The plan

The current plan has us leaving San Francisco Saturday morning - after
one last trip through Little Italy for an espresso and pastries. We
head up to Napa Saturday and down to Yosemite Sunday. Then we'll
spend one last night in Fisherman's Wharf before flying out Sunday.

I think the kids are enjoying the experience so far. Me and John were
the only ones capable of finishing our Ghiradelli Sunday. I think
we've earned a second trip to the ice cream shop but I'm not sure if
we're going to bring the girls since they had such a pitiful ice-cream
eating performance.

Eating well...

After starting the day eating an over priced hotel breakfast, we
headed to North Beach or "Little Italy". Leave it to me to drool over
tons of Italian pastries and settle on an apple fritter - not my
proudest moment. We then found a well-respected local cafe, Cafe
Trieste, where I enjoyed an excellent double espresso.

After the coffee it became clear that we needed a stroller- ok, Becca
was right we should have packed the McLearen. So Becca took the kids
to the play-park while I walked through China Town in search of a
stroller. Proudly returning with my prize, I quickly learned Becca
had a double stroller in mind. Oh well, tomorrow.

From Italia, we took the Muni downtown to get me a fleece - its quite
a bit cooler than I expected.

After picking up the fleece, we headed to Pier 39 via the old style
cable car.. We saw tons of seals hanging out and even got to see one
rather rude seal pushing the other off into the water. I suspect
Becca and I were more excited about the seals than either of the kids.
After the seals we went into Pier 39 proper, where I had the good
fortune of helping a guy mount a six foot unicycle - I know, weird
huh? We couldn't miss out on an opportunity to make the parents dizzy
so we took a spin on the carousel.

Leaving the pier, we dined at Rainforest Cafe which we were familiar
with from Virginia but ours has closed down before the kids ever
experienced it.

We now sit tired in the hotel and debating whether a Ghiradelli ice
cream sundae is doable.

By the way, we got some cupcakes last night from karascupcakes and
they were phenominal. Becca went through a cupcake kick about a year
or so ago where we tried many different bakeries and they were all
only ok. Katas was great. The staff seemed to downplay the vanilla,
but knowing the challenges of making a really good and moist vanilla
cake, I think it was my favorite.

As far as the bridge, I'll let you know when the fog lifts or we get
closer to it. We're thinking about doing a fire engine tour tomorrow
which would get us close enough to appreciate it.

Mediocre eating...

Freshly arrived from a long flight,we were hungry and didn't want to
overthink the selection. So we picked pretty much the first sit down
restaurant we saw. Well, turns out we were sort of tricked into going
into the restaurant next door, Nonni Rose's, which was only alright
and that's being pretty generous. The bread was sub-par for San
francisco. The chowder was decent - everything else, not so much.

We're staying at the Holiday Inn, which we got for a ridiculously
cheap $89 - thanks Hotwire.com. The hotel is clean, decent, and
perfectly located. Highly recommended basically for being good in a
great location.

Virgin America

I'm impressed. I wasn't enthusiastic when Becca booked our flight on
Virgin America but am now pleasantly surprised. The coolness:
- media players in all seats with pretty good tv stations
- comfortable seats
- reasonably sized restrooms
- reasonable legroom
- flight crew seems genuinely happy to be onboard helping out. A huge
change from the bitterness I've experienced from other airlines' crew.

The negatives:
- headphones are terrible. Sound was great from my iPod headphones
though.

Very enjoyable, good work Becca!

Sent from my iPod

Taxing Fast Food

I never thought I'd actually say I'm supportive of a new tax, but here
it is, I think taxing fast-food might be a brilliant idea.

http://wcbstv.com/local/fast.food.tax.2.712510.html

NJ Gas Pumping Safey

The transition to the new job was bittersweet - I'm going to miss the folks I worked with even as I look forward to the new challenges.  To celebrate the past/future job situation, Rebecca surprised me on my last day with a trip to New York to see Cyrano de Bergerac.  I'll try to write about that trip later, but the New Jersey gas pumping situation was so ironic that I felt compelled to write about it first.  

Now, we've driven to New York across the turnpike a few times and I've always found it strange that I couldn't pump my own gas.  So, this trip was no exception, we needed to fuel up on one of those service exits on the turnpike.  While I was waiting in line - and Becca retrieved the Starbucks - I notice this fine fellow helping out.  

Now, I'd seen him before walking around the line of cars, directing traffic etc.  By his actions and the clipboard in his hand I assume he must be some sort of supervisor - presumably responsible for the smooth operation and safety of the gas pumps.   Wait a minute, he's actually going to pump the gas too?  

What a good supervisor - helping out when things get really busy.

Now, I should pause a minute to give my understanding of the insanity that disallows people from pumping their own petrol.  I have assumed all along that it is for our own safety.  To protect us from ourselves.  I supposed perhaps it could be just to employ more people so I figured I'd look it up.  It turns out Yahoo Ask, agrees with me:

The ban on self-service gas stations is a highly combustible issue and makes for some heated debates. New Jersey passed the law making it illegal to pump your own gas in 1949. At the time, legislators felt it was too dangerous to have untrained people dispensing such a flammable liquid.

Having said all this, let's take a closer look at the photo:

Ok, not the best photograph, but you can probably tell  - it's a cigar.  To be fair to the gentleman, I never actually saw him smoke it.  Now each trip I live by the rules and let the clowns pump gas for me; making me feel about the same as I would in asking another man for directions.  I understand that I may not be the safest person at the gas pump - heck, I don't touch metal prior to grabbing the pump to remove the static electricity - but I can do much better than this apparent supervisor.  I'd really love to make a bold statement banning New Jersey from my future travel plans on principle but, unfortunately, it's the only reasonable way to get from D.C. to N.Y. 

Taste tester extraordinaire

So I frequently get asked about "kid stories" and never come up with anything.  It's not that they aren't doing funny/cute/adorable stuff all the time; it's that I'm not sharp enough to remember any of it.  Occasionally, I'll even think about writing it down but then think - hey, there's no way I'm going to forget that.   So, some small tid-bits of the day:

• I was baking a carrot cake for dessert tomorrow and Grace was my little helper.  She stirred the dry ingredients for me as I creamed and mixed the wet.  Every ingredient we'd add (cinnamon, flour, freshly ground nutmeg, etc.) she'd stop me and say, "taste."  I now know to just offer a taste of all ingredients prior to adding them.  When it came time to do the cream cheese frosting I was tweaking it a little because I wanted the cream cheese to be more apparent than the sweet.  So each time I'd stop the mixer while I was making it she'd yell "Taste test" (I'm fairly confident where she got that from).  Then after a while, as if sensing it was about to end - she would say "one more taste test". 
• After working hard at the carrot cake, Grace and I sat down on the sofa - each with a little bag of Dorittos (her with Cool Ranch and me with Nacho).  I was tired and not paying much attention apparently.  She was eating out of my bag - "tasting" them I suppose.  It's been a while since I've had a Cool Ranch dorrito so after mine were gone I reach over and grabbed one of hers.  It tasted funny, bland really.  I tried another.  Same thing.  Then I sat back and watched her "eat" her doritto.  Her process involved sticking the doritto in her mouth, sucking off all the flavor and sticking it back in the bag.  I love Grace, but I doubt we'll be sharing a bag of chips any time soon.

iMac

One of the annoying bits of leaving a job is leaving behind a laptop that has accumulated mass amounts of data. I've spent a good amount of time this weekend sifting through what's mine/what's not and transferring to the new machine.

The good news is that the new machine is a beautiful new 24" iMac. I've wanted one for years but could never really justify the purchase for myself and Becca didn't want one as her computer. I purchased it through Amazon which allowed me to skip out on some hefty sales tax and overnight it for $3.99 (I love Amazon Prime).

The only semi-challenging part so far is getting a proper development environment set up. I've long used TortoiseSVN for version control with Forrest and I'm going to miss it for sure. I immediately began the hunt for a mac replacement for it. It didn't take long to turn up SCPlugin which hooks right into Finder. I had only one last hurdle to clear in using it. I attempted to check out the Apache Forrest trunk and immediately got a PROPFIND error:

PROPFIND of '/repos/asf/forrest/trunk': Server certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted (https://svn.apache.org)

After poking around a while, it seems you need to use the command line svn client (included in Leopard) to make an initial connection to the Subversion server to let it know that you trust the certificate (e.g. "svn ls https://somelocation/path" then, when prompted, type "p" to permanently accept it). Why SCPlugin couldn't simply do that for me? I haven't a clue but whatever. It's a small nit.

Ok, as I write this I realize there were some other challenges as well:

• Quicken.  I was a Quicken user on Windows and it's not exactly easy to convert the data to Quicken for Mac.  It's odd that Quicken's internal data format is different for different operating systems.  It's even more odd that they seem unable to create a loss-less conversion from one format to the other.  Fortunately, they have at least documented the quirkiness.    
• Picasa.  This, I will miss.  I've been a huge fan of all things Google but Picasa has to be one of my favorite.  Folks seem to think iPhoto will fill the void but so far I have found it unsatisfying.  No more simple enhancements.  No more geo-tagging.  Oh well.  

Fortunately, the intuitiveness, responsiveness, etc. of the Mac easily make me forget these trouble spots.  

Curious? 

Heading toward unemployment

It's true, beginning December 22d, I'll be officially unemployed. Assuming all goes according to plan, I'll remain in this state for four whole days. I've resigned from my current employer effective 21 December and will start the new one 26 December. I've had a good time over the past 6 years, worked with some great people and learned a lot. Now the time has come to move on and have a new experience. I'm heading to a small (~12 folks) company and suspect I'm going to like it.

Housing update

Well... it's been a while and most know the status of things but just in case...

We were excited about the house and agreed upon price. Then we let our trusty home inspector loose on the place and, well, he inspected really well. While he spoke really well of the double masonry construction of the place, he found the dreaded termites. I think we would likely have been able to overcome the termites with some treatment but it turns out there were also issues with the drainage, basement dampness, and roof fungus.

Given the issues and the seller's unwillingness to adequately compensate us for them, we decide the best thing to do was sign a release based on our inspection contingency.

We also briefly toyed with the idea of just moving into something safe in South Riding but quickly abandoned that idea and will eventually continue pursuing something in Arlington or Alexandria.

For now, we're going to decorate the rental townhouse properly and relax and enjoy the holiday season. We'll begin the search again next year with a keen eye on the poor state of this economy - assuming we're not in an all-out recession by then, in which case, we'll hold off indefinitely:)

Determination

It's been rare lately to see Rebecca as unwavering, resolute, and determined as she has of late. She's nothing short of marvelous when in that "mode." A real site to behold. I simply sit back and watch her work - like a skilled craftsman whittling fine details in some hand-crafted furniture - confident in every movement and knowing precisely what the next will be.

Least that's the way it seems from the peanut gallery - I was eaves-dropping while taking care of the kids.

It started Sunday when we decided to go take a look at a couple open houses. First on the list was a small Cape Cod in N. Arlington. This house, it turns out, was great but it was located alongside a fairly large street - making peace and quiet virtually impossible outside the walls of the house. On the way to the next stop we saw some FSBO properties where a guy named Wayne, it turns out, apparently owns or has owned the majority of houses in northern South Arlington. We've never really considered south Arlington because of the schools but these are really nice locations - unfortunately we found out after going inside that they were only two bedrooms.

After that short detour, we were at our next stop - a bit of a whim - in the City of Alexandria. We haven't really been looking in Alexandria either - again because of the schools - but decided to take a look at this one for various reasons. The house was well done on the inside and the kitchen totally renovated. It's a 1939 colonial just behind the Masonic Temple and it's gorgeous. Street's nice, house is nice, back yard is nice, basement is nice. From the house, we strolled across the deck and into the backyard where we were able to find some privacy to discuss what we'd seen so far. I told her I really liked it. Becca looked at me with a look unique to her and said, "I want this house." I looked back and smiling (half-chuckle) said "yeah, me too." She then looked back with an even more serious Becca look and said, "no, I mean I *really* want this house. I'll do what it takes, this is our house."

That kicked her into a mode I haven't witnessed in a while. Total focus. Total determination. She came home and spent the better part of the night wheeling and dealing. Going over the contract. Writing a depressingly large check. Waking up loan officers to generate a pre-approval letter to make the offer stronger. Will we end up with this house? I don't yet know, seems like the seller is a bit stubborn so far, but he may have just met his match in the captain of our team;)

** Just to be clear in case this entry leads to a different perception - we are very equal in our desire for the house.

Grace's costume...

In response to Gwen's comments/questions, I figured I'd post them here. Grace had a tail and some ears to be some sort of last-minute rodent - but she had no interest in wearing them. Her napping was just off on Halloween (making her grumpy) and truth-be-told, she doesn't yet get Halloween, pumpkins, or costumes. Anyway, she stayed home with me passing out candy to various kids that came begging in funky garb. For her efforts, she learned a valuable lesson: "She who passes out the candy eats the most."

Maybe next year Gracie;)

I should have known...

... that, when given a choice, John would choose the most difficult pumpkin to carve. Truthfully, I actually enjoyed the challenge and was glad about his selection. Knowing his love for pirates of late, I offered three pumpkin options - two pirates and one "smiling Jack". He quickly decided on the more difficult of the two pirates and I began carving. Fortunately, I helped steer us towards a whopper of a pumpkin earlier in the evening that served as the canvas for this adventure - a 35 pounder to be exact;)

Anyway, bad pictures, but here's a look at our final result. First with flash to appreciate the overgrown squash.


Now, without flash, to appreciate its spooky goodness.

and again... just for fun...

John will be a great (albeit incredibly expensive) pirate for Halloween this year - I'll try to get some pictures of our human and squash varieties together.

Time confusion...

In case your clocks were as confused as ours, here's what happened.

Well... I did it

After months of John and I drooling over the big flat panel TV's when we walk into Costco, I finally took the High Definition (HD) plunge. After surprisingly little research (because of being overwhelmed by confusion), I decided to just look for something that accepted HDMI and supported all popular formats (1080p/i, 720p/i). I was originally looking at a Philips but after reading this article I decided to go with a Vizio. This 47"er was exactly what I was hoping for.

I got the beast home and was immediately dissappointed. It's huge. It's beautiful. No doubt. But it turns out that my Cox Digital Cable box actually converts an incoming analog signal into digital only so that it can infuse the guide/info/feature s and send an analog signal out to the TV. The TV, in this case, is too good in that it highlights all the defects of the inferior picture and looks like surprisingly poor quality. Fortunately, a dood at work led me on to over-the-air HD. I promptly went to Radio Shack and purchased a cheap antenna fully expecting it to pick up nothing in my basement rec room. I, and Becca, was pleasantly suprised to see all the major stations displayed in High Definition - a beautiful thing. Over-the-air HD is looking so good, I find myself watching junk I don't even like;)

Now, I find myself in a bind. The over the air HD is sweet, but I'm paying for a bunch of channels that look like junk on my TV. I've got to figure out whether to make a convincing argument to pay Cox yet another $5 a month to get the true digital/HD signal or make a convincing argument to drop it all together. Already, we've had some weather come in that has shown the weakness of the air broadcast, but its cheapness is appealing. When we do move to our final destination, we won't be fortunate enough to have a rec room at all (and we'll be <5miles from the broadcasts) so I don't expect the air broadcast to have the same weaknesses. Still, for now, I'm leaning toward paying Cox for the upgrade.

All and all, the move to HD is incredible. Most people I've talked to say that once you routinely watch shows in HD you'll never go back. So far, I'm inclined to agree.

Which direction?

Clock-wise or Counter? We've just had a heated debate at work with no real conclusion. Let me know how you see it...

Which way?

More Sweet Music...

As Gwen eluded to in her comments, John received another harmonica yesterday in the mail. We told him that we could look at exchanging it for something else if he wanted. He was having none of it though - "take it out". We took it out of the package and he bounced around the room blowing and sucking into his new harmonica as if it were his first one. We played harmonica's most of the evening yesterday. I was flipping through a book and trying to read how to play Jingle Bells and John just looked at me, shook his head, and began to play - sounded much closer to Jingle Bells than my version that had benefited from the reading. He has enjoyed both of his new instruments and seems to give them equal playing time;)

Sweet Music...

John got a harmonica from his last doctor's visit - after hitting his head in Little Ninja's;) He's had a blast playing it, but the sounds it produced were, ehem, rough. Worse than that, he gets absolutely worn out playing it. He'll play for a few seconds and be out of breath - because of the force of air required to make a sound from it.

Fortunately for him [and Becca and I], he's just received a really nice harmonica in for his birthday. He's so used to the effort required by the other one that he can play this one for extended periods. The music it produces is sweet. It just came yesterday, but I love watching him play the "real" one - his head bounces around and his fingers flutter likes he's playing a horn. Becca and I just sit back and enjoy his sweet music...

Sunday C&O Canal Ride

Pablo and I took the bicycles for a trip down the tow path. We rode it from Georgetown, D.C. to Great Falls, Md - a total of around 28 miles round trip. It was a gorgeous day, a little cool in the morning but warming to a perfect low-70s by afternoon.

We picked up the tow path off of Wisconsin Ave in Georgetown.

The majority of this section of the canal is well maintained clay and crushed stone. This was one of the rare opportunities to get a little dirty - on the way out, I took the bridge - Pablo took the water; coming back, we both got wet.


I don't remember exactly where this was so I couldn't geotag it, but this was the first lock that we encountered. We'd both seen locks before up on the Virginia side of Great Falls, but they have fallen into disrepair so it requires some imagination to appreciate what a feat they truly are. All along the tow path, you get to see great examples of the locks in pretty good condition.


Locktenders were responsible for efficiently getting the boat traffic through the lock at all hours of the night. For their efforts, they received a small house and an acre of land...



... and a sweet commute.


I'd love to see how the gears actually worked to open and close each of the upstream lock doors. I suspect the park service would frown on a can of WD-40 and some genuine curiosity though.


This was a more sophisticated "double-lock" that flows into a basin. We didn't stop to read what it was all about though.


And finally... Great Falls... Either the falls look much more dramatic from the Virginia side or the water is really low.


A trout? No. A salmon? No. Just some dood thinking he's gonna be the one to beat the odds;) In our 15 minutes of observing, I calculated the score to be:
- man-in-little-boat = 0
- thousands-of-gallons-of-water-per-second = 8


more pictures here.

and map view too!

Heading out...

It stormed last night and isn't looking so great this morning. I
typed a day 2 summary but was having trouble posting it. We are
packing up and heading out from just south of Boston. More later...

--
--tim

http://williamstw.blogspot.com