so I’m not biking home in the evening in the dark). But other than walking and doing some push-ups in the morning, I haven’t gotten a lot of exercise since the end of October.

I’ve been spending a lot of my mornings before work making phone calls for my mom’s affairs, being stressed out about making those phone calls, or taking care of stuff around the house. (Home ownership! Never lack for things to do again!)

Anyway, the gym went fine. On the elliptical machine I started reading Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible, whose upside I figure is entertaining-but-lightweight. The place was pretty busy but not too bad.

Maybe I’ll go again next week.

The end of the holiday season for us comes when we take our Christmas lights down, which we did this weekend. We put them up the weekend after Thanksgiving, so they’ve been up for six weeks, which has to be a record for us.

We have two artificial trees, a big one which goes in the living room so it can be seen from the street, and a smaller one in our family room so we can enjoy the lights while watching television. (It is still a little weird to me that our TV is not in fact in our living room. Almost as weird as the fact that we own three couches, even if one of them is in bad need of replacement.) Then we put up lights around the first floor of the house outside. I added a few more this year, and by my count we had 23 strands of lights up. I think almost all of them are low-power LED lights now, except for maybe a yellow strand and a white one which contains some blinking lights. I actually prefer the rich color of LED lights to incandescent ones, so it’s a win all around as far as I’m concerned.

The holidays were somewhat bittersweet this year: My mom is having some issues, which both my sister and I have been dealing with (her more than me, as she made two trips up on the last two weeks to see her; my role has been in making a lot of phone calls). And Debbi got sick the week of Christmas and has continued to be sick through this weekend. She went to the doctor on Friday and got some antibiotics, which seem to be working already. I thought she’d just had the nasty cold that’s been going around (which I had over Thanksgiving), but apparently hers was worse than that. Hopefully she’ll be better soon.

We still got out to see Christmas lights the week leading up to Christmas, though. We have a lot of nice ones in our area to go view.

We also had a good holiday break, as much as possible with Debbi not feeling great. We got out to the coast and walked the new Devil’s Slide coastal trail, which is about as much fun to walk as the old highway along the cliffs was to drive. We also got together with some neighbors for drinks, and got up to Cal Academy for a day with our friends Chad & Camille and their kids. (Doing the museum with kids is quite different from doing it without kids!)

But this weekend we took down the lights and put everything back in the shed for another year. It’s a bit sad each year when we do it, but it’s nice to reclaim the space from the trees and have the house get back to normal. And, as they say, it’s the fact that it only comes around once a year that makes it special.

I’ve been dark here for over a month. It’s been hard to get myself to finish writing this entry, but I’ve got to get through it to put it behind me and move on to other stuff.

In late October I flew back east to visit my parents, and my sister and nephew also drove up. We were all there to celebrate a milestone birthday for my mother. For a change, I had very little to do to manage her financial affair while I was there, so we were able to go out shopping and for some meals, all capped off by a family dinner at a nice restaurant on the evening of her birthday.

At the end of the weekend my sister and nephew left to drive home, and I took mom out to lunch. Then we decided to drive to another city to do some shopping and take a look at the colorful fall leaves on the trees, which I don’t often get to see.

And on our drive there we got into a serious traffic accident.

I’m not going to go into the details of the accident here, save to say that we collided with (I’m told) a Ford F-350 pickup truck. Given that, I think we’re lucky that we got out without broken bones or internal bleeding. I keep telling myself that it could have been much, much worse. My father’s car, nowhere near as big as a pickup truck, was totalled.

We spent the rest of that day in the emergency room getting checked out as both of us were sore. Then we took a cab back to return my mother to her apartment in her assisted living facility, and then I took a second cab back to my dad’s house, finally collapsing into bed close to midnight.

I was lucky to be able to find my iPhone immediately after the crash (it had been sitting in a cupholder giving directions), as it was essential to keeping my family up-to-date and to be able to make necessary calls while in the emergency room. I’m also pretty impressed that it came through the collision with only a small scratch to the case – no damage to the phone at all.

I had originally intended to fly home the next day, but instead I rescheduled my flight for the next weekend. The next few days were a whirlwind of talking to the insurance adjuster, renting a car, helping my father test and buy a new car, visiting my mother, filling out forms, and just generally being massively stressed out.

One bright spot of that week was going to dinner one night with my dad and a friend of his, whom I’m sure I’d met before, but probably twenty years or more ago. It was a nice, relaxing dinner with good conversation and good food, which was much better than getting dinner on my own while they went out together and being left to my own thoughts.

I had a couple of scrapes and nicks and some lower back soreness following the accident, but some extra-strength ibuprofen controlled the pain I felt from the very first dose, and I gradually weaned myself off of it over the next couple of weeks. Today, a month later, I’ve been pain free for a couple of weeks. My mother had a harder time bouncing back, although we eventually learned that she had some unrelated medical issues which were not being properly treated, so we may never know exactly what was happening.

I finally flew home on my rescheduled flight. In a classic “adding insult to injury” development, Debbi called me the day of my flight to tell me that our refrigerator had stopped working. Whee! For various reasons this took a lot longer to resolve than it should have, involving two different repair companies. But it is finally fixed, which makes us happy because it’s really exactly the refrigerator we want (other than that not-working problem). We can highly recommend Your Appliance Repair to any locals looking for similar service: Friendly people who explain what they’re doing.

Since then I have been extraordinarily busy at work, my sister and I have been doing a lot of stuff involving Mom’s health and affairs, and to top it all off I got sick last Monday, stayed home on Tuesday, felt better on Wednesday, and then felt a lot worse on Thursday, and it’s still lingering around today. Few things take the wind out of your sails like feeling like crap for the better part of a week.

So that’s been my month in a nutshell, including what is a contender for the worst week of my life in the wake of the accident. I’m sure there will be more to deal with in the future, but for now it feels like life is finally edging back towards normal.

I’ve used an electric foil razor for shaving for most of my life. When I was a teenager I tried safety blade razors, but they were too abrasive on my skin, and I still cut myself frequently. My grandfather bought me a foil razor which lasted until I was in grad school, and worked well.

For most of the time since then I’ve bought foil shavers from Remington, but I’ve been increasingly unsatisfied with their products. Also, replacement parts were increasingly hard to find locally. A couple of months ago the razor – which I didn’t like as much as the one it replaced a few years ago – started failing, so I bought a new one, which I liked even less. I gave it a try for a month and a half, but it just wasn’t doing the job.

So I did some research online, and the consensus seems to be that the Braun Series 7 razors are the best you can get in the realm of foil razors. So I ordered a 7-720 and gave it a try over the weekend.

And holy cow does it work well. It’s quieter and much more effective than either of the Remingtons. I suspect replacement parts will be a bit pricier because the shaving cartridge is a single unit rather than separate blades and foil, but if it holds up in shaving quality then it will be well worth it.

I bet I’m soon going to wonder why I didn’t switch to Braun years ago. (The answer is that I was cheap and didn’t want to spent that much money on a razor. Being cheap is its own punishment.)

Changed my soap in the shower yesterday to this:

I get my soap from Essence of O, when I see them at the many art fairs in the area during the summer.

The worst part was the waiting, not knowing whether my car would still be drivable, or if it would need a new engine, and thus need to be replaced. Because I wasn’t going to throw a new engine into a 15-year-old Honda Civic that I’d been considering replacing anyway. But if it were toast then I’d need to find an alternative way to work for a few days until I could rent a car and start looking for a new car. Unless I just wanted to go buy another Civic to keep me going for a couple more years.

The cracked radiator is by far the worst problem I’ve had with this car. Next worst would in cost have to be replacing the struts, but they never went bad to the point of inconveniencing me. And after that is mundane things like a dead battery. That’s pretty good. Hondas are very reliable cars.

So I was on edge most of the day waiting for the dealer to get back to me as to whether the engine had been damaged due to running hot. The temperature gauge had been pegged in the red when we got back from San Francisco on Thursday, but it had only been five or six miles since we’d first smelled what we learned was coolant steaming from the crack. And then another two miles or so in the red driving it to the dealer – apparently low-50s morning temperatures aren’t cool enough to keep the engine cool.

Finally I called them, and the advisor got back to me that the leak test showed no problems with the engine. It seems my car is nigh-indestructible, and it should keep going for at least a while longer.

Which means I’m gonna have to get that oil change and new windshield wipers later this month after all.

I think its days are still numbered, but that number is not zero. Not yet.

Debbi and I took today off to go up to San Francisco to go to Cal Academy and a few other places. So here’s the obligatory panorama from the Academy’s living roof:

On the drive home, Debbi remarked that she smelled something like maple syrup. Then she smelled it again as we got close to home. I looked down and the temperature gauge for my car’s engine was pegged. Fortunately we were only blocks from home. I opened the hood and it looks like there is a leaky seal or hose, because steam was squirting out above what I think was the radiator. So, off to the shop it (hopefully) goes tomorrow.

Inside, I found that one of the cats had pooped on the carpet. Hopefully it’s just some transient diarrhea, but we’ll keep an eye on them.

Moreover, Debbi seems to be coming down with a bad cold and plans to stay home from work tomorrow. Hopefully it doesn’t find its way to me in the night – I do tend to get sick when the temperature changes for good in the spring and fall.

On the bright side, I think I’ve figured out how to fix our outdoor accent lights, which have been going on and off erratically at night. And we got to watch the Giants advance to the World Series.

So it should all work out. Worst case, if this is the end for my trusty car, it’s given me 15 years of mostly trouble-free service, which is about all one could really ask for.

I woke up this morning to a rain shower. We’d been expecting it – our second of the season, me having been caught in the middle of the first one last Thursday while biking to work. This one was heavier and lasted several hours before drying up around mid-morning.

I’ve always loved rainy days. I have a memory from probably around 10 years old of having to walk the dog (our Welsh corgi, Punkin) during a hurricane. I’m sure I remember it more fondly than I felt about it at the time, though hurricanes are usually pretty tame by the time they get to Massachusetts.

In Wisconsin we got some great rain storms. I remember driving through a lightning storm on the highway and marveling at the hundreds of lightning bolts coming down in the sky. Also watching a huge storm pass about ten miles north of Madison while watching from my apartment balcony. But also walking through plenty of showers – and a few storms, the rain not stopping me from heading downtown to the coffee shop on any given Friday night. I’d certainly get wet sometimes, since I stopped wearing raincoats in college and stuck with just a jacket and an umbrella. But I didn’t mind.

In California we sometimes joke that we don’t have weather, we have climate. I miss all the weather I’d get in other parts of the country – even the snow, but mostly the rain. Rain here is mostly restricted to November-through-April, and is usually concentrated around Feburary and March. The rest of the year it’s the “eternal summer”, and rain showers are rare and light. But even the winter showers are really just that – showers. We don’t get big storms, we rarely get thunder and lightning, and usually not a lot of wind. Not by the standards of other parts of the country.

But I appreciate the rain whenever it comes (and not just because we’re in a drought). I like listening to it come down on the roof, smelling the scents released by the rocks when they get damp, and even going out and clearing clogged drains with a stick.

There’s nothing else like it.