in extremis.

In college I took a seminar on the Holocaust: I majored in computer science, but it was a liberal arts college which I'd chosen for its theater department, and its computer science department turned out be tiny. Senior year left me lots of credits for "Oh, That Looks Interesting." (I took Racquetball!)

The lecturer was a cantankerous guy in his 60s, with a loud speaking voice and a moderate New York City accent. I liked him, on balance, but I don't actually know if he had some kind of hidden soft side, nor could I tell if he was crotchety from studying the Holocaust, or if that's just how he was. He ranted at us a lot, repeatedly disappointed with the quality of our educations up to that point.

"And who was the central figure of Italian reunification?"
[120 undergraduates sit in stony silence, because who the hell studied Italian reunification?]
"Come on, you refugees from social studies class!" 
[*crickets*]
"Garibaldi!" 

(Did you know that? I didn't know that. I'd never heard of him.)

He really wanted us to learn—since the Holocaust, like, you know, matters—and he worked pretty hard at it.

One day he was talking about one of the Polish ghettos, about how they'd been reduced to eating horse meat, even though it's not kosher. He told us about the idea of pikuach nefesh, which he called "the saving of a life": circumstances where the value of human life outweighs the value of observing Jewish law. It was better that they should eat non-kosher meat than that they should starve.

The same concept arises in other cultural contexts, but I've always really liked that Judaism has a pithy term for it.

It's worth thinking about what you might be willing to do, to save a life.

blah blah work blah blah awesome blah

My brain is completely full of my job right now. I think that makes me boring at parties--I just got back from one and I'm pretty sure I was boring people--but holy crap, it's just fascinating. I like Fridays because I get to have my one-on-ones with most of my team, who are all incredibly awesome, smart, nice people. They're a joy to just sit down and listen to and talk with, and then I get to find out how their week was with all the stuff I didn't see, and if there's anything I should look into, and if there's something that needs to change, maybe I can't do it immediately but so far I've figured out how to work on it and do it eventually. I get to listen and respond, and especially to do it one person at a time, which is the only way I can do it and have it not be draining.

Basically, it's the end of the week and I get to talk to nice people, one at a time. And barring emergencies, most people have given up on completing anything for the week. It's a good transition to the weekend.

...where my brain is still filled with work. Anna points out that this the first tech job that has fully engaged me in the time we've been together, and I'd say it's the first such period since 2006 or so. And I'm good at it. The job fits me in a way no job has in a long time. It's not just me: I've been told as much by people around me. It's not that I should have been a tech lead before; more that this is a confluence of me and a team and a company and projects to produce a situation where I'm the right choice to do the thing.

At least, we all think and hope so. I've never actually done this before. First time for everything!

hiiiiii.

The work changes I've been alluding to are now official: I'm taking over the video transcoding team that I've been working closely with for the past many months. It's 4 people, highly visible to customers, the former tech lead is leaving the company entirely, I don't know anything about video transcoding, and I've never run a team before. No pressure.

The first few weeks have been...not a sustainable way of working. Two days last week I had four and a half hours straight of meetings, which is way, way over my limit, especially when a big chunk involves video encoding questions way out of my expertise. Monday was more meetings, but today I did carve out a few hours to write some code, and I plan to be pretty firm about getting that, because otherwise the job won't be any fun.

Everyone at work is very kind and congratulatory, but they don't know--and don't absorb very quickly--the enormity of the task I've taken on. I'm not sure I understand it, and I've spent months cataloging and organizing and developing a direction to go in. It's a big mess: I was all excited to get some re-architecture work done, but when we scheduled this 2-week "sprint", the amount of time for re-architecture work was about 1/2 of one person's time (which can easily be eaten up by customer or production issues). But, we have talented people and we work well together, and we've got the organization behind us, so...we'll get things to a better place. Slowly, so far.

surfacing!

Wednesday night I went to the local YMCA, which we joined a while back. It turns out that compared to an unlit, cold running route full of traffic lights, a treadmill is just fine.

I'm working a fair bit, trying to give work its due after a few months of non-work chaos. That's going well, although our system has been in meltdown for a few weeks. I feel like I should be able to fix it, but I actually can't, and it's hard to let go of that and go write code for the new and improved version, instead of trying to get the current version working. It's a terrible time for our team lead to be quitting: the boss thinks we can hire a replacement before the end of the year, which means I'll consider us lucky to find someone before March (he's often a little optimistic about hiring, and in general, hiring mostly stops during the holidays). My fellow SREs voiced my fears by pointing out that when the team lead leaves, one natural choice for at least an interim team lead would be the other senior engineer, which is...me. I hate meetings and I don't know anything about video, but hey, it could work.

Married life is going well in Week 5, its cold iron grip generously offset with snuggles and head-petting. Ain't nothing boring about it, that's for sure.

Hanukkah is coming! Have some cute Jewish boys singing excellent a cappella:


The best part for me is that the description says, "Feat. Big Bang Theory's Mayim Bialik!", when in fact those of us of a certain age remember that Mayim Bialik starred in her own TV series, Blossom. Like most of us, she's much hotter now at age 35 and not dressed in horrible early-90s clothing. Somewhere in there, she got a Ph.D. in neuroscience, which of course makes her even hotter.

No real rain yet! Someday, though.

it seems I'm awake

We're experiencing some household-wide Epic Sleep Failure here at the Snugglehaus. I often sleep erratically anyway, then Anna came down with this brutal cold and cough, and now I have the cough, though it seems not as bad as she did. (As a girlfriend told me years ago, in a delightful fake Russian accent: "Strong, like bull. Smart, like tractor.") Our sangha's retreat is this weekend, and if I feel like this, I won't be able to go. I'm normally fairly robust, though, so there's a good chance I'll be better. If not, I have a quiet weekend alone in the house, which isn't so bad.

I can do 15 push-ups! The last 5 hurt my upper incision, which is healed on the surface but will take some time to knit together underneath. It's hard for me to imagine how debilitating a traditional open surgery must be, where they make a huge incision in the abdominal wall. It's such a strange feeling to try and use a normally-reliable muscle and it's just...broken. A couple years ago I was throwing a football around with some kids at Thanksgiving, and after one particular throw my shoulder hurt and one of the muscles (the front part of the deltoid, from the diagrams) stopped working for a few months. I couldn't do push-ups, which meant I couldn't get up in aikido the way I was used to: where before I would put my hands down and push up, I learned to put my elbow down instead, and use my sturdy, jointless upper arm for support. I assume I tore the muscle or something: it got better very slowly, and it was at least 18 months before it was fully healed.

It turns out, though, there's no working around the need for my upper abdominal muscles.

J's excitement at programming in Scratch continues. Sometimes I show him stuff, sometimes he figures things out; he found a bunch of code examples I didn't know were there, and picking those apart seems to be a good way for him to learn. He digs through the icon library and makes varyingly elaborate stories about how the knight was mean and so he's being punished by J making him spin around and grow small. It's pretty adorable.

Not that I've been at work much this past month, but we're finally done with our Quality Initiative (which left me with a single vague assignment I wasn't interested in) and back to re-designing the transcoding system (which is really interesting and it's what I want to do). Now, of course, I have to design and build extremely high-quality components from scratch. This is something I can do, of course, but I feel like it's not necessarily something I have done, so there's a certain sense that I'm now playing with the pros and this is the time to bring my A-game. There's a strong leadership aspect, too: the team already has a leader, but they're looking to me for the vision of the re-design, and I need to communicate with and get everyone understanding and participating. There are several parts of the thing that I don't actually know how to build yet. (It's a big, complicated thing. The broad strokes are clear, many details are not.) I'm happy to be back onto that.

And apparently I'm getting married in three (3!) weeks. We have the expected last-minute RSVPs and cancellations, crabby or insane relatives, ordering cupcakes, writing checks, sorting out final details. Anna and I finally picked witnesses to stand up and sign paperwork and handle logistics the day of the event (because we shouldn't have to worry about stuff, even if we'll be able to, which I doubt): they're both named Ann, so I decided mine would be the Best Ann and Anna's would be the Ann of Honor.

recent events

I tried going for a run Friday!

I'm not trying that again for a while. The impact made stuff hurt. I do need some exercise, but something less jarring. I guess I can try swimming; sadly, the only things I really like doing are running and aikido, and I can't do either right now.

We had a weekend of doing roughly nothing, since Anna's not feeling well and I think I'm fending off whatever she's got. There are various wedding things to do, even for me, so losing the weekend doesn't feel stellar, but it'll be fine.

Speaking of: less than 4 weeks now! We're looking forward to it, and we'll be very glad when the marrying part is over with and we can continue on with being married. For our honeymoon we'll be getting sloppy drunk in all the highest-quality strip clubs of Portland.

Well, I will. I think Anna was planning to go look at art museums or a quilt convention or something. Whatever. Chick stuff.

I've had several opportunities to remove Anna's power of speech over the years: early on, by jokingly using the word "girlfriend"; then a couple of times by oblique reference to marriage; once we were engaged, I once made her seize up completely by referring to her as "Mrs. D---". (Behold my feeble attempt at blog anonymity.)

However, she has decided to escalate everything by changing her name. I'm not sure I can top that, at least without some planning. I'm sure I'll think of something.

It brings up some interesting stuff for me, though. It's this very unexpected jolt insisting that I'm all grown up now. Which I am, of course. I now have a matching set of dishes to prove it. I've fulfilled my life's ambition to own a butter dish. I thought I was as grown up as I could get!

Imagine my shock.

the state of things

We were gone over the weekend, but the Elephants upstairs have been, if not quiet, subwoofer-free in the evenings. We'll see if that continues through the weekend. Their landlord sent us the text of his email to them saying he wasn't renewing their lease and asking them to move out before it expires. It seems there have been various other complaints from other complex residents about them, including some concerns about a rotating cast of people living there. The landlord asked the Elephants about this, but somewhat incredibly, the leaseholders don't return his emails or phone calls. There's circumstantial evidence that they're fresh Stanford graduates, possibly MBAs (always a bad sign), and this may be their first experience living around non-students. Hopefully they learn from the experience, or just rent a house.

I'm still looking at the rental and housing markets occasionally, just for fun, and it's still insane. Houses are still too expensive, rentals are impossible to find. By the time house prices come down, getting a loan will likely be a dodgy thing, requiring a full 20% down payment on what will likely still be a $400,000 house. We may be here a little while, which is all right because wow, this is a nice place. Granite countertops, wood floors, spare bedroom, two bathrooms. And mostly unpacked, even.

I bought a new case for my home server. I'd intended to get a small one, but then I saw this guy's writeup of it, and it sounded so amazing that I went out and bought one. And it's amazing.

It has a pair of 200mm fans--that's 20cm, or 8". The big fans have white LEDs that make for a soothing glow in a dark room, as well as being really quiet and cooling the case really well. The sides have latches: no need to unscrew anything. The hard drives and optical drive slide in, with no screws. The only time I picked up a screwdriver was attached the motherboard to the case.

All the cables run along the back side of the motherboard, getting them completely out of the way of both the fans and any work you want to do in there. There are USB ports in front of the case, and all the fans plug into a built-in fan controller.

The whole thing is a bit of an extravagance, but I figure I'll keep it for many years, and it's such a pleasure to have well-designed things in the house.

I've been working a lot. We're doing this 6-week push to increase our code quality and testing, and it's really an epic project, but also puts me a bit adrift, just when I'd started digging into the Transcoding System re-architecture which is the thing I really care about. I have a nominal project, but I've quickly found more interesting things to do.

I've realized that my bosses' expectations of what I should do are in fact very vague and noncommittal, and what's best for everyone is my new realization that no one has much stake in my doing anything in particular, and I'm perfectly capable of picking important things to work on and just going and doing whatever I feel like. I'm the only one of my kind in the company, so there's no model to follow, not even another person to compare me to. Also, it's been impossible to hire anyone else like me, so I'm not going to get fired. I'm feeling less stressed overall, though still I'm always casting about to get my hooks in something cool, like a torpedo looking for a target.

[EDIT: In addition to few people being able to do my job, nobody else wants it.]

Today I discovered that with all my years of designing complex interacting backend services, what really impresses people is a webpage they can look at to see what's going on. Awesome. I hate webpages.

Apparently Anna and I are getting married in 7 weeks! We've decided to start writing the ceremony. She's been a complete bad-ass about organizing the whole thing. It feels like there's a lot to do, which there sort of is, but it's all manageable. Should be a good time. And then we go to Portland and fall asleep for a week.

changing things that weren't working

On Tuesday I decided to pull the offer on the house. Last week a comparable house--smaller, but 3-bedroom and a bigger lot--went on sale for 13% below our offer price. And a couple other houses are listed for 20-25% below. I was expecting a price drop, but not that steep, and I'd hoped it would at least come over a period of years, instead of losing money right at the start. Given the amount of my savings going in (a 20% down payment around here is a ludicrous amount of money), I decided this was all a bad idea.

Because it was a short sale and the seller's bank took forever to do anything, we weren't even in escrow yet after more than 2 months, so I don't lose any money: the deposit check hasn't been cashed. (Or, if anyone tried to cash it, it bounced.) Backing out was just a matter of telling my realtor, who told the seller's agent.

Tuesday night we went to look at a pretty cool condo for rent, and once the owner confirms she has a rental place to move into (she's moving to another town so her daughter can use the better schools), we'll sign the lease on it.

I was also supposed to take the GRE this Saturday, but realized I wasn't going to be ready, so I pushed it out to September.

To recap, on Tuesday, I:

1. Avoided throwing my life savings into a bad investment.
2. Canceled an enormous standardized test I wasn't ready for.
3. Found a place to live where we'll have a bedroom! And a couch!

I feel much better.

oof so busy

No house yet. The sellers accepted the offer on June 6, but as you'd expect, we're still waiting on their bank (it's a short sale). Still looking around at other places, but there isn't anything, really: lenders are only dribbling out the foreclosures and short sales, to keep prices from cratering, and combined with the local tech boom, prices are only inching down.

I'm flying to Western New York State this weekend for my grandmother's memorial service. It will be nice to see everyone and be supportive however I can. I expect miserable weather, although on the bright side there seems to be some hope of thunderstorms.

I studied a little bit for the GRE! Have I taken practice tests yet? Nope! Do I need to? Yes! When will I do that? Dunno!

Work is going smoothly. It's pretty slow in the office. Also pretty warm. The Ops office completely lacked ventilation until last night: one of our guys sent email (possibly profanity-laden) to a few people explaining that he wasn't coming into the office until they fixed the AC like they've been promising to since before I started there. They installed a couple vents in our office, but it was a little hard to tell how well it worked because one of the AC units for the entire building broke, so it was generally a bit warm. Our floor-standing AC unit seemed to keep us in better shape than the rest of the office, though.

For reference, the guy who complained has a weather station on his desk, and it was 86F in the office, with no air movement, when I gave up and went home yesterday.

My toes seem to be doing well. Anna had the bright idea that my awesome kick scooter might have been the problem, and sadly I think she was right. But, I can run again. Or I would be able to, if I weren't drastically out of shape and my limbs didn't feel like lead. I'm working on it.

Perhaps in lieu of studying for the GRE, I've been reading a lot. I finished Dracula! It's really, really good. I'm not entirely clear on how deep it is in the "literary" sense, as opposed to just being exquisitely constructed storytelling. I'm going to read some background essays for help: there are various claims of themes involving Irish-ness (did you know Bram Stoker was Irish? I didn't, until a few weeks ago) or the power/danger of female sexuality, or whatever. Philistine that I am, I failed to notice any themes that persisted through the book, despite my years of education. But I often think any fiction more complicated than Steinbeck is wasted on me.

(Speaking of nice things being waste on me, I tasted a $300 bottle of red wine last week. It had the exact same metallic-dirt taste as reasonably-priced red wine, except this was worse because it was a Bordeaux, so it was kind of watery as well. Yum!)

I highly recommend Dracula, because it's probably not quite what you expect. Set aside your previous vampire-fiction experiences: I got to the end and thought "Wow, that would make a horrible movie." Plus it's just fun to read.

Sunday felt like my first Father's Day. J spent the day with his dad, but Anna took me out to dinner.

Anna refers to me as a "bonus parent," and J and I are growing closer with time spent together. So I get to do things like tell him how to dump the nasty cough medicine on the back of his tongue so he tastes it less, and he occasionally steals my shoes like he steals Anna's. We have the occasional history lesson: for example, if you're building a Lego base on the moon a thousand years ago, there were no horses because they were brought later by the Spanish.

This is nuts. When did I ever find time to watch TV?

housing thoughts

Back in 2005, I investigated buying a house. Specifically, I was filling out the offer paperwork for a townhouse, when my gut told me something wasn't right, and I went and did some more careful math, which told me that after the mortgage payment, I'd have about $1200 left each month, even at the lowball offer I'd planned on. And I also didn't really think it was worth the $475,000 they were offering.

To my unending glee, I was right. In 2005 it sold for $505,000, and then last year it sold for $299,000.

My favorite metric for a reasonable house purchase is the price-rent (P/R) ratio. It's not the most complete, but it's easy to calculate and it appeals to common sense; it also points to whether buying a rental property is a good investment or not. (Rental income only covers half the mortgage payment? Probably a bad idea.) Take the price of the house and divide it by the cost of renting that same house for a year.

I started thinking about this again because of a couple of foreclosed duplexes under $400,000 that appeared on Redfin. When I was living by myself, renting was a no-brainer: this lovely 1-bedroom apartment is an extravagant $1400/month, which is maybe a $250,000 house, which doesn't exist around here (certainly not near the train station).

Once you start looking at 3-bedroom rentals near the train, though, you're looking at rents over $2200/month. The rule of thumb is that for a P/R under 15, it's better to buy, and over 20, it's better to rent. With my rent going up, the denominator in the price-rent ratio, the ratio goes down.

Sadly, the housing crash is coming slowly to this part of the Bay Area: it's a nice place to live, and there are far too many people with lots of money, especially since we're in yet another tech bubble. I have faith, though. I think houses in this neighborhood have about 15-20% to fall before being in line with the pre-bubble trend.

new job!

I got so excited about transcribing the interview with Jim that I forgot the mention that I'm employed, as of Monday the 28th! The winner is a company called Ooyala, which is only the third-worst name on my resume (after "Cadabra" and "Neomeo").

The job is called "Site Reliability Engineer" (SRE), for which Google is the most famous. At Google, there are two kinds of SREs. Sysadmin-SREs (SA-SRE) work more on the systems administration side of things: automating SA tasks, making them scale. Software Engineer SREs (SWE-SRE) have to understand things broad and deep, to debug and modify complex multiple-service architectures with many moving parts. They also communicate with regular software engineers (SWE), or as an SWE-SRE friend at Google says, "mostly consult with product teams to make sure 200 million people can use their crap at once. I think it's a pretty good deal actually ... regular SWEs have to write features and ship products, all an SWE-SRE has to do is make them faster and more scalable."

Basically, most software engineers, even those of considerable skill and talent, don't necessarily understand how their code contributes to the larger system, or how it interacts with real-life concerns like network bandwidth and disk I/O. I'm unusual that way, and I gravitate toward that responsibility anyway, but I can never put all my energy into it because something else has always been my primary responsibility. (Less true at my last job, broken as the place was.) So this will be the first time that "chasing down problems and fixing stuff" will actually be my job description.

I originally wanted to apply for a regular SWE position, but they worked pretty hard (I pressed them) to convince me this was a good role for me, and it seemed reasonable and fun, so I decided to go for it. They mostly program in Ruby, which is my new favorite language, with a couple other languages tossed in. My boss, who seems to grin from ear to ear as a matter of course, was clearly extra-ecstatic when I ran into him on the way out from signing the offer. He said he already has a task picked out for me, once I'm settled. I asked what it was, and it does look pretty exciting: a central job queue that is performing poorly and mysteriously in numerous ways.

The company I'm not working for, MV-1, kind of...I think "panicked" is not too strong a word. I had a rant all written up, but having gotten it out of my system, it's not that important. I think they were a little confused and it didn't bring out the best in them as a team.

It is interesting that MV-1 kept talking about what an opportunity I was passing up. That's true, it was a good opportunity (though I'm not sure now what opportunity it was). Ooyala is also a good opportunity, and I would necessarily be passing up one or the other, and never without a certain amount of regret or wondering or second-guessing.

And yet, I'm really, really excited to start working.

Did I mention I'm excited to start work? I'm excited to start work, stuff that's new and hard and yet right up my alley. And I get to commute on the train! And work with technology that interests me!

I'm also setting up my grad school application. And I can't stop thinking about how reasonable the mortgage payment would be on those duplexes just south of downtown. And I'll be getting a sailing certification so we can follow through on the promise to bring J sailing.

This might be a busier year than originally planned.

so very, very cranky

I didn't get the Palo Alto job, which sucks five ways from Sunday. The team manager is also bummed, so it'll be interesting to see if I can find out what happened: maybe I didn't pass the founders' cultural filter.

I'm especially cranky because, as I suspected, I really wanted to work there. Hip company, great environment, cool people, interesting work, across the street from the Caltrain station, giving a 25-minute commute on public transit.

It'll pass.

In the meantime, I have to continue to be present and engaged:

• I had a phone call today for the Santa Clara company.
• In Mountain View I have a 3-hour interview tomorrow...
• ...and another hour on Friday, for the guy who works from home on Thursdays.
• Monday is 5 hours in San Francisco.
• Tuesday is 6 hours in Santa Clara.
• There's probably an opportunity with a friend's tiny company in San Francisco, which is really tempting, but they don't actually have an office yet and it could easily end up in an untenable location.

For the past couple of years my life has been a bunch of huge changes either in-progress or in-waiting: planning to go to Chile, getting unexpectedly laid off, waiting to go to Chile, coming home. Now I need to find a job, and then we'll need to move into a bigger place. I'd hoped that this week I might finally get one thing settled, and in a pretty optimal way.

Not yet, apparently.

I don't want to overstate things. It sucks, and I'm angry and disappointed and annoyed. Today I also got to catch up with a couple of good friends, and have some nice time with Anna and J. In a few weeks we're visiting my family back East. I'm not angry about those things. Just...RAR, with the job nonsense.

daily life

I live with Steve, another WorldTeach volunteer, in Valparaíso, Chile. We live on Cerro ("hill") Rocuant, in Barrio ("neighborhood") O'Higgins. (Bernardo O'Higgins is the great hero of Chilean independence.)

Our "host parents" are Oscar, the sub-director of my school, and Ximena, a Spanish teacher there. They're educated and urbane and not terribly traditional in most ways, so we don't experience most of the stuff we learned about as possibilities in a Chilean family: overprotectiveness or lack of privacy. We call them "Oscar" and "Ximena" instead of "Mom" and "Dad" (as many of our colleagues do with their families) because that's more of the relationship we have.

Aurora is Ximena's mother, lives here and helps with keeping house. I assume she goes out and plays poker or something when we're not looking, she's pretty active.

Ignacio is Oscar's son, age 13, who lives with us full-time. He's pretty quiet and plays a lot of video games, but has relaxed around us more over time.

Jaime is Ximena's older son, a very tall and athletic 17, who comes for weekends or half-weeks.

Álvaro is Ximena's younger son, age 11, quirky and charming. He loves to say "Hello, Chris,"and I think that's the only English he knows.

Three very odd dogs: El Duque, La Princesa, and La Chiquitita. Like everyone else's dogs, they're there to bark at people who walk past the house. They don't like dry food, so Oscar actually "cooks" something for them every night, which is vegetable trimmings and human-food leftovers and wheat flour and I don't know what else, simmered. Sometimes it smells good. Sometimes it looks and smells like that soup made out of human body parts in James Earl Jones's evil serpent temple in Conan the Barbarian.

We're down to three cats (they found a home for a kitten): La Sacha, Comepoco ("eats little," seemingly the parent), and Comenunca ("eats never," the kitten). They're all outside cats, but would very much like to be inside cats, so they find their way in through slightly open windows, or they lie in wait by the front door and run past on their way in. I'm allergic and so is Jaime, so they're not allowed in, but they're incredibly friendly, and they understand that once inside, they will be removed. They always let themselves be evicted, with no scratching or struggle, just a stream of resigned, reluctant meows.

In the mornings we have breakfast, which is tea or coffee, and bread. Steve and I usually eat at the dining room table, because that's where they put out stuff for us, and I guess it's expected; I'm not really sure what's up with that. Dinner happens at random times between 7 and 8:30 PM, and that is also usually just me and Steve, at the dining room table. Oscar and Ximena eat in the kitchen as part of their couples-chatting time, and Ignacio eats in the kitchen, in front of the computer, at the dining room table--who knows. Occasionally Oscar and Ximena join us at the dining room table, especially for lunches on weekends, which seem to be the family times. I think this is probably representative of an educated, two-working-parent blended family in Chile.

I have very few classes right now, which I'll try to remedy now that I've kind of got my bearings a bit. I have time for 40 minutes of morning zazen every day except Wednesday, when I have class at 8ish and I go down the hill with the family at 7:15. Right now I have Thursdays free, which is pretty great. Thursdays or weekends, I go eat something nice, and have some espresso, and read Don Quixote or write blog entries, run errands.

At different times I miss Anna and J and aikido and my sangha and good coffee, but it's a life. I like it.

misc.

The laundry people in Santiago matched up several of my socks with red lettering with socks with black lettering. HOW CAN THESE PEOPLE LIVE LIKE THIS?

Yesterday I finally figured out the calafón, the on-demand hot water heater, so I've had a couple of not-frigid showers. Despite all my past experiences, I think the true glory of a not-freezing shower escaped me until I took a couple of cold showers on 50-degree mornings in an unheated, poorly-insulated house full of tile floors, and walking semi-wet into a bedroom where the window has a big gap to the outside. (Not big enough to admit either of the two kittens who very much like coming inside, but plenty big for a draft. Trust me, it's on my list of things to fix, before it gets really cold.)

Mike from the Ministry finally explained why there's no central heating here, and why everyone's focused on how much hot water you use (I haven't seen this from my family here and I don't expect it, but by all accounts it's common): natural gas is really expensive. And it's really expensive because Chile doesn't have any. Neighboring countries like Peru, Bolivia and Argentina all have natural gas, but they're kind of cranky at Chile, so Chile imports natural gas from someplace far like Russia or Australia.

I'm constantly amazed how much Chile reminds me of Mexico. Somehow, even though the culture is different, the aesthetics are almost the same: homemade houses, stores with the names painted directly on the buildings, similar fonts used on the micro signs. Thousands of street dogs, although the Chilean dogs are well-fed. Where dogs of Mexico seem to have driven the cats into hidden exile on the upper levels of buildings, cats and dogs outside of Santiago (which seems cat-free) seem to have a relative truce. We have three strange but friendly dogs here at the house: La Princesa (the Princess), El Duque (the Duke), and La Chiquitita (the Little One). La Reina (the Queen) was apparently hit by a car. The dogs seem a lot like street dogs that Oscar has brought home and made part of his pack somehow.

There's a small rotation of outside cats, who would all love to be inside cats. Two kittens and one adult look to be clearly related, and one or two longer-haired cats come and go. At least one of the kittens loves to stick his paw through the gap in the kitchen windows, clawing at the wood to try and open it. The dogs bark at whatever people they're not introduced to by a known person, and occasionally they go into a frenzy at what I assume to be a cat they disapprove of. This often happens late at night; they also respond to the network of other yard dogs barking across the hills and valleys around us.

Like Mexico, there's an exuberance to the rhythms of daily life here, an appearance of impossible chaos that looks as though everything must be improvised. That's not entirely untrue, but the improvisation happens within the framework of a functioning society. Everyone has to get to work and home again, buy bread, cook dinner. It's just...different. And sometimes kind of insane.

recap

In May I decided to apply to teach English in Chile for most of 2010. I got laid off in June, about six months earlier than I'd planned to stop working. I've been reading an endless stream of books, tutoring kids at the library, cooking, shopping at farmer's markets, fixing my motorcycle so I can sell it, getting to know my girlfriend (no, she's staying here), and most recently, getting my aikido black belt.

Every now and again, I pop my head up from the mix of what I'm doing, and I think: "Oh yeah. At some point I'm spending nine months teaching English to kids in a foreign country. Forgot about that."

My life is inevitably full of stories, and I want to both document them and share with them as they happen. This way, hopefully, I won't forget them, and I won't have to dump them on everybody all at once when I get back.