Category: Personal

Day-to-day life and other ramblings

Ten Years in California

It was ten years ago yesterday that I moved to California from Madison, WI.

Back then I had just turned 30, interviewed with Apple, and accepted the job that brought me out here. The months of January, February and March 1999 went by in a whirlwind of travel, cleanup, preparation, packing, starting a new job, and finding an apartment. The upside of such a big move is that you’re just too busy lining up all the ducks to get too stressed out about the change – you’re too busy being too stressed out about getting it to work. It was just an insane time.

On the one hand I think I could have managed things better way back when – in particular, I wish I’d gotten better guidance from my friends about where to live, as I ended up living 15+ miles away from all of them, which made me miserable for a while – but on the other hand I did eventually correct the mistakes I made, I ended up at a company that was on the upswing and working on interesting stuff in a job I enjoy (ten years later, I’m still working at Apple), and my life in California has been enjoyable and productive and involved considerably less cold and snow than did my life in Madison.

Even ten years later, leaving Madison still feels bittersweet: I had and have a lot of friends there, and it’s a great city. But it’s also a small city, and I’ve appreciated the more and varied opportunities for all kinds of things here in the Bay Area. I guess I’m just a big city guy at my core.

(And I have lots of friends here, too!)

All-in-all, it’s been a good ten years. What will the next ten bring?

Rainy Day by the Ocean

We’re having another storm come through the area this weekend, bringing more much-needed water to the area. Now, for those of you who live in regions with actual weather, rather than mere climate, “storm” in this case really means “series of showers, and maybe some wind”. We almost never get the raging downpours and gale-force winds, never mind any thunder and lightning, that hit the northeast or midwest. Still, I’m happy for any showers we do get, since for eight months out of the year it’s Eternal Summer here.

We drove over to Half Moon Bay this morning for breakfast. We parked across the street from the Main Street Grill and noticed an ambulance and fire engine outside. We waited until they were done taking a guy away in the ambulance before heading in. (I wondered why an ambulance always seems to be accompanied by a fire truck; Debbi thinks it’s because the firemen have the equipment and knowledge to extract people from difficult spots if necessary, while the EMTs are there for their medical expertise. Seems plausible to me.)

While the Grill was reasonably busy (though hardly packed), the rest of downtown Half Moon Bay was pretty dead. We walked down Main Street and I don’t think we passed anyone else walking around, although there were a few people in stores. I think Half Moon Bay is driven by a vacationers economy, and it’s had plenty of turnover of retail stores since I started going there; I wonder how hard it’s going to be hit by the recession.

Afterwards we drove over to Half Moon Bay State Beach and just sat in the car for a couple of hours reading, listening to the rain, and watching the waves roll in. There were a handful of other cars in the parking lot, and one minivan disgorged a family who walked down to the beach – mostly in shorts and carrying beach shovels and buckets – and who later returned and left. The rain came in waves but never completely stopped.

Now we’re home and winding down for an afternoon and evening inside (assuming we can figure out what to do for dinner). Considering I went into work yesterday, that’s pretty much all I want to do today.

Rainy Weekend

We’re getting a series of rain storms here this week and next, and boy do we need the rain, what with northern California in the midst of a drought. Today it’s been pouring pretty hard all day.

We had a pretty quiet weekend, running errands and almost getting them done before the rain set in. We got the new TV broken in, and I broke down and threw out my ancient stereo cabinet, and we put our old TV in storage. Not sure if we’ll ever use it again, what with the transition to digital broadcasting and all, but if we don’t have it then we’ll definitely never use it.

We’d hoped to go to the California Academy of Sciences today – it’s been open for 6 months but the crowds have apparently been intense. Unfortunately the friends we’d planned to go with had to bow out, so we stuck around home instead. The silver lining might be that we didn’t have to drive and walk through the rain, eh?

Plus the cats we happy to have us home. Especially Roulette, who’s totally addicted to the toy that Lucy gave us at my birthday party and got a bunch of good playing in.

I enjoy rainy weekends. Wish we had some more of them this winter.

The Stuff Shuffle

This weekend I went out and bought something I’ve been thinking of buying for 2 years: A new television.

Of course, it hasn’t been delivered yet. And, more importantly, we’re still preparing for it.

One issue is that my stereo cabinet is something like 25 years old. I remember going out with my Dad to a furniture store in which seemed like an old-and-decrepit part of Boston (which probably means it was just “any not-suburban part”) to buy it, which was back in high school. I used to have slats for it to store LPs, although I think I chucked them a few years ago. Anyway, the thing is really old, and even though it could probably hold the new TV, I’m going to buy a cabinet made in this century which isn’t just a boring rectangle of particle boards. We scoped some out (note: Ikea’s TV stands are totally not made for me: short, boring, and lacking in storage space) and I’ll likely go buy the one we liked tomorrow (from Fry’s), now that we think it will meet our needs (read: it’ll fit in the space for the TV and hold my stereo components).

The other issue is reorganizing our DVD collection. We have frighteningly more DVDs than I thought we had, and yet probably an order of magnitude fewer than any serious DVD collector. But we don’t really have a good place to store them – we’ve been using some old semi-modular CD racks that Debbi had plus a modular wooden A/V rack to hold the DVDs and a variety of other things. Debbi’s idea was to just buy a bookcase and keep the DVDs in that. I was skeptical that a bookcase – rather than a case made specially for DVDs – would work, but we measured stuff at home and I was convinced. So I stopped at Ikea on the way home from my book discussion and picked one up. I put it together and the moved the DVDs into it. Yay! It’s more compact than the old shelves, but we can also keep some of the old shelves for knick knacks.

(By the way, I spend a lot of time measuring stuff and scoping stuff out when it comes to buying or arranging furniture. Our place isn’t very big and we have a lot of stuff [which arguably can be reworded as “I have a lot of books”] so I prefer to be careful to figure out whether what we’re looking at will fit.)

So that kept us plenty busy for the weekend, and will for the next couple of days as well. But hopefully it’ll be worth the effort. The last hurdle will be to see if the electrical circuit can handle the load of a modern TV (as opposed to the 8-year-old picture tube model we’ve got right now). We’ll find out later this week…

Chilly Vegas Trip

We’re back from a long weekend in Las Vegas. While we didn’t get the snow that the city got last month, it was surprisingly chilly all week, with lows below 40. We don’t often have to wear jackets when we go to Vegas, but this time…

Saturday night we went to see Le Rêve, the show at the upscale Wynn hotel. It’s not actually a Cirque du Soleil show, but it was created by a former Cirque choreographer. Apparently it wasn’t a big hit when it debuted, and has undergone quite a few changes since, but overall it’s quite good. For those who have been to Vegas, it’s a water-based show like “O”, but has many of the feats of strength and agility of Mystere. The music is somewhere in between, with several songs with English lyrics. The story – such as it is – doesn’t make a lot of sense, but as a framework for the sights and sounds it works well enough. Overall I still think Ka is the strongest show of this sort in Vegas, and it actually does have a story that makes sense! But Le Rêve is worth seeing, and I could see going back to see it, too.

We bookended our trip with our usual outing to the steakhouse at Bally’s, which was excellent as always. We never regret going there. If anything, we only regret being too full to eat everything on the menu.

Chinese New Year fell on Monday, so many hotels had decorations up for the event, such as the Venetian:

Venetian tower decked out for Chinese New Year 2009
(click for larger image)

…and, as always, the Bellagio conservatory:

Bellagio conservatory decorated for Chinese New Year

Panda plant sculptures at the Bellagio conservatory

We didn’t try many new restaurants this time; the only new one was BLT Burger at the Mirage, which was quite good. The Mirage is reconfiguring things since Siegfried and Roy are no longer there, and BLT replaced the white tiger habitat, which is too bad, but that’s the way it goes I guess. Otherwise we hit our usual haunts, which were good as usual, save that we had really bad service at the Studio Cafe at the MGM: Slow service, and Debbi’s eggs benedict were cooked wrong and we sent it back. We were very grumpy about this, especially because we’ve always liked them in the past, but now we’re not sure we’ll go back. We probably will eventually, once we get over this experience.

Debbi played a bunch of Pai Gow poker and I joined her for much of it. We had a few interesting hands, as every so often you have several choices of directions to go and one is clearly better than another. The most interesting was a hand Debbi had where she had both a straight and a flush, but playing the straight gave her a pair in the low hand, which was better overall. I played two hands at once for a little while, on the theory that it would lower my variance, which seems like a good idea in games played against the house.

We had some really nice dealers, especially one woman at the MGM. We also watched the other players, who can be fascinating: A lot of high rollers play pai gow, and bet $100 and up on each hand, which is a good way to win or lose really quickly. That’s an order of magnitude higher than we feel comfortable with, but it’s interesting to see. Some of them are perfectly friendly and others seem to want to just play their game and not be bothered.

I also played some poker, mixing in limit games with some 1-2 no limit. I was pretty lucky all around, and had a few memorable hands:

  • Picked up Aces in the big blind. Before the action came to me there was a raise, two calls, and a reraise. I reraised, the first raiser and callers folded, and the other player reraised me all in. I called. Someone asked, “Who has Aces and who has Kings?” A King came on the board, which worried me, but he had Queens, and I won the pot (and his whole stack, since I had him covered). I wonder what he thought when the other played wondered who had Aces and who had Kings?
  • A young woman sat down at the table and gave the impression of knowing the basics of the game, but none of the nuance. A few hands later I hit my set of 8s on the flop, and rivered a full house, and put her all in, winning her stack. The other players ragged on me for dampening the mood at the table (many of them were flirting with her). She re-bought and started winning many hands, including a huge one just after I left the table.
  • In my last session I got stacked myself: The under-the-gun player called the blind, the next player called, and I raised with Ace-Jack. UTG reraised and everyone else folded. UTG was an aggressive player who had won many pots at the table (which had just been formed when I joined) without showing down any hands, so I thought there was a good chance he had a worse Ace or even King-Queen or something like that. But he had Ace-King, and I didn’t catch a Jack and got stacked. Bummer. I did consider folding rather than going all-in, but it seemed like a borderline situation, where I could go either way.

Limit poker went well too, although the hands were less memorable.

We also always enjoy seeing the lion habitat at the MGM:

Lazy lion at the MGM Grand's lion habitat

One thing we noticed was how quiet things were the whole time. It even started in San Jose airport when we got there on Saturday, and there were maybe a couple dozen people in Terminal A when we got through security. Las Vegas was relatively quiet, too; Debbi says one dealer said the whole city is like that, but that the MGM Grand’s casino is doing better than most. The recession is hitting Vegas pretty hard.

On the other hand, we did have to wait to get seated at a couple of restaurants, and the poker rooms seemed as busy as usual when I played. So it’s not completely dead.

All-in-all, another pleasant getaway. Going back to work was a bit of a shock!

Birthday Weekend

I can’t complain about my birthday weekend: It’s been packed full of fun stuff.

Friday night Debbi took me out to dinner. We went to Sundance the Steakhouse, a local place that we’d never been to before, but which we discovered through the discount cards we get through our workplaces. (We’ve actually discovered several good places through them.) It was very yummy! They have an elegant decor with wood panelling and display cases of what I assume are memorabilia from Stanford, which is just down the street. We each ordered a steak dinner, with an appetizer of potato skins. Good stuff! We’ll definitely go back.

At home we watched 3 more episodes of Battlestar Galactica, and we’re now nearly caught up.

And that wrapped up my birthday proper.

Saturday we ran a variety of errands in order to host my birthday party in the evening. As always I didn’t send out the invitations until quite late – Wednesday evening. With my birthday falling so soon after Christmas it’s always hard to get myself to put it together early. I also have a hard time figuring out whom to invite. I worry about having so many people over that we won’t have space to cram them all into our house, but on the other hand I also consider inviting some people I know casually, enjoy hanging out with, but wonder if they’d feel peculiar that I invited them to my birthday party. Debbi encouraged me to invite more rather than fewer people, so that’s what I did. And then of course, there’s always some obvious person that I forget until a day or two later.

Anyway, despite my worries and despite the short notice, we had plenty of people show up. Which is itself rather flattering: I have lots of friends! Some folks I hadn’t seen in a while showed up, too, such as Lucy, Trish, and Mark & Yvette.

People were mesmerized by a frustrating puzzle that Debbi’s father sent her for Christmas: I think we managed to identify all the OCD people in the room with it. And our friends Lisa and Michael brought their daughter Isabella, who is now walking, and who loves cats. I guess she was able to pet Blackjack at one point, which left her completely delighted. She’s become quite the little flirt. Subrata and Susan brought over Ajay, who’s not yet crawling, but who seemed pretty happy to see all the people. He’s going to be quite the little charmer himself.

After consuming the USDA-mandated quantities of cake and ice cream, everyone staggered off home. But we had a great time. Even the cats had fun!

Today we headed off to Half Moon Bay for brunch and an hour walk along the seashore: It’s been quite warm here recently, so it was perfect weather for it. Then we came home and sat around watching football and putting the house back together.

I couldn’t really have asked for a much better weekend. How was yours?

Forty

My Mom sent me an e-mail this morning that began, “I know what I was doing 40 years ago. I also know what you were doing, probably crying. Well, we both made it this far.”

I have mixed feelings about reaching the big four-oh. On the one hand I lead a comfortable life, I enjoy my job, I have a great girlfriend, great friends, and more to do with my time than I have time. And I still have all my fingers.

On the other hand, the older I get the more I feel like certain things are slipping away from me. It’s unlikely I’ll have a significant writing career at this point (and there’s a whole post I could do about my writing skills, aspirations, and failures), and I regret that my drawing skills have lain fallow over the last 15 years.

Of course, there are also things that I feel like I “should” have done, such as travelled more widely, but I don’t really regret not having done because they’re not things I’m really into.

Age 40 is something of a landmark age: If you haven’t had kids yet and want to, you’re probably thinking seriously about getting moving on it. On the other hand, if you had kids in your early 20s, then they’re starting to head off to college around this time. 40 is an upper bound for even most world-class athletes to compete at the highest level, so what about the rest of us? Not to mention that in past centuries, many people were lucky even to make it this far. Those factors, combined with it being a round number which our monkey-brains like to treat as something special, make this birthday a little melancholy for me.

But I really shouldn’t be gloomy about it, because really things are pretty good. Turning 30 seems like it was a long time ago now, so I have lots of time ahead of me, too. And maybe I’ll get to some of that stuff over the next decade.

Plus, I managed to keep my birthday under wraps and it looks like I’ll escape being suddenly embarrassed by all my cow-orkers today, the way we embarrassed my friend James on his last birthday. Thank goodness!

Sure I wouldn’t mind being 30 again. But this ain’t bad.

Week Back

Well, that wraps up my first week back at work following the holiday break. It was actually pretty low-key: Trying to finish up the project I was working on before the break (nearly done!), and handling the steady stream of questions and small stuff that comes up.

Unfortunately I came down with another cold on Sunday night, and spent most of the week congested, and missed frisbee on Tuesday. Fortunately, it wasn’t much more than congestion, and it’s just about done. I don’t think I could have taken another two-week deal. Speaking of which, Debbi’s cold is lingering with a nagging cough, but it’s much better than it was when I last wrote about it, and we’re hoping it’ll go away entirely soon.

I spent the week alternating between gaming nights (Magic on Monday, board games on Wednesday) and watching TV or reading the book for our book group (Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh, one of my favorites). Tonight we’re watching a bunch of Battlestar Galactica season 4.1 which arrived on DVD today.

January always feels plenty busy even after the madness of the previous month’s holidays. Sometimes I wish it were quieter. Yet there’s always so much I want to do.