Category: Personal

Day-to-day life and other ramblings

Amaryllis

For Christmas my aunt and uncle gave me an amaryllis plant. Pretty neat, but before I set it up I had to check whether it was poisonous to cats, since both Jackson and Sadie like munching on plants (yet another obstacle to my mastery of growing orchids!). It turns out it is moderately toxic, so I decided I couldn’t just set it up in the house. So it sat for the better part of a month while I thought about it (or, really, ignored it).

Around my birthday I realized that the plant was forcing the issue, as even though I hadn’t watered it it was sprouting anyway. So I unpacked it – it came in a very attractive little pot – and put it out on the front porch, where it will get a lot of indirect sunlight and hopefully not get too cold. And I started watering it.

Well, as of this morning it looked like this:

Amaryllis

And it looks like it has more flowering yet to come.

I’m not certain what I’ll do once it goes dormant for the summer, maybe put it in the garage, where it will stay warm and get some light. But it’s working out pretty well so far.

15-Year Appleversary

Today marks 15 years since I started working at Apple.

Coincidentally, as part of the 30 Years of Mac celebration a month and a half ago, Apple put up posters with the name of every employee. I believe there are 12 posters, and I’m in the very top row of poster 3. (That’s actually too high off the ground for me to get a good picture with my iPhone; what I need is a camera with a good optical zoom.) I guess that means I’ve been at Apple longer than over 85% of all employees. That’s a long time, especially in Silicon Valley.

I remember back when I was going to interview, I told two of my friends at my old company. One of them immediately said, “Oh, you are so out of here.” It didn’t seem to clear to me at the time, but she was right!

15 years ago it was me and my two cats moving into temporary housing. The Dot Com boom was in full swing. Mac OS X was under development but wouldn’t be released for another two years.

10 years ago Debbi and I had been dating for almost three years, and she had a couple of kittens. The Red Sox were about to embark on their first championship season in 86 years. Macs still ran on PowerPC chips and Apple stock was riding up on the strength of the iPod.

5 years ago Debbi and I were still living in the townhouse. My cat Jefferson would pass away a year later. The iPhone was already a big thing and I think its App Store was available by then, but the iPad was still in the future.

1999 feels like a different era, yet it wasn’t so long ago. It feels like so much has happened, yet it all felt like a series of manageable transitions while it was happening. (c.f. John Gruber’s “This is How Apple Rolls” piece – for the most part, that’s how a person’s life rolls, too.)

Where will I be in another 15 years?

Frogs & Flowers

Debbi and I took Tuesday off for a fun day in San Francisco. We spent the morning at California Academy of Sciences, where we renewed our memberships for the year. Sadly, their planetarium was closed for the day, and it’s one of the highlights of a visit there. But we had a good time otherwise. It was really quiet there, relatively speaking; I guess the end of February is not the busy season for SF museums! One nice benefit of this was we got some lengthy quality time with the penguins, who were happily swimming in their pond, and one of whom followed me back and forth through the window.

I took another panorama from the rooftop:

View from the Cal Academy rooftop

Debbi took a bunch of pictures and posted a few to Facebook having made collages out of them with Pic Stitch. I liked this one with the many small frogs we saw in the tropical rainforest:

Frogs

After five trips in the last year, I think the Academy needs to refresh some of their exhibits. The earthquake exhibit feels very stale at this point, and they haven’t had a good exhibit on the second floor in a while – they really need something like their Extreme Mammals exhibit from a few years ago.

Afterward we went to the Conservatory of Flowers, which I always think is one of the best-kept secrets in Golden Gate Park. We were pleased to see they had their butterfly exhibit in their rotating exhibit room, but I always enjoy seeing all their rooms. I got a panorama of the room with the large pond:

Conservatory of Flowers pond room

And Debbi made a collage of some pictures from our visit:

Flowers

Finally we went to Ghirardelli Square for sundaes, and then drove home.

We had a quiet rest of the day, but sadly we were both strangely wiped out by it all; Debbi took a nap in the afternoon, and I developed a headache later in the evening (though not the debilitating kind I occasionally get), so we went to bed early. A disappointing end to an otherwise fun day.

On the bright side, we’ve gotten some rain since then, which the state badly needs and which I always enjoy. And more coming in the next few days!

Little Kids Love Me

Last week one of my cow-orkers had his wife and daughter meet him at work for lunch. I ran into them in the cafeteria and said hi. His daughter is a little over a year old, and she promptly took her pacifier out of her mouth and handed it to me. He later told me he hadn’t seen her do that before. I joked that she thought I was talking to much and wanted to shut me up.

This is just the latest example of how little kids seem to love me. We have many friends with kids aged 5 or less. Two of them decided at one point that Debbi and I are their friends, but they allow their parents to socialize with us, too. Some other friends Debbi goes to visit every week, and I joined her a few weeks ago. The next week when Debbi was going over, apparently the younger child asked if “Uncle Michael” was coming too. And a few years ago whenever we’d fly back east to visit our families, we’d take a red-eye and I’d crash in late morning (since I can’t really sleep on planes), only to wake up covered in couch cushions courtesy of her nieces and nephew.

I’ve never really wanted kids, but I don’t dislike them (I think I feel compelled to say that because it seems many people perceive that people who don’t want kids also don’t like kids). I sometimes feel a little uneasy around them, like I’m going to say the wrong thing or accidentally hurt one of them. Debbi thinks kids like me because I’m willing to get down on the ground and play with them, or carry them around, or get chased by them. I bet the fact that I rarely fill the roll of the disciplinarian helps, too. (That is, I’m rarely the guy who has to say ‘no’, though I am sometimes the guy who tries to steer them away from things they shouldn’t be getting into.)

None of this really explains how a toddler can take one look at me and decide to share her pacifier with me, though!

That Darned Tree

Our house has a big ol’ sycamore tree hanging over the front yard. For the most part this is a good thing, as it keeps the yard (and the front porch) shady for most of the day in the summer.

The winter is another story: The tree starts dropping leaves in October, and sometimes it seems like it never stops. Last weekend I was out filling our yard waste bin again, and it’s mid-February! And the tree still has plenty of leaves left on it! It’s not even particularly attractive in the fall, as the leave turn brown rather than turning bright colors. Also, our neighborhood has a couple of dozen such trees around, but our tree seems to have more leaves left on it than the other do. Geez!

I think what’s happening is the warm weather and California’s drought that’s on right now: Normally we get plenty of rain in the fall and early winter, along with colder temperatures and occasional gusts of wind. I think the warm weather is tricking the tree a little, but more importantly the rain and wind are important to knock all those leaves off. Most of the leaves I raked last weekend fell during the rain showers the previous weekend.

Now we’re heading into spring, and I bet the leaves will start falling faster as the tree starts sprouting some buds. Most of the flowering trees in the area are in bloom right now, and the deciduous trees are probably not far behind. So I expect more raking in the month ahead.

Plus, there’s a forecast of more showers in the middle of next week, so maybe that will finally knock the last of those leaves off that darned tree.

Val Days

Some years ago (maybe even our first year together) Debbi and I stopped celebrating Valentine’s Day on the day itself. I think at first it had to do with me having ultimate frisbee scheduled for that night or something (which would have been a Tuesday or a Thursday, so it’s not like it was a weekend night). What we started doing was celebrating it (more or less) the day after.

One great thing about that is that restaurants aren’t nearly as crowded, and flowers are a lot cheaper!

This year I decided to cook dinner on the night itself. Specifically I knew Debbi had been craving “my” rice pilaf recipe (which is actually from Cook’s Illustrated), and I decided to try making chicken breasts with a grape-and-tarragon sauce. I had tried making this combination when visiting my Dad a number of years ago and I knew it was a lot to juggle, so this time I tried to make it less stressful by making the rice pilaf first, and letting it sit while I made the chicken.

It worked to the extent that it all went smoothly and mostly stress-free. It didn’t quite work optimally in that we didn’t eat until after 8 o’clock! But at least it was yummy.

After dinner we watched Lilo and Stitch, because I had a yen to see it again after hearing “Burning Love” at the end of a Storycorps story in the morning.

True to our tradition, we went out to dinner last night, going to our favorite Indian restaurant, Amber India, where we ate too much, as we usually do.

The day ended with a short rain shower, which we really need because of the drought we’re having. We could really use a lot more rain, though!

Vegas Long Weekend

Last weekend we went to Las Vegas for the first time in several years. (For those following along at home, due to the frail condition of our two cats Newton and Blackjack, we didn’t go away on vacation for several years. Both of them have since passed away, so we’ve been travelling again.)

Something about this trip didn’t feel quite right to me from the time we booked it. This isn’t foreshadowing, nothing bad happened on the trip; it just felt slightly off, like I couldn’t quite figure out why we were going. Vegas can be a bit of an odd trip for us, trying to figure out what we want to spend time doing, especially since we’ve seen most of the spectacle before several times. But walking around aimlessly is tiring and kind of pointless.

What we did do was book tickets to go see Cirque du Soleil’s “O”, which we saw the first time we went to Vegas about ten years ago. (We had wanted to see their new show, Zarkana, but it was dark during January.) We flew in Saturday afternoon and went to the show in the evening. It’s quite a spectacle, of course; it seemed like they’d changed it up a bit (in particular the closing piece was different from what I remembered).

We stayed at the MGM Grand, where we’ve stayed several times before. We liked them partly because they had a branch of Fat Tuesday in them, but also because they had a killer poker room, a large room with a variety of games. Sadly, their great room is no more, the space largely unused, and the remaining poker tables shoved into an alcove to one side of the casino. And they only seem to have 1/2 no-limit games anymore. Disappointing. Also, the room where they used to bring in lions from a nearby preserve has been remodeled into a night club. And it turns out that Fat Tuesday now has something like eight locations on the strip, so we could find daiquiris all kinds of places.

Anyway, I went to the site All Vegas Poker to check out rooms, and it seems that the collapse of on-line poker has hit poker rooms on the strip hard, with many of the downsizing or closing.

I struggle to have the courage to play no-limit poker; all my poker playing friends seem to play no-limit when they come to Vegas, and that’s what we play in our nickel-dime home games, at which I hold my own (and our home games are tough). But I feel more comfortable playing limit when I play for real money, so we went to the Flamingo, which still has a 2/4 game and I’ve enjoyed playing at before. It was a good choice: We visited several other poker rooms over the weekend and they were pretty consistently quiet, while the Flamingo’s room was active during the day and busy at night. I talked to several people I played with during the trip and they said the Flamingo was one of the better rooms on the strip for finding a game at all hours.

While I play poker Debbi usually goes to play a mix of pai-gow poker and video poker. I often feel guilty for separating from her for hours at a time to play poker, but she seems okay with it. This trip I tried to embrace her giving me the time to sit at the table for a lengthy session.

Well, the first couple of days it didn’t work out so well. Sunday in particular I spent the afternoon being dreadfully card-dead. Honestly the best I can say from the session was that I didn’t lose much more than I was going to lose, and I actually made some pretty good folds when I did have good (but losing) hands. Monday afternoon was more of the same, except I had the sense to order some coffee with Bailey’s to warm things up (or “add some variance to my game” as I joked).

Coffee and Chips

Monday night my luck finally changed and I was able to recoup most of my losses from the rest of the trip, winning some big hands and losing a few through bad luck. Overall I was pretty happy with how I played, which I guess means I need to figure out what the next step is to become a better player.

Monday night we also went to our usual dinner at Bally’s Steakhouse (Bally’s – another casino which has shoved its poker room into a corner of the casino). I was pleased to see they haven’t changed much – if anything they’ve improved a bit with the addition of a mixed drink menu (their Old Fashioned was well worth the price). Afterwards we went to the top of the Eiffel Tower replica at Paris, which was a bit over-priced but fun anyway. I got a couple of good pictures of the strip from up there, too:

Strip facing south
Strip facing north

We had a quiet morning Tuesday before flying out. It was, overall, a fun trip, but it felt slightly dreamlike at times. I’m not sure if I wasn’t quite mentally into it, or if the place has changed just enough in five years that I was thrown off. I do want to go back, though, and perhaps we’ll figure things out ahead of time a little better, now that we’re familiar with what’s changed.

Another Year Older

Yesterday I had about as low-key a birthday as I can recall having. Last year we took the day off and drove up to Cal Academy, but this year I didn’t even take the day off. Well, I did take it off from going to the gym, and went this morning instead.

In the morning I opened presents (yes, I still get presents!), which was a nice set of stuff. One thing Dad gave me was a DVD set of the Doctor Who Black Guardian trilogy (which includes one of my five favorite stories, “Mawdryn Undead” – man I wish they could release Paddy Kingsland’s music from that separately, as it’s amazing). But when I opened it I noticed it included two copies one one of the three DVDs in the box, and none of “Mawdryn Undead”! Some sort of assembling problem where the DVDs are made, I guess. Fortunately, Amazon has a straightforward exchange system, and they sent me a new copy of the set which arrived today – and I didn’t even have to return the old one!

I had something of a blah day at work, unfortunately, as I was juggling a bunch of different projects, and that sort of juggling isn’t exactly what I prefer to be doing. Maybe I should have taken the day off after all.

Along the way I got a call from Dad, and about 50 happy birthday wishes on Facebook. I wonder how many I got last year?

In the evening we went to Sundance the Steakhouse for dinner, which was yummy as always. I was good and didn’t indulge in too much food during the day so I was able to enjoy all of my dinner. Though I was still too full at the end to get dessert!

Not perhaps the most memorable birthday, but I didn’t feel like making a big fuss this year. Maybe next year.

Holidays’ End

Hey, it’s a new year!

We had a nice New Year’s Eve visiting some friends and their kids; the kids conked out around 10, but we made it to midnight (despite plenty of alcohol earlier in the evening), and then somehow managed to stay until 1:30 in the morning. We quit drinking around 9:30 so we weren’t at all tipsy, though we were pretty tired, but the roads were quiet and we got home without incident.

New Year’s Day we met Nadyne and her husband for lunch, having all been communicating online for a number of years (not to mention living just a couple of miles apart), but we’d never actually met, so that was great to do, and they’re both very nice people (which we knew!). I guess this means we can invite them to our open house this year!

Debbi and I actually went back to work on Thursday, but our offices were both very quiet as most people took Thursday and Friday off to extend their holidays. I think we both got some stuff done, but it was not a fast start to the year.

Friday night we went to Cascal for dinner, and then we mostly had a quiet weekend. On Saturday I read Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane on Saturday (I don’t often read a book – even a short one – in a single day). And we watched the football games. I was indifferent towards most of them, but I did root for the Niners over the Packers in the Really Cold Bowl today. The Niners won by a field goal, but it felt like they should have won by more given how the Packers defense (wasn’t) playing. Still, a win’s a win.

We also took down our Christmas trees. It’s nice to have the living room back to its normal state, but I do enjoy having the trees up for 1/12th of the year. We decided to leave the outside lights up for another week, which will probably make us about the last people in the neighborhood to take them down. But, not a big deal.

Hard to believe another holiday season – and another calendar year – is behind us.

All I want for this new year at this point is some rain. Northern California just completed its driest year on record, and the snow packs which supply a significant fraction of our water are at 20% (or less) of average for this time of year. Unless the next three months are a significant turnaround, it looks like it’ll be a water-rationing summer. And frankly I’d rather have the frigid temperatures the midwest is getting this week.