Category: Personal

Northern California is being hit by a serious of major storms, the first of which rolled in on Thursday night. Tens of thousands of people are without power – especially along the coast – and freeways and bridges have been shut down at times, in part thanks to fierce winds blowing over some semi trucks.

And us here in the south bay? It’s not been so bad, actually. Debbi went to work on Friday (I took the week off) and seemed to avoid the worst of the traffic snarls (which all seemed to be in the north bay), except for hitting one backup at the very end of her drive home. I was worried that our back yard might flood at times, but it turned out that the rain was just coming down slightly faster than it could be absorbed into the ground, but it never got any higher than when I first got concerned. It helps that we haven’t had much rain recently, so the ground is able to suck up a lot of water. Palo Alto’s Creek Monitor shows that the creeks are far from full, too.

It got windy enough to blow down some small branches (or large branches, in bbum’s case) and a sales sign at a nearby condo complex, but that’s about it. We had a couple of power outages Friday morning, the first before I got up, and the second while I was out and about, both of which I noticed only because clocks were flashing when I got back.

Really, the worst we’ve suffered is that our cable TV is out today. I called Comcast, got put on hold for 25 minutes, and gave up. If it persists, I’ll try again tomorrow. It’s a bit of a bummer to be missing the football playoffs, but you can’t have everything in a rainstorm.

And the rain didn’t stop me from being productive the last two days: I sold a whole bunch of CDs to Rasputin Music, and a box of books to BookBuyers. We took down and put away our Christmas lights from outside today, too. And of course I made my weekly comic book run. Tomorrow we might drop some stuff off in our storage unit.

It sounds like it’s going to keep raining through Wednesday or later, which probably means no frisbee on Monday. But if yesterday was the worst of it, then it should be okay.

Especially if our TV comes back on.

As we usually do, we spent last night at Mark and Yvette’s for their annual New Year’s Eve Drunken Scrabble Party. They’ve recently moved, so this was also a housewarming party for them, which meant house tours for the rest of us. They’re renting an interesting house whose first floor was built in the 1930s (or so), and a second floor was added in the 1980s. Since they’re on a hill, this means the house has a large number of staircases, including a staircase down from the second floor to the guest bedroom/office. It reminds me of some of the interesting organic architecture you sometimes find in New England homes. Anyway, they seem pretty happy with it, and they’re still trying to figure out where everything will go in any event.

Gaming was pretty successful for me (and fun too). We played two games of Apples to Apples and I won one. Then we played two games of Blokus and I won one (and came in second in the other; Debbi ended up using all of her tiles – a good feat – and won that one), and then I played a game of Scrabble with Mark, Subrata and Susan and won that one by 2 points over Susan. Debbi helped a little when I got stuck with all vowels and a blank since I’m not very familiar with the esoteric “Q” words, but I also managed to play “blitz” for the first word of the game, which was 52 points, so I was happy about that. I’m not a very good Scrabble player, compared to Mark and Subrata, at least.

Susan got in one of the best lines of the night, playing “queer” for a big score just after midnight, and observing “2008 has been a much better Scrabble year than 2007 so far!”

We drank plenty of champagne, but were pretty well dried out by the time we left (after 1 am) and made our way home through the relatively busy streets.

This morning we slept in, finally getting up after 10 am. I’ve become hooked on scone mixes from Iveta, so Debbi had some scones in the oven while I was brewing coffee and she was in the shower – when the power went out. It flickered briefly and then went out again, so I knew it wasn’t because of a circuit breaker tripping, and a call to a neighbor confirmed that. Happy New Year – now sit in the dark and cold! I have no idea what happened (I couldn’t find any info about outages on PG&E‘s web site, and their phone number just told me that they were aware of the outage, but not the cause), but the power came on a little under an hour later, which to be fair is a pretty good response time for a utility failure. So at least things are back to normal.

Now to figure out what we’ll be up to for the rest of the day. Plenty of time – it’s only 1 pm, right?

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and all that to you and yours. I hope if nothing else you’ve been doing the sorts of things that we’ve been doing today, which is to say, not a whole lot, and what we have done has been fun.

We got up a little early and opened presents. The big present was that I bought Debbi a MacBook, replacing the old Powerbook G4 she inherited from me when I bought my MacBook Pro a year ago. It’s been having battery problems, and of course it’s a heckuva lot slower, so this is a nice upgrade. Yes, I bought her the black one.

She bought me a couple of games I wanted (I hadn’t realized until recently that Mayfair Games has released two new variants of Empire Builder: Russian Rails and China Rails). She also bought me a giant stuffed turtle, as you can see here (the turtle is the one on the left).

Plus she bought me a small box of marzipan chocolates from See’s Candy – they’re among my favorites. Mmmmm.

After going by to take care of our friends’ cat Missy in the afternoon, we came home and made dinner. And boy-oh-boy did it turn out well. A 12-pound turkey which was cooked just about perfectly, plus stuffing, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, plus gravy. I roasted the turkey while Debbi made most of the rest (with a little help from me on assembling the materials) Everything came out on time (which might be a first for me cooking a turkey) and it was tremendously yummy, and we have plenty of leftovers, too.

We also talked to our families during the day, and otherwise relaxed and watched TV and surfed the net.

On top of that, last night we drove around to look at Christmas lights and saw quite a few good ones, including one cul-de-sac which put out those candles-in-bags (no, I have no idea what they’re called) all along the edge of the whole street, both sides. Very pretty! We smiled to see our own light display out front when we came home, too.

A very nice Christmas. How was yours?

I’m on vacation now. Somehow the weekend flew by so fast that it’s already Monday. Yet I’m not at work. Which is a good thing, since I can really use some downtime. We get this week through New Year’s off anyway, but I took the rest of next week off, too, so I have two full weeks at home. That’s right – we’re not going anywhere, just doing Christmas at home and hanging around.

As usual I have a lengthy list of things I’d like to do over the break, and I expect I’ll only do about half of it. Here’s what comes to mind off the top of my head, and in no particular order:

• Play poker. Going to the casino during a weekday is a good way to avoid the crowds.
• Assemble some Magic decks.
• Take care of our friends’ cats, which we’re doing through tomorrow.
• Hit some used bookstores.
• Clean up the study upstairs, especially the closet, which is full of disorganized crap. I’m hoping that Storables will have their annual closet sale after Christmas, in which case I might redo all the shelving in there, too.
• Related to that, prepare some comic books to sell on eBay, and just throw out (well, recycle) some others that I know won’t be sellable.
• Buy a new stereo receiver. Mine is over 18 years old and is showing signs of being on its last legs. I might also look for other consumer electronics, like a DVR.
• Write. I have some stories I want to work on which have been coming together in my mind. I ought to try to get a few pages of them written and see if I develop some momentum so I keep going.
• Draw. I’ve also ben getting the yen to do some sketching, so I might play around with different styles in my sketchbook.
• Cook. We plan to cook a turkey for Christmas, and I also plan to make meatloaf (mmm, bacon-wrapped meatloaf) and biscuits sometime.
• Go to lunch with Debbi some day when she’s at work and I’m not. (She has this week off, but not next week other than New Year’s.)
• Upgrade the desktop computer to Leopard.
• Find a new theme for this journal, as I’m getting tired of this one. I expect I’ll find a theme someone else has concocted and just make a few usability tweaks to it to work with my set-up. Since I don’t have a testbed install of WordPress, I’ll have to set one up, probably on a local computer, to play around with themes.
• Read. Our book discussion group is early next month, and the book is long, so I need to get cracking on it.
• Catch up on journal entries. I have several that are half-written which I haven’t posted yet. Including two from last month’s vacation!

Like I said, I probably won’t get through all of that. But it’s good to have a list, right?

I haven’t made much progress on it yet, though. But I did finish the crossword in this morning’s paper. Oh, and finished my Christmas shopping – that’s very important!

Our weekend hasn’t all been the glamour and excitement of steam-cleaning the carpets, although I did do the stairs today. No, instead last night we shlepped our way up to the city to go to AT&T Park (home of the Giants) for the Genentech holiday party, Genentech being Debbi’s employer.

We ended up leaving about 45 minutes later than usual, but we still got to the park 35 minutes early, which was even early enough to park at the optimal parking lot. We met up with a couple of Debbi’s friends, and in fact we were the first ones in line to get into the park.

It was a pretty neat party: They’d set up an ice-skating rink and a little sledding hill on the field, along with a large dance floor. They had caricature artists and photo stations around, lots of food, and beyond the outfield bleachers some fire pits set up to making s’mores.

(Click for larger image)

We indulged in several of these activities – with no lines since we’d gotten there so early – and especially enjoyed making s’mores. We also had a snowball fight when we got down to the field near the sledding hill. Plus, I got to enjoy some parts of the park that are usually covered in kids and have long lines when I go to a ballgame there. The cable car, for instance:

Around 9:30 there were fireworks!

I also astonished Debbi (and a myself a little, too) by running into someone I knew at the party – a woman who used to come to my book discussion group. Seems I know a lot of people out in this little Bay Area place!

This was a novel event, making good use of the park’s space for something pretty neat in the temperate climate. I was a little disappointed in the food, which often seemed on the cold side, but otherwise it was a fun time. And a lot less crowded than I’d expected – although some lines got long, there was plenty of elbow room and even places to sit.

And Debbi was happy because she got to hang out with friends, and see snow and fireworks. It helped make up for not going to Disneyland for Christmas this year.

After getting back from our vacation I made an appointment with the eye doctor, figuring this would be the last of my appointments for the year. I went in on Tuesday morning and everything checked out fine, so that was easy.

The “last of my appointments” part, not so much. Debbi had noticed a little puddle of oil underneath where I park my car in the garage, and I confirmed that I have a small oil leak. So I’m taking my car in to get it fixed. Hopefully it’s just a leaky seal. Actually I’m not so worried about what it will cost, I just want them to be able to find and fix it. It’s worth some money to have some certainty that my car is working right.

I also talked to a neighbor about the termite inspection we had recently, and it sounds like we do have sights of termites around the building in the complex. Not really a surprise, since termites are a fact of life in the valley, but it’s something the homeowners association will have to deal with early next year. Again, it’s not so much the expense that bothers me, as the annoyance; if our building needs to be tented (and I assume it will) then we’ll need to clear some things out of the house, and find somewhere for both us and the cats to stay for a couple of days while it’s taken care of. Maybe we can find a hotel which allows cats, or maybe we’ll have to board them. Unfortunately most of our friends who don’t have allergies already have pets.

Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I’m sure we can figure something out.

Meanwhile, we’re now in the holiday season, so I’m hoping after getting my car fixed I can focus on that and put other chores off until next year.

Fortunately, Jefferson seems to be recovered from his bowel problems of a couple of months ago. I’m still keeping an eye on him, but the symptoms seem to be nearly gone, and that’s a good thing.