Sheep Guarding Llama

It is always hard figuring out how to write the daily update when I am awake all night long.  My day started just after they had figured out that we could fly last night so we were just taking off from San Francisco airport (SFO) as it became today.

I had been watching the Argentinian film Corazon de Léon which is a bit of a crazy romantic comedy made all the weirder because it is a movie (pelicula, one of my few solid Spanish words) about a midget except instead of getting an actual midget to play the role they took an actor of average height (about one inch shorter than me) and filmed him separately from the other actors putting him on oversized furniture and whatnot.  The effect kind of works and kind of is just that odd uncanniness that makes you always uncomfortable.  His size relative to other people is not uniform, sometimes he is nearly the size of a normal person and sometimes he is ridiculously tiny.  And you can tell often that there are green screens, failed forced perspective or split screens with obvious lines right down the center of the movie.  Overall the movie was pretty good, cute and entertaining but definitely odd.  No doubt about that.  I liked that it was a South American film, always nice to see a movie set in an interesting and different locale.

We were in the air and had a very rough first half of the flight.  We were thrown all over the place for much of the flight.  It was possibly the roughest flight that I have ever had, at least in a large aircraft.  It was really something.

I wanted to try napping but just was not tired, especially with the crazy turbulence.  So I watched The Bourne Identity which I have not seen in quite a while.  Delta has a great selection of free movies on the flight.

There was time at the end of my flight so I watched a Brazilian film in Portuguese called Os Homens São de Marte… E é pra Lá que Eu Vou!  It was pretty good although I was starting to fall asleep for a bit of it so did not catch it all and did not see the very ending.

The plane got into Atlanta a few hours late, but I still had an hour to make it to the next leg of my trip.  So not a bad layover really.  I had no issue getting onto the next plane, the little plane going to White Plains.

I did not get so lucky as to have a row to myself on the second leg but I did have  the aisle which was nice as there was not enough head room against the window.  On this leg I just listened to my book on my iPod as there was nothing to watch.  This was only an hour and a half, not bad at all.

Once I got to White Plains I went inside and my girls were in the airport waiting for me!  I was so glad to see them.  They surprised me as I came around the corner at baggage claim.  I am so happy to be back home.

We had to wait for my luggage, but only for a minute or two.  It was the third one out on the carousel.

We drove back to Peekskill and went right to the downtown diner that Dominica has been wanting me to try out.  This is the same diner that we started using just recently but apparently it has since changed hands and is still a diner but is now a Guatemalan place.  Dominica and her parents had figured that out just recently.

The food was good but I was so tired.  We ate and then went back to the house.  Then it was right to bed for me.  I was so tired.  Completely exhausted.

It was probably two, maybe three at the latest, when I got into bed.  Liesl was already in bed waiting to snuggle.  I was asleep in no time.  Soon Luciana came up and climbed into bed with us too.

The three of us ended up sleeping for many hours.  It was dark, maybe as late as seven, when I got up.  Dominica had been packing more while we were napping.

Dominica and I spent the evening packing as much as we could until around eleven when we just had to call it a night in order to get some sleep so that we will be functional tomorrow.

After going to bed so early last night, I was up shortly after four this morning.  Probably not the best for having a good flight tonight as I am going to be past exhausted and long ready for bed even before I board my very first plane.  It is going to be a long, long day.  I do not get to New York until noon tomorrow with no chance to sleep between now and then unless some miracle happens and I am able to rest a little on the plane, but I do not expect that at all.

I tried staying in bed as long as I could but by five it was clear that I was not going to fall back asleep.  So I got up, did a little work and packed up the hotel room.  I headed out around eight thirty.

I checked out of the hotel and started my walk.  For the first time this week it was really raining.  Really, really raining.  There is a major storm hitting San Francisco today.  Not only did I have a nearly two mile walk in the rain, but a two mile walk while pulling my suitcase behind me and carrying both the laptop and the CPAP bags.  It was a very long feeling walk.

When I got to the office I was completely soaked.  Everyone was pretty shocked when I got to the office.  I’m told that in California, people just do not walk in the rain.  Apparently I am a tough New Yorker.

I spent a lot of the day in meetings.  Lots of “getting ready for me to go” kind of stuff.  This is my last day in the office until, most likely, late June.  So a lot of little things to wrap up.

This evening, as my last thing in the office, I gave the weekly demo presentation for our team!  So I got to get up in front of the entire company and give a quick technology talk.

After work I hung out for nearly an hour before actually leaving the office.  Then I walked almost exactly a mile from the office to the Mission and Sixteenth BART station.  It was raining pretty hard again and the wind was really whipping through.  It was so windy that at one point I actually got hit by a rock!

I got to the BART station and took the train, which was completely backed, to San Bruno where Sarah picked me up and delivered me up to her and Jeff’s house.

Jeff has been in pain for days with a killer headache that he cannot shake at all.  He has been in incredible pain.  I hung out there till around nine.  We got dinner in from Shari’s which Sarah ran down the street to pick up.  I got their pie shake this time, it is their signature thing.  And it was delicious, but I think that I would rather just have a normal pie normally.

Sarah dropped me at the airport and I went pretty quickly through security and was to my gate nice and early.  I just listened to my Audible book for a while until getting onto the plane.  My flight was delayed by thirty minutes since early in the day because of the weather. So instead of leaving at 10:55 PM we were scheduled to leave at 11:25 giving me extra time to just sit.  I did hit a bar and have one Blue Moon while waiting and had a nice conversation with a California college student named Matt who was at the packed bar next to me.

Once on the plane I started watching a movie while we were waiting.  I was really, really fortunate that on a completely full, not one seat left over, plane that I somehow was the only person in my entire three seat row!  The flight attendant even stopped and looked at me and I was like “I know, right?  It’s like winning the seating lotto!”  So I had lots of space to myself.

They came on the PA system pretty quickly and told us that the plane was not able to take off at wind speeds of greater than thirty miles per hour and we were currently sitting at forty two which meant that we were stuck.  We could, in theory, use different runways with different wind patterns except that they are all shorter and we were ten thousand pounds over weight to safely use those runways.

So we had to sit tight for a while and wait for the wind to die down, which it didn’t.  We sat for a long time.  We got regular announcements as to the status, but it was never good.  At one point the airport management came onto the plane after the pilots had left and explained the situation and explained that they were carefully watching connection times and would be in contact with Atlanta airport to work out options for people and were already removing people from the flight that had no means of making it to their connecting flights.  Luckily for me, for once, I have a really long layover in Atlanta so I can absorb at least four hours of delays in San Francisco and still make my connections there.  So I was not really worried yet.

We had pretty much accepted that we were going nowhere tonight and figured that we would all be heading to a hotel soon when suddenly the pilots dashed onto the plan, sealed the doors and we were off.  There was a lull in the wind and we were going to make it out during that window come hell or high water.  And we did.  We only had a few planes ahead of us on the runway and we took off as quickly as possible, only about two or three hours later than originally planned.  I was quite impressed that they pulled it off.

The take off was tough, I was nearly thrown from the aisle to the window from the swerving of the plane with the cross winds tossing it around.  Even once we were in the air the turbulence was something awful.  But we were underway and going to be in Atlanta in time for me to make it back home on my planned flights.  So even though there were major delays, it did not actually affect me in any way.  I just sat on my airplane (where I had three seats to myself and a movie to watch) instead of sitting in the airport later on.  Six of one….

It was a nice, new Boeing 737-900 plane with the nicer seats, really nice built in entertainment system, USB chargers and full electrical outlets.  I have been pretty happy with Delta over the last several flights that I have had with them.

Today is my next to last day in San Francisco.  I can’t believe that I have been here for two weeks already.  The time has actually passed by very quickly, although I really, really miss my family and cannot wait to be back home on Saturday afternoon.

Normal morning.  Up before six.  Spent some time in the hotel and then walked to the office on the early side leaving just after eight instead of at nine.  That got me to the office more than an hour before I needed to be there but made for a cooler walk and much less sunlight directly in my face.  The brightness of the nine o’clock walk, if there are no clouds, is a big frustrating as I walk directly into the sun on the way in.

At lunch today I got taken out for a full infrastructure team lunch which was fun.  We got Thai at a place that I have been walking past every evening on my way home and always look in wondering if I should stop in but had not yet.  It was a nice walk over there too, so my distance for the day is adding up quickly.

I had to leave the office early, just after three thirty, because this evening I am meeting with Loggly at their offices downtown.  I walked back to the hotel first and freshened up before heading out again.  The walk to their offices was another thirty minutes past the hotel, so a full hour on foot from the Change offices.  A pretty hefty walk.

I got the Loggly’s offices at a few minutes past five.  They got dinner for me and we had a really nice meeting for maybe two hours. It was very productive, I think.  They gave me a very cool goodies bag full of stuff for Dominica and the girls and the bag itself was really nice too.  I know that Dominica is going to love the shirt and the bag.

I walked back to the hotel and grabbed an evening snack.  I went to bed pretty early, maybe by nine.  I want to get lots of sleep and I need to get up on the early side tomorrow and get the hotel room all packed up.  I leave the hotel in the morning.

Overall today I walked 16,600 steps and 7.9 miles.

Today is Wednesday. Hard to believe that I have been out here in California for almost two weeks already.  This is, by far, the longest that I have ever been on the west coast.  I am pretty close already to having been here longer in this one single trip than I have been in all of my previous trips combined.  I was in California in 2001, 2012, 2013 and 2014, each time for two or three days and then three days in Seattle in 2014.  That is my total west coast time coming out to twelve days total!  So this twelve day trip will equal all of those.  This exactly doubles my time out there and more than doubles my time in California.  It is really weird to me, considering how little I had been to California over the course of my life, that I have been in California every year for the last four years.

I got up this morning around three and turned on the air conditioning.  It was warm enough that I was not able to keep sleeping!  That is something that I was not expecting.

Had another good day in the office.  It was cooler again this morning and the walk in was quite nice.

For lunch today I just took myself to What’s Up Dog again.  I love being able to get food from a hot dog stand that is vegetarian!  That’s just awesome.

After work we had a happy hour again up the street at Thee Parkside.  Had a good time there but did not stay too late, only till around seven.

I learned this evening from my cousin that I am related to, but not directly descended from, two notable Americans on my mother’s father’s line.  One is a “many” great uncle Abraham Oberholtzer (aka. Abraham Oberholt) famous for his rye whiskey being part of the Jim Beam family and sold, still today, as one of the most widely available rye whiskies in American under the name Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey.

The other, and much more famous, relative is my second cousin, five times removed Henry Clay Frick.  Frick, famously the most hated man in America, ran Carnegie Steel and was the founder of the Pennsylvania Railroad!

I put in a few hours working on Ruby stuff tonight.  Then at nine thirty I went across the street for the last time to get food from Custom Burger.  A salmon burger and mozzarella sticks.  Then I got into bed a few minutes after ten.  Being well rested is one of the primary benefits of being on the Pacific coast.  I played some Trivia Crack and then did my daily DuoLingo lessons before drifting off to sleep.  I put on the air conditioning again tonight, it is still a little warm for sleeping.

Tomorrow I have all of my meals scheduled all day.  Only one more full day in California now.

I read more of Bill Bryson’s “One Summer” throughout the day today.  I am really enjoying learning about all that happened in the summer of 1927.  Quite an interesting year.

I got up around seven today and put in some time working through my Trivia Crack backlog to make sure that I was not missing any of my games.  I am doing pretty well in Spanish now.  The amount that this is helping my reading comprehension is surprising.  I can read so much more and so much faster than a month ago.  And I have won well over one hundred games in Spanish now (and some in Catalan, French and Portuguese.)

Then I did my daily DuoLingo training to make sure that I am staying on track there.  I do 20XP which requires a minimum of two lessons per day.  I did that and ran down the battery on my phone and got it plugged in.  Then I took my shower to get ready for work.

My favorite set of tweezers, which I have had for probably more than a decade now, went missing last night.  I know exactly where they were and I am pretty sure that the housekeeping staff just threw them out without thinking.  I am very sad.  Both because I have no other tweezers with me but also because it takes me forever to find a pair that I really like and that pair was by far the best in recent years.  They will be missed for sure.

After my shower I was on the computer for a little bit and did not leave the hotel until after nine so I had to walk a little more briskly this morning.  I am not sure if I am adjusting to the temperatures or if it is getting dryer or something but I was not so hot when I got to the office today, which was great.  Maybe I am starting to get into shape!  But probably it is just better weather.

For lunch today I went to What’s Up Dog again and got the veggie sausages.  Very tasty.

I am scheduled to have dinner on Thursday evening with Loggly which is very cool.  Their offices are very close to my hotel.  One of the things that I love about being in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is that all of the companies that I work with or know of are based out here.  There is a huge value to having all of the talent in a single place.  You can easily run around meeting with and talking to just about everyone.  It is no wonder that companies are willing to pay to be located here, even though it is the most expensive city in the country.  You can really get a lot done.  I have been using Loggly for about a year so I am looking forward to getting to meet up with them and see where they are going now.

Left work a little before six and walked home.  I stopped at Custom Burger as usual.  I only have probably one more chance to eat there after today so no real reason to worry about looking for something else at this point.  Tonight is Tuesday.  There are only three days left here in San Francisco and tomorrow is the only night that I am free for dinner, although even then there is a happy hour after work so not very likely that I will want to get food separately from that.  And then Thursday night I am having dinner with the Loggly folks.  And on Friday, after work, it is straight to Jeff and Sarah’s house in San Bruno for me and I am sure that we will get dinner there at the diner by their house.  Then it is off to the plane to fly back to New York.  So my chances to go out to eat on my own are mostly over, at this point.

I came back to the hotel and ate my food while watching a telenovela in an attempt to improve my Spanish.  I was able to follow along a little bit and learned a few works in the process.

I did a little work on RubyMine tonight.  Worked on some Git.  Worked on my Spanish a little.  Talked to some people.  Did a little posting. But I was more or less tired and wanted to get off to bed on the early side, so that is what I did.  I was in bed by a quarter after ten.