Postcards

Yay Christmas! The last few days have been insanely busy. I finished most of my Christmas shopping ahead of time and got presents mailed off early enough, but I had to get something for Jenny's dad for a gift exchange with her family, and we hadn't decided what I should get him until this past weekend. So I went out to buy his present over the weekend and got to deal with the holiday crowds. I got him a digital picture frame, which involved driving to four different stores because the first three were either completely sold out of everything or just had very ugly looking frames.

We had Jenny's entire family over yesterday, so we had to unpack some of her stuff and do a lot of cleaning. Jenny's been out of commission with pneumonia for the last week or two, though. I managed to get the house in pretty good shape, though. I also chopped off the bottom of our Christmas tree and got it set up in the living room over the weekend. We'd bought the tree a couple of weeks ago while I was still sick, so it's been sitting on the patio in a bucket of water since then. I got it trimmed to the perfect height for the living room, and Jenny helped put lights and ornaments on it.

Some of Jenny's family showed up on Monday and spent the night, the rest came over yesterday just for Christmas. Things are finally settling down today. Last night during dinner, I would clean off the counters in the kitchen and load up the dishwasher, and by the time the dishwasher was finished, there'd be another pile of dishes needing to be washed. It was a good time, though. Jenny got me Rock Band for the XBox, and her sister got me Guitar Hero 3 as part of the gift exchange. Those should keep me busy for a while.

A couple of weekends ago, Ice Oasis had a little Winter Wonderland thing going, where they put up some Christmas trees on the ice, surrounded by piles of snow and benches. That was a lot of fun, and gave me a chance to practice some skating without the pressure of a game. Our regular games for that night were actually canceled because of it and rescheduled for this past Saturday morning. We still had our regular games in the evening, too, for the possibility of four games in one day.

I skipped the first game, because it was just too early, but got there early enough for my team's game. We lost the game, but I scored my third goal. I came home and got some rest, then went back up for the two evening games. I subbed for one of the other teams in the first game. We lost that one, in large part because our goalie didn't seem to care too much about keeping the puck out of the net. Fortunately, that goalie was playing for the other team during the second game, which made it pretty easy for me to score two goals during the first period and an assist later in the game. We won that one 4-2.

The other interesting thing about that game was that our entire team was there, and we didn't play with any subs. That left us without two full shifts, and with one fewer man on the bench than the other team (which had four or five subs), but at the same time we were all much more invested in winning the game. All too often, we have subs that end up playing defense, taking long shifts, and not really putting much effort into the game, which results in the other team getting to the net more often than they really should. Playing with just my teammates was a lot more fun.

There are cats in my house! So I finally got everything unpacked and was settling into my new house, and then Jenny moved in. Now there are boxes and stuff everywhere again. Today we brought the cats over. Kitties! They're locked up in the bedroom with us now. Pixel's exploring the bathroom, and Spiff was camped out by the door waiting to check out the rest of the house.

The new house is pretty awesome. Jenny's painting one of the bedrooms because she couldn't stand the color. I've got two of the pinball machines home, but there's still one at work and one at a friend's house. Other than that, I'm pretty settled in, and soon Jenny will be, too. I've got some pictures up, but the house was still pretty disorganized when I took them.

We flew to South Carolina for Thanksgiving with Jenny's sister and dad. We stayed at her uncle Moe's house for a couple of days, and I got to meet a bit of her extended family. They were all fun people, and they had a couple of dachshunds running around the house. Our stay there was great, but we had flight delays going both ways. On the way back, we spent about six hours in DC and didn't get home until 3 in the morning.

Work is work. One of our publishers, SAGE Publications, ran a hugely successful free trial during the month of November, which generated a bit more traffic than usual. Dealing with that kept me pretty busy and not working on the stuff I wanted to get done. I finally got some time to start working on that, and then I got sick for a week. Still getting over that.

I'll be missing my ice hockey game tonight. My skating has improved a bit, but I still need to work on handling the puck. Most of the time I end up passing it almost as soon as I get it, which isn't so good. Last week I scored my second goal. Woo!

Escrow closed on the condo and the new house on Friday without any problems. I picked up a U-Haul that morning for the move. While I was waiting for the guy to bring the truck around, my realtor showed up to give me the keys to the new house. (Wow, service!) Keith and Alex from pinball and Harold from work came over to help load the truck. It took two trips to get everything moved, but that went pretty smoothly. After we finished unloading everything, we went to the nearby Sushi Factory for all-you-can-eat sushi. Yum! I took the truck back with Jenny, and we went back to the condo to finish cleaning things up. The rain that had been forecast for that day started just as we were finishing around 9:30.

Yesterday we put together all the furniture and unpacked some stuff. We still need to get the dryer hooked up, and there's no TV or internet access yet, but it's getting there. I took a bunch of pictures of room full of boxes, but haven't been able to upload them yet.

I skipped ice hockey this weekend, but last weekend I scored my first ice hockey goal. Woo!

So it took me five months to sell my condo, and less than a week to buy a new house. I would say it's a buyer's market right now. Jenny and I went to a few open houses on Sunday, then toured with my realtor on Wednesday. There were a couple of houses that we both liked, but we weren't sure which one we liked best. Then the guy buying my condo asked if he could move up the close of escrow by two weeks, giving me just over two weeks to find a place and move out. No pressure or anything...

Thursday morning I sent my realtor a few more listings to go check out for us, and then we were going to go back to the ones we liked to compare. She called after checking out the first two, which both had issues. Then she called again from the last one and said we should go have a look. Most of the places we'd been looking at were about 1600-1700 square feet on a 5000-6000 square-foot lot, asking between $725k and $750k. This house is just over 2000 square feet with a 7000-square-foot lot, and they're only asking $715k. It's been on the market for over a month, I think because the yard is in really bad shape, but Jenny and I can fix that up without too much trouble. The inside is frickin' awesome. It's also right around the corner from one of the guys I play pinball with, near the intersection of routes 87 and 85 in San Jose.

So yeah, yesterday morning I filled out the paperwork for an offer, and it was accepted in the afternoon. In a couple of weeks I'll be in twice as much debt as I was in before! And I get to move!

Today was a good day. Except for the web server falling off the internet because it's connected to a crappy 10-year-old hub. I woke up to a call from my realtor telling me that my condo is finally in escrow. Yay! That only took five months. Now I can start looking at houses again.

I played my second night of ice hockey tonight, the first night being last Saturday. I still haven't been assigned to a team yet, because the hockey director keeps not showing up, but that also means I've been playing for free so far. Last week I subbed in for both games in the beginner league. I had some good plays, some embarrassing falls, and a couple of near goals. This week was pretty much the same, subbing for the same two teams, but I got a bit more ice time and felt more confident in my play. Next week I'll have to score a goal.

So I accidentally got an iPhone the other day... Jenny picked one up at the Apple store when they dropped the price, only to find out she's still under contract with Verizon until March. Rather than paying them $175 to switch to AT&T, I paid for the phone and activated it for myself. It's pretty sweet, and I'm actually writing this on the phone. I've still got my Stanford phone, as well, for now. I found out too late that I could have transferred the number to a personal account. Oh well. Once I get the new number to everyone (who matters), I'll turn the old phone back in.

I'm starting up with an ice hockey league in a week or so. Woo!

Let's see, what have I been up to for the last two months? I went sailing with Jenny and her father in the San Francisco Bay. I also took her to Vogelsang in Yosemite to celebrate our one-year anniversary. This past weekend we drove up to Healdsburg, where I met her highly-entertaining grandfather and saw a crap-load of colorful flowers.

I got contact lenses, so I can potentially start playing ice hockey. I stopped playing ball hockey in Alameda once the last season ended, because most of us were fed up with driving so far to play the same team every week. There's a pick-up game in Sunnyvale tomorrow night that I'm going to, though, and that could end up being a weekly thing.

California Extreme happened not too long ago. I only went the one day this year, instead of the whole weekend, but I don't think I missed a whole lot. I've moved the two pinball machines that were left in my condo into the office, to make some space. I also put about half of my stuff into a storage unit to try to make the condo look presentable. It still hasn't sold. I keep hearing about how worried everyone is that the market is going to crash. Whatever, people are still buying the neighbors' condos, somebody buy mine.

I'm still messing around with software for the PSP, still with nothing much to show for it. I can get a decent amount of wxWidgets to compile for it, but that by itself doesn't do much.

Still waiting for somebody to buy my condo. Somebody bought the other unit with the hot tub a few weeks ago, but I'm still waiting for it to close escrow to find out how much they paid. Most of the other one-bedroom condos in Mountain View have sold, too. Right now it's just me, one smaller, cheaper place, and a bigger, more expensive place. Both of the other condos are in a neighborhood that's not quite as nice. Oh well.

I've been trying to spend a lot of my free time lately getting that Catan game working on my PSP. It's been slow going, because first I had to figure out how it all works in the first place, then find a starting point from which to begin porting the code. They wrote the game using several "cross-platform" libraries that make it easier for them to make it run on Windows, Mac OS X, etc, but those libraries don't really exist for the PSP, so in some places I'm having to write replacements for the functionality those libraries provide. (I can't wait until I get to the actual display logic.) I've got some of the back-end stuff functioning though, so my PSP is able to read some of the data files from the PC version of the game. It's sad how exciting that is to me.

That takes up most of my evenings, and of course half of each weekend is taken up by hockey. I mentioned our first win of the season last time. The following week we had our second win, with an exciting 13-8 game. Some of our best players were out of town (in Germany, to be specific) playing in some international ball hockey tournament, but some random guy from the Bay Area Street Hockey league, Matt, came out to play with us. Apparently he's the best player in BASH, and I later found out that he had tried out for the Sharks or something. He scored several of our 13 goals that game, and assisted me on one goal early in the game. I scored a second goal later in the game, and was itching for a third. Matt and I were both on the bench near the end of the game when he told me to wait by the left goal post and he would give me my third goal. We went out for a faceoff, which Matt won. I ran for the net and looked back for the pass. Matt sent the ball my way, and I took the shot... and missed. Fortunately, one of our other teammates was behind the net and managed to send the ball back to me for another shot. At this point the goalie was on the floor with his legs spread out to the post, but I managed to shove the ball through a tiny gap he'd left open just before the buzzer, scoring my first career hat trick!

Our winning streak ended the next week with an 8-2 loss against the team that had shut us out every game up to that point. At least we scored that time. Last weekend was Father's Day, and most of the teams ended up short-handed. A player from one of the other teams subbed in for us, and we played a game of four-on-four. I managed to score two goals, but the other team scored four. Either way, it was still a fun game.

I've made reservations for one of the High Sierra Camps in Yosemite next month for a trip with Jenny to celebrate our one-year anniversary. The High Sierra Camps provide food and shelter, so we just have to carry in sleeping bags and enough food and water to get us there. It's going to be sweet.

Yesterday was Gretchen's birthday. Woohoo!

Yesterday was also a hockey game, and our first win of the season. The first four games didn't go so well. Two of them were shut-outs: 9-0 and 7-0, but the other two were at least somewhat close: 4-2 and 12-9. Yesterday we were somewhat short-handed, with only one extra guy on the bench. One of the players from the previous game decided to help us out, which gave us a second guy on the bench. He ended up scoring two of our three goals, but more importantly, we all played an awesome game and kept the other team at only one goal during the first period. Hopefully we'll be able to repeat that for the next game in June.

Saturday was this year's Pin-a-Go-Go up in Dixon. I drove up for that and met up with a bunch of guys from the pinball league for a fun-filled day of free (ish) pinball. The highlights this year were a custom-built game where some guy wired his PC into the CPU board of the pin to control the game, and Dragon, an old Spanish game from the '70s. Some guy found a bunch of new-in-box machines in a warehouse and brought them to the show to sell them. It was a fun game, but pretty simple and probably not worth the $1500 the guy wanted for it, even for a brand new 30-year-old game. The new Family Guy pin was there, too, but I didn't bother playing it because the line for it was too long. Jenny missed all of it, because she went to a wedding instead.

So I was driving down 85 on my way to Jenny's place last night with the sun setting behind me. I came around a curve in the highway to see a big yellow moon, low on the horizon, with some clouds positioned just right across the middle of the moon to make it look like a giant Pac Man sitting on top of the mountains in the distance. I would have pulled over to take a picture, but the clouds were moving too quickly. Oh well.

I'm starting off the weekend in style today. I realized I hadn't cleaned out my moosheep root inbox in a while, so I went to do that. Since October last year, I've received almost 2,500 bounce messages from spam using made-up moosheep.org addresses as the sender. (There really should be a way to prevent that.) Lost among that mass of crap was a lonely email that Judd sent to webmaster in March, but I have no clue WTF he was talking about, so it might as well have been spam...

It's not all bad news today. It's April's birthday, woo!

And yesterday was Jenny's birthday. She got an espresso maker.

So my realtor held the first open house of my condo on the 15th. I thought it went pretty well. Jenny and I were out looking at other open houses for most of the afternoon, but once we finished we stopped by the condo to see how things were going. Several people had come to look at it already, and a few came while we were there. So selling it should be easy, right? If only.

A couple of days later, the landscapers finally got around to cutting back the ivy throughout the complex. I'm told this is something they do every winter, and that it's to control its growth and keep any tiny critters from deciding to live there. The ivy usually grows back pretty quickly when spring comes around, and everything's good. Unfortunately, they didn't do it until after the ivy had its spring growth spurt, and they cut back way more than usual. By which I mean the patch of ivy that used to live outside my front door is now a patch of dirt with some dead-looking stems coming out of the ground.

Great, so now my place looks like crap from the outside. But it's not so bad, right? The ivy should eventually grow back, and it's not like there are any better one-bedroom units for sale at Willow Park. Until this past weekend. I was checking out the listings because my realtor had mentioned a two-bedroom unit that had just been put up for sale, and saw to my great dismay that another one-bedroom place had just gone on the market. This one has the exact same floorplan as mine, except in reverse, and is also a ground-level end unit, with an asking price of about a hundred dollars less than mine. And they have a hot tub.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

My condo is officially on the market, as of yesterday. Woot! My realtor held the realtor tour this morning, and as I was heading out the door, the first realtor showed up. She walked in, took one look, and said, "Wow!" It was a good wow, really. There's been quite a bit of interest in the place so far, which is an excellent sign. I might just be able to check the "Profit!" item off of my fridge whiteboard to-do list when this is done.

Anita's in town for a few days, and she and Ian have organized a poker night at his place tonight. As soon as Jenny gets here, we're heading up to that. Tomorrow, Jenny and I will start touring the open houses.

Yeah, I'm cheating by back-dating this post, but at least I called him on his birthday.

I missed the last hockey game of the season, but the other team forfeited anyway, so we won. The Sheap finished second in the league, which is pretty much where we wanted to be going into playoffs. Unfortunately, we lost the first round against Fury, 4-2, so we won't be going to the finals. I'm OK with that, though, because it gives me an extra weekend free to go house hunting.

That's right, I'm officially looking for a house. I took Friday off last week to do a huge amount of cleaning (including eight 33-gallon trash bags full of leaves from my tiny back yard), and my realtor came to take a look at my condo on Saturday to see what kind of shape it was in. She thinks it looks great, and that I shouldn't have any trouble selling it. Another realtor at an open house in my complex also mentioned that a couple of people have been waiting for one-floor units like mine to become available, which is excellent news. As soon as I get mortgage pre-approval out of the way, the house hunting will begin in earnest. Holy crap!

The final score of yesterday's game against Fury was 4-1, giving us our first non-forfeit victory. Woot! Which isn't to say that we suck completely. We've come a long way since we started and had a lot of close games, including last week's tie. In yesterday's game, we took the lead early and held onto it, keeping Fury scoreless (and very frustrated) until close to the end of the game.

Right now the Sheap are tied for second place in the league with two of the other three teams. The leading team, Incognito, beat the Bladium team 14-2 yesterday. (As they did three weeks ago when they last played each other.) We're up against them next. 10 of their goals were scored by one player, a short Asian guy who likes to hang out next to the net and whack away at the ball even after the goalie has covered it. We're discussing strategies to keep him in check. If we manage to win this game, we'll be tied for second moving into the playoffs, which is good because it means we won't be playing Incognito the first round. Even if we tie, that will still put us in third place, which has the same end result.

Jenny and I noticed some nice looking houses on the market in Blossom Hill over the weekend. They're relatively affordable, and about the same distance from Stanford and UCSC...

Sorry, Anita. I'm going to copy and paste the email I just wrote to you, because I'm that lazy.

The Black Lab show almost didn't happen. A day or two before, Sandy said "Oh by the way, $publisher is flying out on Wednesday for a meeting about single sign-on." And I was all "WTF, biyatch, you said I could take the day off." And she said "OK, you can leave at noon, but you have to come in in the morning for this meeting." Then the day of, one of the Journal Managers sent an email saying $publisher's flight had been canceled, so they wouldn't get here until about noon. So Sandy said I didn't have to come in after all, but then right when Jenny and I were about to head out the door, she called to tell me they showed up early and asked me to come in for an hour after all. And I was all "I can't work under these conditions, I quit!" But then I pussed out and went in anyway, but Jenny and I still made it down to LA with time for sushi before the show started.

The show was pretty good. Paul's band-mate Andy started out on guitar with him, then moved over to the piano half-way through the show. (Unfortunately the piano was not quite tuned or something, so the first song didn't sound so great, but Andy figured it out.) Paul's friend Kristin, from his Cake or Death album, was there, too, and she went up on stage to sing the last couple of songs with him. We chatted a little bit after the show. She's a psych major, go figure. At one point during our conversation, she also said "Oh, you're the Stanford guy!" My notoriety is growing. There was also a guy from Syracuse who flew out to see the show. He wrote to Paul ahead of time to ask about the set list, so Paul was all set to give him his props during the show. He stopped between songs and said "OK, we're going to have a little contest to see who was stupid enough to fly the farthest just to come see me." There was somebody from San Diego, somebody from Detroit, then this guy from Syracuse. Paul was about to proclaim him the winner, when somebody at the back of the room said "We came from Sydney..." Paul quietly said "Aww, fuck."

The band that played before Paul and Andy, A Fine Frenzy, was pretty awesome. Their first album's supposed to be out soon, but until then, they have a myspace page or something.

I've been spending a lot of time lately futzing with Cities3D. It's an open-source Catan game, written initially on Windows, but in theory compatible with Linux and Mac OS. Some guys got it running on Linux, and I've spent a lot of the last few days trying to get it to compile on my iBook. Not because I want to play it on my iBook. I actually want to get it running on my PSP, but that part comes later. There have been issues, though, some with the environment on my laptop, some with their code and build scripts. I'm *so* close to getting it compiled, though.

Game number 8 of our second hockey season was on Sunday, playing against the Bladium team. We didn't start out as well as I'd hoped, given our performance last week, but we pulled it together. There were a lot of penalties on both sides, some good calls, some bad, including my first career penalty for boarding. (Unless you count the unsportmanlike conduct I got in fifth-grade intramural floor hockey. I said "darn" when the other team scored a goal against us.) We tied the game at 3, and unfortunately there's no overtime in this league. My penalty ended with 10 seconds left in the third period, and the ball happened to be moving right by the penalty box as I came out. I took control and started heading for the net, but the refs called a tripping penalty on the other team for something that happened behind me. Not only should they not have called this penalty while I still had possession (it should have been delayed until one of the opposing team touched the ball), but they also started the faceoff within our zone, which was incorrect. (It gave the other team an advantage, when they'd just received a penalty.) We only had about three seconds left at this point, so we were pretty screwed. The ref admitted afterwards that she'd screwed up, and it probably wouldn't have made much difference anyway, but I was robbed of a legitimate chance to bring sweet, sweet victory to my team. Next week we play Fury.

Uh oh. The guy who edits gay porn for a living and thinks he's doing the world a favor by telling them how to get a good deal on 400 tampons thinks my blog is boring. I better write something funny.

I know it's been a while, but I've been busy living the good life with Jenny. We had our six-month anniversary in January... and our seven-month anniversary in February. We've had the occasional argument, but things have been going so well and just keep getting better. That's why I haven't been writing much here lately, I'm spending all of my free time with her. Last weekend she got me a new camera for my birthday, because she's just that awesome.

I got a little impatient with the email poker tournament at the end of January and started making some bad plays. Things were slowing down and hand after hand ended with one of the last players to act before the flop making a big raise and everybody else folding. I decided it was my turn with ace-ten, but I was called by pocket kings. I finished 468th out of about 1300, which was better than I thought I'd do at the beginning of the tournament.

We're coming to the end of our second season playing hockey in a few weeks. We picked up a couple of new players on our team at the beginning of the season. We got off to a rocky start, but a couple of weeks ago we made a pretty big breakthrough in our play. We're all pushing harder and playing a lot smarter, and the games have gotten a lot closer. A couple of weeks ago we kept the score tied through most of the game, and only lost because of a power play goal in the last 10 seconds of the game. This past weekend we actually spent a lot of the game in the lead. Alex did an awesome job during his first game in the net, since our regular goalie couldn't make it, but we ended up giving up a goal at the end of the game again. We were a few players short, but I think next week we're going to win one.

Wednesday afternoon, Jenny and I are driving down to LA for yet another Paul Durham show. He's celebrating the release of the third Black Lab album, Passion Leaves a Trace, and this time band-mate Andy is playing with him. A couple others associated with the band will be there, too, so I just couldn't pass up the opportunity. We'll be leaving in the afternoon to get to Hollywood in time for the show, then we'll drive about an hour back north afterwards. We've got a hotel room reserved, and from there it'll only be a few hours back in the morning. Woot!

Seriously, I'm seeing puddles and fountains and stuff covered in ice. It's been really cold lately.

Anyway, I know I'm long overdue for an update, but every time I remember how long it's been, something else comes up. Jenny left for a week-long conference in Nevada today, though, so I've got some free time.

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