Tag: San Diego

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.

Raised white pickup?

Bill1 Comment

Last night, I had a dream that I was driving one of those ridiculously high raised pickup trucks that had a ball hitch sticking out the back of it. We were in some parking lot way out in the country and I was doing a three point turn to get out of the parking lot. Then I somehow backed up and into a parked SUV that I didn’t see, my ball hitch smashing the rear window of the SUV.

The woman came out, rightly upset and so we did the whole insurance, take your information thing. Turns out it was Margaret Atwood (whom I had no idea what she looks like, nor what her ethnicity was prior to that Wikipedia lookup), and it turns out Margaret Atwood looks almost identical to Michelle Obama. I wonder what it is about your subconscious that just every once in a while looks around and says “Awh, fuck. Uhmmm… uhh… fuck it, you know what, just make her look like uhh…. Michelle Obama.” (also, raised white pickup truck? I know we’re moving back to SD, but, really subconscious? Do you really see that in our future?)

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.

Back in Berk

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Been back in Berkeley; back to waking up at 6:30. At least the days are getting longer, though. Still seeing beautiful sunrises, just coming into them a little later. Christmas was really nice, Clare and I got like 6 cookbooks for Christmas, which is pretty cool. I’ve been cooking a lot more lately, and really fun stuff, like Thai coconut soup and such.

It was nice being in San Diego again – it really felt like coming home for the first time in a while. It probably helps that we drove around a bit with the intention of looking at places we might like to live. It looks like we’ve decided we’d like to live somewhere in North Park or that area. That will be pretty sweet if it happens – we’d only be about 15 minutes from the beach. We went to La Jolla on our little excursion, and watched a guy on a boogie board zipping around the waves and Clare declared (teehee!) that was what I ought to be doing when we come back to SD, which sounds great to me. I think she’s going to actually buy me a boogie board for Christmas, lol. Caught a great sunrise with a few dozen random onlookers.

So what about Berkeley and the Bay Area? I’ll miss things about it. I’ll miss that I can (mostly) rely on public transportation. Riding BART has been very… interesting… at times, and at other times frustrating. But on the whole I appreciate it quite a bit. I’ll miss Halfmoon Bay and San Gregorio beach. I hope Clare and I can make at least one more day trip to San Gregorio before we leave. That beach has a very strong and personal connection for us. I love how it just goes on and on for miles, and on some days you won’t see another soul on it for half an hour. It’s not like any other beach I’ve been to. Magical things seem to happen there.

There’s a sort of hardy loneliness to it. The sand is fine, like good Southern California beach sand, but… crunchier. People build huts out of driftwood logs and branches. Shells, sea glass, driftwood are all scattered along the shore. Cliffs jut straight up and run along the coast for miles in either direction, dotted with caves. When the tide rises you’re physically separated from other parts of the beach. In some places, between the cliffs and the shoreline, the sand forms dunes and valleys where you can just disappear.