Tonight's weather might be the most perfect it's felt at night since we moved here. The wind is coming through in bursts at a cool 71° and the scent of chocolate chip cookies are filling the living room.
We still aren't settled in, but right now we're feeling pretty good.
Hello, November 5th.
Eight years of Bush and two years of primary bullshit later, we can actually take the next step tomorrow. It will be my first time voting in a national election despite being eligible for the past two.
So.
I hope things get better.
Good Old Games takes old classics and republishes them to work with modern hardware. I wanted to do that 
Too bad it's just for Windows.
There's still room for me. All I need is some time.
Comments on and promoting of search results? Damn.
It took me a few seconds to track down what didn't look right on the results pages. Funny how you can sense subtle changes as things imprint in your head over years.
Somehow one of my Wordpress files was overwritten, which caused the journal to die. I have no clue how that happened – I haven't touched the files in months. And now, without thinking, I didn't look to see what the modified file time was before I fixed it.
Ah well. Wordpress sucks. Not that it had anything to do with it, but still. Bikes are also a lot of fun. I've been missing out.
Elton died last Friday, September 19, at 12:45 pm.
I was on the phone with Josh from work when I heard the fence being rattled harder than I'd ever heard. I ran to the room and found Elton on his side, kicking violently. Then it stopped.
I hadn't cried so hard in years.
It was beyond unexpected. He always looked healthy, and he was always active and eating and drinking normally. He and Papaya were starting to get old, but in my head I thought they'd grow old together.
We took his body for a necropsy, but the vet we took him to didn't find anything conclusive. There was discharge around his nose, but she said she couldn't say whether that was a post-death thing. The most likely thing, apparently, was that he had an acute infection that took over.
The following night, Asma was sitting down with Papaya and noticed a cyst on her left cheek. We went to All Animals Emergency Hospital to get it checked out, fearing that Papaya might also have an infection. Dr. Van Horn (amazing person) didn't find anything conclusive, but Papaya seemed to be in good health. When he heard about Elton's nose discharge, though, his immediate reaction was that it didn't sound right, and that Elton probably had an upper respiratory infection.
If we had known, that could have been easy to cure. Mishti went through hell and came back healthy from one. Sigh.
At Dr. Van Horn's unofficial recommendation, we made an appointment with Dr. Dustin at Bay Area Bird Hospital and found that Papaya has an ear infection. Nothing major, but still significant. We also got two blood tests done, both of which cleared her from two common rabbit issues.
Two days later, after seeing some abnormal things with Mishti, we took her for an emergency visit and found out that she has a urinary tract infection.
On top of that, I came down with a bit of sickness, and Asma suffered from food poisoning (which is hopefully subsiding finally).
This has been a bad and exhausting week. I wish we had some vacation to look forward to. Being busy all the time is wearing extremely thin. I hope there's a clear sign soon, one way or the other, on if it's been worth it. I want to spend time with my family.
I still miss Elton. The end of Donnie Darko, of all things, made me cry. We lost a son. He was the sweetest little big guy. All our babies are the sweetest. I hope everyone gets healthy again soon.
Before I forgot, I wanted to mention that Asma and I saved a goose (err, at least we hope we saved it). We were running around Lake Merritt on Saturday night, and out of the corner of my eye I saw some weird animal movement. I stopped and went closer, and saw that there was a Canadian goose that moving around only with its wings, like its legs were broken.
We ran back home as fast as we could and after an hour figured out where we should probably take it. But it also meant we had to catch the goose, which turned out not to be hard – by the time we got back to it, she was worn out. We put her in a box, bundled her up with towels, and drove to Contra Costa Veterinary Emergency Hospital.
The staff there said that they'd turn her over to animal services in the end. I hope she makes it… when I called the next day to check, they said they still didn't know what the issue was. It was really sad to see that her friends were just a few yards away and that she was in pain and would probably die alone if we hadn't come along.
We also found out that removing birds from Lake Merritt is a misdemeanor. So we need to find the proper way to handle things next time we find a bird in distress in the off-hours.
Dedicated to all the tiny hearts of the world.
From Thursday morning at 8:40am CST to Friday morning at 10:00am PST, we drove. Drove, drove, drove. 1500 miles. The babies' situation was just becoming unbearable for us, so we powered through Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah so that we could set up the cages and give them their space again (and keep things hygienic and comfortable).
All the discomfort and tiredness was worth it. The babies are happy again, the apartment is more amazing and bigger than I remember (Asma was totally shocked; she didn't imagine it being the way it was even though she saw pictures), and we still had the entire day to do household things.
We're already feeling at home here, East Bay especially (at least around Oakland and north of it). I haven't seen much of the Bay area yet, but from what I have seen, East Bay is totally our thing. There's a good mix of people, interesting neighborhoods, tons of restaurants, and an overall alive feel. San Francisco is cool too, but East Bay really has a soul to it. Silicon Valley is pretty sterile and kind of lame, in comparison. I can't ever imagine us living there. Maybe that's a bad choice professionally for me, but maybe I need to change professions too. Hah.
DC is pretty lame now. I'd be surprised if we ever moved back. I'd be surprised if we moved out of the area. We'll see in a few years, or a few weeks, I guess.
For now, I'm loving it. It's in the 60s right now. And we live next to Chinatown. And we don't have to spend ages browsing through Yelp wondering if there's a place with good vegan options. Most places here seem to. I've been to a few great and cheap restaurants so far and they've all had yummy vegan things. You cannot just do that in DC; the restaurants there are all hit-or-miss, and not many good cheap eats in the first place. Sad.
We were dying last night. I've pulled all-nighters before, but this was the roughest of them because of all the physical activity it involved in the errands we ran in the afternoon. I couldn't make myself go into Trader Joe's (our last stop), so I feel asleep in the car. One guy knocked on the window to check if I was okay. I should've reclined the seat to make it obvious, instead of how it probably was: head back and ackward, mouth partially open.
Mona is visiting us for the week. She's flying in tonight. That'll be fun.
Decorating and furnishing the apartment is going to be a long process. We cannot buy shit anymore. Plus, the apartment is stylish. It'll look so pretty when we fill it out. Asma's our chief of interior design.
I have so, so much work to do. I might freak out in a few days.
Follow along at mobilemice.
But basically, we left at 7:00pm on Monday and, 48 hours later, we've covered 1330 miles.
The babies are miserable, the most being the chins. Penelope seems pretty good, though. Happy bird.
I do not like time. You don't have it, it goes by too fast, it goes by too slow. Maybe you even have too much of it?
It's almost midnight, August 10, as I write this. On August 11, if everything goes well, we'll be on our way to California. It'll be me, Asma, the five kiddies (three of which are now members of the Timothy Club), and essentials for the road and the first few days in the new apartment.
The apartment is surprisingly emptied. The past few days have been intensified purging of the apartment. We just mailed off eleven box (six through media mail). As for furniture, we sold some of it and my in-laws took the rest (along with a lot of our other junk). But all these stragglers lying around keep making me feel like there's still a lot more to do as far as packing.
We haven't really addressed the cleaning and painting issue, either, and we've got plans to hang out with the family and a couple of friends tomorrow. I really think we'll be leaving Tuesday, but Asma thinks we can take care of everything by tomorrow.
So it's finally here. We're only a couple of weeks off from the ‘end of July’ timeframe I mentioned back in April. I feel like the last few weeks have been focused more on getting prepared for the move than anything else. Outside of the apartment, for me, much of that also entailed winding things down at AARP, even though I'll still be working remote for the next three months (perhaps until the end of the year or beginning of next even). As much as I actually look forward to working remotely, I'm sadder than I thought I'd be at knowing I won't actually be seeing anyone for some time. And I haven't said proper good-byes to some people, nor will I be able to.
I'm so bad at posting that I didn't mention I was in the Bay in early July for a week. It still feels like foreign land. And I'm surprised at how much like home DC is now. And California is beautiful, but so is Maryland if you just drive out a few miles. It's more lush here, maybe that's the best way to describe it. The greens are richer. California has tinges of desert to it.
There's probably a ton of things we never took advantage of living here. But maybe we'll actually do more in DC when we visit.
The move will be good, though. Aside from being a friendlier place [in theory] for our lifestyle, the packing process has exposed all the useless junk we've accumulated over the past four years. It's disappointing when you start to tally the dollar value then and how much of a burden it is now to find a good way to get rid of it (short of throwing it away). With this fresh start, we're hoping to buy things we'd want to take with us on our next move.
Gotta get back to packing. I hope I don't exhaust myself too much before the trip. Our first stop will be at my parents' house.
Wish us luck! And hopefully nothing bad will happen during the drive, but I love you, my family and friends, and I apologize pre-mortem for not keeping in touch.
Flickr updates will be coming throughout the week, maybe?
This was a post that I started typing up through the iPhone on the 18th, when our power went out for the second time in a week. But while typing, Safari kept doing funny stuff with textboxes, so I couldn't actually finish my post at the time. And I clearly wasn't in a rush.
So yeah, I like my iPhone, even if Safari is glitchy. I don't understand why there's still a line after two and a half weeks, but that's life.
In other news, I'm sort of scared of moving. I'm also extremely stressed about stuff. And now there's a cat in our lives who has gone from being an outdoor, likes human scratches to indoor, can't live without humans. Does he move to Oakland with us? Can he truly be a fulltime indoor cat after more than a year outdoors? More on Kit Kat later.
Mishti is two years old! An official toddler? She's been toddling for a long time though, and will continue to toddler.
We love the meesh(es).
(Stuff's been happening. Will try to catch up this weekend.)
Just upgraded last night and didn't like the default theme. So it's taken me forever to explore Themes. I've been missing out.
Right now I'm liking Red Cats (green flavor) and GrApple Yummy (blue).
I hope the memory leak is fixed.
Running Eudora through Parallels the past year and a half has been annoying, to say the least. Much of it was that it was just so slow – I want to say it's because my mailboxes were stored on the Mac partition and not within Parallels, but I'm not really sure.
Eudora for Mac was not an option, unfortunately, because I had to convert the mailboxes, and I would lose some message markers (and statuses, I think). Converting the mailboxes was not successful, anyway.
So it's been a slow move to abandon a program that's been good to me the past decade (!), and with so much history saved, who would? But it had to happen. And I did it last night with the most logical choice: Mozilla Thunderbird.
It's taken a couple of hours all together since last night, but I'm back up with email in a native setting. I can finally keep Parallels shut when I don't need CQDE.
Thanks to the following software for making this transition possible:
PS – Happy Futon Day!
The good: with some minor adjustments to our driving style, Asma and I have squeezed 80–120 extra miles out of a full tank of gas. In the city.
The tricks?
There are other ways to save on gas consumption, but these two tips don't require anything more than altering some habits in the driver's seat. And at least for a Honda Accord that typically gets 25 MPG on the highway, the change is significant: 24.37 MPG in the city.
The bad: we went to a memorial service for a family friend's great aunt, and the food was not vegan-friendly. But we could not starve ourselves.
I think I'm starting to understand some fundamentals of life.
So I was really floored and excited when I saw that Facebook released their platform source code. As soon as I found out, I downloaded it and started going through all the code.
And I'm underwhelmed.
For a long time now I've been trying to envision how they did things, and when working on our own platform [‘ our own’ being VarLabs], I've been thinking, ‘Am I approaching this the right way? How is Facebook tackling this?’. And the answer is that I'm doing it far more elegantly and orderly, I think, than Facebook.
There are some interesting things for sure, but on the whole I'm a bit disappointed. So either I'm a delusional jackass for missing something amazing, or I'm as good as I think I am and just not having a chance to show off my skills.
Based on the code, I think Facebook's strength lies in how they mix together applications written in different languages, their MySQL scaling, and their consistent and pretty UI. Their coding and any clever queries, not so much. At least from what they've openly released.
Whatever the case, it's working well for them, so I'm just being a stickler for details. What they've done has inspired and guided how I'm approaching new projects. So good for them.
On the whole, I think I will be following a vegan diet for the rest of my life. It won't be easy, but I can't buy into the cruelty anymore. So this is a start.
I will try to find farms and farmers that are sane, and if I agree with their practices, I'll buy dairy and eggs. But there are certain outcomes that may not go away ever.
Still on the fence about honey.
I would not call myself a vegan; the label is like that of feminism. The overall ideals might be noble and positive, but in the end, they're labels. And those labels make for extremist thought. I want to call myself cruelty-free and fair, hopefully in every aspect of my life.
This isn't just about animals, after all.
At the same time, I can't understand people's sensitivity towards following a vegetarian/vegan diet. People are honestly offended when someone doesn't want to eat meat? Really? These people are either ignorant of how those animals were treated from birth to death, or they're just sick. (Or both.)
(And just to be clear, this isn't against meat-eaters in general.)
What happened to rationality and compassion? It's been missing for thousands of years, sure, but it can't be that hard to have.
Anyway, let's see how this all plays out. And move on to happier things.
Asma, Mona, and I went to Poplar Spring yesterday. I fell in love with a new birdie:
That's Arabelle. She's a guineahen. Someone let her go, or she escaped, and she was found on the streets of DC. Meh.
She's currently under partial isolation, but one of the co-owners, Terry, asked if Mona and I could take Arabelle outside and watch over her while she explores. I was happy she asked, given that it was only my first time at the farm and I was too caught up in taking pictures to do much real work.
Good times were had. I'm going to go every weekend for sure.
And horses take huge dumps.
To sum up the Bay: wow. California is a strange place. Oklahoma, Florida, Illinois, and DC are similar in a lot of ways, but Cali is just different. I might have an uneasy peace with that vibe, but it'll work for sure.
The investor meetings went well, but I'm not sure we're any closer to funding yet. The more I develop, the more nervous I get. E-commerce is not a thing to just throw together. Eek.
Josh is in China for two weeks, so I am sort of heading the CMS group until he returns. Hopefully it'll be uneventful and I won't be stuck doing tons and tons of work. Sigh.
Asma has started volunteering 4–5 times a week at Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary and will continue to do so until we move. I'd rather do that with my time. She's lucky. I'm going to volunteer their on Saturday though! I'll try to make it a weekly Saturday and/or Sunday thing, time permitting. Can't wait to meet the animals.
I love animals. But not Sheese.
