Category: Personal

Day-to-day life and other ramblings

Boston in September

I’m back from a week-plus vacation to Boston to visit my parents. Debbi of course also came to visit her sisters, so we didn’t see a lot of each other, since our families live about 40 miles apart. Our strange family vacations. 🙂

We took the JetBlue red-eye the night of Thursday the 16th. Several people asked me if we had any trouble landing, because I guess there was a big rainstorm that night, but when we landed (around 5:15 am) I looked outside and just noticed it had been raining. The trip otherwise was perfectly smooth. Debbi’s sister picked us up and we drove down to spend part of Friday with them. I didn’t sleep on the plane, so I sacked out on the couch even before all of Deb’s niephews (2 girls and 1 boy) had headed off to school. Then I had lunch with Debbi and her sisters, and they drove me up to my Mom’s house.

I saw them once more, on Sunday, when one of the girls had a soccer game near my Mom’s house, so I drove over to say hi and hang out. And then I drove Debbi up on Monday to spend the night with us and have dinner, since my Dad picked up some lobsters from Legal Sea Foods for the three of them. (I don’t eat seafood, so I picked up some ribs from Whole Foods. But the verdict on the lobsters was that they were excellent.)

I visited with two friends – my friend Bruce, whom I know from my old APAhacking days, and my friend Charley, whom I know from high school. Charley asked how long it’s been since we’d seen each other, and I said, “Well, last time I saw you you still had long hair…” He said that meant it had probably been a decade or more, which sounds about right. We’d basically lost touch until I came across his web site. We had lunch in Harvard Square and caught up on various things. Bruce and I, as usual, had dinner in Boston’s North End followed by coffee and dessert at Cafe Vittoria, which is an excellent place to hang out and chat, even if we did have to watch the Red Sox get thumped by the Orioles on the big screen. (At least we got to mock them along the way.)

I spent much of the week hanging out at my Mom’s house, with occasional runs to Dunkin Donuts. She volunteers at the new Waban Library Center, in the building where the Waban branch of the Newton Free Library used to be. It’s a beautiful building, built between the two World Wars, and I went up and took some photos, and reminisced about going there as a kid. (Their Facebook page has photos from 1930 as well as from the modern era.)

I went in to visit Dad and have dinner with him twice, and he also joined me for my usual trip out to That’s Entertainment in Worcester, where I picked up some comic books and Magic cards.

The weather was up-and-down: Rainy and cold when we arrived, then cool, and then hot-and-humid! And then alternating cool with hot-and-humid for the last few days. I used almost all the clothes I brought, including my jacket and sweatshirt. I guess we left just before the rains returned. Though the area already looks like it’s perpetually raining leaves, since fall arrived during our visit.

Our flight home was uneventful, other than an hour’s delay taking off (half of which we made up in the air) – far better than last year’s debacle of a return trip!

All-in-all it was a very lazy vacation, and it flew by awfully quickly. Fortunately Debbi and I are also taking Monday off to catch up on things and recover from the plane flight home (it’s over an hour longer to fly west than east between Boston and San Jose). And the kitties are delighted to see us, of course, after 9 days of 3 different pet sitters! (Though I guess Blackjack did his best to charm everyone.)

Driving in Boston

Driving around Greater Boston is a much bigger pain in the ass than driving around California, for a bunch of reasons:

  • The streets are generally narrower, since many of the roads predate automobiles.
  • People park on the streets, even though they’re generally narrower, making the streets functionally even narrower. Many streets allow parking even though they don’t have a dedicated parking lane.
  • People get out of cars and just amble across the street without looking, usually without caring whether they’re jaywalking.
  • Pedestrians suddenly appear from behind parked cars, waiting for a space to jaywalk across the road.
  • Turn lanes usually aren’t marked until you’re actually in the lane, whereas most turn lanes in California are marked ahead of time, or at least on signs attached to traffic signals so you can see them from a distance. Consequently you often find yourself in the wrong lane because there was no way to tell you were heading into a turn lane until it’s too late.
  • Drivers give you approximately 1/5 of a second to go after a green light before honking at you. Personally this motivates me to drive slowly.

My strategy for driving in Boston is just to be patient and not let other drivers (or pedestrians) get to me. If they’re impatient, well, that’s their problem.

The only bright spot, really, is that Massachusetts has been on a long-term campaign to make drivers aware that they must stop for a pedestrians in crosswalks, and most drivers obey this law. This makes it a little easier to be a pedestrian than in years past.

I’m still not sure why they haven’t just added more lanes to Route 128 yet, though. They’ve been doing construction on it seemingly in perpetuity, so you’d like they could make the most obvious improvement to it.

New Bed!

Our home improvement project of assembling new bookcases for my comic book collection got finished a couple of weeks ago – I now have three 8-foot-tall bookcases (yes, anchored to the wall to guard against earthquakes) holding my collection, replacing the four 6-foot-tall cases. Overall the new cases have slightly more shelf space, so I have a little extra room, and they’re in better condition and look nicer than the 15-year-old things they’re replacing.

But the real reason for installing them is to make more space in the bedroom (yes, my collection is in the bedroom), in order to buy a new bed.

The old bed was also 15 years old, a queen-sized mattress and box spring, and has been on its last legs for a while. We’d actually started wearing through the mattress’ covering, exposing some of the foam. Well, last weekend Debbi talked to her friend Lisa, whom we learned bought a new bed that weekend, and from whom we also learned that that weekend – Labor Day weekend – is the time of the deepest sales in the mattress business. So we headed out to Sleep Train to try out mattresses.

Well, long story short, we bought a new California-king-sized mattress and box spring. Long story slightly longer, there are a lot of different mattresses out there. We lay on about 7 of them, and actually liked the one we bought more than several higher-end ones. Though I knew anything we bought would be much nicer than the one we were replacing.

Also, this just in: Mattresses are expensive!

So yesterday the new bed was delivered. They gave us a 4-hour window for delivery, and arrived near the very beginning of it. The two guys came in, removed the old mattress, assembled the new frame, and put the new mattress and bed spring on it all in about 20 minutes. Amazing, really! We spent about half an hour before they arrived vacuuming under the old mattress (I think most of what I sucked up was Jefferson hair), and another 15 minutes or so removing picture frames from the stairwell walls so they wouldn’t damage anything while carrying the thing up. But it was finished in a whirlwind of activity. (I gave the movers some water while they were there, which they both sucked down. Debbi observed that most people probably don’t offer them anything.)

In addition to being larger, the bed is also taller than the old bed, which means I’ll need to move the shelf mounted on the wall above the bed. But other than adjusting to that, the bed is really nice and comfortable, and it’s much harder for us to feel the other person moving around on it (which should help keep Debbi from waking up when I roll around at night, active sleeper that I am).

Newton has instantly claimed the bed as his own space, snoozing on it even before we put the blankets on it, and curling up with us last night. Debbi noted that the old bed has smelled like him and his brother for years, so he might be trying to make this one smell like him. I said to him that this is the second bed I’ve bought in his lifetime. He really seems to like it.

Last night’s sleep was very comfortable.

San Jose Municipal Rose Garden

Last week I bought myself a new digital camera – a Nikon Coolpix S8000. My old camera is still decent, but I was sucked in by the growing megapixel rates, and more importantly by the suddely-growing optical zoom capabilities of subcompact cameras. This thing has a 10x optical zoom, about 3 times greater than my old Canon! I’m by no means a power photographer, but greater optical zoom is one of the few things I’ve wanted in my cameras, and now I’ve got it.

Then, since we were heading down that way yesterday anyway (to buy cinnamon bread at Greenlee’s Bakery and drop in at Recycle Bookstore), I surprised Debbi by taking her to the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. This rose garden was in danger of being taken off national registries a few years ago due to neglect (presumably due to shrinking budgets), but a huge volunteer effort not on revived the gardens, but won them an award recently, as well as a lot of local recognition.

So it’s no surprise that it’s quite pretty. There appeared to be two weddings going on at the edge of the garden when we arrived. We wandered through it for about an hour, Debbi being attracted to orange and peach roses, and me by any roses that weren’t white. I also like old municipal land like this since they often have signs of early 20th century architecture or decor, which I find attractive: The wrought-iron fences, the stone benches and buildings, and so forth.

And this gave me a chance to try out my new camera, so here are a bunch of pictures:

Continue reading “San Jose Municipal Rose Garden”

Long-Delayed Project

Yesterday I finally got around to putting together an Ikea bookcase – that I bought over Memorial Day weekend.

One thing I’ve been bad about doing with my bookcases is anchoring them to the wall, but this bookcase is 8 feet tall (including the extra shelf I bought), will hold a third of my comic book collection, and will hover (ominously?) above our bed, so I really needed to anchor it, this being earthquake country and all. The thing is, having never anchored a bookcase, I wasn’t sure how much work it would be. So I’ve been intimidated by the project for all this time, while the bookcase stood unassembled, in its box, in the garage. (Why didn’t I put it together over the long weekend on which I bought it? Because I spent a big chunk of that weekend at work.)

It turns out none of it was a big deal, but it did take about 2-1/2 hours to finish the project. All together the project involved:

  1. Carrying the bookcase upstairs – too big a job for one person, and actually it took Debbi and me a good 5 minutes to maneuver it up the stairs.
  2. Assembling the bookcase. Really, this was the easiest part. I’ve assembled so many prefab bookcases in the last 20 years that I can almost do it in my sleep.
  3. Unloading comic books from the first of the four six-foot bookcases they currently live in, and piling them on the bed. Then, realizing that I really need to unload the second bookcase, too.
  4. Locating the wall studs and marking the spots to drill holes for the anchor straps.
  5. Moving the old bookcases out of the way and putting the new bookcase in place.
  6. Vacuuming where the old bookcases where, since it was pretty dusty back there.
  7. Affixing the anchor straps to the wall. (Requires ladder.) Then attaching the straps (which are the velcro type) to the underside of the top shelf of the bookcase. Why the underside? Because the top of the top shelf is going to be a usable shelf itself, with comics on it, once the extension is attached, and I don’t want comics sitting on the straps.
  8. Assembling the extension and attaching it to the bookcase.
  9. Filling the bookcase with comics.
  10. Since one eight-foot bookcase is not as capacious as two six-foot bookcases, carrying a small (three-foot) bookcase into the bedroom from the front room and fill it with the remaining comics.
  11. Putting one of the two six-foot bookcases in the front room in place of the small bookcases.
  12. Disassembling the other bookcases and dump it in the trash. (I inherited this bookcase when I bought the house. It’s not an Ikea bookcase, and is not as cleverly designed as Ikea bookcases. Ikea cases don’t have screws going all the way through the outer wood, whereas this one did, and had little wood-patterned stickies to cover up the screws.)
  13. Cleaning up. In this project I used a bunch of stuff in my toolbox, a ladder, a ruler and a tape measure, a pencil, a studfinder, and the vacuum cleaner. Waste included the box the bookcase and extension came in, the box the earthquake straps came in, and various bits I didn’t need (Ikea often adds a few extra hardware parts, though which parts you get always seems random). Plus two glasses of water. Not to mention that I showered and changed clothes.

So, that’s one bookcase, and it looks great! Now I need to buy two more such bookcases, put them together to replace the remaining six-foot bookcases, and then throw away two (or maybe all three) of the old bookcases (we’re undecided whether we’ll put the three-foot bookcase back in the front room or leave a six-foot bookcase there). So that will be a project for the coming weeks. But now that I’ve done it once, hopefully the other two will be easier.

The ultimate result of all this, I hope, will be a little more extra room for comics (ultimately, the three new bookcases should replace 21 shelves of comics with 21 slightly-wider shelves), but more importantly converting lateral wall space into vertical wall space so that we can replace our aging queen-sized bed with a new king-sized bed.

Plus, of course, the new bookcases really do look a lot better than my 17-year-old ones that I bought from a furniture store in Madison, in different colors because they kept running out of the colors I wanted. Ikea really does things right.

By the way, comments about the number of comics books I own will be ignored. 🙂

Common Grounds

First, a little background: Several weeks ago I was moved to a different team in my department. As with past such moves (and I’m unusual in this regard), I’m once again working on the same stuff, only on a new team and for a new manager. Additionally, the other half of our department, which moved off to another building a year and a half ago, has been reunited with us in our building (which is a different building from where we were when they left, but the point is that they’re back with us). So there are a whole bunch of different people in my work life, most of whom I knew before, but most of whom either weren’t really around or I didn’t interact with a lot.

And then there are some folks I didn’t really know before.

A couple weekends ago Debbi and I got together with one of these folks, Jacob, who’s a relatively new hire (earlier this year) on my new team, and his wife Lisa. We had breakfast together and then went to their house and played board games for the afternoon, which was fun. I told them about Subrata’s Wednesday night board gaming, which recently started up again, and this past Wednesday we met up to introduce them to the gaming crowd. It was a large night, so we split into two groups (I ended up getting crushed in my game, despite being the one who chose it). They played in the other group, had fun, and signed up for Subrata’s mailing list for gaming.

Then earlier this past week I went to lunch with the usual group at work, and another guy, Sean, tagged along. He’s in the group that moved to our building recently, and I know him a little because he’s interned with us in past years (he’s a full employee now). Well, it turns out that not only does he read comic books, but he also plays Magic. “How is it we don’t know each other better?” I asked him. “Probably because I’ve been in the other building for the last year and a half.” Well that makes sense. Anyway, I told him about our Monday night Magic game and it sounds like he might come on Monday. On the other hand, I might join him some Saturday for a Magic draft at the store he patronizes.

You’d think that working in a company full of geeks that I’d be surrounded by people I have lots of things in common with, but it mostly doesn’t seem to work out that way. My strongest interests are pretty specialized (and/or I make casual friends easily but find it difficult to make close friends, but that’s a different post), so this has been an unusual set of encounters.

Date Day

Yesterday Debbi and I took a day off from work and had what Debbi called a “date day” – we drove out to a couple of spots in the Bay Area and had fun together. When Dad visited me last spring he and I went to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, and I thought that would make a nice outing with Deb.

We started by driving down to the Original Pancake House in Cupertino, which has the advantage over the one we usually go to (in Los Altos) of having more seating, comfier seating, and a lot more parking. Though the parking didn’t come into play since the place was pretty quiet on, well, a Thursday morning.

Big Basin was much busier than when I went there with Dad (that’s the difference between April and August, I guess, even on a weekday). I think I’ve decided Big Basin is not quite as nice as Muir Woods (at last as far as the main scenic trail goes), but it’s still a fun little walk. Someday we might head back for one of the longer hikes.

After the park we drove down to Santa Cruz – eventually, since it turned out that Highway 9 was closed for the last few miles before Santa Cruz. The signage along the way didn’t (IMO) make it clear that it was actually completely closed – the mere presence of “detour” signs aren’t really persuasive since such signs are often put up long before and taken down long after the detour is relevant. At least the route was scenic before we had to turn around.

We did a little shopping in downtown Santa Cruz (always fun to drop in on Logos, not to mention the Pacific Cookie Company), and then headed down to the Beach Boardwalk where we walked along the beach, and out the wharf. It turned out that a landing along the wharf is currently hosting a group of sea lions, and you can get extremely close to them. I was standing about 4 feet above the lions when I took this shot:

After returning home we collapsed for a bit before heading downtown to have dinner and walk around Thursday Night Live. We don’t take many random days off, and as Debbi said it was nice to spend a day going around doing some fun things and not having any chores or errands to run. We’ll have to do it again sometime. But where to go?

Three Emotions

I’m happy because several of my friends at work have moved into my building, after having been working in another building for the last year and a half. Before they moved they were my regular lunch and coffee buds, so I’m very happy to have them back (even though I’ve recruited other folks in the meantime – this does mean we’re going to have large lunch outings!).

But I’m sad because one of those friends is leaving Apple next week, to head back to grad school.

But then I’m amused that another friend, who had a day off today, decided to get out of the house and ended up at the same beach that Debbi and I went to when we went to Half Moon Bay on Saturday: Cowell Ranch State Beach. What a coincidence! It’s worth a visit if you’re in the area and want a nice secluded beach. While walking from the parking area, look for the blue whale gate:

Infants and Independence Day

We had a pretty lively weekend. Saturday we went over to our friends Chad & Camille’s place for their twin kids’ one-year birthday party. As I’ve been saying, one-year birthday parties are more for the parents than for the kids, though the kids seemed to enjoy it anyway. We knew everyone there (other than C&C’s nanny and her fiancé), and saw a few folks we hadn’t in a while.

We had another hot weekend – not a scorcher, but still warm – and C&C invited us back on Sunday to avail ourselves of their pool, which we were happy to take them up on. So we spent the afternoon there, and I got to entertain the kids some more. Kids love me. I like them as long as I can hand them back to their parents when I run out of steam with them. 🙂

Sunday evening we biked into Shoreline Park for the annual Independence Day fireworks, which is always fun. Dealing with the idiots on the paths and streets on the way out of the park isn’t so much fun, but this year they had people directing traffic at the main intersection on our way out, which made it easier. And we had our first-class location on the grass as usual, too.

Monday we both had off from work, and we had a fairly quiet day mostly at home, with a few excursions for lunch and coffee. We also picked up the fixings so I could make mocha chip ice cream, which I did. This batch turned out especially good, too! And the heat broke (which I’m sure all of you sweltering on the east coast are envious of), which made the day even nicer.

But I had a terrible time sleeping last night, and woke up not only groggy but also with a sore throat, so I decided it was prudent to stay home from work. I dozed some in the morning (Newton and Blackjack snoozed with me), had some lunch, and spent the afternoon on the couch finishing a book and re-watching chunks of the films of The Lord of the Rings.

Hopefully I will be all better tomorrow. There have been some nasty illnesses going around at work and I’m hoping I haven’t caught one of them. Though each person seems to have something different, so it’s probably my own special thing.

Five-Minute Medicine

This morning I had a doctor’s appointment at 9:15 at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Since it usually takes me 15 minutes, tops, to drive to the main clinic from home, I left myself half an hour. This turned out to be not nearly enough time, as I hit pretty much every single light, encountered several stupid and/or slow drivers, got stuck at a light as a train went by, and got stuck at a backup going past the high school (taking the route the clinic’s map suggested I take – I shoulda stuck with my original plan). I got there a couple of minutes late. Fortunately, it didn’t make a different.

This was in fact a follow-up appointment to last year’s world’s shortest doctor’s visit to see a dermatologist. Happily, the mole she wanted to keep an eye on has not gotten any larger in the last year. I also asked her again what term she used for the large bump on my upper chest, which hurts a bit when I mash it (e.g., when scrubbing in the shower), and she said it’s either a large mole, or it’s a neurofibroma. She said she could cut it off, but that there’s no reason to unless it’s really bothering me. Which it isn’t, really – at least not to the point that I want to cut things off. 🙂 I have another one on my lower back, although that one never hurts, so maybe it’s a mole. I dunno.

Anyway, the appointment took less than 15 minutes. She suggested I come in in another 2 or 3 years, so they’ll send me a reminder. Easy enough.

I always enjoy telling the staffers at PAMF that I used to work on the office software they use (when I worked for Epic Systems). I also enjoy looking at the screens when they’re typing to see how much has changed in the look-and-feel of the software since I worked there (in the 1990s); it always looks pretty much the same to me, although the staffer today said that they find it a little frustrating that the workflows change with each major release. Epic was a very firm Microsoft shop when I was there, and I wonder if they’ve been getting pressure to provide tools for iPhones and iPads.

The physical set-up of the terminal in the office I was in was pretty interesting; probably a bit of a pain to put together, but I bet it’s very functional for the staffers who have to type at it: