Sheep Guarding Llama

I am slowly adjusting to the west cost and slept until around seven thirty today.  So I did not have several hours of just chilling in the hotel room to do before getting ready and walking to work.

The walk to work was cooler this morning and I was a little early so could walk a little slower to stay cooler as well.    On the way I hit the Cafe Moda again and got coffee (brewed, the traditional American type) and an egg and cheese on a croissant that was incredibly delectable.  I am sure that I will get another one of those tomorrow.  I’m not sure that I could resist not doing it.

Work was great today, and short.  I am not used to environments that knock off a bit early on Fridays.  In fact at Citi it was the latest day of the work week often going several hours longer than a normal day and at Bridgewater it wasn’t late but it wasn’t early either.  I know that most companies like to go home a little early on Friday but I am not used to it at all.  This is very cool.  Everyone was heading home at five!

I got to do my first “on my own” tickets today, which was great.  People were visibly excited that we were already productive and making a difference to workflows.  Makes me very happy to be productive so quickly.  In the past it has always taken weeks at least or months, more likely, to get new people up and running.  I only have two weeks here in the San Francisco office so any stalling constitutes a major loss of “in person” time.  I am anxious to be useful.

I walked back to the hotel and stopped at Custom Burger on the way.  I wanted things to be quick and easy.  I am ready for an early night tonight.  I got the mozzarella sticks tonight and wow were they ever good.  It has been many years, maybe over a decade, since I have had mozzarella sticks that were that good.

I Facetimed with the girls for a while tonight.  They were very excited to get to see me.  It has been a long week without them.  Dominica got the iPad set up sitting on the moulding in the girls’ room so it is like a little “talk to daddy” kiosk there on the wall.  Liesl and Luciana were able to sit in their bed and talk to me.  They are very excited that grandma and grandpa are coming to visit them tomorrow and bringing Truman on his first visit to our house.

It is hard to believe that my first week with Change in San Francisco is already over.  What an exciting week it has been.

I was back to getting to the office at ten today.  The walk, this morning, was very warm.  The sun was out and in my eyes the entire way to the office and I was sweating very hard long before I was even halfway there.  That was no pleasant.

I finally figured out where a cafe is en route to the office, right on seventh near the hotel which is very handy.  So I was able to stop in and grab a large coffee to bring with me on my walk.  Cafe Moda is very convenient for me.  I grabbed an apple Danish too.

Another awesome day at work.  Got to learn about the week’s successes at a meeting this morning’s meeting which was very cool to see ways in which we are improving the world or, most appropriately, helping to change the world.

Went out for lunch today at Market & Rye right behind the office.  I got a smoked deviled egg sandwich on lettuce which was really good, and moderately healthy.  More or less.  It was a great day to sit outside and eat along the sidewalk.  So nice being in California!

After work, around six, a bunch of people from the office went to the bar up the street for an after work happy hour.  This was nice as it gave me an opportunity to meet several new people and really hang out.  I had a really nice time; it was a lot of fun.  I hope that they do that next week as well since that is my last week being at the office here in San Francisco for the known future, although I would not be surprised if I did not come out here for a week during the summer, potentially.

I had two beers and a handful of tater tots.  Then I walked back to the hotel stopping at Custom Burger to get a salmon burger on my way back to make things easy.  I am over halfway through my Bill Bryson book now, as well.

I stayed up past midnight, very late for me out here in California.  On normal ten o’clock start tomorrow. I can’t believe that I am already up to the last day of my first week at my new job already.  This week and flown by.  Although I am looking forward to the weekend and a chance to really just relax and do pretty much nothing.  My plan is to visit Jeff, do some catching up on stuff in the hotel room and probably do some daylight walking around the city to see some more of San Francisco while I can.  I only have Saturday and Sunday to really see anything and I need to do laundry during that time too.  So my time is actually pretty limited.

Missing my girls but I will get lots and lots of time with them once I am back out east.

Today is day three at Change.org.  I was up a little later today, about a quarter until six.  And I need to be at the office around nine this morning rather than at ten like the last two days.  So my morning in the hotel was much shorter.  Almost two hours shorter than it has been.

I had another good walk to the office this morning.  I am really loving all of the time to be outside and walking.  I am averaging way over an hour every day that I am here.  That is a lot of time.  And that is really a minimum, like I did on Monday.

I left the hotel just after eight so I got to the office about eight thirty.  I had an hour long meeting first thing this morning and then had a pretty busy day, by far my busiest yet.

At lunch time I had my first time that I was left to my own devices for lunch since arriving in California.  It has been sponsored sushi the last two days.  I have been wanting to try out the little hot dog place around the corner: What’s Up Dog.  So around one I went out and got myself a vegetarian kielbasa and went for a walk of a few blocks, maybe six to eight total, while I ate.  Not a long walk but maybe as much as twenty minutes.  I listened to more of my Bill Bryson book while I walked.

The veggie dogs were very good.  I got one to start to see how it was and then did my walk.  When I returned I got another before going back up to the office.

This afternoon I learned that one of the engineers on my team at the office had just read one of my articles that I had written just a couple of weeks ago on “DevOps and Snowflakes.”  Not only had she read it but she recognized the title when we were talking about it at the office and when I showed her the two sites where it was hosted it was not the more common StorageCraft Blog that had had it but was, in fact, SMB IT Journal where she had read it!  Now that is really cool.  It is extremely rare that being in a company like this someone will have read your work before, let alone a recent paper written in just the last few weeks and that we would have figured out that she had done so.

I worked until after six thirty, I think the latest that I have been in the office so far.  Definitely the longest day since I came in over an hour earlier. Almost a ten hour day, actually.  Not quite, but pretty close.

The walk home was fine.  I know the route well by now.  I am almost exactly halfway through my Bill Bryson book at this point.

Before returning to the hotel I stopped at Custom Burger again and got a salmon burger as the one on Monday night was so awesome.  I took that back to my hotel room right across the street and ate there.

I decided on having just a quiet evening in the hotel to myself tonight.  I am a little soar from all of the walking that I did yesterday.  No blisters or anything, just would like a light day today so that I am ready to walk more tomorrow.

At the end of the day, my walking for the day was 11,700 steps and 5.6 miles.

Today I bought a copy of JetBrain’s RubyMine for myself.  I have been wanting to get a copy for a while and now that I am going to be doing Ruby programming all of the time it seemed like a really good time to have it.

I did a little work tonight but mostly had a slow, quiet night to myself.

Stayed up fairly late last night playing with the new Macbook Pro and getting SGL updates out the door.  Write about five thousand words on SGL beyond the tons and tons of posts to ML and SW that I did.  Very busy evening of writing.  So it was pushing one in the morning when I got off to bed.  I also found that, by accident, the SGL update from January 20th had not been posted, even though it had been written, so I got that posted for anyone who had not seen it but did not know to look back and find it.

Today is day two at Change.org!

My internal clock did not allow me to sleep in past five twenty.  So I was up very early once again.  Now that I have a laptop, though, that meant that I was able to get up and start posting online and keeping up with communications instead of just being in the hotel with nothing to do.  So much better today than yesterday.

I did some posting and catching up with things and then showered and hung out in the hotel room until eight thirty.  Then I walked the roughly two miles to the office and realized that I did not have the building code on my phone like I thought that I did and was unable to get into the office.  I was still cooling down from my walk, listening to my book on exploring small town America, when my team lead walked by and let me in.  So that worked out pretty well.  And while I had the code I did not know how to use it so I had to be shown that anyway.  Worked out just fine.

Another good morning at the new job.  Still very excited.  Later in the morning I and the other new person who started the same day as me were given first an office tour so that we would know where everything is in the office and then a tour around the neighborhood.  There is a lot of good food in the area which is nice.  I will have very little change to eat around here so it may not matter at all, but I might get a chance or two.  There is a hot dog place near the office called “What Up Dog” and they offer veggie sausages which sound awesome.  I probably got another mile under my belt from walking around the area.  I am racking up the foot miles on this trip.

For lunch we went out for sushi again.  It was very good.

The afternoon went well and we (Chris and I) left the office at five thirty.  I have not seen the city, really, and she has been telling me about the Mission District so she gave me a tour.  We walked down 16th to the west until we got to Mission and then turned south and walked to 24th.  Rather a hefty walk.  There we hit La Corneta which is, I am told, a Mission District landmark and the best place to get authentic Mexican food in the area.  I got two Super Fish Tacos which were amazing.  Salmon and refried beans.  They were so mounded up that there was no way to even attempt eating them like a taco.  It was far more like a salad.  So good.

From there we walked towards The Castro to the west to find the apparently famous Bi-Rite ice cream stand.  It too, was amazing.  Dominica would really like it.  It is an American ice cream place but totally a European style like an Italian gelato stand.  Tons of crazy flavors and the assumption is that you will try two or three flavors every time.  I got one scoop of brown sugar ginger and one of cinnamon snickerdoodle.  The brown sugar was the big winner.  Amazing.

From there Chris took the train back and I walked back about four blocks to the east to get back to Mission then followed mission all of the way back to 7th where I turned east and got quickly to my hotel.

When I checked my iPhone Health app, just as I was climbing into bed, I had walked an even (literally, to the step) 23,000 steps today and 9.76 miles.  Not too bad at all.  San Francisco is very good for my health.  I’ve had nothing but healthy food, except for the fries and onion rings, for days and have been walking many miles each day.

I was pretty tired once I got back.  I was on the laptop for maybe an hour before deciding that there was no reason for me to be keeping myself awake for no reason.  So I called it an early night and climbed into bed at nine thirty.  I listened to my book for maybe fifteen more minutes but then drifted off to sleep.  I am sure that I will be awake very early tomorrow.

As always happens when traveling to the west coast, I was in bed very early last night and that means that I woke up, on my own, super early this morning.  My internal clock does not allow me to sleep in, which would have been handy.  Instead I was awake first at two thirty in the morning, but managed to fall back asleep that time, and finally woke up for the last time at five.  It’s good to be up nice and early before your first day at a new job but this was excessive.  I had a full four and a half hours to kill before I was to leave to get to the office.  That is pretty early.

Had a bit of a technical emergency this morning.  Of course, anytime that I am traveling or incredibly busy this happens.  So frustrating.  I had to assist with that early this morning, around six or six thirty, but luckily Dominica was able to jump in and take over so that I did not have to focus on that this morning, especially as I did not have a computer to work from!

I showered, got dressed, shaved (well, trimmed) and killed some time.  I eventually left as late as I could stand it and that was at eight.  An hour and a half before I needed to leave the hotel.

The walk to the office was less than half an hour.  But it was more than twenty minutes which is ideal.  You don’t want your walking commute to be under twenty minutes or it doesn’t really count as a cardio workout, of sorts.  So this is good.  For the next two weeks I shall be getting two twenty to thirty minute light cardio work outs per day.  That, in theory, should do wonders for me.  I am looking forward to that.

On this morning’s walk I took along just my iPhone and my iPod.  My iPod is loaded up with my new Audible books and this morning I began listening to Bill Bryson’s “The Lost Continent: Travels is Small Town America” which is good, but I am glad that I am reading it without Dominica as I feel that she would find it too dry.  She loves Bill Bryson half of the time and cannot stay awake for him the other half of the time.  This one is one of his less gripping tomes, but even his lesser works I still enjoy.

As expected, I arrived in front of the office at eight thirty.  I was not slated to start until ten.  So I walked around the area for a little bit to see what was around.  I also spent some time just sitting nearby cooling down from my walk.  I am rather out of shape these days and a half hour hike through the city is enough to warm me up quite a bit.  Partially that is because I only have two walking speeds: idle and brisk.  So even on a cool day with a  breeze I walk myself fast enough that I get warm no matter how hard I try to walk slowly and relax.

Once I had cooled down I found the Steep Brew Cafe attached to the Whole Foods diagonally across the intersection from the new office on Rhode Island Street.  I was happy to find that they do a true Cafe Americano (not brewed coffee like Americans drink, a confusing name to be sure) and ordered a large and spent some time sitting in the cafe listening to Bill’s tales of Iowa.

At nine thirty I gave up on stalling and went over to the office to start my first day at Change.org.  This is it, a major new chapter in our lives.  This is the beginning of the steam roller of life changes.  New job, new career in a new industry, my first time working in California – here in the city that I dreamed would probably be my city in American when I was very little.  And with this new job, the move to Europe.  Everything is different after today.  Everything is in motion and really happening.  Really, until today, none of it really felt all that real.  Now it seems pretty real.  This truly is a completely new chapter in our lives.  I’m not sure what moment really is the more significant.  Is it today with a new career?  Or is it in late March when we arrive in Spain?

My new Macbook Pro was waiting for me when I got into the office.  I got shown to my desk and everything was all set up and waiting for me.  This is a new adventure for me too, in a way.  This is the first Apple Macintosh that I have had since I bought the Mac Mini PowerPC G4 model more than a decade ago.  And that old Mac Mini was never my main computer but only ever a secondary or tertiary machine that I bought to be used in “the other room” for occasional computing needs and even for that it was never used and almost immediately turned into nothing more than a DVD player in the living room of the Geneseo house.  And once we moved from that house in 2006, it was boxed up and never used again.  I still have it, but only as a keepsake, not as a useful device.  It wasn’t useful ten years ago.

So now, using a Mac as my main computer is actually something quite new to me.  I have never once tried this before.  I am jumping in with both feet this time.  A scary thing for an IT professional who is rather a power user on several platforms.  My ability to work quickly and efficiently is something pretty important with what I do all day, every day.  Learning a completely new system is a major handicap.  Little things like figuring out how to scroll down on a web page, how to open an application, how to install something or how to get wireless working are all things that are foreign to me.  And Mac, in my experience, is the least obvious, steepest learning curve of any commercial available operating system.  There is a lot to learn in the OS alone, let alone in all of the supporting applications.  And that’s before learning a new job and all of the special systems that are used there.

So when I say that I am starting a new chapter, I really mean it. Everything is new.  From my employer, to my industry, to the type of work that I will be doing (in a way), to the tools with which I will be doing it, to the people with whom I will work, to the type of computer I am using, to the country in which I will be working, as well as the continent on which I will be residing, and even so far as to the language that I will be speaking!  That all of this change comes as I start at Change.org seems like an omen, at the least.

Soon after I got to my desk, my new coworker who is always starting today came in and we got introduced.  A lot of people came and introduced themselves to us.  We are sitting directly next to each other and working on the same team which makes things very easy.  Another new person, sitting facing us, started today too joining us about twenty minutes later.  So there is a little group of us newbies today.

We had a bit of introductions then we were introduced to everyone at a meeting and then we set about getting actually set up so that we could start work.  Many, many systems to set up and learn how to use today.  A very busy day.  We were hard at it from ten in the morning until late in the evening, not leaving the office until around six thirty.  A full first day.

It was a gorgeous, bright and crisp day in the low sixties here in San Francisco.  And back home in New York?  Well, I managed to escape right as a record blizzard was hitting there.  They are expecting as much as thirty inches today, which would break some records.  Although, from what I have heard, it is bad but nothing like that at all.  Still Dominica is very thankful that I ran out and stocked her with food supplies so that she would not need to go out grocery shopping while I am gone.  She and the girls are hunkered in for the time being.

For lunch today the two of us who are new on my team got taken out for sushi for a “team lunch” which was cool.  Always nice to get taken out for food on your first day.

Overall I had a very busy day but am really thrilled.  It is a really exciting job both in what I get to do technically as well as what we do as a company.  I am really feeling quite positive about everything and am so thankful that I decided to go in this direction.  We are really feeling blessed that this opportunity came along.  Our lives could so easily have turned out so dramatically differently with just a little different decision making in December on many parties parts.  But both Dominica and I are really feeling confident that this was absolutely the right decision.  This is where I was meant to be.  And we are confident that in twenty years we will look back and agree that this was the best decision to make.

At six thirty, in the dark, I headed out from the office.  I had not thought about the need to carry my laptop to and from the office and had brought no bad of any kind for doing so.  That was very short sighted of me, to be sure.  Luckily my team lead at the office tracked down a silly bag for me to use so that I could at least get to and from the hotel today and he plans to have a real backpack for me to use after tomorrow.  I just have to get through two weeks but I do not want to do anything that causes me not to walk as much as possible.  I am excited about the exercise too.  I really hope that this job isn’t just the better career move and the better family move but also allows me to become healthier for it too and I started today.  This is a complete life change, all at once.  No hedging now.  All in.

The walk back to the hotel was fine.  I took different streets on the way back so that I could see a little more.  My hotel is on seventh and I walked down to Rhode Island on eighth this morning.  I came back via Kansas / Henry Adam and seventh tonight.  Not a very different route but one block different in both sections.  I only get two weeks to see San Francisco and get to know it a little so I have to leverage what I can.

I got back to the Carriage Inn and dropped off the computer and set it up for a few minutes.  I am loving that Apple Messenger allows me to talk to the people who text me via the laptop rather than having to use my iPhone for things like that.  It saves my batter a lot and makes responding so much easier and less interrupting.  Dominica and I already used that all day long today.  Otherwise talking to her from the office would drive me crazy.

Once home I found that Michael Slane, that I went to high school with at York Central, had joined Facebook and added me today.  He was online while I was in the hotel so we caught up a little bit.  It has easily been twenty one years since I have spoken to him.  Hard to believe.  I have looked for him a few times but had not had any luck in finding him.  Apparently because he has not had Facebook until today.

Speaking of old connections: my old college roommate from GMI in Flint, Michigan from 1995 (we were housemates in 1995, we lived across the hall from each other in 1994 in the dorms) Russ Sarquis finally accepted a Facebook friends request that I made years ago.  So that is two of my housemates from GMI tracked down now.  Russ has the old Chevy Cavalier Z24 convertible that we used to cruise around Flint in back in my college days.  He is the person that I drove to Sarnia, Ontario with just to go to Canada for fun one night too.  That was a very long time ago.  Although, strangely, there was only five years between college and when I started blogging, just one quarter of the time between then and now is not recorded here in SGL!

I ran across the street to Custom Burger again.  Tonight I tried the salmon burger.  I brought the food back to the hotel.  With the full beard now there is no way to eat things like burgers in public.  The beard is actually a pretty serious diet plan.  There is so much food that I cannot eat with people watching me.  It is a little bit ridiculous.  I wonder how people normally handle this.  I need big bearded friends to ask.  It is forcing me to eat healthier, at least around other people.  And certainly to eat less and more slowly.  It is a weird side effect but a healthy one, at least.

The salmon burger was truly amazing.  I mean really amazing.  So delicious.  I am sure that I am going to get that again tomorrow night too.  I was craving another one as soon as I was done with the one that I had.

After eating my dinner I watched the Rough Guides “Top Things Not to Miss in Spain” video on YouTube and was excited to see that the number one thing not to miss was flamenco dancing in Seville which we plan not only to go see but hope to secure dance lessons for Liesl which she is very excited about.  And the number two thing not to miss was seeing the little hill top villages of a specific region where, it turns out, is exactly where we are going to be living – in one of those not to be missed villages!  So we are really getting the experience, for sure.

Much of my time in the office today was spent discussing the travel and visa needs for our European (and elsewhere) adventures.  We are attempting to figure out when visas will be needed, how often and how to manage the time, taxes and everything else.  In some ways it all seems pretty simple but there are potential complications and many, many things to be considered.  It is going to be a huge amount of work for Dominica and I to track and manage all of our travel consideration.

I spent all evening working on my new Mac.  It is pretty awesome.  It is the high end fifteen inch model with the Intel i7 quad core processor with hyper threading (so it appears as eight cores) with the high end discrete nVidia GPU, huge SSD, Retina display and 16GB of RAM.  I’ve never had a computer anything like this. This is so much power!  I am very impressed.  I have never had a job, even on Wall St., that provided gear like this.  And it is not like I had to request this at all.  This is just the standard stuff that I got for checking the “whatever you provide” request box!

I made sure to get caught up on SGL as much as possible as I know that everyone is going to be watching it carefully this week to see how things are going.  I also did a ton of posting on MangoLassi and Spiceworks.  With all of the travel I have been a bit behind and am trying to keep up when possible.

I am also really excited that I get to talk about where I work.  It has been more than a decade since I could openly discuss the work that I am doing, at least for the bulk of my time.  I have always had to have been at least partially secretive about it.  This is going to be a major change.  Now I am encouraged to write, post and speak about where I am and what we are doing.

In many ways today was an overwhelming day, but overwhelming in a very good, very positive way.  It is very hard not to be excited.  Tomorrow is going to be very busy again, but we are going to be doing a lot of the working out of the visa arrangements tomorrow so I am looking forward to finding out much about those details.

Dominica had to deal with our Irish and Norwegian housing arrangements today as those are some of our final travel plans that need to be finalized before we are ready to go.  That parts would not have been so bad except that the house that she and her family were already set up to rent in Orlando, for which they had already paid their security deposit, was canceled on them because the owners “decided that they wanted to stay there.”  So Dominica, in a panic, had to spend the day finding alternative housing options and getting something lined up before the Walt Disney World trip turned into a disaster.  She was able to get things all worked out but it was a lot of stress for no good reason.

Dominica tell me that the girls are mopey and really miss me.  Luciana has not been more than two feet away from Dominica all day and is very sad that she cannot see her daddy.

This evening Luciana ran up and jumped on Dominica giving her a big hug and declared loudly, “I am the master of snuggles!”