(continued)

We had a lovely small welcome-home party tonight. I'll get around to seeing everyone, but it was good to start with a small group. I think for the next phase I'll try an outing to La Fiesta, since they do a guajillo-sour cream sauce that's on my list of things I've missed.

It was nice to see people, including my friends' daughter A, who, like J, is now huge and looking very grown-up at 7 years old. We cracked open a bottle of 1996 port they gave me a while back, and had delicious spicy food--Ann brought a Burmese curry, and William made a spicy Thai soup. I made some challah, which came out very well. I'm looking forward to buying a good-size stand mixer to help with baking: I'd like to make bigger batches, but I'm not really interested in mixing up 6 cups of flour by hand.

My hip is misaligned and bugging me badly enough to keep me off the mat. My Oakland chiropractor, Elizabeth, has shuttered her practice (personal reasons, not economic), and some research found me a guy in San Mateo in the same modality. It's called "bio-geometric integration," and on a gross level it deals with the fact that our bodies are tensegrity structures, where (for example) you push down on a shoulder and a hip moves. There's a whole deep system to it that I don't understand, involving energy connections and such, and lots of BGI practices are called things like "Awaken Chiropractic" and "Radiant Life Chiropractic" and such. It's a very California thing, and yet it's a very gentle way of physically adjusting the body, and the energy work isn't crap, either. I have no idea what Paul was doing, but eventually he snapped the air in front of my chest and there was a chunk of emotional release. I think it's a bit more apparent with him than with Elizabeth because I haven't had an adjustment in 9 months, and a lot of physical and emotional cruft accumulated during a long, stressful experience. That's true even as other stuff cleared up during that same experience; complicated, no?

I have 2 phone interviews next week! It feels very sudden, but then I'd like to start a job in January, so it's time. I'm actually surprised anyone's doing anything this close to Christmas. It sounds like tech hiring is binging again, so my timing is good for once, and I shouldn't have any trouble picking up something. At the very least I'm pretty sure a friend's company will hire me, since they need someone with precisely my skillset and experience; but they're in Santa Clara and not near the train, and while I enjoy writing code in Perl, I'd like to branch out into other languages.

This has been a child-enabled couple of days, so the re-entry is focused on family time, time with the boy both alone and with Anna, and finding ways for me to be in the house but not completely enveloped by the chaotic noisy kid-space. Life here continues to not feel strange, except as I'd expect from my poor sleeping. This is where I'm supposed to be.