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.
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.
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.
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:
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?
Don't let your RPM go above 2000.
Neutrality is good. Shift to neutral where it makes sense (downhill, whenever you think you need to slow or stop).
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.
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.
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.
Asma and I arrived in SF Saturday morning. We missed our first flight but managed to get on the next one on standby.
This area rocks. We've had a lot of good food and done a lot of walking. We've also taken tons of pictures. The scenery and weather is amazing. The weather can be confusing, though.
Our first order of business after checking in to the hotel was to meet someone to see an apartment. We walked through a very sketchy area and thought we were going the wrong way, so we turned around only to realize we were going the right way. So we scrapped the apartment but managed to find Taqueria El Castillito. Amazing food. So that turned out to be a succesful outing.
Right now I'm on the Caltrain, on my way to Redwood City to meet Raymond. We're going to prep in our temporary office for a meeting with an angel investor. It's the second one for this guy. First time I'm ever participating in something like this. I'm nervous.
I also stood in front of Facebook's main office (wow!). Stanford is amazing. Berkeley has its pros and cons.
Commuting around here might actually be fun. All seats on Caltrain and BART have enough space to work on your laptop. And the scenery [again] is nice. Metro's has mayb 25% of their seats as being laptop friendly, and half those are handicap-preferred.
In conclusion, we feel good about the move for sure.
We left for Springfield on Friday morning. Saturday we watched Hasan graduate, and we ate a good amount. Sunday we came home on the most turbulent flight either of us have been on.
We snapped a lot of good pictures: I looked or acted goofy in most of them, and my stomach jutted out.
The pilot on Sunday had a perfect landing despite the plane still moving around from the wind. Pilots are awesome.
Mishti got even fatter, presumably from lack of running around.
If I keep not sleeping at a decent time and waking up early, I'll have a third encounter with a fever in…three to ten days? Just in time for either Springfield or San Francisco. Fun.
Even with all the work and late nights while doing TCC, I never got fevers. Just burn-out. Waking up early is really tough. Thankfully, Asma did shift her wake-up time from 5 to 6 a few weeks ago.
Thankfully, Asma is also quitting Census. Tomorrow is her last day. Too bad it didn't work out overall, because her co-workers are good people.
We went to Asma's former manager's wedding on Saturday, and gave her co-worker Matt and his girlfriend Heather a ride there. (Matt and Heather are pretty fun, btw.)
Overall, it was good. I caved and ate a pulled barbecue beef sandwich – wasn't worth it. The sauce and the texture was nice, but the meat itself didn't do much for me. So reset my vegetarianism to May 4th. I'm really aiming to just give up meat now, but if I'm just able to cut my consumption to hardly any, that's better than not cutting it down at all.
And what's with the electric slide and other retarded dances? These line dances… are they just for white folks? I don't get it.
walking
We walked around with Mona yesterday in-between Adams Morgan and Cleveland Park. Beautiful weather.
First, we were in the cheering section of the Avon breast cancer walk, waiting to intercept Sarah. She covered 40 miles in two days. Amazing.
Second, we went to 2 Amy's for their weekly donuts. Yum. We also went there for the first time Friday night. Possibly best pizza I've ever had. They're great.
Third, we were going to go to the zoo, but felt pretty exhausted after Chipotle. We'll go soon. I haven't been there ever (that I can remember); definitely not since I moved here.
camera
We're getting a Canon XTi! It's arriving today! I'm working from home today and keeping my ear open for the UPS guy person. We're ultra-excited about this. Haven't had good pictures in years. We missed out on Mishti's baby months, sigh. It's a really big purchase for us, especially with the move, but we've been waiting too long. We probably should've skipped out on a couple of things, including the Wii.
Hopefully we'll be okay with the move.
Nine Inch Nails
It's lame of me to say this, not knowing him personally, but I'm so proud of Trent. All this output from him, licensing his music for free distribution, being communicative with fans, working with Saul, and just general awesomeness has got me admiring him. I thought he was an amazing musician before, but now I'm really inspired by everything he's doing. Fighting off depression and addiction and being free of record labels has really helped him step out into the world.
His music isn't nearly as intricate as The Fragile. In fact, I used to think With Teeth was pretty bad because of that, and wasn't really sure if he'd ever be able to get his skills back. But the relative simplicity of all the songs nowadays (apparently because Rick Rubin told him he had to keep it simple) is definitely part of the reason he's ridiculously prolific now.
And it's not just prolific, but his songs are pretty good in general (his touch with production hasn't diminished: it'll still be better than 99% of anything that will ever come out probably). He still goes back to that style of his musically/lyrically, but he's also experimenting. And the songs aren't so depressing anymore. They're getting to be more thoughtful in a non-selfish way.
I'm even appreciating With Teeth more now. I knew the album had a lot to do with recovery, but the lyrics were pretty awful at many points (production-wise, it's pretty good). A few weeks ago, Asma and I spent a night watching nin videos on YouTube and watched ‘Only’, among other things: the song used to make us cringe. A little bit later we watched ‘Down In It’ and the lines
just then, a tiny little dot caught my eye, it was just about too small to see, but I watched it way too long, it was pulling me down
jumped out at us like it was the first time we'd ever heard them, because they were so similar to some lines from ‘Only’:
well the tiniest little dot caught my eye and it turned out to be a scab, and i had this funny feeling, like I just knew it's something bad
It all clicked at that point. ‘Only’ was a joke – he was poking fun at his old self. Knowing that, the sort of lameness that we thought it was went away and we started liking it on the whole. It wasn't a direct response to ‘Down In It’, but the video was like the antithesis of all other videos he's done: clean, sterile, fairly calm, and not in some weird place. The only chaotic thing was himself, except it was confined to this:
ANYWAY, what I'm getting at is that Trent gets us excited. He released an album entirely for free online, during the night. And we should be getting the ultra-mega-fantastic edition of Ghosts today. And maybe he'll release another album, probably while he's taking a dump during his tour.
So far, that's four albums released in three years. Two just within a span of a few weeks. Yay.
