Sheep Guarding Llama

Today begins my second week in the office at the new position at Change.  I slept in until around seven then got up, worked a little, showered and did my walk into the office.  It was not as hot today, at least I did not feel as hot.  Perhaps I am simply getting used to the walking more at this point.  It has been a full week of walking now with my lightest day being just nearly four miles.

Work was good today.  More progress.  Not much time left now.  Only four work days left before I am heading back home to see the family.  Sixty percent of the work days are done now and two thirds of my total time away from home has passed.  I am really looking forward to being home.

On the walk home I finished reading “The Lost Continent” and began reading “One Summer: America, 1927” also by Bill Bryson.

For lunch today we had sushi again at Live Sushi.  I got the full vegetarian rolls.  I’ve learned that I really like those and can eat them all of the time.

After work I walked back to the hotel.  On the way back, which was much cooler and I did not get all sweaty for what I think is the first time since coming out to the coast, I picked up fish and chips to eat in the hotel room.

I did a little posting and worked on my Rosetta Stone and DuoLingo before driving down to San Bruno to drop off Jeff’s Kia Optima.  Sarah drove me down to the San Bruno BART station and I rode that back to Mission and Sixteenth and from there I walked back to the hotel getting in around eleven.

The extra walk and train ride gave me some time to continue listening to the book that I started reading. So far it is very interesting.  American in 1927 is not a piece of history that I know all that well.  Many things, like the biggest news events of the time, are things that are not familiar to me.  It was a very odd time period.

With the extra walking today I managed to do a total of 15,500 steps which comes out to 7.3 miles.  Nothing staggering but it is a good walk for the day.

I got up this morning, probably around seven, and spent a bit of time paying the bills.  Not something that I really wanted to be doing from a hotel room but that is how things are going to be for quite a long time now.  That took a while as I am not on my own computer for the first time in a very long time.  While I was going through the bills I had to go over the charges to our bank account with Dominica because there are so many.  Everything was fine, it is crazy seeing all of the money coming out of the account for all of our expenses over the next several months.  Because of the time in Europe we are paying for our flights in both March and June as well as our hotels in Dublin and Oslo and our apartment in Spain all now.  Even our rental car is paid for up front.  So the amount of money that has left our bank account is just crazy, and terrifying.  In theory, though, we will have no real expenses again until around the end of July.  So while this looks really scary, it is really not too bad.  We hope.

I spent the morning puttering around the hotel.  Then spent about an hour on the phone with Dominica after her parents left.  They came up to visit yesterday with Truman, their new (ish) Boston Terrier puppy.  Liesl and Luciana had a blast having Truman at their house.  Dominica’s parents gave the girls their old Apple iPad 2 which Dominica was getting set up this morning.  This is really helpful for the girls as they have been working from a mix of an original iPad and an iPad 2.  The older, original iPad cannot run the current version of iOS.  In fact it is several releases behind.  That means that lots of the games that the girls want to play will not work on there and it has made things rather difficult.  Now both girls can use matching iPad 2 tablets (the “new” one has 32GB of storage while the “old” one has 16GB, but otherwise identical) with the same games and features.  And the same interface.  Perfect to have this fixed before going to Spain for several months where the iPads will be their most used devices even more than usual.

Dominica and I discussed travel plans and what to do about different visa scenarios.  There is a lot that we are still trying to figure out.  Once we were done on the phone I walked across Seventh and got a salmon burger.  I don’t want to go to the party this afternoon having eaten nothing all day.  I will be too hungry and will devour everything.

I drove down to San Bruno to go see Jeff and Sarah for their Super Bowl Party.  I got there about two thirty.  There were several other of their friends there as well, none that I had known previously.  This is the first Super Bowl that I have seen in over a decade, maybe in over two decades.  Possibly the first American football came that I have watched in as long as well.  I cannot remember actually watching one.  It still shocked me just how short and trivial the whole thing was, no sport at all, just lots of ads and no one actually doing anything. No wonder the whole world mocks this sport, it really is embarrassing.  And in the end the game was decided in the last few minutes by the one team emotionally falling apart rather than who could play better.  It’s like watching little children fight on the playground.  Not competent sportsmen at all.  At least they wear gear so no one is biting each other.

The halftime show was great, though.  Katy Perry put on an amazing concert.  I’m told that this is the first serious halftime show in a decade since Janet Jackson ruined it for everyone.

While at Jeff and Sarah’s I did my laundry for the week.  Now I have enough clothes to make it until I go back home to Peekskill on Friday night.

It was late when I got back to the hotel.  My drive back was much better this time.  I roughly knew where to go and was much more adept as the use of the GPS now.  I did not get lost and made every turn correctly.  I still do not want to drive any more than absolutely necessary, though.

It was probably ten thirty when I got to the hotel.  I went up to the room and was in bed pretty promptly. Before going to bed I got my Rosetta Stone completely installed and working and managed to do a little bit of the first lesson.  I need to commit to working on that every day.

I got up and did a little writing and posting this morning in the hotel room.  I got lots of sleep last night.  I am liking the opportunity to sleep so healthily.

This afternoon I walked from Seventh and Mission to Sixteenth and Mission, which is a longer walk than it sounds like as those numbered streets are not every street like they are in Manhattan but are just the major roads with little ones in between, to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station there.  This is my first time taking a train anywhere in California, of any type.  The Bay Area is well served by the BART (akin to the subway system), the CalTrain which handles the south side of the Bay from San Jose up to San Francisco and Amtrak’s Capital Corridor which comes in from the capital and runs up the north side of the Bay through Oakland.  The trip to Jeff’s place in San Bruno is just four dollars and for a New Yorker the BART is especially easy as it works almost identically to the NYC Subway system but with an extra ticket scan as you leave the system.

I road the train from the Sixteenth and Mission Station to San Bruno down on the peninsula which took maybe twenty minutes.  It was extremely easy.

Sarah, Jeff’s wife, picked me up at the station and drove me back to their house with is almost exactly two miles from the station.  Very easy.

We hung out this evening.  Jeff and I did some catching up and talking about work. Then we watched the entire first season of Father Ted on Amazon Prime On Demand, which he has never seen before.  He really enjoyed it.  He was looking to start watching the second season as well but discovered that, unlike the first season, the second season is not free.  Our timing is pretty poor because until yesterday Netflix had had the whole thing.  They just had a major disruption in their BBC contract so a ton of the best shows are no longer available on Netflix.

Since there was no more Father Ted to watch I introduced him to the first episode of Coupling which also went over really well.  He will be binge watching that soon, I am sure.

I borrowed Jeff’s car and drove it back to San Francisco, a rather brave thing to do.  Driving a new car with which I am unfamiliar, in the middle of the night, into San Francisco where I have never driven before is no fun.  He has a Kia Optima Hybrid which takes a little getting used to just because I don’t know where any controls are, the GPS is very different from what I am used to and every hybrid feels very different and you need to get used to them.

I struggled to understand the GPS and made a “slightly” wrong turn.  I say slightly because the GPS wanted me to take the hard left at a five way intersection and I made the soft left, mostly because I was unsure if the hard left wasn’t an oncoming one way street and the last thing that I wanted to do was to plough head first into oncoming downtown traffic.

The soft left turn turned out to be Interstate 80 which was past the point of its last exit and, you guessed it, onto the Bay Bridge I went.  So I had the adventure of driving around Treasure Island attempting to get turned back around to get back to the peninsula.  The GPS went completely insane and directly me onto a private military barracks road that led to the top of a very high hill.  I decided that the GPS was useless and gave up on it.  I drove myself back to the highway and managed to get myself back to the city.

I parked the car at the hotel.  I had to drive down to the sub-basement area which only has what appears to be a walkway that a single car can kind of fit down if it is a very small car.  The ramp going down was so small that I wasn’t even sure that a car was supposed to go down it but there was nowhere else for a car to go so I assumed that it was the right place.  I have no idea what you do if someone else is coming or going at the same time.  That would be a disaster.

That was enough of an evening for me.  I got myself into bed and called it a night.

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.