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.
