Tag: Clare

Hi again.

BillLeave a comment

Well, welcome to 2011.

First order news:  Clare and I got engaged!  More details on that to come.  It’ll be in San Diego, and we’re currently looking into three different venues in: A winery in Julian, an organic lavender farm in Valley Center, and a beautiful park just outside of Ramona.  We’ve actually had a lot of fun thinking about different ideas for food, decorations, etc.  Date set for sometime tentatively in June 2012.  Waterhouse Lavender Rose.

Now then, back to the normal news.  So, we moved back to San Diego, and we’re currently living in Julian with Clare’s parents.  I haven’t found work, and have decided to go back to school, which brings me to another happy announcement: I’ve been accepted to Cal State San Marcos for the Fall of 2011.

This is pretty great.  It’s been almost a decade since I was able to make school a priority, and in the last semester and a half I’ve been doing just that and getting straight A’s.  I’ll be switching from a CompSci degree to an InfoSys degree, which I think is more my interest right now.  Less math, more business focus.  Time to focus on some Java development, I suppose.  That’s kind of cool, though, because Chris is getting into the idea of trying to get back into coding, too.  We’ll see how that goes, hopefully we can get on the same page and work on something together.

In somewhat related news, Clare and I have been tutoring my cousins Sam and Noah in Computers/Programming and Art respectively, so I’ve actually been enjoying working with Sam on that.

What have I been up to other than that… well, I’ve been watching with hope and amazement as the Arab world comes unglued.  Memories of the failed Iranian revolution keep coming back to me.  But so far, there’s been some measure of success in Egypt and in Tunisia.  Now that the international community is getting involved, we’ll see if Libya is next.

On an entirely different note, I’ve been having a lot of fun cooking lately, again.  I made a nice thin chocolate sauce recipe, pizza dough, cinnamon raisin muffin bread, cupcakes, and a very good blueberry tart the other day.  Then I found a recipe program called Krecipes and I’ve been putting my favorite recipes into it, since Google Wave (my current recipe keeper) is going away.  Krecipes uses a SQL database backend, which seems like overkill but opens up some interesting side-applications.  For example, I’ve been thinking it might be fun to put that database online and to write an Android recipe app which pulls from the database.  Then someday, when Android tablets are free in cereal boxes, I can have one in my kitchen for my recipes.

That’s about it for now.  I’ll leave you with these:

And this, seen from /., a long, long time ago.
Q: How do you identify a dyslexic, agnostic insomniac?
A: They lie awake at night, wondering whether there’s a dog.

Air

BillLeave a comment

The fog and the sky looked crazy the other day, I wished I had my camera with me. This winter’s rain has been amazing. People around here are starting to grumble, but I’m still in love with it. Let it keep coming for all of me. It really reminds me of the weather five years ago, the winter Clare and I got together. There was just crazy storm after crazy storm. It was such an amazing time… every time we’d go some place we’d see something beautiful. At the beach we watched loose sand blow gently over shoreline on a pitch black moonless night like the thinnest possible fog. On a drive down to the desert we saw millions and millions of butterflies migrating down Banner Grade. Walking around Julian when there was fog so thick you couldn’t see 10 feet in front of you. It just sort of made you feel alive and aware that you were surrounded by the world, and that there was magic in it… a beautiful way to start a relationship.

An old co-worker of mine from the Adult School, Michelle (not to be confused with Chelle from PetCo), wrote on her Facebook the other day about how her daughter had just lost her first tooth, and apparently hid the tooth for the tooth fairy so well that Michelle couldn’t find it to take and replace with money. She mentions how she crawled all over the room in the middle of the night with a flashlight and then finally says, “Why do we go to such lengths to deceive our children?”

I think thats the answer.

Listening to The Album Leaf, In A Safe Place, which seems appropriate.

And breathe

Bill4 Comments

V-day came and went.  Clare requested an extension on her end of it (something she’s making?), citing extenuating circumstances (broken down car, her dad in town bringing a replacement for said car, flu, etc).  That works out ok for me, too, as  I’ve got a day planned for us, but it requires a little leg work that I wasn’t quite prepared to undertake in my plague-racked state.  With that and the recent passing of my birthday, we’re all done with our Winter Rush.  Christmas, New Years/Anniversary, her birthday, Valentines day and my birthday… it can all be quite exhausting.  I think maybe when we get married it should be in August.

In other news, we’re mostly on track to be moving back down to San Diego in early summer.  It’s weird – it’s actually a little scary to be moving back in some ways.  Looking for a job is something I haven’t had to do in a while, and it’s something that will need to happen as soon as I get there.  And in a rough economy at that.  We’ll also have to find an apartment right away.  I’d like to be able to move the cats down the 5 and directly into their next home.  It’s all really complicated and it all kind of has to happen at once.  Ideally It would be best if we had an apartment and jobs lined up so we could move right in… but that would involve taking time off of work and spending it down in San Diego before we move.  Time off of work is money we could be making and saving for the rainy-day fund we’ll obviously need.

I think we’re both also a little worried about fitting in.  We’ve both been up here a few years now (Clare almost 6?).  Attitudes are different up here.  People (at least in Berkeley) are more open-minded about a lot of things (certainly not everyone or about everything though).  And it’s relatively easy to try new things.  Cultures are so much more easily accessible.  The first year I was up here, we went to San Francisco and took part in the Day of the Dead festival.  Last summer we went to an Iranian Pro-Democracy protest rally.  I’ve taken a few yoga classes and no one really bats an eye.  It is strange the things that people can be uptight about here, though.  It seems like more people are less accepting of say two people being in a long term relationship in their 20’s than you would see in San Diego.  Of course San Diego can be uptight (and/or ignorant) about different things.  It will be interesting to see how much it’s changed in the past few years.

I suppose I should probably go ahead and end this.  I have an A+ cert test to prepare for.  Which basically means I need to learn about hardware 20 years old like dot matrix printers and try to memorize tables of CPU pinouts from before the dot-com bubble burst.