modern technology

The place we lived before the house had a built-in microwave, so we gave mine away. It wasn't a nice microwave, it had the simplest possible controls (a single dial) for my aging grandmother's sake. It warmed things by adding energy to the water molecules inside them, and that plus a door that closes is all you really need out of a microwave.

We've been living all this time without one, for one reason and another, but we've finally gotten to the point of needing to have easy foods around for zombified adults to eat, especially with me and lunch, and while you can of course heat things up in the countertop oven, it requires 30 minutes of planning ahead, which is mostly what we're trying to avoid for the zombified adults.

I had gone without a microwave for a while before, in the Dark Apartment of 2007-2008. I was cooking for myself constantly, engaged in one of the heights of my aikido and Zen practices, and planning 30 minutes ahead for dinner wasn't a problem. Eventually Nana moved into a nursing home back east, and I kept the microwave and toaster oven.

Now it's been 3 years without one, and I would just like to say that holy shit they are amazing.

I eat Trader Joe's Pork Buns sometimes. You can do them on the stove, boiling water (but not too much water) for some amount of time, always check to see if they're done, and the whole thing takes 20 minutes. For frozen pork buns. It's pretty rare that I can start a task 20 minutes ahead of time. Now it's 2 minutes. Frozen Indian food, in like 7 minutes instead of 40.

Once you know how they work and what it's reasonable to use them for, they really are that awesome. I'd forgotten.

*mrowr*

We took the extraordinary step of going to look at cats yesterday. The therapist says we should get a cat: that the right cat would be a comfort to the entire household, since all 3 of us are in some high-energy emotional stuff. She's probably right.

We didn't have pets growing up. The reasons varied--"dogs are too messy," "parent X is allergic to cats" (which was a lie to cover "parent X doesn't want a cat")--but came down to parents already having 3 boys and being at the ends of their ropes and unwilling to take anything else on.

I later learned, at a sleepover at my friend Vinnie's house, that I was actually allergic to cats, starting with the itching in the nose and ears, leading to the runny nose, constant sneezing, watering eyes, and I think once I've been exposed for enough hours that it affected my breathing. I have re-tested it periodically, and I've never grown out of it, and ever since dating a woman with cats in 2004, I just keep little bottles of 24-hour Claritin everywhere. I don't know if Claritin keeps working if you take it every day for years, and while it is renowned for its lack of drug interactions, I am taking several other drugs right now.

(Anna used to be allergic, but we went to two shelters, and she was fine. My ears itched and I sneezed once.)

People actively work on treatments for cat allergy. It's hard to imagine there's enough allergic people who want cats to make a real market, but a strong allergy could be a serious thing for people who already have asthma (and friends or family with cats).

There's a desensitization routine, which takes about 100 individual shots. But! There's a company starting a Phase III trial (with actual humans, the last testing step before FDA approval) and this one is only 4 shots, each a month apart, and the effect claims to last at least 2 years.

We made friends with a very nice, introvert-yet-snuggly cat. We'll have to see.

new job continues

We are all really enjoying that I work from home. I quickly realized something I'd never bothered to examine before, which is that I really hate offices. I love talking to people; I hate the soul-sucking fluorescent lights, the noise, the constant interruption, the ugly furniture, and pretty much everything else. Because most of Engineering works remotely, the communication friction is very low: if we spend more than a couple minutes not making progress on HipChat, we switch over to Zoom immediately and figure it out on a video call.

In an office, when you've got your head down and completely absorbed in a programming task, inevitably someone comes up and says "I hope I'm not interrupting...". I usually say, "Too late!", which not everyone has a ready sense of humor about. Working remotely achieves the Holy Grail: it is more work to interrupt you than not.

When the boy gets home from school, there are snuggles! And I can go annoy him almost whenever I want. And I get to spend more time in Redwood City, which is one of my favorite places in the Bay Area (good thing, since I own a house here now). We got a killer Vietnamese restaurant some months back. What's not to love?

(Okay, the bank owns most of the house. I get to act like it's mine, which is pretty close.)

The job itself is quirky, in that my primary skillset is distributed Unix/Linux systems--think 500 computers all trying to coordinate and talk to each other--and I am working on a Windows client program. We'll have to see how it unfolds with my desire to get back into leadership. My co-workers are super nice, though, and it's a joy to be back working at a place with a more adult attitude.

And I have a really nice chair...

composting

One of many nice things about our house is that we have a proper compost bin. At our previous place, a very nice but yard-less rental condo, we would put our compost stuff into special plasticky bags for the city compost, which reduced our trash by a whole bunch, but was still pretty annoying. Thanks to my parents, though--who not only bought us the bin but assembled it while they were visiting--we have this magical thing where I take what turns out to be 50% of our trash, throw it casually into a bin, and then it smells like dirt.

(All of our parents, when visiting, seem energized to do house or yard projects for some reason. One year on my younger brother's farm, my father and older brother had the urge to build a very nice outdoor shower.)

I periodically (once a month, maybe) turn the compost over, and as much insect life as you can see on the top, there is so much more underneath! Once I went so far as to try and extract some dirt from the bottom (not really worth the trouble, at the moment), and I unsettled a vast quantity of the only beetles I ever see around here, these 1.5cm grooved black thingers with small heads. The compost heap is apparently where all the tiny ants live, and I'm thrilled they have a place to be that's not in the house. More recently, millipedes appeared.

Maybe I wouldn't find this so magical if I grew up in the country. Really substantial amounts of food trash turns into a really very small amount of dirt. And it never smells like rotting food, only like dirt.

Between the compost and recycling, we put out about a half a paper shopping bag of actual trash every week. Pretty cool.

back to work, slackers

We had a lovely holiday season here at the Snugglehaus. On Christmas Eve we went to St. Gregory's to watch a family we're friends with be in the Christmas pageant. (The 3-year old was the best sheep ever.) Of course, since it's St. Gregory's, the pageant is different every year, there's a script and choreography and varied kinds of singing, and of course they alternate years with the different versions of Jesus' birth (Luke's and Matthew's). Then we were off to Dessert Night elsewhere in the city, and then we were cooked.

On Christmas we got the boy back around noonish, and opened presents. We spread his larger presents over the twelve days leading up to Christmas, which encourages actually playing with them as their opened. I got various nice useful things; Anna got a boatload of ukulele accessories from her family Secret Santa, and I got her a ukulele. I had hoped the ukulele would be a surprise, but she had said she wanted one, I'm the resident string instrument expert, and I'm kind of predictable in that this is exactly the sort of situation where I will buy her a present.

J got a full set of Star Wars Family Car Decals, so now our two back doors have adorable banthas on them.

The boy has been challenging at times recently, which I think is manifesting the half-year pattern: half a year of turbulence as he struggles to make a developmental leap, followed by half a year of cruising as he flexes new skills and cognitive abilities. He's been reliably on that cycle, and it's been a very smooth 6 months overall, so I suppose we're due. Given the level of sturm und drang we can already get at age 9, the teenage years are looking a little daunting. He's a loving, compassionate little human, and we'll figure it out.

At just about any tech job, the holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Year's is largely a loss. Half the company goes on vacation, which makes it hard for the remaining half to accomplish much; you have long deploy blackouts, not wanting to risk production outages during the holidays, which are customer-visible and also short-staffed (see above re: vacations). Years ago I stopped taking the holidays off, first because holiday travel is miserable, but second because workplaces become largely indifferent to whether and how long I show up in the office during that time, so it's not like I'm Bob Cratchit, toiling away while everyone else relaxes into the holidays. (Larger companies will often just shut the office entirely for the two weeks of Christmas to New Year's; nicer ones will do so without requiring you to take vacation days for it.)

Work has been unfortunate, if educational in a character-building sense, and that's probably all I should say about it for now.

We've added yet a few more stuffed animals to the household. We already had so many! But there's a specific kind of stuffed beaver that's a family institution, and Anna couldn't resist a pair of badgers from Ikea. I think we need a moratorium.

And, as always, being married is the easy part. Nice work, if you can get it. =)

meet the neighbors

We hit a milestone in home ownership! Our first zoning hearing.

There's a duplex directly across the street which is obviously used for some kind of residential program, with 6-9 people or so always milling around, getting in a van and driving somewhere, smoking outside. When we moved in, we had a few people say, "That's a halfway house, you know," except that none of them had bothered to actually look into it and discover that it's the residence house for a private substance abuse rehab clinic. The patients live there, and the van takes them back and forth to the meetings downtown.

We thought to introduce ourselves, but when I walked over there, the staff member came out and we didn't have an encouraging conversation.

"This is private property."
"I know, I just bought the house across the street and wanted--"
"Yeah, this is private property."

Oookay then. Anna tried another time, and had the same conversation. She sent them a "Hi, we're your neighbors" email, and didn't get a response. Well, fair enough. Maybe there's a policy or something. We think rehab programs are important, and we understand they have to protect the patients.

Other neighbors' hushed voices notwithstanding, the rehab center isn't really any trouble, except that the residents' smoking/social area is right outside all our bedroom windows. They can come out as early as 6 AM, and are sometimes outside as late as midnight, and because they're humans, they're talking and sometimes laughing. It sounds like they're right outside our window, because they are: 65 feet with no obstructions.

We've been living with the noise, because there's not that many people and it's bearable. Then we got a notice about them applying for a "Use Permit modification" to let them have more patients.

More noise + They won't communicate with us = We have a disagreement

We showed up for the hearing, which was fascinating, and we met the treatment center people in almost the most awkward way imaginable, by getting up afterward and testifying why we think they shouldn't get their permit. The Executive Director and Manager were very gracious and concerned to meet us afterward. They were shocked that the patients were out that late, that we had been chased off the property, and that we hadn't been able to establish communication with them.

Today one of the Residence Supervisors stopped by, and he was also shocked at all those things. Even though there's staff awake 24/7 at the residence house. So...that's three layers of management, none of whom seem to have any clue that their patients are outside after lights-out. It doesn't seem a good omen.

At least they're nice, so far.

Except for the lady who chased us away.

house in progress

We closed on the house on Friday. Everyone's immediate question is "Do you have keys?", which inevitably wound up awkward because

1. The sale didn't get recorded until Monday (apparently why people don't close on Fridays).
2. I didn't get a key until Tuesday.
3. I didn't care that much.

Getting the key is a big symbolic thing, I guess, but boringly pragmatic as I so often am, I just think, "If the county says that I own the house, I don't need the key--I can pick or replace the locks." Plus I didn't need to get into it for anything.

The remodeling started yesterday, with taking out the doomed kitchen floor, which was covered with nice, absorbent particle board! Perfect for a room with lots of water splashing around.

As predicted, I'm learning a lot about houses in a big hurry. For example, seeing the dirt of the crawlspace because your kitchen floor is gone takes a little of the mystery out of how a house is put together.

Our handyman is named Carlos, and while his English is fine, he's glad I speak pretty good Spanish. Establishing communication is fascinating, and only about 60% successful: Spanish-speaking cultures have very different conversational styles, and I'm flying completely blind. Every conversation requires 10 minutes of repeating the same facts with different phrasing and expressions of agreement. I believe he is also finding this unsatisfying, because he knows where the conversation is supposed to go, and I have barely a clue, so I think I am being inefficient even by the standards of ordinary native Spanish. We'll muddle through, of course: we're both nice, competent people.

There are so many decisions to make, though. If it's this much work to manage two guys who are honest and capable, I can scarcely imagine how much worse it can get. Now I know why everyone complains.

The house smells so much better! Whatever held the musty odor stinking up the entire house has now been removed to the trash pile. It is really a lovely little house: the living room has giant windows, which someday will look out on greenery instead of the street. At nearly 1400 square feet, it's California-large; even the unfinished wood walls with children's writing on them have a nice vibe. The wood floors are beat to hell, but you can see the wood underneath and get a sense for how it will look when it's refinished.

This is the first house I ever walked into and actually saw the potential in. I'm glad I took that seriously.

settling in

Anna has been doing some massive unpacking and organizing. We need some furniture, like a bookcase or two, and something new to do with the television, but overall we're in pretty good shape to be ready for the coming of the Epic Couch, whenever that is. The spare room bears the brunt of the unpacked bins, but they have to live somewhere, and hopefully we can cull out a bunch of stuff.

We had some drama around getting Internet access, since the DSL tech showed up and basically went "WTF?" and left. There's a phone junction box outside on the next building, but there's also a junction in our front hall closet, and it appears AT&T naturally ran their circuit to the outside box, except it's the closet junction that connect to our internal wiring. I know, it bores me, too. At any rate, DSL Tech #2 came on Friday and ran a network cable from the outside junction box, around the building, in the ivy groundcover, through our window. It's very fast, and hopefully when AT&T comes to run a new circuit, they don't break everything.

The new place is amazing. We have a bedroom! With a door, that closes! Also, hardwood floors, granite countertops, gas stove, and a porch. It's a good change and we like it.

It's not been a restful weekend: my teacher gave dharma transmission (see next paragraph) to a student, yesterday was a one-day sitting to welcome a new teacher. It was a particularly rough schedule, so I was beat last night, and today was shopping and going to a celebration dinner. Nowhere near as much slacking as I'd like.

Dharma transmission is a Zen ceremony where a teacher gives full teaching authority to another teacher. This something to do cautiously, because for better or worse (Eido Shimano, Dennis Merzel), it can't be undone. My teacher especially feels that some people receive transmission too early in their lives and their practice, so right now it seems likely she'll only do it twice, and this was one.

There's a lot of romanticism around dharma transmission, usually making it out to be some magical anointing with pixie dust that lets you bestow enlightenment on people. The original story goes that the Buddha was speaking to an assembly, and held up a flower. Everyone was confused, except for Mahakashyapa, who smiled, and that connection between them was the first "mind-to-mind transmission". It's not something that happens, though. It's a recognition by the teacher that this other person sees the Dharma, Buddhist practice and teaching, the same way as the teacher; that the student will carry forward the essence of the teacher's teaching, with their own individual stamp. Certainly true in this case. So, yay!

transition

We moved, finally! Last month we punted on buying a house, and pretty much immediately compromised on our ideal place and took a 3-bedroom condo in the same neighborhood as that house. Because of our trip East, we only had about 2 weeks to pack, which I don't recommend.

It turns out we had about a 3-bedroom apartment's worth of stuff stored in our 1-bedroom with garage, and Anna is just very good at storing things. I feel justified in feeling as cramped as I did.

Speaking of bedrooms, we have one now! With a door that shuts! I was working in the bedroom today when J careened in to ask Anna a question (even though she was elsewhere). Anna made the best sign ever for our bedroom door:


It seems to work nicely.

We did have some adjustment to the new sounds. It's only a 5-unit complex, but various noises, like a guy slamming a front door at 2 AM on a Saturday, sound like they're right in our hallway. Partly it's poor construction, partly the other people are noisy, and partly it's just such a big place that we can't easily localize sounds the way we could before. At any rate, our first night here, we woke up adrenalized in home-defense mode because we thought someone was making loud noises inside the apartment. A couple hours later, exhaustion calmed me down enough to take a nap. Eesh.

It's a lovely place, though. Hardwood floors in the non-bedroom areas, trees outside the windows, a much nicer kitchen. A few weeks ago we ordered what I can only call an Epic Couch, plus an ottoman, currently being built in Los Angeles and arriving in a week or two. Incredibly cheap, as couches go.

Did I mention we have a bedroom?

All the excitement carries a cost, in stress and a bit of money. We're doing well, though.

J, of course, adjusts pretty smoothly to most changes, if you don't tell him first. He used to have these cheap, scratch Bob the Builder sheets, and when Anna would suggest he switch to some nice soft microfiber sheets, he'd say no, he loves his Bob the Builder sheets. I suggested she just go ahead and put the soft sheets on his bed, and of course he laid down and started rambling about how soft the new sheets are and how awful and scratchy his old Bob the Builder sheets were.

That's the human thing, isn't it? We have our idea of how things will go, and it's all imaginary crap until something actually happens.

Anyway. It's good to be home.

bedtime conversation

"Time for a snuggle?"

"I guess. Do we have to?"

"No... You can always lie there by yourself and listen to me cry."

This is how you know you found the right girl.

*heart*

because we needed another project

Actually it's because we need a place to live, and suitable rentals are rare and expensive, and house prices have fallen enough that this becomes reasonable:

The offer goes in today, then we'll have a few weeks to back out, giving us time to get inside it again (there are tenants right now). I'll write up details when I take interior pictures, but it's 1,280 square feet, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, nice little kitchen with granite counters and the kind of recessed sink that Anna loves because you can just wipe the counters cleanly into the sink. (I also like it, but she is a much bigger fan.) Fireplace, big living room, dining room, 2-car garage, cute little backyard with a lemon tree. The yard is dried-out, cracked clay, which means doing raised beds for gardening, but I think those look cooler anyway. And it's still walking distance to downtown and the train.

More details as it happens. It's a short sale, so there's still all sorts of things that can go wrong, and then the house needs to be tented for termites before we can move in, so there's a whole process left. Still, pretty exciting.

(We had breakfast with Anna's grandparents this morning, and Lois said, "It's good to own property." I was trying to be both honest and gracious, but the fact is that it really depends. We'd be paying 60% of what it sold for in June 2006; whoever that was, owning property didn't work out too well for them.)

home again

We had a nice visit up outside Seattle. The town feels like The Truman Show: most of it was built in the past 5-10 years. The streets full of identical 1900-sqft houses sit on 3,000-sqft lots, putting some perspective on our California "postage-stamp" 5,000-sqft lots.

You really notice the northern latitude there, with long days, even so close to the spring equinox. The long winter nights drive away a lot of people, including my uncle's wife. (Not to worry, my uncle went with her.)

It was a pretty good weekend. Anna's mother kept the crazy reasonably under control while we were there: not a sustainable thing for her over the long term, but I think we all appreciated the effort. Time with Grandma usually translates into J navigating life with greater difficulty, but again, it could have been worse.

I read the blog of Marco Arment, who created Instapaper, a marvelous tool made more unbelievably awesome by the iPad/iPhone app. He reviewed a quirky iPad game called Super Stickman Golf, and I figured for 99 cents it couldn't be that bad, and...wow. It's compelling. We all know the video game mechanic of shooting projectiles at an angle, with a certain amount of force, from the original 2D artillery games, to the far more sophisticated and artful Angry Birds. The graphics are simple, the music is annoying (and optional), but the gameplay is just cool. There's a few dozen courses, quirky golf ball options (I unlocked the Sticky Ball, which sticks to anything, thus allowing shots on vertical walls or overhangs), and a really pleasant interface. I'm not obsessed, but I do enjoy having something lightweight to do with my brain, and it's more engaging for me than most games.

J, on the other hand, is willing to do homework just to watch me play it. We've had a couple of snuggling periods where he just lies on me and gets very excited about whatever's going on. Sometimes when I say "Doh!", he'll be all reassuring and say "No, that's okay, you can just hit it up on the ledge!", which is charmingly unnecessary and very sweet.

I also walked in from work and got a smiling child charging at me to give me a hug. So that was pretty awesome, too. It's been a parental sort of weekend, in a good way.

Finally, I am proud and somewhat startled to discover that I have, in fact, scuffed the finish on my tungsten carbide ring. My best guess is that it's from diving into the sand playing beach volleyball at the company picnic a couple weeks ago. I guess it's an argument for continuing with the tungsten: imagine what I'd do to gold.

the gigantor apartment

We went and looked at this absolutely enormous apartment yesterday. Actually it's a condo. It's for sale, you're in luck! There's some photos there to give you a sense of scale, but nothing quite does it like this view from the front door:

It must be over 120 feet to the back wall of the master bedroom. Room-sized closets at every turn, a wet bar, enormous kitchen, at least 5 balconies. (Anna says 8. Which is totally at least 5. Plus there were 5, not 8. She's maddening.)

It was bewitching, really, to have all that space available. We were ready to take it. We could have people over! Everyone at once, if we wanted.

But the lease term would only be 12-24 months, because they want to try and sell it again. And it's $1000/month more than a small house down the street. Is it really worth $12,000 over the year to have all that space, just for a year, before we move back into a small space? Nope, not really. Properly managed, $12,000 could pay for the wedding and a very, very nice honeymoon. (You people eat hummus and Ritz crackers at the reception, we go to Venice for a week. Sounds like a plan.) We don't have enough furniture to make 1800 square feet feel reasonable. We don't want that much furniture.

Even more hilarious is to imagine buying that place, with the monthly cost pushing $4000/month. Ah, no.

So, nope. Gunning for the small house with the hideous kitchen and bathroom.

phase 3: profit!

(Underpants Gnomes reference.)

In a rather complete and abrupt lifestyle shift, I now go to a "job," in an "office." The first couple days have gone well: I'm still useless, but getting better. I made some minor changes to irrelevant things, often with supervision. Tomorrow the real fun starts, when we sit down with the head of the team I'll be working with for a couple months, and start to learn how the systems all work and tie together. My co-workers, not knowing my background, seem to think I will be cowed or dismayed by how bad the code is; eventually they'll get a better sense of what I've been doing with myself these past 6 years.

They're also training me to be a sysadmin, which is a bit outside my comfort zone--I'm not a sysadmin, I'm a software engineer. Isn't that interesting, though? "I'm a software engineer." I have this whole piece of identity involving the work that I do, and I have this internal rebellion against the fact that "Software Engineer" is not really my job here. It affects my interactions with other people in the company, especially the people who are SEs; and even on my team, my background is so different that I feel like a stranger in a foreign land. As Anna says, it's good that I've spent some time that way recently.

Anna has been visiting a friend up north for a couple of days, leaving me the apartment to myself. I'm enjoying the solitude: this apartment is a good size for just me. I've been listening to NPR again--I've gotten out of the habit, because while Anna can suck it up and deal, J hates it. In the quiet, I'm relaxing a bit, and noticing the sense of cramped-ness that I normally have to manage. I'm also dreaming of having my stuff unpacked and accessible, and a comfy place to sit and read, and generally starting to think I'd like us to find a bigger place before the summer.

I'm also not at all sure I'm up for the project of owning a house right now. My commute on the train is still 60 minutes, though I think I'm going to get a magnesium-frame kick-scooter that should shave off 15-20 minutes. My time is feeling crunched at the moment. Being alone in the house, I can get up, sit zazen, go for a run, and eat breakfast, all on my own schedule, and have plenty of time. With Anna and especially with J, I run on their schedule. I could do my own schedule, but then I would miss some snuggling and playing time with J, and that time is important to us, both individually and together. Then again, I'm cranky if I don't exercise, leaving me with less energy to put toward enjoying and being present for my time with Anna and J.

And I need to carve out time for aikido and Zen practice, but if I do those things for the purpose of deepening my relationship to the rest of the world, and they come at the expense of my relationships...well, you see the problem. Spiritual-yet-stupid parents can sometimes neglect their parenting in the pursuit of their spiritual path, a failure sometimes called the "Zen orphan" phenomenon. It's easy to do it wrong and think you're doing it right. (This is why it's important to have a teacher, who can tell you when your head's on sideways.)

The solitude is nice, but after 36 hours or so, I remember that living alone was only about 90-95% awesome, and we all live together to get that extra awesomeness. Soon the Barbarian Hordes return, and we'll all be home again.

home life: miscellaneous.

We've been nesting a bit here, trying to make our small space work better for us. Anna ordered some fold-up camping lounge chairs, to give us something comfy to sit on besides the bed, which is not actually that comfy for sitting. We're looking at getting rid of some pillows. I unpacked some of my more useful books.

I bought an expandable bamboo spice shelf for the cabinet, and it's hard to describe how awesome it is to have all the spices visible. We don't have room for any more, of course, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Our refill spices live in a paper grocery bag in the pantry, so I cataloged them in a Google Docs spreadsheet and gave her permission to edit it. Honestly, we only need so much dried cilantro at one time. Technology is neat.

(I admit, we have a vast number of spices. But we're good cooks, and food snobs [okay, I am], and dammit, freeze-dried shallots are awesome. And freeze-dried celery slices save us from buying celery, when we only ever use one stalk for the soup and the rest goes to waste. And the freeze-dried bell pepper...okay, I admit to just being lazy on that one.)

I'm still looking into buying a house. I can only bring myself to pay so much for one, but there are still a few candidates. The latest one I've thought about is a large house and lot across the street from the railroad tracks, which means it's probably doomed if high-speed rail (HSR) ever comes through. Of course, if I buy it at a discount, losing it to eminent domain in 10 years probably wouldn't be so bad. And since HSR still needs $10 billion in local funding, and cities and counties are figuring out how to fund their fire departments, it's actually not a bad bet to think that HSR won't come through the Peninsula at all. The catch is that the house might be unsellable while the uncertainty of HSR lingers. It might already be unsellable: it's spent more than a year on the market and the asking price has dropped 26%.

There's a wonderful lack of home stress. J can sometimes be a challenge, but Anna and I get on just fine. This is what our sad attempts at an argument look like:

"I'd like greens with dinner."

"Yeah, I should eat more greens. But I'm usually happy to just make them once or twice a day, instead of three times. I just don't always feel like cooking them, you know? I don't really want to cook them tonight."

"I wasn't asking you to cook them. I'll cook them."

"Funny, I had this whole conversation with you in my head where I got annoyed about cooking greens when I didn't want to, except I'm not actually annoyed, because that'd be silly, it was an imaginary conversation, and I don't have to cook greens."

"That...that's it? That's the best you can do for creating conflict?"

"Yeah, sorry."

Pathetic, isn't it? I'll leave it up to you to figure out who's who in that conversation (it's not obvious).

climatic dissonance

Facebook is rife with Californians apologizing to East Coast friends and relatives, but nonetheless feeling the need to point out that it was in the mid-70s today. In fact it was too warm for pants, so many of us switched to shorts for the day. Barbecues abound.

We had a lovely sangha morning, and then I had a blessed day of doing precisely jack shit. I read a book that had nothing to do with work. I did my first laundry since I got back. (Long story, I have a blog post in progress about that.) I dug out my small cloth bag for bringing books to the coffee shop, and a few books to put on the shelves in the living room. I made dinner for a slightly stressed girlfriend, and that was it.

I started a spreadsheet to set down and share my thoughts about the two Mountain View jobs. It's premature, since I don't have offers from either one, but I'll be surprised not to get them. The world is not full of Tools Engineers (Job #1), and even less full of Site Reliability Engineers (Job #2). As the founder/CTO said, "No one is an SRE right out of college," because of the breadth of knowledge involved, and then a lot of people just...aren't, by temperament or mindset. I am, at least by skillset and habit. It's sorely tempting, the siren song of complex systems interacting at high speed. The hassle and pressure of keeping a service online? Less tempting.

In fact, it seems like there's not a lot of good people anywhere:

James: yeah the job thing
James: see here's the thing
James: THERE ARE NO GOOD ENGINEERS LOOKING FOR WORK RIGHT NOW
James: you're like, the only one.
James: in the whole bay area.
Chris: heh.
Chris: yeah, it seems to be a problem.
James: I mean I admit that the work my company does may not attract as many applicants.
James: but we still have 3-5 coding tests per week.
James: and everyone fails them.
James: and deservedly so, given what I overhear them asking.

I hear the "talent shortage" story all over, and not just from employers, who are usually trying to justify either outsourcing overseas or an increase in H1-B work visas. I asked a recruiter about it, and he said it was mostly people complaining that they couldn't find engineers who were good at both server infrastructure and user-interface programming--not surprising, since those people are like unicorns. At no point in computing history have there been a meaningful number of people who were good at both those things, and no one has ever thought it a reasonable strategy to try and find one. So mostly I think the recruiter was an idiot.

It is true that Google and Facebook have taken their piles of money and perks and vacuumed up vast quantities of area tech people. We're also in the middle of a startup bubble, where stupid companies are once again getting too much money from venture capitalists, at excessive valuations. I give it another 6-12 months before something bad happens; some of my risk/reward calculus on my job offers involves finding a stable place where I won't have to change jobs for a few years.

The warm weather is supposed to continue, sadly (I dislike bright sunlight, and thus most of California's weather). Tomorrow afternoon is a housewarming barbecue, and on Monday I'm interviewing and lunching at Mountain View #2. Their office admin says:

"Should be a beautiful day, too (we usually eat on the balcony)."

Rough life.

jumble of thoughts

I had a phone screen today! It went poorly, but apparently that's not unusual with experienced candidates at that company. There are some...internal discussions happening there, so we'll see if I'm actually out or not.

I get occasional little flashes of anger when things aren't quite right. Anna has done a stellar job of clearing out space for me in the apartment, which is why the flashes are only occasional and little. On Friday I went to make challah for a party; cooking, and especially baking, is a really grounding thing for me. I went to get my measuring cups, and of course, they're not quite there: some in the dishwasher, some adventuring elsewhere in the kitchen. There were a couple of Anna's measuring cups, but of course I wanted my measuring cups. RAR!

But only for a second. Anna is very patient about helping me find things, and in reality most stuff is still near where I left it, because she merged our kitchen stuff, rather than box mine up. (Partly due to time, partly because I often have nice stuff.)

I've got clean clothes in my space in the closet, and I've brought up some books, so I'm feeling a lot more at home in the apartment. It's still too small for 2.5 people, but we're going to be here a few more months, so we'll make it work.

It's very strange to just...be here, with Anna. In the same space. Like, we leave, we go do stuff, and we get home, and there's the other person! Like magic. I have a bit of a clingy urge to always be in contact somehow, always involved or communicating or something, with her; but that's not helpful for either of us, not what we need or want. We rely on sharing space quietly, leaving each other alone for stretches. It's just a little harder when we've been apart for 9 months and we live in a tiny apartment.

I guess more generally, it's hard to relax and unwind. I saw the hippie chiropractor again today, and enough of my body released that I'm starting to get some perspective on what a tight, curled-up little ball I've been for 9 months. My body remembers feelings of being relaxed and open and flowing, but my mind forgot.

Periodically in books and essays I see someone quoting their grandmother as saying, "You can get used to anything, even a turd in your hat." We adjust our habits of mind to our circumstances, and with time we can lose track of what's possible. Feeling relaxed is something I've been carrying around only as an intellectual memory--"oh, I'll work back to that when I get home"--and now that I'm finally putting it back into practice, it's just as awesome as I told myself to remember it was.

productivity!

Pretty remarkable for a Sunday.

• Got family Christmas presents done.
• Ordered new innards for the home server (which should be here by Thursday, weirdly).
• Temporarily set the Squeezebox running off my laptop until the home server is alive again.
• Switched the wireless to WPA so it's actually secure now.
• Discovered that while an AT&T pre-paid chip will let an iPhone make phone calls, you're not supposed to do that, because if the iPhone hits the Internet at all, it will run your balance down right quick. Basically, there's no such thing as a no-data chip.
• Went grocery shopping.
• Made chicken simmered in tomato sauce that is at least the equal of anything I made before I left.
• Retrieved some geek books from the garage.

Slightly upsetting is that the current setup of the dryer vents, at least when combined with rain, leads to the garage being incredibly humid. The garage, which has all my books. Mostly stored in cardboard boxes. Some of which are now damp. So I have a project before we run the dryer again.

Mostly it's been a lovely day of lounging, reading, and watching Carnivàle, the latest entry in the collection of TV Shows That Died Too Young.

(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.

home.

I made it back without incident or delay, from Santiago through Miami to San Francisco, arriving yesterday morning.

The ride to the airport was a little weird. I was riding in a car with two tourists, looking out the window and wondering. "Did I just spend nine months in another country? That actually happened?". And beginning to realize that my response to coming back is vastly different than for all the people around me who have only been gone a week or two.

If you're coming from a Spanish-speaking country, Miami International is not exactly a shocking return to an Anglophone world, since everyone is still speaking Spanish (passengers and airport employees). In fact, at 5 AM, after customs, as I got off the inter-terminal light rail, I heard one employee tell a couple in Spanish that they could go get a cafecito, which is the diminutive of café "coffee," and Chileans are forever using the diminutive of everything (besides "coffee," I heard it used for "excuse me," "tea," "bread," "beer," "wine," "water," "towel," and "shower"). Curious, I went over to him.

"Hey, are you Chilean? I just heard you say cafecito."

"Well, it's kind of early, but there's a place over by gate 36 where you can get coffee."

"No, I just heard you say cafecito. Are you Chilean?"

"Yeah, there's one or two 24-7 places to get coffee here."

I thought, "Wow, you must be Chilean, you're not listening to me at all."

U.S. Customs, at least at that pre-dawn hour, really makes you feel at home. I always forget that they have separate lines for visitors and for U.S. residents, so I didn't have to compete for space with the 80 Québécois students and chaparones. The guy was maybe a little bored, but not unfriendly.

"What'd you go there for?"
"I was a volunteer English teacher for nine months."

"What's this $100 of stuff?" (I'd written $80 and then crossed it out.)

"Oh, I have a small bottle of liquor, a gourd for tea, a little carved wooden penguin..."

"Okay. Welcome back."

Anna left J with his dad for a few hours so she could come get me alone, which was a good choice. We went back to the apartment for a bit before she went and got the little chaos machine, and we had some nice family time before he went to bed.

Since then it's been dumping out my suitcases and pulling some useful things out of storage (not my cell phone yet, sadly). Anna and I are settling back in: we seem to still like each other, which is convenient because I have no income and nowhere else to live. I had a burrito for lunch yesterday, and today we went to Naomi Sushi and I had the multi-course omakase--fresh fish or no, sushi in Chile does not cut it.

In Trader Joe's this afternoon, I walked in and savored all the smells, of fruit and vegetables and other foods and the smell of mulled pear-cinnamon cider.

"It's a whole store, full of flavors! And that smell--it's spices! In the air!"

An old woman nearby chuckled.

"Sorry, I just spent nine months in Chile, where the food is really boring."

Suddenly another woman turned around.

"It is!"

She had just spent 3 days there with her husband and they were shocked by the blandness of the food, especially after being in Argentina, which, while it has its flaws, has pretty good food. She was glad to hear it wasn't just her.

Except for my urge to talk to restaurant staff in Spanish, what most strikes me about being home is that...it's really home. Except for the brutal months of non-rain, I love my life here. I already knew that I've chosen and constructed my life to be something I enjoy and that supports me and helps me learn, and that was one reason I went to Chile; now I see very clearly how much I've chosen, and chosen well. I love my girlfriend, my friends, my dojo, my apartment (technically our apartment, but we're working on the integration), my neighborhood, my town, my car. Stepping outside I get the smell of wet leaves, common enough in my homeland of the Northeast, but a precious treat here in California. Outside my second-story window is the giant morning-glory vine engulfing half of a very large tree; both dormant, waiting for April to bring the sun back. Down the street is the fantastic taqueria, and farther is Peet's and the indie coffee shop. The mist and clouds crash over the hills from the coast like giant gray waves.

Some of my habits of thought have changed, and I'm accustomed to some different things, and a few things are not as important as I thought. But this is where I belong.