The stretch of vitality

Next stop was a week long family reunion vacation on lovely Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. We rented a fabulous enormous mansion. We spent our days on the beach, riding bikes, playing golf or tennis, lounging in the pool, and making the periodic Starbucks run. We also celebrated my father’s 60th birthday. In a fantastic travel-blog synergy, I was able to get Jamie Sue to come out from Manning, SC and spend two days with us, which was a real treat since I haven’t seen her since early fall I think. If you have been reading my blog, you will definitely enjoy her blog of her trip to Buenos Aires and camping in remote Patagonia, Argentina. I must admit that both her writing and photography are vastly superior to mine, so check it out

Vacation photos are here.

Well, I’m having an exciting and lovely time here in Jacksonville. I
arrived Saturday night. Sunny had stayed up late to meet me, so I
went into her bedroom to say goodnight. She didn’t recognize me with
my shaggy hair, but she played it cool. Eventually we convinced her I
was the same person. Marc and Casey and I chilled out and caught up
Saturday night.

Sunday morning Casey and Sunny made Marc a delicious Father’s Day
breakfast, served initially in bed, but quickly followed up with an
invitation to join the rest of us in the dining room. After breakfast
we headed out to the beach. The beach we went to is out across some
packed sand flats, and you can drive your car directly to the tide
line on the beach and just park there, which is a bit odd, but must be
great for the folks there in their RVs. Sadly, the weather was pretty
cloudy and quickly turning to rain with thunder and lightning, so the
beach patrol was soon clearing everybody out of the water. Now the
rain is a bit of a problem given two of the windows in the Skarecki
Volvo don’t close, so we had to improvise some shelter by hanging
towels over the windows. Later on we took Sunny to see Indiana Jones
and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the San Marco theater – which
serves snacks and beers.

Monday Marc had to leave for a road trip for work. I was working from
home and Sunny and Casey were out and about in the morning. They came
back to pick me up to go out to lunch. Casey had a few navigation
issues that resulted in us crossing the blue bridge four total times.
Eventually we arrived at the Jacksonville Hooters restaurant, on the
banks of the St Johns River. This was a bit of an experience. They
had golf playing on so many TVs set at maximum volume that you got the
combined effect of the tinny, blaring sound plus the delay effect from
TVs around the restaurant made it sound like air raid sirens and that
Tiger Woods was attacking from above. We shouted our conversation to
compensate for the din.

When we arrived back at home, we found the power and water were not
working. Ut oh. Casey offered another trip back into the city so I
could work from the Jacksonville Public Library. So back again over
the bridge we went. I got settled in the library and Casey made calls
to figure out why the power and water were out. Eventually she found
out there was some issue that had caused the house to be “flagged” and
an electrician would need to come out tomorrow and do something to get
the power back on. Casey called me in the evening when the library
was closing to say that she had checked in to the Crowne Plaza with
Sunny for the night. So they came by and picked me up and we went for
a dusk swim in the pool. The view from the balcony of the lights and
bridges along the St Johns River was really pretty. Casey and Sunny
were gushing at how fancy and posh the hotel was. After our swim we
had a late dinner at Al’s Pizza in Five Points just prior to closing.
Back at the hotel, again more gushing over the luxurious
accommodations, including Casey’s exclamation “The bed doesn’t have any
sand in it!”.

The next morning Casey put on her fancy interview suit to go in to the
city and get the power straightened out. Sunny pleaded for a quick
swim in the pool before they checked out. I walked across the bridge
back to the library to work. Casey got the power worked out and later
that afternoon after a few technician visits the power and water were
back on.

Tuesday evening we biked to a neighbor’s house for a dinner party
featuring gumbo and rum punch. Marc got back from his road trip and
joined us there. It was a late night with lots of rum punch and
discussion of politics out back in the heat and mosquitoes. People
alternated going in to play with Sunny and Maya. After my stint it
was after midnight and I was exhausted so I had to take the early trip
home and the rock stars came back later.

Wednesday was a more mellow day at home with a nice dinner followed by
crowding onto the bed where the TV with HBO is to watch Hairspray,
which Sunny loves. Then we played some dominoes.

Thursday Marc and I took off work to try the beach again. We had much better weather.

Saturday we piled all four of us into Marc’s mini cooper and drove up to Savannah. This saved me from a bus ride, which was great. We met up with my folks for Bar-B-Que at Wall’s – a small joint in a tiny alley. Then we left the Skareckis to explore Savannah while we hit the road for Hilton Head Island. Sadly it started to rain immediately, which I’m sure put a damper on the Savannah sight seeing.

Check out the rest of the photos, including adorable kitten shots!

It’s been a fun but quick week here in L.A. hanging out with aps101 and weiskind and browascension. Monday I picked up Andrew after he got out of work and we ate and chatted at Canter’s deli. Tuesday I had to make a sudden trip to San Antonio, TX for work, so I headed to LAX Tuesday evening, stayed overnight at the very nice Hyatt Regency Hill Country Resort and Spa, and worked at a customer site on Wednesday. This was mostly a social engineering effort that boiled down to me shepherding them through the realization that, as the error message on screen says, and as I described in detail over email, and as I described in detail over the phone, and as I described in detail over fancy HTML email, and as I sent in an MS Word document with screen shots of network captures, the problem is indeed a misconfiguration of your third party software. So with me there in person they finally figured the should humor me in my theory and voila, problem solved. Thanks very much, I’m heading back to California.

However, I stayed the rest of the day to assist the account team. In my haste rushing to the airport with just enough time to make my flight, I had forgotten my cell phone charger in LA. Actually, as I’m blogging this I realize I had a USB adapter in my backpack I could have used. Anyway, my coworker had forgotten his laptop power cord so all day we had been sharing mine. Oh andby the way he also spilled water on his main cell phone and busted it. At the end of the day he left earlier than me and out of habit packed up my power cord. So now if I have to stay another day I have no laptop power and no cell charger. And the guy who just left with my power adapter can’t be reached on his spare cell phone since he doesn’t have voicemail set up on it. Plus I didn’t rent a car so even trying to find a Best Buy would be a challenge. So I was walking around the customer’s lobby alternately trying to figure out whether management wanted me to stay another day or not, trying to change my flight, and having the security guard follow up on my taxi which was taking a long time to arrive. However, I had enough cell juice left to get a barrage of phone calls and when one of them said “OK, you can go back home tonight”, I decided that would be a good point to turn off the phone to save those last few minutes. So I went immediately back to the airport and made my way back to LAX late Wednesday night. The taxi driver drove into the office parking lot, saw no one on the curb waiting, and started to leave, so I had to run out of the lobby and shout him down. If he had had his windows up, I would have missed the flight for sure.

Thursday Andrew bumped Rebecca’s car tire into a broken curb and got a flat tire. AAA came and inflated his spare, but after putting the spare on it turns out the spare is not right for the car and it won’t budge. So then we had to try to get the flat tire to a tire shop (in my car), but it was already 8:20 and we figured everything would be closed. However, the AAA guy knew a place that was open late, so we headed over there in my car. Sadly they didn’t have the size we needed in stock, but they did have some soap and a hose faucet Andrew used to clean up his hands. So we had to leave the car until this morning. However, it was parked with the front end away from the curb to make operating the jack easier, and we were worried about getting ticketed for that, so Andrew had to do an extra tire swap, back the car up a foot, and then another one. All told I think he swapped tires many times: original to spare once, spare off to get filled by the AAA man, spare back on which didn’t work, original back on to re-park, spare back on overnight so we could take the original with us, and then finally the new tire on this morning.

This evening I had dinner at home with Rebecca and Paul, followed by some packing for Florida, a final stroll around West Hollywood, some Haagen-Daaz, and then some hula hooping on the roof with Rebecca just now.

Tomorrow morning I’ll head out to visit Marc in Jacksonville, FL. Oh, and it looks like over this weekend I need to decide which of three major projects at work I’d like to be involved in primarily over the next year or so. Hmm.

More photos here.

I had a nice drive down to Los Angeles on Saturday. Upon arrival in West Hollywood I immediately spotted two transvestites walking the street – OK, I’m back in a huge city again. I met up with Andrew and we walked around West Hollywood a bit. We walked past a small fashion show on a side street and around some of the retail areas and residential neighborhoods. We walked past the line for hot dogs at Pink’s. We met one of Andrew’s fellow Ogdormers Madrew and headed to the Newsroom Cafe for dinner. Then Andrew and I went to see some improv acting. There is a group here that does long form improvisation, and they are currently doing a soap opera form. So we saw an improvised soap opera including the “previously on Avalon Terrace” and “next week on Avalon Terrace” montages. Overall it was pretty funny with some clever and well done bits. Then it was to Farmer’s Market for some dessert.

This morning we went to Manhattan Beach where Andrew had a piano lesson to teach, so during that I walked around Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach and watched beach volleyball and all the bikers, runners, and surfers. It was great weather around 75 degrees. I had my camera but left the battery at home, so sadly no pictures of all the cool vintage convertibles.

This evening I reunited with my old Oberlin College roommate. We had some delicious burgers at Father’s Office and had some nice conversation. Tomorrow it’s back to work.

So this was my last week of working at the old Opsware HQ in Sunnyvale. On June 20th they are closing the building and everyone is relocating to HP Cupertino. It was a particularly vivid week for me. It is a completely different experience to interact with people face to face, and much more intense. During the week I noticed and was thankful for the large number of heavy hitters I get to work with. hmp packed up the map room and folks are generally starting to put all the stuff in their cubes into boxes. There was higher then average nerf weaponry in the air this week, and folks overall seemed a bit giddy. Friday afternoon beers happened since that will no longer be tolerated at the new office. On Friday Ed came to visit and we went out drinking with three of the old Loudcloud guys, which was a lot of fun. OK, now the final Comfort Inn make-your-own waffle and then it’s on the road to L.A.

Well, I finally got the green machine to a repair shop. I think sometime in Bend it started running really really loud especially in low gear. It sounded like a motorcycle with no muffler. As would be expected, I had to shell out a large bucket of cash, but man is it nice to pull away from an intersection without people running under bridges thinking it’s an earthquake. I had to jog back about 3 miles from the repair shop when I dropped it off, which left me semi-crippled since I haven’t been doing any running since the fall. But she’s in good shape for the next treks to L.A. and then Flagstaff.

Well, I can officially say that the green machine has made it all the way across the country. I started at the Hudson River and made it to the Pacific Ocean. Saturday night I made it from Portland to the coast in southern Oregon, and Sunday I did the rest of the drive down to the San Francisco bay area. I took the scenic route along highway 101 for almost the whole way, which is several hours slower than I-5 but a lot more interesting. I also took a side trip into Humboldt state park to check out the giant Redwood trees. This week I’m in Sunnyvale for week and I’ll be heading down to L.A. on Saturday.

More photos here.

OK, I’ve been traveling around and having various adventures for a while since I’ve had time to post. A couple Fridays ago I packed up shop in Bend and headed to Portland. I met up with Bernie, Wyatt, and Charles for some video games at Ground Kontrol followed by some Sushi. Then the next morning I flew back to New Jersey for Alex’s wedding. I hung out with Chris Saturday and we had some fantastic Moroccan food in Manhattan followed by a trip to Jack Dempsey’s pub to watch some UFC with a bunch of Marines and a bunch of drunken Irishmen. Sunday we trekked out to Long Island for Alex’s wedding, which was a good time.

Monday I trained it down to Long Branch to visit Thorp and the Jersey shore crew. I met Wes, Thorp’s baby son, and we had some great BBQ food. I gathered the jazz nerds and played some of the Cannonball Adderley transcriptions I have been practicing for a while, which was fun to nerd-out on. Then I trained it out to Lambertville to hang with the folks a few days.

More NJ visit photos are here.

Thursday I flew back to Portland, hopped the MAX train, and met up with Bernie, who got the fun experience of driving a fully loaded green machine in all of its busted-muffler glory. Friday after work Bernie had to do some last minute housewarming party prep so I headed on bike to the Pub and Pedal. This time the Pub and Pedal was hooked up to a big parade march from the existing Voodoo Doughnut shop around town to the new Voodoo Doughnut location. There were a couple hundred goofballs assembled for this, and it was just a generally weird event. Everyone is pysched up about doughnuts, and the police in riot gear are blocking off traffic. The participants included a father/son team randomly dressed as hot dogs, a guy in a doughnut outfit, one of the owners in a shiny silver suit, and the other owner prancing around in a parasol. This one guy Trey (I think they are the owners) said this quote: “Oh, I forgot about my noise maker. I was too busy concentrating on my money maker.” Local drum line Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers provided the beats for the parade, and the local roller derby team skated up and down the paraders with balloons.

When we arrived at the destination, it was so crowded that we decided to ride back to the original store to get doughnuts, which we did, and there was no line there, so hurray for that. We grabbed a few dozen Vegan doughnuts for the party and then headed back to Bernard’s, where we spent the evening. Bernie invited a few folks from the Portland Juggling Club, and eventually they ended up passing flaming torches around outside on the street.

Saturday we went briefly up to Mount Tabor Park, then we helped Wyatt move some stuff into a storage unit, and then I headed out to get a jump on the long drive to Sunnyvale.

More Portland visit part 2 photos are here.