Category: Personal

Day-to-day life and other ramblings

Vacation Part 2: Cape Cod

The main plan for this vacation was to spend a week on Cape Cod. My parents have been vacationing there every year (well, as far as I know they haven’t missed a year) since I was a kid. Even after they divorced they continued to go, each one going down to the cottage on consecutive weeks, with my sister Katy and me going down for two weeks. We moved among different cottages in Orleans over the years before eventually settling on a duplex near Skaket Beach.

Katy suggested last year that we all go down with my Dad this year, so we were able to rent both sides of the duplex. Dad and I drove down last Saturday, and Katy joined us, with her boyfriend Andrew, and her son I and his daughter A. I haven’t done more than a day trip down to the Cape in over 20 years, so I was looking forward to this.

Cottage Sign

We had gorgeous weather for most of the week – a little humid at the start, and a little cloudy at the end, but considering it could easily have been drivingly hot and humid all week, or raining, I’m not complaining!

We settled into a pattern of Dad going to get us pastries for breakfast in the morning, and we’d each brew coffee on our sides of the cottage. It was relaxing. Katy and Andrew went out for runs or walks in the morning, and sometimes I’d amble down to the beach to look around. We spent some time down on the beach during the week, but we also spent a lot of time going out and doing stuff.

We took a trip down to Chatham, where we stayed for a few years when I was quite young. It’s got a cute downtown with a nifty candy shop, among other stores. On the way back we swung by the beach, which has changed a lot over the last few decades, as storms have washed away the natural breakwater and radically changed the shape of the sands. Once upon a time you could walk in the shallows and pick up starfish, but I don’t think they come in that far anymore. I bet that over the next few decades that erosion will even threaten Chatham Light which stands a few dozen yards from the bluffs over the beach. We’ll see.

Chatham Beach

None of us were terribly familiar with restaurants to go to on the Cape, so by Wednesday we were turning to Yelp to find some places to eat. We found several good ones, such as the Orleans Public House (which we went to three times), and the Rock Harbor Grill.

On Tuesday, everyone else went off on a horseback ride, so Dad and I drove down to Woods Hole to see the Oceanographic Institution (WHOI, pronounced “hooey”). Unfortunately, it took longer to get there than I’d expected, and it turns out the WHOI buildings close down at 4, so we didn’t get to see a lot. But it’s pretty down there. We’ll have to go back earlier in the day someday.

On Wednesday we went to the Edward Gorey House, where we tried another new restaurant, the Optimist Cafe, which was maybe the most popular among us. The Gorey House was quite cool, with lots of samples of his cartoons and original works. The house is the house he lived in, which is also pretty neat. And there’s a scavenger hunt based on the Gashleycrumb Tinies. Well worth the visit. I wish I’d bought one of their tote bags.

Edward Gorey House front door

On Thursday, Debbi came down with her sister Dianne and two of her kids, R and J. The girls, R and A, are about the same age, and the boys, J and I, are also about the same age. After a bit of ice-breaking, they all got along great. We got pizza for lunch, and then went down to the beach for a couple of hours. It was nearly low tide, so the boys dug in the sand for a while, and the girls pulled the floats out to the water and paddled around until it was time to go. Everyone seemed to have a great time!

Andrew and A left Friday morning, and the rest of us made a trip to shop in Wellfleet. We had lunch at the simply-named Bookstore & Restaurant; I’d been going to the bookstore for decades, and always assumed the restaurant was just a basic diner, but it’s actually a quite good restaurant. The bookstore, sadly, is a shadow of its former self; I found a number of neat things there in the past (they once had a fine set of silver age comics, for example), but now it seems to be a barely-organized collection of random stuff. Too bad. Anyway, we also walked over Uncle Tim’s Bridge, which is quite scenic. Well, on the way back I and I (heh) ran down the hill and across the bridge as fast as we could go. I can outrun him, but he’s not far from being able to outrun me. Then we waited for Dad and Katy to catch up.

Saturday it was time to head out, so we packed up and cleaned the cottages and drove home. Dad and I stopped at the Optimist Cafe for brunch, and bludgeoned out way across the Cape through nasty traffic. I visited Mom for the afternoon and then went back to have dinner with Dad and do laundry. Tomorrow Debbi and I fly home.

It was a nice, relaxing trip. Kind of nice to be off the Internet for a week except for my iPhone. I don’t know when I’ll make it down there again, but hopefully before another 20 years go by.

Sitting on Skaket Beach

Vacation Part 1: Errands with Mom

We headed off for our latest vacation last Tuesday night. Yes, another red-eye flight to Boston to visit our families. Which also means it was another vacation apart for us, since I go to visit my family and Debbi goes to visit hers.

The payoff for the vacation for me comes tomorrow – more on that in part 2! But this week was about doing stuff with Mom.

One thing I miss about visiting is that I no longer spend long, lazy days hanging out with Mom at her house. Since she no longer drives, I spend a chunk of my visits taking her to places she wants to go, and since I’m managing her finances I often have things I need to do with her. It can be stressful at times, and it’s definitely less relaxing than before she moved.

It was raining when we landed early Wednesday, and it kept up when Debbi and her sister dropped me off at my Dad’s house. He and I went to breakfast and then I took a nap. After lunch I drove out to get Mom.

On the way I drove past my elementary school, which is being demolished to be replaced which a modern building. It’s about 90 years old and felt out of date even when I attended, so while it’s sad to see it go, it’s also time. Then I drove past my Mom’s house, which we sold last year, and found that it had been demolished. Which is what we expected when we sold it, since like the school it was old and not really able to be modernized. I was less shocked by it than I’d expected. But it does close the book on part of my childhood.

I met Mom and told her about the school and the house. And then we headed off to run some errands. First she had some watches she needed fixed, and I had researched some jewelers we could go to. One of them was supposedly just a few blocks from her place, but it no longer existed. So instead we drove to a very nice little place the next city over, and they were able to get all of her watches’ batteries replaced the same day. Then we swung by the bank to deal with an issue with her bank account, which was pretty straightforward.

We went to dinner at Tartufo, a quite good Italian place I hadn’t been to before. Definitely worth a return trip someday. The only downside had nothing to do with the restaurant – the rain had gone away for several hours, but returned during dinner, and I’d left the umbrellas in the car, so we got drenched on the way back.

Thursday morning I got up really early to pick up Mom and her cat Maggie to take Maggie to the vet. Maggie is a middle-aged cat who needed her teeth cleaned, so we dropped her off shortly before 8 am. We met the vet and he said they’d cleaned her teeth before, which was a relief to me since it meant she’d gone through anesthesia before and would probably be fine.

The other big task for the day was to go to the Registry of Motor Vehicles to get her a new state ID. One thing I’ve been very grateful for is that Mom has not wanted to resume driving, and though I asked her repeatedly if she was okay with surrendering her driver’s license, she stuck to her willingness to do so. So that meant all we had to do was wait for 90 minutes for our turn to submit the forms. Fortunately the lady who helped us was extremely helpful and after the wait it all went very smoothly.

We had lunch and then picked up Maggie, whose cleaning had the best-case outcome, with no teeth pulled. We brought her home, the vet having warned us that she might be lethargic and have a suppressed appetite for a day or so. She promptly ate half a can of food which alleviated that worry. Since we’d driven all over creation, we instead went out to get coffee and do some walking, and ended the day having dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant.

I breathed a sigh of relief at having done all the tasks I needed to do for the week, so Friday Mom and I did some shopping that she wanted to do, and had a nice lunch along the way. We also swung by my elementary school to get a closer look, and ran into my sixth grade teacher who has been taking pictures every day during the demolition. I haven’t seen him in several years, and it was good to chat with him again.

In the evening I headed back to have dinner with Dad and do my laundry.

And tomorrow Dad and I are heading to Cape Cod for a week with my sister and her clan!

Tiny Kittens

Over the last couple of months I’ve been watching a group of kittens through a page called Tiny Kittens. They have a Facebook page, but more importantly they have a live stream page. Ceej turned me on to them.

These particular kittens are six called the “tiny dancers”, born to a mother named Calypso, and with six dancing names: Mambo, Foxtrot, Jitterbug, Lindy, Salsa and Hula. Over that time the kittens have grown from barely-able-to-move to being small but fully-functional cats, running and playing. Their mom has been great, too: Once they started weaning from her, she became playful and would even wrestle with her kids. And she was a beautiful calico to boot. (She was a little clueless about monitoring her kittens sometimes; once one of them fell out of their bed and was meowing on the ground, and Calypso would go down, then jump back up, and back and forth until a human came in and picked up the kitten and put it back.)

Anyway, the kittens are now about three months old and have been getting fixed and are heading out to their forever homes. Mambo and Hula headed out on Wednesday, and Calypso – who has also been spayed – went to her own home today, after one last morning snuggling with and cleaning her kittens. I watched Wednesdays’ departures being packed up with little plastic lunch box care packages, and being shown to the camera one last time before they departed. (Each pair has their own Facebook pages: Hula and Mambo, Foxtrot and Salsa, Lindy and Jitterbug.)

Watching them get broken up has been sad. Even though I know they’re all going to good homes, living together is all the kittens have known and I wonder how the seven cats each react to being broken up like this. It’s totally anthropomorphizing on my part, since I know most cats adapt to their new situation, and they’ll all be happy with their new humans. It’s great that it looks like each kitten will have one of their siblings to spend their lives with: I remember telling Newton several times that he got to spend just about his whole life with his brother Jefferson. Of course I don’t know whether they really cared about that, but we humans like to think they do. I still have small regrets that none of the other three cats got to say goodbye to Jeff, since he went so quickly.

Anyway, I can’t imagine fostering kittens myself. It would be too hard to let them go, I think. It’s hard enough watching these kittens – who I haven’t even spent times with directly – head off. Debbi has thought about volunteering with our local Humane Society, but I think she worries that she’d have trouble saying goodbye to them, too (not to mention that not all of the animals will come to a good end; even if the shelter is no-kill, some of them will get sick or have other problems).

In any event, I guess the Tiny Kittens shelter will get some new kittens in at some point, and I’ll get to watch them grow and then leave. It’s adorable and entertaining while it lasts. But it’s sad because what the end is for me comes all too soon.

Kid-Filled Weekend

We had a surprisingly busy long weekend over this past holiday.

Friday we planned to have Lisa and Michel and their kids over for a barbecue, and we learned that OSH was having their “we pay the sales tax” sale this weekend, so Friday morning we went and bought some more liquid propane for the grill, as well as quite a few other things: Bulbs for our outdoor accent lights, daisies, basil, a new hose for the back yard, and new cushions for two of our patio chairs, whose cushions had been shredded by something – I suspect crows. A much bigger run than we’d planned on!

The BBQ went well, though the kids are strangely intimidated by the cats, even Ms. 6, who has been visiting our cats since she was about 2. Plus, our cats are pretty harmless. So we mostly ran around in the yard, tiring all of us out until Mr. 3 was exhausted. Then we went back to their house and swam with Lisa and Ms. 6 in their complex’s pool.

In the evening we biked in to Shoreline Park to see the fireworks; last year we walked there, which is do-able, but means we don’t get home until close to 11. Biking shaves about half an hour off of that. But some pedestrians really need to learn how to share the trail with bikes when there are a lot of people coming back from an event – there seemed to be a lot of walkers who didn’t know to keep right for bikes to pass, and one woman who was telling us to walk our bikes. Twit.

Saturday we went over to Chad & Camille’s house for an unbirthday party for their twins, who were turning 5. There were several other adults and three other kids there too, and their pool got pretty busy, so Debbi and I stayed out of it and chatted with the adults. Once other folks had shown up, I think this is the first time I can remember that the twins weren’t pulling me around to play with them all afternoon! We had fun, though, and stayed a couple of hours later than we’d planned. Oh, and they had delicious cupcakes from Frost in Campbell, which we picked up for them before heading over there.

Sunday we went back to OSH to pick up a few more things, including some neat color-changing solar lights to accent out front and back yards. And I planted the daisies and did some yard work – there’s always more yard work!

I also did a Magic draft, which went pretty poorly and I lost in the first round to an opponent who was not very good, but who had a much better deck than I did. Plus I made a tragic misplay in the final game – though I might have lost anyway. So, not worth doing a draft recap. Also, I am getting pretty tired of having Bearer of the Heavens as the rare in my opening pack, which I did 2 weeks ago, and again yesterday. Blecch.

But mostly we stayed at home on Sunday, other than our errands.

This week I’m enjoying watching the A’s dismantle the Giants in their Bay Bridge series. The A’s are such a good team this year, while I think the Giants have peaked and are now being exposed as merely average.

Retractable Screen Doors

Our house has some nice french doors that open from our family room onto the back porch. But with multiple indoor kitties we haven’t really been able to enjoy them (i.e., leave them open) except for a few open houses when the cats have been confined to a room. But recently we got some retractable screens and now we’e able to have them open when we want:

I staged this picture specifically so you can see the screens, but they're not generally this visible.
I staged this picture specifically so you can see the screens, but they’re not generally this visible.

We bought the screens through ClearView of San Mateo after seeing them at the Mountain View A La Carte & Art fair this spring, and getting them ordered and installed was quite straightforward. Installation took a few hours, but really there was nothing (including the price) which was beyond what we expected. We were also quite happy with how well the frame blended in with the door trim, including the dark brown bottom rail which works quite well with our wood flooring. We bought a few upgrades, such as low-profile handles, magnets inside the doors, and locks to hold one of the doors in place.

We almost immediately learned that opening up the doors cools off the family room and kitchen within just a few minutes. And the cats have been gradually warming up to sitting and looking outside, although at night we often have to close it up because Jackson starts jumping at bugs that come up from outside. I understand that other people have had problems with cats quickly figuring out how to get under the screen and get outside, but our cats so far haven’t tried. (We have on order an enhancement to put a piece of clear plastic into a slot at the bottom of the screen to prevent them from being able to do that.)

The screens are not invisible, but they’re not intrusive, either. And we did get heavier-duty screens to deal with potential cat paws on them. Plus it’s good to have them slightly visible so you notice they’re there and don’t walk into them. So far, neither of us has, and we haven’t tripped over the bottom rail, either. (And neither did anyone at our open house, as far as I know!)

We’d been thinking about doing this since we first moved in, and it’s great to knock down another long-standing home improvement domino.

Open House 2014

Yesterday we held our fourth annual open house, which is really just a party for our friends and neighbors. Of course, none of them have been as big as the first one, from the month after we moved into our house, but we’re still enjoying them. One frustrating detail is that we use Evite to send the invitations, but we are never sure whether the invitations it sends make it to their recipients, or if they end up in peoples’ junk mail boxes, or what. A lot of people don’t respond. But, we haven’t really found a better site than Evite, and the alternative is to send a bulk e-mail and collect replies that way.

Anyway, we bought too much food as usual, and made sangria and margaritas and infused water. It got into the mid-80s by the time the party started (2 pm), but the first people showed up around a quarter to 3, and by 4 pm it was cooling off pretty nicely. Plus our back porch is in shade by then.

The biggest downside to a large party is that I have good conversations with a few people, but there are many who I do little more than say ‘hi’ to. But as long as everyone has a good time, that’s the important thing.

I also tend to be in high demand to play with the kids – for some reason, kids love me. We had kids from ages 2 to 7, plus a (I think) 12-year-old, and they spent most of the afternoon running around in the back yard, kicking balls around and the like. We bought some bubble-blowing stuff and I made bubbles for them, and they ran around popping them.

We had a few guests who hadn’t been to the house before, so we gave some house tours, which is always fun. We also had our home’s builder and his wife come by, so we got to catch up with him.

At first we left the cats out to play with the guests, but after the first hour it was getting too chaotic and we wanted to leave the doors open, so we put them in our guest room for most of the party. I think Roulette and Sadie snoozed together under the bed, while Jackson was mostly resentful at being closed away from the action. When the party started winding down we let them out and the kittens came down to check things out.

Anyway, we had some folks stay until nearly 9, and I got to talk to several people I don’t see very often. We’ll do it again next year!

The Working-from-Home Experience

A couple of months ago I decided to start working from home one day a week. I have a couple of cow-orkers who work from home one or two days a week because they have a long commute, but even though I live a lot closer I thought it was reasonable to see if I could, and my boss didn’t have an issue with it. For me, the decision was a tension between liking to be around my cow-orkers, and the fact that I now have an officemate but wanting to have my own dedicated working space once in a while. So I thought I’d try it.

Well, actually I kind of did try it back in 2012 when I worked from my Mom’s house while she was recovering from surgery, and that went pretty well.

It took me a couple of weeks to get into a good routine working at home. From a work standpoint this was because my first two days doing so happened to coincide with days when a bunch of random things to investigate came in and my plans to make progress on major projects got derailed. (This is not uncommon for the project I work on, but those two days seemed to be particularly bad for disruptions.)

Another reason is that the day I chose to work at home is Wednesday, which is also comic book day. Plus I had to figure out what to do about lunch. So the first couple of weeks I went with my first instinct: Go get comics over lunch, and also eat somewhere while I was out. This turned out to take way too long and took an unreasonable chunk out of the afternoon. So I quickly moved to planning to have lunch at home (sometimes leftovers, otherwise soup or something simple), and then go get comics after work as usual. This has worked out much better. And honestly it was a little weird to be getting comics in the middle of the day, then having them sit around unread until the evening!

Since our study is a bit of a work-in-progress (read: we need to replace my ancient desk that we have in there), I set up to work in the dining room. One perk to this is that I have one or another of our three cats hanging out with me during the day. In the morning, Sadie and Jackson come and lie in the sun. Later on Roulette comes in and sits in the window, and eventually moves over to lie on the table. Sometimes Sadie or Jackson lies there, too. And Rou and Sadie each come over to get attention from me at some point in the afternoon. I think they enjoy having something different happen at home.

The other little perk is that I’m driving in one less day per week, which with my biking twice-a-week schedule means I’m only looking for a parking spot twice a week. Not bad. Though I do drive a chunk of the way there to get comics. But you can’t have everything. I do save some commute time, too.

I definitely don’t feel like, “gee, I should’ve done this years ago”, but it’s nice to have the option, and the quality time with the cats has been fun. Plus I get to play my music and podcasts without wearing headphones. So, on balance it’s been a win.

Meeting the Neighbors

Next door to our house is a house which is a rental property. When we moved in, our neighbor Juan told us that the renters were a bunch of Stanford students, mostly engineers. Other than saying hi to them once in a while when taking out the trash or mowing the lawn, we haven’t really interacted with them. That’s not so strange, since we have several neighbors we haven’t really met, but none of them are right next door to us. They’re mostly fine neighbors, actually; they’ve had a couple of loud parties, but never late into the night, and they used to have an old camper parked in their driveway right next to our joint fence which was there for a couple of years, and which left last year. That’s barely anything to complain about.

So the last two days I’ve been working the developer tools lab at WWDC, for which I woke up early (5:40 am!) and Debbi drove me up with her and dropped me off at the South San Francisco CalTrain station, and then I took the train back home, getting back around 7. Yesterday we also went to get my comic books and then out to dinner. And it was trash day.

We got home and found that someone (probably Juan) had brought in our recycling and yard waste bins (which we store around the side of the house), but the actual trash bin was missing. Since we and the neighbors put out bins right next to each other, I figured they’d probably brought our bin into their yard by mistake, so I went over to ask.

Sure enough, that’s what happened, and two of them went out and checked and brought it out for me. Then we ended up chatting for a while, because we’d never met! Three of their roommates came back while we were talking, and we learned that one of them had just moved in, and he’d brought the trash bins in, and didn’t know which were their and which were ours. So, an innocent mistake (as I’d suspected). But Debbi came out and we got to meet each other. Some of them are students, but others are working at startups. And it seems one guy – who’s since moved out – was responsible for most of the occasional wackiness we’d seen.

Anyway, now that we know them, they seem like nice folks, and it’ll be nice to have more people to say hi to around the neighborhood.

Oh, if they hadn’t been the ones with our bin, I have no idea where else it would have gone! So, glad I was right.

Another Ant Invasion

The summer we moved into our house, 2011, we had serious problems with an ant invasion. We brought it under control with Terro, and have only had a few minor problems with ants since then.

This year has been another matter: Two weeks ago we had an incursion in the kitchen, along the base of the cabinets. Fortunately we seem to have pretty dumb ants around here: They were just wandering back and forth, ignoring the trash, the dishwasher (under which they were coming in), and only wandering kind of close to the cat food. We put the cat food and water in trays surrounded by water, deployed the Terro, and in about three days they were gone.

Late last week, though, Debbi noticed a few ants on the kitchen counter, between the stove and the sink. A few of them made it into the sink, but there weren’t very many. Indeed, there were so few that it took us a couple of days of watching to see that they were coming down from behind the mounted cabinets. Again, dumb ants: Not going into the cabinets (you know, where the food is), and also ignoring the toaster oven and the stove. We deployed the Terro after moving everything off the counter, and holy cow have there been a lot of ants over there this weekend! Annoying the disgusting, but they sure did find the Terro quickly.

The problem is that by the time we see more than one or two stray ants inside, it usually means there’s a nest established fairly close, so Terro takes two or three days to get rid of them (i.e., for them to take enough of it back to kill the queen and the rest of the nest).

I wonder whether California’s drought is causing the ants to range places they usually don’t in search of water or food. We do have a lawn which we water, but I cut back the watering by over a third due to the drought, so maybe that makes a difference. Or maybe it’s a fluke.

A friend of mine suggested using fipronil around the base of the house to keep them away. “Good for a year”, he says. So maybe I’ll try that. If the Wikipedia entry is correct, it’s fairly safe. On the other hand, it does seem to be dangerous to bees, of which we have a number who forage in our yard. So I’ll have to think about it.

Anyway, we shouldn’t complain too much as a serious incursion every three years doesn’t seem too bad, and we are able to deal with it. But it’s still pretty annoying and somewhat disruptive.

Volunteer Tomato Plant

We have two large pots in the back yard where I grow tomato plants each year. (We don’t have a proper garden – someday, maybe.) Sometimes random weeds drift in and start to grow, but this year I got a surprise: A little tomato plant, probably from a seed from a tomato from last year’s plant that dropped into the soil, sprouted and started growing.

I bought a plant for the other pot, but I moved this little volunteer to the center of the pot, and it’s been doing pretty well so far. The store-bought plant is bigger and bushier, but I’ll take care of this little guy and see how it develops over the next two months.

Volunteer Tomato Plant