So, the batteries in my camera died. I'll have to post pics later, after I get them from Keiko, Greg, et al.
A quick recap of the day:
1) reading on the balcony listening to the waves
2) reading in a hammock down on the beach (finished Sundiver)
3) 90 second swim in the super-cold ocean water
4) lunch, including margaritas
5) reading by the infinity pool (started the 2nd book in the series: Startide Rising. It's even better!)
6) swimming in the infinity pool
7) napping at the infinity pool
8) get ready for wedding ceremony
9) attend wedding ceremony
10) reception cocktail-margaritas for an hour or so
11) dinner, screwed up my part of group speech (never did play well in groups)
12) danced from 930pm-230am without stopping except for 5 min while they cut the cake
All in all, a pretty good day.
Here are a few observations about doing your vacation in a super-fancy resort:
1) Whatever outrageous price you happen to be paying for the room ($625/night in this case), you should plan to rack up about 50% of that in daily incidentals. EVERYTHING costs something, and what that something is, is roughly 3-10 times what you would pay for it elsewhere.
2) Being at a resort like this means you will have to work pretty hard to get out of it; indeed, we're only leaving the resort because we're shifting to the Westin (which is 1/3 the cost) for our last 2 days. It's a combination of the resort being pleasantly awesome, and the ever-present undercurrent of holy-shit-for-what-I'm-paying-I'm-going-to-squeeze-every-last-drop-of-fun-out-of-this.
The implication is, if you actually want to see the country you're in, this is not the way to do it. As it happens, there's not much country to see other than this resort; we're at the bottom of the Baja peninsula and pretty much everything here exists because white people decided to build something, and needed other people to do all the work (starting with the Spanish, who founded the place).
3) Because of the cost of labor here, the ratio of random serving people to guests is at least 1-1, maybe even higher. The resort is organized in small buildings, and each building has its own butler, maid, etc. If you don't put on the privacy sign, there is someone coming in and out of your room like every 10 minutes in an effort to be servile. Turn down your bed, make sure there's fresh fruit in the bowl, give you more towels, whatever.
We quickly put on the privacy sign and have left it on constantly since, since neither one of us needs any of the shit they're wanting to give us, and neither of us particularly cares for people to be wandering in and out. But it's really caused our poor butler a lot of consternation; he even came up to us yesterday afternoon and somewhat plaintively asked if we were *really* sure we didn't need our beds turned down. I think he's worried he and his buddy the dayshift butler are not going to get tipped.
Now we're off to the day-after breakfast, and then we shift over to the Westin, where I think there is also a very nice pool. More reading! I haven't done this much nothing in decades, and while I don't think this is really the way I most like to vacation, I *am* enjoying this very much. And we're very proud of Alex & Rose, who are, in some really weird, ineffable way, perfect for each other...
Monday, June 29, 2009
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Cabo, Day 2
After 2 days here, I think the dominant strategy is this:
1) be poolside by 9-ish. Lay out/swim until around 11.
2) eat lunch.
3) nap on the enormous, super-comfortable deck furniture at the room, listening to the waves crash in.
4) be back poolside by 3-ish. Lay out/swim until 5 or 6.
5) shower, change, have dinner, socialize until 1-3am. Because yes, we're great big pussies who throw in the towel around then in part so that we can cycle back to (1) above the next day.
Also, all steps except (3) include drinking margaritas. From the menu over at the Agua restaurant, I've now downed 3 of 17 margarita types in their entirety, and sampled an additional 3 from others. I think we need to spend more time at the pool that's closer to that restaurant, because I'm pacing behind on my goal of drinking all their margaritas before I leave.
Keiko is starting to look really pink in places. I'm perilously close to burning myself, though I don't exactly turn pink. We're going to have to be more aggressive with the sunblock. Also, we're going to go to the actual beach this morning, and try laying around there. The beach here is mostly wild beach, with craggy rocks and such, but there's a supposedly swimmable beach at the north end of the resort. We'll check it out. Also, there's talk of zip-lining today. We'll see if that happens- I'm fine with laying around and reading.
Here are some pics from yesterday- most of our pics we're taking with Keiko's camera, including basically all the pics of other people, but here's a taste of the pool area:
Morning at the room. That futon thingy is so-o-o-o comfortable...
The adults-only pool, with the island bar that you can literally belly up to.
The pool. The trees. My legs.
Keiko, unconsciously making a very nice ad for the Kindle.
Reading "Sundiver" by David Brin. Finally getting some color back. Ironically, I never have time to sunbathe in CA.
On our way to lunch. This is all hard work, let me tell you.
With Greg & Claudia for lunch. That's the "Blue" margarita- #3 of 17 from the drink menu.
Off to go get some wild beach pics, and read my book out on the sand. Very much liking "Sundiver"... all of y'all who read sci-fi should check it out.
1) be poolside by 9-ish. Lay out/swim until around 11.
2) eat lunch.
3) nap on the enormous, super-comfortable deck furniture at the room, listening to the waves crash in.
4) be back poolside by 3-ish. Lay out/swim until 5 or 6.
5) shower, change, have dinner, socialize until 1-3am. Because yes, we're great big pussies who throw in the towel around then in part so that we can cycle back to (1) above the next day.
Also, all steps except (3) include drinking margaritas. From the menu over at the Agua restaurant, I've now downed 3 of 17 margarita types in their entirety, and sampled an additional 3 from others. I think we need to spend more time at the pool that's closer to that restaurant, because I'm pacing behind on my goal of drinking all their margaritas before I leave.
Keiko is starting to look really pink in places. I'm perilously close to burning myself, though I don't exactly turn pink. We're going to have to be more aggressive with the sunblock. Also, we're going to go to the actual beach this morning, and try laying around there. The beach here is mostly wild beach, with craggy rocks and such, but there's a supposedly swimmable beach at the north end of the resort. We'll check it out. Also, there's talk of zip-lining today. We'll see if that happens- I'm fine with laying around and reading.
Here are some pics from yesterday- most of our pics we're taking with Keiko's camera, including basically all the pics of other people, but here's a taste of the pool area:
Morning at the room. That futon thingy is so-o-o-o comfortable...
The adults-only pool, with the island bar that you can literally belly up to.
The pool. The trees. My legs.
Keiko, unconsciously making a very nice ad for the Kindle.
Reading "Sundiver" by David Brin. Finally getting some color back. Ironically, I never have time to sunbathe in CA.
On our way to lunch. This is all hard work, let me tell you.
With Greg & Claudia for lunch. That's the "Blue" margarita- #3 of 17 from the drink menu.
Off to go get some wild beach pics, and read my book out on the sand. Very much liking "Sundiver"... all of y'all who read sci-fi should check it out.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Cabo, Day 1
Yesterday I left HMB for 6 days in Cabo, to see Alex and Rose get married...
I was worried that my arriving at the airport 90 min early would doom me to some kind of mishap, but in a strange twist of fate, nothing went wrong and I arrived in Cabo exactly as scheduled. Keiko and her BFF Claudia, and her husband Greg, had gotten there an hour earlier but waited for me at the airport so we could head into town together.
We got a taxi into town ($50), and went straight to our hotel: The One & Only Palmilla. Now, those of you who have followed my travel stories over the years know that I usually stay in places like the Happy Land Hotel, in Luxor Egypt, where $1.10/night includes breakfast. However, Alex & Rose are the exact opposite of that, and they picked the Palmilla as the place to get married. Now, there are other places to stay in town, but knowing that hanging out with A&R means you're a great big pussy if you throw in the towel at 3am, I decided we should stay at the Palmilla, since that's where the events are and that way we wouldn't have to try to get to some other place at weird hours of the morning.
To view the One & Only Palmilla, follow this link:
http://www.oneandonlyresorts.com/flash.html
So, the discounted rate for wedding guests, including all taxes and fees, came to $625/night, nonrefundable, the first 2 nights of which they charged in advance when I booked back in March. So once you book, you're committed. For $625/night, I decided that it was reasonable to expect that I would be greeted by a unicorn. A talking unicorn. A talking unicorn that pulled up on a magic flying carpet. A talking unicorn on a magic flying carpet that would escort us to our rooms, pooping little rainbows the whole way.
Sadly, no rainbow-pooping talking flying unicorn. But, we do have a giant room. With a gorgeous view of the ocean. And a butler. Here are a couple pics from the room, which we took on arrival:
The view from our balcony, to the north
Greg & Claudia are our next-door neighbors. There's a little wall that separates our balconies.
Sunset, from standing on the balcony railing.
Greg, who is a golf teacher, decided to head straight for the course, with Alex. Claudia, Keiko and I decided to head straight for the infinity pool that has the bar in the middle of it. That's right- the pool surrounds a bar. No man is an island, except the bartender in the infinity pool. Soon we got hungry though, and that meant having to go to the *other*, larger infinity pool, which has a landside bar that serves food. And margaritas. 17 different kinds of margaritas. I decided that I'm drinking pretty much nothing but margaritas on this trip, including, if possible, all 17 kinds on the drink menu there.
As I formed that noble goal, I had no idea of the size of those margaritas- they come in glasses that are huge, and they're very strong. That makes my goal that much harder, but what is life if not an opportunity to achieve audacious goals?
After some food, and a huge margarita, we swam in the infinity pool for quite some time, before heading back for a short nap, and then cocktails with the whole wedding group on the central plaza of the resort. That meant more margaritas, and at 130am when Alex & Rose decided to organize a trip into downtown San Jose del Cabo, Keiko and I decided that we are indeed great big pussies, and we went back to the room to order room service dinner and go to bed.
Now it's 9am, and we're headed back to the beach for a day of aggressive sunbathing and margarita drinking. I could get used to this life...
I was worried that my arriving at the airport 90 min early would doom me to some kind of mishap, but in a strange twist of fate, nothing went wrong and I arrived in Cabo exactly as scheduled. Keiko and her BFF Claudia, and her husband Greg, had gotten there an hour earlier but waited for me at the airport so we could head into town together.
We got a taxi into town ($50), and went straight to our hotel: The One & Only Palmilla. Now, those of you who have followed my travel stories over the years know that I usually stay in places like the Happy Land Hotel, in Luxor Egypt, where $1.10/night includes breakfast. However, Alex & Rose are the exact opposite of that, and they picked the Palmilla as the place to get married. Now, there are other places to stay in town, but knowing that hanging out with A&R means you're a great big pussy if you throw in the towel at 3am, I decided we should stay at the Palmilla, since that's where the events are and that way we wouldn't have to try to get to some other place at weird hours of the morning.
To view the One & Only Palmilla, follow this link:
http://www.oneandonlyresorts.com/flash.html
So, the discounted rate for wedding guests, including all taxes and fees, came to $625/night, nonrefundable, the first 2 nights of which they charged in advance when I booked back in March. So once you book, you're committed. For $625/night, I decided that it was reasonable to expect that I would be greeted by a unicorn. A talking unicorn. A talking unicorn that pulled up on a magic flying carpet. A talking unicorn on a magic flying carpet that would escort us to our rooms, pooping little rainbows the whole way.
Sadly, no rainbow-pooping talking flying unicorn. But, we do have a giant room. With a gorgeous view of the ocean. And a butler. Here are a couple pics from the room, which we took on arrival:
The view from our balcony, to the north
Greg & Claudia are our next-door neighbors. There's a little wall that separates our balconies.
Sunset, from standing on the balcony railing.
Greg, who is a golf teacher, decided to head straight for the course, with Alex. Claudia, Keiko and I decided to head straight for the infinity pool that has the bar in the middle of it. That's right- the pool surrounds a bar. No man is an island, except the bartender in the infinity pool. Soon we got hungry though, and that meant having to go to the *other*, larger infinity pool, which has a landside bar that serves food. And margaritas. 17 different kinds of margaritas. I decided that I'm drinking pretty much nothing but margaritas on this trip, including, if possible, all 17 kinds on the drink menu there.
As I formed that noble goal, I had no idea of the size of those margaritas- they come in glasses that are huge, and they're very strong. That makes my goal that much harder, but what is life if not an opportunity to achieve audacious goals?
After some food, and a huge margarita, we swam in the infinity pool for quite some time, before heading back for a short nap, and then cocktails with the whole wedding group on the central plaza of the resort. That meant more margaritas, and at 130am when Alex & Rose decided to organize a trip into downtown San Jose del Cabo, Keiko and I decided that we are indeed great big pussies, and we went back to the room to order room service dinner and go to bed.
Now it's 9am, and we're headed back to the beach for a day of aggressive sunbathing and margarita drinking. I could get used to this life...
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Adventures in American Healthcare Part 2
So, my mom went into the hospital a couple weeks ago. She had been experiencing chest pains and dizziness for several days, with increasing severity and frequency, to the point where the doctor wanted her to go to the ER on a Monday, and she refused to go on the grounds that there was no one to take care of my dad. Of course, none of the rest of us in the family knew that.
By Friday, she wound up in the ER anyway. Fortunately, my cousin volunteered to take over caretaking for my dad for a couple days, even though she was putting on her biggest fundraising event of the year that weekend (she works for the National Kidney Foundation in StL). But after a couple days of dealing with giving him shots, cleaning up after him, feeding him, etc., plus not getting any sleep since he wakes up every hour during the night and has a non-trivial risk of falling, which requires a 9-1-1 call since he's too heavy for either my mom or my cousin to pick up (he can't help since half is body is basically non-functional), she called my sister for help.
So, my sister, 7 months pregnant, flew up to Stl Sunday morning to take care of my dad for a few days. I was scheduled to head to NYC on Wed night, but I changed the ticket to go to StL instead, and flew in to relieve my sister. Fortunately, by that time my mom had been released from the hospital.
Now, here's how it went down with the hospital: they admitted her on Thursday, did a first round of tests, determined that her ventricles were not working in sync with each other due to some issue with the nerves in her heart or something, and then decided that they needed to run a second round of tests, including an echocardiogram and a cardiac catheter, in order to determine the cause of the nerve issue. Trouble is, by the time they'd worked that out as the best course of action, it was late Friday, and they couldn't get on the Friday schedule, and the people who run those tests "don't work weekends".
Nice.
Apparently, the doctors felt my mom was at enough risk of something bad happening that they definitely wanted to keep her in the hospital over the weekend, but not at enough risk that it was urgent to get someone to FUCKING COME TO WORK and run the tests. The insurance won't pay someone overtime or whatever to come in unless there's an imminent risk of something life-threatening happening.
I looooooove healthcare in this country.
So my mom sat in the hospital twiddling her thumbs over the weekend while my cousin and sister took care of my dad, and then on Monday people came back to work and they ran their tests. They expected that they would find arterial blockages, which are apparently the typical cause of issues like the one my mom has, but both tests came up empty. At which point, the doctors admitted that "we don't really know why her heart is doing that", and decided that the best thing to do would be to send her home with medicine for her blood pressure, which was high, and have her start seeing a cardiologist on a regular basis.
Of course, they ended up having to keep her one extra day because she started bleeding from the site of her cardiac cath, but hey, she didn't contract a staph infection while in the hospital so I guess we should all just be glad it wasn't worse.
So, with all this fancy technology, all they were able to do was rule out arterial blockage as a cause. Granted, that's good to know, and is decisively good news. Still, to have been in the hospital for 6 days and have only that and a $10 trillion dollar bill to show for it, I question how much medicine has really advanced since the 1800's.
I mean, would the results have really been that different if they had just slapped some leeches on her and given her some heroin? I'm not so sure...
By Friday, she wound up in the ER anyway. Fortunately, my cousin volunteered to take over caretaking for my dad for a couple days, even though she was putting on her biggest fundraising event of the year that weekend (she works for the National Kidney Foundation in StL). But after a couple days of dealing with giving him shots, cleaning up after him, feeding him, etc., plus not getting any sleep since he wakes up every hour during the night and has a non-trivial risk of falling, which requires a 9-1-1 call since he's too heavy for either my mom or my cousin to pick up (he can't help since half is body is basically non-functional), she called my sister for help.
So, my sister, 7 months pregnant, flew up to Stl Sunday morning to take care of my dad for a few days. I was scheduled to head to NYC on Wed night, but I changed the ticket to go to StL instead, and flew in to relieve my sister. Fortunately, by that time my mom had been released from the hospital.
Now, here's how it went down with the hospital: they admitted her on Thursday, did a first round of tests, determined that her ventricles were not working in sync with each other due to some issue with the nerves in her heart or something, and then decided that they needed to run a second round of tests, including an echocardiogram and a cardiac catheter, in order to determine the cause of the nerve issue. Trouble is, by the time they'd worked that out as the best course of action, it was late Friday, and they couldn't get on the Friday schedule, and the people who run those tests "don't work weekends".
Nice.
Apparently, the doctors felt my mom was at enough risk of something bad happening that they definitely wanted to keep her in the hospital over the weekend, but not at enough risk that it was urgent to get someone to FUCKING COME TO WORK and run the tests. The insurance won't pay someone overtime or whatever to come in unless there's an imminent risk of something life-threatening happening.
I looooooove healthcare in this country.
So my mom sat in the hospital twiddling her thumbs over the weekend while my cousin and sister took care of my dad, and then on Monday people came back to work and they ran their tests. They expected that they would find arterial blockages, which are apparently the typical cause of issues like the one my mom has, but both tests came up empty. At which point, the doctors admitted that "we don't really know why her heart is doing that", and decided that the best thing to do would be to send her home with medicine for her blood pressure, which was high, and have her start seeing a cardiologist on a regular basis.
Of course, they ended up having to keep her one extra day because she started bleeding from the site of her cardiac cath, but hey, she didn't contract a staph infection while in the hospital so I guess we should all just be glad it wasn't worse.
So, with all this fancy technology, all they were able to do was rule out arterial blockage as a cause. Granted, that's good to know, and is decisively good news. Still, to have been in the hospital for 6 days and have only that and a $10 trillion dollar bill to show for it, I question how much medicine has really advanced since the 1800's.
I mean, would the results have really been that different if they had just slapped some leeches on her and given her some heroin? I'm not so sure...
Friday, June 12, 2009
I dream in puns...
This is the dream I had 2 nights ago:
I was in a large office with my parents, looking as I did when I was a teenager. It turns out to be a doctor's office, and I am there for some kind of medical exam. The doctor pulls out a tricorder, like straight from Star Trek, and proceeds to wave it over me like they do, finally tilting my head forward and waving it around the back of my skull. Finally, she speaks:
Doctor: "Hmm..."
Mom: "What is it??"
Doctor: "He seems to have too much of this amino acid in his brain."
Mom: "Which amino acid??"
Doctor: "Asinine"
(pause)
Me: "Is it serious?"
And then I woke up. Feeling extremely pleased with myself, I might add. I almost called JOC, except it was 5am StL time, meaning 3am for him, so I didn't. I can't wait to tell him though.
I was in a large office with my parents, looking as I did when I was a teenager. It turns out to be a doctor's office, and I am there for some kind of medical exam. The doctor pulls out a tricorder, like straight from Star Trek, and proceeds to wave it over me like they do, finally tilting my head forward and waving it around the back of my skull. Finally, she speaks:
Doctor: "Hmm..."
Mom: "What is it??"
Doctor: "He seems to have too much of this amino acid in his brain."
Mom: "Which amino acid??"
Doctor: "Asinine"
(pause)
Me: "Is it serious?"
And then I woke up. Feeling extremely pleased with myself, I might add. I almost called JOC, except it was 5am StL time, meaning 3am for him, so I didn't. I can't wait to tell him though.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Adventures in American Healthcare Part 1, or I Always Knew Chocolate Was Bad for You
This story begins on Memorial Day, when Joel suggested that we bike up the Mountain of Death...
The ride up was typically brutal, but the view from the top was typically amazing. And, there's always the reward of the fun part, which is riding *down* the mountain at breakneck speed. We got back to the house around 3, where I decided to reward myself with ice cream and a shower, in that order. I decided to fire up back episodes of Colbert and just chill out while I ate the ice cream.
Joel, not satisfied with having done that much biking, and possessed of a love for chocolate greater than anyone I've ever known who is not actually female, decided to bike into town and get a giant bar of fancy chocolate from the hippie grocery store (in which everything is organic and overpriced). Normally I would mock him incessantly, but having done that severak times in a row, and being somewhat tired, I simply waved as he headed out.
3 Colbert episodes later, I decided to take that shower, vaguely noting that Joel seemed to be gone a lot longer than he normally is when he goes on a chocolate run.
After a long leisurely shower, I got dressed and eventually wandered over to check the phone. There was a message from a random 650 number, which I assumed would be something work-related, a new family needing tutoring perhaps. So I decided I would listen to the message and call back shortly.
When I did finally listen to the message, it was from Stanford Hospital. It said: "Joel was in an accident. He is fine, but you should call in when you get this."
Uh oh.
So I call Stanford Hospital. Joel has been hit by a car and is in the emergency room. I can come down to see him at any time. So I get things together quickly, and drive over the hill into Palo Alto to the hospital.
When I arrive, Joel is surrounded by a couple of nurses, who are cleaning his wounds with Q-tips and tiny squirt guns. He is heavily bandaged, and everything not bandaged is basically a giant road rash. They're cleaning out the dirt and tiny pebbles from all the open road rash. It's pretty gruesome. So, I'll share a couple pics I took...
Joel when I arrived.
Joel immediately after the nurses finished cleaning him. Note that he failed to use this god-given opportunity to get some digits.
Joel with the bar of chocolate that he almost died trying to procure. It also survived the crash, though it didn't ultimately survive Joel.
Joel, finally leaving the hospital.
Joel's clavicle. Ultimately, they had to do surgery & put a titanium plate in there, & tie the bones to it. Although painful, it moves Joel a tiny step toward his goal of becoming a cyborg.
The final tally of the damage: 4 broken ribs, 1 broken clavicle, 1 mildly sprained ankle, one actual chunk of flesh missing from his arm near his elbow (every time Joel raised that arm I had to look away- it was the most gruesome by far), and road rash over basically everything else. Glasses destroyed. The helmet did its job though- no head trauma at all. The helmet was cracked completely.
I leave the hospital around 11pm, and walk out to the garage. I get in my car, drive to the gate, and see the sign that says "After hours, pay at the self-service station in the garage." So I turn around, park again, and find the self-service station. I stick my ticket into the machine: $6. I get out my credit card, and look for the credit card slot.
Which has a metal plate bolted over it. Cash only, apparently. A quick examination of my wallet shows $2. OK, no problem, I keep spare change in little baggies in the car (organized by coin type- the first time Keiko saw me filing my change away we had the following exchange:
Keiko: "You organize your spare change??"
Me: "Uh, yes."
Keiko: "Wow, baby."
Me: "Admit it- you're a little turned on right now."
Keiko: "Yes babe, I have never been more hot for you."
Anyway, I go back to the car and discover that the big bag of quarters is not there, because I used it for the BART to go up to SF during the week, and left it in my backpack, which is at home. So all I've got is some dimes and nickels. Adding up all those, plus a couple coins on the floor, takes me up to $5.65. The annoying thing is, I've got enough with the bag of pennies, but the machine won't take pennies. I double-check this and then kick the machine.
So I go back into the largely deserted hospital, and after wandering around awhile, find someone who can direct me to the ATM. The ATM, of course, charges me $3 for cash, since it's rather predictably not a Chase/WaMu/Consolidated Barely Solvent Megabank atm, which means that my Chase/WaMu/Consolidated Barely Solvent Megabank is now also going to charge me $3 for the sin of using another crappy bank's ATM. Thus, my parking cost will literally double b/c the parking folks haven't figured out that ONLY DRUG DEALERS STILL USE CASH.
Dammit.
Joel comes home late the next day, and is pretty loopy from all the meds. Plus, the only way he can sleep is on our Sofa of Death (once you lay down on it, you will basically keep laying on it until you starve- it's weirdly comfortable), wedged up against it on his side so that there's no pressure on his various broken bones.
The next day, Joel's mom came down to stay a few days, which was nice. I was crazed at work and couldn't do all the helping he needed. But after she went to bed that night, Joel had trouble sleeping, and asked me to help him put new bandages on the giant open wound that was the left half of his back. That involved the following steps:
1) peeling off the existing bandage, which had been placed on while the wound was still actively oozing/lightly bleeding, and hence had become congealed. That's a LOT of surface area to peel congealed bandage off of, and poor Joel sang songs to himself while I slowly peeled away and tried not to cause too much fresh bleeding, which I was reasonably successful at. I offered to get him a towel to bite down on, but he muttered something about manhood blah blah blah, so I didn't press the issue.
2) once the old system of bandages was peeled off, the wound was freshly oozing/bleeding a little, and I said: "I can't put a new bandage on this without wiping it down a little." So I got a washcloth, put cold water on it, and lightly cleaned the wound. This process confirmed my long-held belief that I am in no way, shape, or form cut out for a career in medicine. I used a skill acquired in traveling in 3rd-world countries, which is: find the part of your mind that is really grossed out by what's happening right now, and pull the plug.
3) I had a box of 3" x 3" bandages, a roll of tape, and a single contiguous wound constituting 1/3 of the total surface area of Joel's back to bandage. An additional complicating factor was that Joel is basically a lowland mountain gorilla that's evolved a capacity for speech and baseball fandom. So I said: "I'm not going to be able to securely bandage this without trimming some of this hair."
So, we trooped into the bathroom, and I got out Joel's shears. We stood in the bathtub, and I proceeded to shave his hairy-ass back.
Joel: "So, you've finally gotten me bent over in the shower like you always wanted."
Me: "Hahaha. Remind me again exactly which ribs are broken?"
Joel: "Don't make me laugh... it hurts."
4) After the shaving, I proceeded to carefully assemble a patchwork of bandage over the entire wound, and it did serve the purpose of covering the wound and allowing him to sleep. The entire process took over an hour. But I figure it helps the balance in my karma account, which empirically speaking, seems to not be particularly good. Either that, or I've inadvertently stored all my karma in a Consolidated Barely Solvent Megakarmabank.
The real lessons of this story are:
1) Chocolate can kill you. It almost killed Joel.
2) Had I simply mocked Joel as I was tempted to do, it would have delayed him a few precious seconds as his lowland mountain gorilla mind formed a comeback, thus putting him not quite in the right place at the right time to get hit by the car. (A zipcar, with a dude, his GF, and his GF's mom. That's gonna make a good impression on mom.) So I told Joel that I will never again willfully pass up an opportunity to mock him. It's for his own safety.
For more details of Joel's saga, check out his blog: http://aufrecht.org/
The ride up was typically brutal, but the view from the top was typically amazing. And, there's always the reward of the fun part, which is riding *down* the mountain at breakneck speed. We got back to the house around 3, where I decided to reward myself with ice cream and a shower, in that order. I decided to fire up back episodes of Colbert and just chill out while I ate the ice cream.
Joel, not satisfied with having done that much biking, and possessed of a love for chocolate greater than anyone I've ever known who is not actually female, decided to bike into town and get a giant bar of fancy chocolate from the hippie grocery store (in which everything is organic and overpriced). Normally I would mock him incessantly, but having done that severak times in a row, and being somewhat tired, I simply waved as he headed out.
3 Colbert episodes later, I decided to take that shower, vaguely noting that Joel seemed to be gone a lot longer than he normally is when he goes on a chocolate run.
After a long leisurely shower, I got dressed and eventually wandered over to check the phone. There was a message from a random 650 number, which I assumed would be something work-related, a new family needing tutoring perhaps. So I decided I would listen to the message and call back shortly.
When I did finally listen to the message, it was from Stanford Hospital. It said: "Joel was in an accident. He is fine, but you should call in when you get this."
Uh oh.
So I call Stanford Hospital. Joel has been hit by a car and is in the emergency room. I can come down to see him at any time. So I get things together quickly, and drive over the hill into Palo Alto to the hospital.
When I arrive, Joel is surrounded by a couple of nurses, who are cleaning his wounds with Q-tips and tiny squirt guns. He is heavily bandaged, and everything not bandaged is basically a giant road rash. They're cleaning out the dirt and tiny pebbles from all the open road rash. It's pretty gruesome. So, I'll share a couple pics I took...
Joel when I arrived.
Joel immediately after the nurses finished cleaning him. Note that he failed to use this god-given opportunity to get some digits.
Joel with the bar of chocolate that he almost died trying to procure. It also survived the crash, though it didn't ultimately survive Joel.
Joel, finally leaving the hospital.
Joel's clavicle. Ultimately, they had to do surgery & put a titanium plate in there, & tie the bones to it. Although painful, it moves Joel a tiny step toward his goal of becoming a cyborg.
The final tally of the damage: 4 broken ribs, 1 broken clavicle, 1 mildly sprained ankle, one actual chunk of flesh missing from his arm near his elbow (every time Joel raised that arm I had to look away- it was the most gruesome by far), and road rash over basically everything else. Glasses destroyed. The helmet did its job though- no head trauma at all. The helmet was cracked completely.
I leave the hospital around 11pm, and walk out to the garage. I get in my car, drive to the gate, and see the sign that says "After hours, pay at the self-service station in the garage." So I turn around, park again, and find the self-service station. I stick my ticket into the machine: $6. I get out my credit card, and look for the credit card slot.
Which has a metal plate bolted over it. Cash only, apparently. A quick examination of my wallet shows $2. OK, no problem, I keep spare change in little baggies in the car (organized by coin type- the first time Keiko saw me filing my change away we had the following exchange:
Keiko: "You organize your spare change??"
Me: "Uh, yes."
Keiko: "Wow, baby."
Me: "Admit it- you're a little turned on right now."
Keiko: "Yes babe, I have never been more hot for you."
Anyway, I go back to the car and discover that the big bag of quarters is not there, because I used it for the BART to go up to SF during the week, and left it in my backpack, which is at home. So all I've got is some dimes and nickels. Adding up all those, plus a couple coins on the floor, takes me up to $5.65. The annoying thing is, I've got enough with the bag of pennies, but the machine won't take pennies. I double-check this and then kick the machine.
So I go back into the largely deserted hospital, and after wandering around awhile, find someone who can direct me to the ATM. The ATM, of course, charges me $3 for cash, since it's rather predictably not a Chase/WaMu/Consolidated Barely Solvent Megabank atm, which means that my Chase/WaMu/Consolidated Barely Solvent Megabank is now also going to charge me $3 for the sin of using another crappy bank's ATM. Thus, my parking cost will literally double b/c the parking folks haven't figured out that ONLY DRUG DEALERS STILL USE CASH.
Dammit.
Joel comes home late the next day, and is pretty loopy from all the meds. Plus, the only way he can sleep is on our Sofa of Death (once you lay down on it, you will basically keep laying on it until you starve- it's weirdly comfortable), wedged up against it on his side so that there's no pressure on his various broken bones.
The next day, Joel's mom came down to stay a few days, which was nice. I was crazed at work and couldn't do all the helping he needed. But after she went to bed that night, Joel had trouble sleeping, and asked me to help him put new bandages on the giant open wound that was the left half of his back. That involved the following steps:
1) peeling off the existing bandage, which had been placed on while the wound was still actively oozing/lightly bleeding, and hence had become congealed. That's a LOT of surface area to peel congealed bandage off of, and poor Joel sang songs to himself while I slowly peeled away and tried not to cause too much fresh bleeding, which I was reasonably successful at. I offered to get him a towel to bite down on, but he muttered something about manhood blah blah blah, so I didn't press the issue.
2) once the old system of bandages was peeled off, the wound was freshly oozing/bleeding a little, and I said: "I can't put a new bandage on this without wiping it down a little." So I got a washcloth, put cold water on it, and lightly cleaned the wound. This process confirmed my long-held belief that I am in no way, shape, or form cut out for a career in medicine. I used a skill acquired in traveling in 3rd-world countries, which is: find the part of your mind that is really grossed out by what's happening right now, and pull the plug.
3) I had a box of 3" x 3" bandages, a roll of tape, and a single contiguous wound constituting 1/3 of the total surface area of Joel's back to bandage. An additional complicating factor was that Joel is basically a lowland mountain gorilla that's evolved a capacity for speech and baseball fandom. So I said: "I'm not going to be able to securely bandage this without trimming some of this hair."
So, we trooped into the bathroom, and I got out Joel's shears. We stood in the bathtub, and I proceeded to shave his hairy-ass back.
Joel: "So, you've finally gotten me bent over in the shower like you always wanted."
Me: "Hahaha. Remind me again exactly which ribs are broken?"
Joel: "Don't make me laugh... it hurts."
4) After the shaving, I proceeded to carefully assemble a patchwork of bandage over the entire wound, and it did serve the purpose of covering the wound and allowing him to sleep. The entire process took over an hour. But I figure it helps the balance in my karma account, which empirically speaking, seems to not be particularly good. Either that, or I've inadvertently stored all my karma in a Consolidated Barely Solvent Megakarmabank.
The real lessons of this story are:
1) Chocolate can kill you. It almost killed Joel.
2) Had I simply mocked Joel as I was tempted to do, it would have delayed him a few precious seconds as his lowland mountain gorilla mind formed a comeback, thus putting him not quite in the right place at the right time to get hit by the car. (A zipcar, with a dude, his GF, and his GF's mom. That's gonna make a good impression on mom.) So I told Joel that I will never again willfully pass up an opportunity to mock him. It's for his own safety.
For more details of Joel's saga, check out his blog: http://aufrecht.org/
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Why I love HMB, Part 6
Because, on a clear night, for instance, tonight, you can stand in the doorway of the deck and listen to waves crash into the shore while you wait for the International Space Station to rise above the waves and go zipping across the night sky until it disappears over the coastal hills.
Vaya con dios, intrepid spacefarers...
Vaya con dios, intrepid spacefarers...
Sunday, May 10, 2009
The HMB beachcam
Joel set up a beachcam. It takes a picture every 60 seconds. You can check it out at any time of day by following this link:
http://24.6.149.194:4780/top.htm
He also set up a nifty program to take the day's images and make an approximately 90 second movie out of them. Also, the program randomly selects a song from the house jukebox to use as a soundtrack. The first few days results are posted below:
5/8:
5/7:
5/6:
It's a fun new toy!
http://24.6.149.194:4780/top.htm
He also set up a nifty program to take the day's images and make an approximately 90 second movie out of them. Also, the program randomly selects a song from the house jukebox to use as a soundtrack. The first few days results are posted below:
5/8:
5/7:
5/6:
It's a fun new toy!
Saturday, April 11, 2009
A good day for a bike ride
It was a good day for a bike ride yesterday.
Joel likes to bike up hills, as you can see from the pics he posted below. I hate biking up hills, but Keiko and I are attending a wedding in Cabo in June, and the problem with dating a former swimsuit model is that she looks really, really good in a swimsuit. That's a problem because when we're on the beach together, one of three things will happen:
1) [best case scenario] People will say: "Hey, what a nice looking couple."
2) [mediocre scenario] People will say: "Wow, that guy must be really rich."
3) [worst case scenario] People will say: "How pathetic that the pudgy balding guy felt he had to rent a date. I wonder how much she's costing him?"
As of today, Scenario 3 is the highest probability, so if I don't find a way to close the hotness gap at least somewhat in the next 2.5 months, I'm going to suffer undue scorn. Hence, agreeing to bike up a really fucking steep hill that goes on for like 500 miles. I nearly died going up it. The view from the top is nice though.
It's so miserably unfair that it's so easy to accumulate calories, and so goddamned hard to shed them.
Joel likes to bike up hills, as you can see from the pics he posted below. I hate biking up hills, but Keiko and I are attending a wedding in Cabo in June, and the problem with dating a former swimsuit model is that she looks really, really good in a swimsuit. That's a problem because when we're on the beach together, one of three things will happen:
1) [best case scenario] People will say: "Hey, what a nice looking couple."
2) [mediocre scenario] People will say: "Wow, that guy must be really rich."
3) [worst case scenario] People will say: "How pathetic that the pudgy balding guy felt he had to rent a date. I wonder how much she's costing him?"
As of today, Scenario 3 is the highest probability, so if I don't find a way to close the hotness gap at least somewhat in the next 2.5 months, I'm going to suffer undue scorn. Hence, agreeing to bike up a really fucking steep hill that goes on for like 500 miles. I nearly died going up it. The view from the top is nice though.
It's so miserably unfair that it's so easy to accumulate calories, and so goddamned hard to shed them.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
It doesn't pay to be cheap (or to be me)
Friday I had to go up to SF to check out an office there that we'll be using to see a client in the city. It's a pain to drive into the city and park, so I thought I'd take the handy BART system into town.
Normally I take the CalTrain if I need to go into SF, which means just leaving my car at the office and walking, but the BART station is much closer to the office building that was my final destination, so I thought I'd use that. But that necessitated driving to the Daly City BART station, which I'd never done before.
Upon arriving there, I was shocked to discover that it costs $3 to park for the BART. To me, this was offensive. I mean, the point of public transport is to make it easy for me to use it. Don't fucking charge me to park. So I saw a nearby side street, and thought I'd check it out. I mean, I refuse to pay that stupid fee in principle if I can possibly avoid it.
A quick glance at the side street showed that there was a patch of curb available, so I quickly backed into the space. Now, this is exactly the sort of story that can end badly- person tries to save $3 and ends up getting screwed, so the first thing I did upon parking was to get out, walk down the driver's side in the street until I was in front of the parking signs, and then read them 3 times to make sure I was allowed to park here (i.e, not a residential permit area, not a streetcleaning day, etc.)
The signs clearly indicated that I was golden. I then walked back up along the driver's side, and doublechecked to make sure I'd locked the car. Don't want ol' Betsy to get stolen.
With that, I took my stuff, turned around, and walked down to the BART station, all the while thinking "I was VERY careful. I checked all possibilities. You're not getting me this time, fate. In your FACE, universe!"
So I took the BART up to SF, where we had a good meeting. Then I took the BART back, arriving at the Daly City BART station around 8pm. I walked over to where I'd parked the car.
And, it wasn't there.
Later, Laszlo asked me: "Did you feel a moment of panic?" The answer is, maybe for a nanosecond. But the benefit of being me is that panic is quickly drowned out by a feeling of inevitability. OF COURSE something like this happened. I knew there was a risk. I taunted fate. I thought I'd thought of everything. I should know better by now.
So, I went into problem-solving mode. The car is not there. There are really only 2 cases:
1) It was stolen.
2) It was towed.
So, I decided to survey the area for possible reasons it might have been towed. The signs still indicated it should have been OK to park. But a more thorough inspection of the specific place I parked yielded an observation that the patch of curb I parked on looked, upon closer scrutiny, like it was shorter than ol' Betsy, who is a GMC envoy with a trailer hitch, and therefore has a long, wide ass. And, upon closer inspection, the house I parked in front of had one of those built-in garages, largely obscured by the large overhanging tree in front, and it became possible to envision that person coming home, and finding ol' Betsy blocking 1/4 to 1/3 of his/her driveway. And that would probably lead to towing.
So I went up to the door and knocked, to try to get confirmation of this hypothesis. No answer. And, I have no idea what towing company might have been called. So, I had little choice but to get back on the BART. I had been scheduled to stay the night at Laszlo's anyway, for some video-game playing, since I had to be back at the office Saturday morning at 815am.
So I got on the BART and went to Millbrae. Cost of the BART ticket: $3.25.
From Millbrae, I called Laszlo, and with GA in the background saying "Oh god, what now?", he volunteered to pick me up at the San Antonio CalTrain stop. So I got on the CalTrain and headed to San Antonio. Cost of the CalTrain ticket: $4.25.
Laszlo picked me up, and we went to In N Out, which soothed my nerves a little. By the time we got home, we were both really too tired for video games, so we went to bed. Saturday morning, Laszlo lent me his car, and I went to work.
At work, while my students were taking their tests, I called the Daly City police department and confirmed that they had towed my car. The process to get it back was: show up at the police station with exactly $204 in cash- no checks, no credit cards, no change given, and they would give me a slip of paper I could take to the towing company to get my car back.
Unfortunately, the office at the police station is only open until noon on Saturdays, and not at all on Sundays, so given that I wasn't done proctoring tests until 1pm, the earliest time I was going to be able to get my car was Monday morning. At 1pm, I headed back to Laszlo's.
GA, displaying the kind of practical genius that if I had just one tenth of one percent of, would absolutely change my life forever, devised a plan whereby I would borrow Laszlo's car for the evening so I could go home, and then come back and stay the night Sunday night. Monday morning I could get a ride to the train station and go get my car. It was imperative, though, that I have a vehicle, since GA is due to give birth tomorrow, and I'm the backup scheduled to take care of Li and Em if she has to suddenly go to the hospital.
So, after an afternoon of running errands with Li and Laszlo, I borrowed the car and went home. It was nice to be home. I went for a long bike ride, and it was wonderful. A beautiful day at the beach.
The next day, after a grueling bike ride with Joel up to the top of one of the hills that overlooks the harbor (the view is absolutely spectacular, but I wanted to die by the time I got up there), I drove back over the hill to Laszlo's. I put gas in the car just before I got there. Cost of the gas: $20.
After a late night fighting evil locust hordes (Gears of War 2), we went to bed. This morning, GA dropped me off at the train station at 830am. No CalTrain until 903am. Cost of the CalTrain ticket to Millbrae: $4.25.
From Millbrae, I took the BART to Colma, which was the nearest station to the Daly City police department. Cost of the BART ticket: $3.25.
From Colma, I walked to the Daly City police department. It was a fairly easy process there; I just forked over my $204 cash and got my slip of paper, which helpfully had directions on the back for how to get to the towing place. So, I took a nice walk through the local decaying industrial area until I found the towing place. I was curious to see what ethnic group was running the local towing scam. In New England, for instance, it's the Italians. Here, it's pretty clearly the Mexicans.
I handed over my slip of paper, and the guy walked over to the calendar and started counting days: "1,2,3...4" and then looked at the chart of costs, and then said: "That'll be 535 dollars."
Trying not to visibly wince, I handed over my credit card. He started to run it, and then said:
"Wait, no, that's not right. What's $340 plus $75?"
"$415", I answered.
"Thanks man! It's 415 dollars." (pause) "No, no, that's not right either. What's $390 plus $75?"
(sighing) "$465", I answered.
"That's it! $465. Thanks man!"
"Sure," I muttered.
This, folks, is why we'll all someday be nannies, housekeepers, and janitors for Chinese and Indian middle and upper class families. Because they can fucking add by the time they're in their 30's.
In fairness, it was clear that $465 was the correct amount as indicated by the chart of costs hanging above the desks, assuming the $75 labor charge was accurate ($190 flat impound fee + $50/day * 4 calendar days + labor charge). What is not clear is whether he would have known any better if I'd said: "That all adds up to $135."
So, after paying the $465, I went onto the lot and found my car. I unlocked it, put my stuff in, and got behind the wheel. At last, I thought, it's all done.
And then I noticed the parking citation stuck to the window. Cost of the citation: $30.
It's funny how we go through life and often make decisions in the moment that don't seem particularly significant at the time, but turn out to have enormous downstream effects later. The butterfly effect, as it were. Here's a summary of the downstream effects of one moment's decision not to just suck it up and park in the goddamned parking lot like normal people:
BART ticket: $3.25
CalTrain ticket: $4.25
Gas: $20.00
CalTrain ticket: $4.25
BART ticket: $3.25
Police fee: $204.00
Towing fee: $465.00
Citation: $30.00
Dollars saved not parking at BART: $3.00
Total cost of standing on principle: $714.00
Total benefit of standing on principle: $3.00
Total benefit (loss) of standing on principle: ($711.00)
Many people agonize over what the purpose of their lives is, about what it all means. I don't. I've known for a very long time what the purpose of my life is. It's to be an example to others.
And I, my friends, am a good example of a bad example.
Normally I take the CalTrain if I need to go into SF, which means just leaving my car at the office and walking, but the BART station is much closer to the office building that was my final destination, so I thought I'd use that. But that necessitated driving to the Daly City BART station, which I'd never done before.
Upon arriving there, I was shocked to discover that it costs $3 to park for the BART. To me, this was offensive. I mean, the point of public transport is to make it easy for me to use it. Don't fucking charge me to park. So I saw a nearby side street, and thought I'd check it out. I mean, I refuse to pay that stupid fee in principle if I can possibly avoid it.
A quick glance at the side street showed that there was a patch of curb available, so I quickly backed into the space. Now, this is exactly the sort of story that can end badly- person tries to save $3 and ends up getting screwed, so the first thing I did upon parking was to get out, walk down the driver's side in the street until I was in front of the parking signs, and then read them 3 times to make sure I was allowed to park here (i.e, not a residential permit area, not a streetcleaning day, etc.)
The signs clearly indicated that I was golden. I then walked back up along the driver's side, and doublechecked to make sure I'd locked the car. Don't want ol' Betsy to get stolen.
With that, I took my stuff, turned around, and walked down to the BART station, all the while thinking "I was VERY careful. I checked all possibilities. You're not getting me this time, fate. In your FACE, universe!"
So I took the BART up to SF, where we had a good meeting. Then I took the BART back, arriving at the Daly City BART station around 8pm. I walked over to where I'd parked the car.
And, it wasn't there.
Later, Laszlo asked me: "Did you feel a moment of panic?" The answer is, maybe for a nanosecond. But the benefit of being me is that panic is quickly drowned out by a feeling of inevitability. OF COURSE something like this happened. I knew there was a risk. I taunted fate. I thought I'd thought of everything. I should know better by now.
So, I went into problem-solving mode. The car is not there. There are really only 2 cases:
1) It was stolen.
2) It was towed.
So, I decided to survey the area for possible reasons it might have been towed. The signs still indicated it should have been OK to park. But a more thorough inspection of the specific place I parked yielded an observation that the patch of curb I parked on looked, upon closer scrutiny, like it was shorter than ol' Betsy, who is a GMC envoy with a trailer hitch, and therefore has a long, wide ass. And, upon closer inspection, the house I parked in front of had one of those built-in garages, largely obscured by the large overhanging tree in front, and it became possible to envision that person coming home, and finding ol' Betsy blocking 1/4 to 1/3 of his/her driveway. And that would probably lead to towing.
So I went up to the door and knocked, to try to get confirmation of this hypothesis. No answer. And, I have no idea what towing company might have been called. So, I had little choice but to get back on the BART. I had been scheduled to stay the night at Laszlo's anyway, for some video-game playing, since I had to be back at the office Saturday morning at 815am.
So I got on the BART and went to Millbrae. Cost of the BART ticket: $3.25.
From Millbrae, I called Laszlo, and with GA in the background saying "Oh god, what now?", he volunteered to pick me up at the San Antonio CalTrain stop. So I got on the CalTrain and headed to San Antonio. Cost of the CalTrain ticket: $4.25.
Laszlo picked me up, and we went to In N Out, which soothed my nerves a little. By the time we got home, we were both really too tired for video games, so we went to bed. Saturday morning, Laszlo lent me his car, and I went to work.
At work, while my students were taking their tests, I called the Daly City police department and confirmed that they had towed my car. The process to get it back was: show up at the police station with exactly $204 in cash- no checks, no credit cards, no change given, and they would give me a slip of paper I could take to the towing company to get my car back.
Unfortunately, the office at the police station is only open until noon on Saturdays, and not at all on Sundays, so given that I wasn't done proctoring tests until 1pm, the earliest time I was going to be able to get my car was Monday morning. At 1pm, I headed back to Laszlo's.
GA, displaying the kind of practical genius that if I had just one tenth of one percent of, would absolutely change my life forever, devised a plan whereby I would borrow Laszlo's car for the evening so I could go home, and then come back and stay the night Sunday night. Monday morning I could get a ride to the train station and go get my car. It was imperative, though, that I have a vehicle, since GA is due to give birth tomorrow, and I'm the backup scheduled to take care of Li and Em if she has to suddenly go to the hospital.
So, after an afternoon of running errands with Li and Laszlo, I borrowed the car and went home. It was nice to be home. I went for a long bike ride, and it was wonderful. A beautiful day at the beach.
The next day, after a grueling bike ride with Joel up to the top of one of the hills that overlooks the harbor (the view is absolutely spectacular, but I wanted to die by the time I got up there), I drove back over the hill to Laszlo's. I put gas in the car just before I got there. Cost of the gas: $20.
After a late night fighting evil locust hordes (Gears of War 2), we went to bed. This morning, GA dropped me off at the train station at 830am. No CalTrain until 903am. Cost of the CalTrain ticket to Millbrae: $4.25.
From Millbrae, I took the BART to Colma, which was the nearest station to the Daly City police department. Cost of the BART ticket: $3.25.
From Colma, I walked to the Daly City police department. It was a fairly easy process there; I just forked over my $204 cash and got my slip of paper, which helpfully had directions on the back for how to get to the towing place. So, I took a nice walk through the local decaying industrial area until I found the towing place. I was curious to see what ethnic group was running the local towing scam. In New England, for instance, it's the Italians. Here, it's pretty clearly the Mexicans.
I handed over my slip of paper, and the guy walked over to the calendar and started counting days: "1,2,3...4" and then looked at the chart of costs, and then said: "That'll be 535 dollars."
Trying not to visibly wince, I handed over my credit card. He started to run it, and then said:
"Wait, no, that's not right. What's $340 plus $75?"
"$415", I answered.
"Thanks man! It's 415 dollars." (pause) "No, no, that's not right either. What's $390 plus $75?"
(sighing) "$465", I answered.
"That's it! $465. Thanks man!"
"Sure," I muttered.
This, folks, is why we'll all someday be nannies, housekeepers, and janitors for Chinese and Indian middle and upper class families. Because they can fucking add by the time they're in their 30's.
In fairness, it was clear that $465 was the correct amount as indicated by the chart of costs hanging above the desks, assuming the $75 labor charge was accurate ($190 flat impound fee + $50/day * 4 calendar days + labor charge). What is not clear is whether he would have known any better if I'd said: "That all adds up to $135."
So, after paying the $465, I went onto the lot and found my car. I unlocked it, put my stuff in, and got behind the wheel. At last, I thought, it's all done.
And then I noticed the parking citation stuck to the window. Cost of the citation: $30.
It's funny how we go through life and often make decisions in the moment that don't seem particularly significant at the time, but turn out to have enormous downstream effects later. The butterfly effect, as it were. Here's a summary of the downstream effects of one moment's decision not to just suck it up and park in the goddamned parking lot like normal people:
BART ticket: $3.25
CalTrain ticket: $4.25
Gas: $20.00
CalTrain ticket: $4.25
BART ticket: $3.25
Police fee: $204.00
Towing fee: $465.00
Citation: $30.00
Dollars saved not parking at BART: $3.00
Total cost of standing on principle: $714.00
Total benefit of standing on principle: $3.00
Total benefit (loss) of standing on principle: ($711.00)
Many people agonize over what the purpose of their lives is, about what it all means. I don't. I've known for a very long time what the purpose of my life is. It's to be an example to others.
And I, my friends, am a good example of a bad example.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
White Trash (don't call me that...)
I recommend that song, by Southern Comfort on the Skids.
I read that Bristol Palin has split with her fiance. The minimal amount of generically feeling bad about that, that I feel because I reflexively dislike seeing people suffering, is totally, totally swamped by a feeling of righteous vindication, since I commented to all that would listen during the throes of the campaign that the only reason they were engaged was that they were forced to as a method of political damage control, since it was no doubt awkward for Ms. "family values" to have an unwed pregnant teenage daughter.
Seriously, that family is so-o-o-o dysfunctional white trash. I hope she and Rush are the face of the Republican party for as long as possible.
I read that Bristol Palin has split with her fiance. The minimal amount of generically feeling bad about that, that I feel because I reflexively dislike seeing people suffering, is totally, totally swamped by a feeling of righteous vindication, since I commented to all that would listen during the throes of the campaign that the only reason they were engaged was that they were forced to as a method of political damage control, since it was no doubt awkward for Ms. "family values" to have an unwed pregnant teenage daughter.
Seriously, that family is so-o-o-o dysfunctional white trash. I hope she and Rush are the face of the Republican party for as long as possible.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
A quick thought on patent law...
I just read an article on slashdot saying that a lawyer is trying to patent the idea of a "marketing company devoted to selling/marketing products produced by other companies in return for a share of their profits".
Yes, he's trying to patent the idea of a marketing company.
It seems like common sense that the patent office would read that application, and then pull out its special "Fuck Off" stamp and reject it, but the patent office isn't run by anything approximating common sense these days.
Which led me to a brilliant idea: I'm going to file a patent for the idea of "being a dick". That way, once my patent is approved, anytime someone is being a dick they'll either have to pay me royalties, or else stop being a dick. Or get sued.
I am going to be filthy fucking rich.
Yes, he's trying to patent the idea of a marketing company.
It seems like common sense that the patent office would read that application, and then pull out its special "Fuck Off" stamp and reject it, but the patent office isn't run by anything approximating common sense these days.
Which led me to a brilliant idea: I'm going to file a patent for the idea of "being a dick". That way, once my patent is approved, anytime someone is being a dick they'll either have to pay me royalties, or else stop being a dick. Or get sued.
I am going to be filthy fucking rich.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
A Valentine's weekend to remember, Part 1, 2009 Edition
A year ago, I celebrated Valentine's Day by taking Keiko on a romantic trip to Mendocino, where I proceeded to nearly get us killed.
This year, I celebrated Valentine's Day by helping Ed nearly kill himself...
I invited the whole NYC crew out for a weekend in CA. As it happened, the weekend we all agreed on was Valentine's Day weekend. The plan was:
Friday: everyone arrives on the evening JetBlue flight into SFO.
Saturday: breakfast at the house, I cook all day, and we have a V-Day dinner party
Sunday: we recover from Saturday
Monday: leave early and head to Napa for winetasting tour
Tuesday: more winetasting, and then everyone but Keiko flies out on the redeye
The entire crew was coming: MK & his wife Carrie, Alex & his fiancee Rose, Ed & his GF Alison, and J-Rob and Socci. And Keiko. Counting me and Joel, that's 11 people staying in the house. That's a high population density for the house, but high population for the house = heaven for Kona the Corgi, or as Joel calls her, Kona the Whore-gi:
Kona and Socci
Kona and J-Rob
Kona, Alison, and Ed
Joel and Karen had broken up a couple weeks previous, so he generously volunteered to give up his room as a guestroom, and sleep on the floor of the library. In the days leading up to everyone's arrival, we were frantically trying to get the place ready for all those guests, plus I was trying hard to get started on the cooking for the dinner party. I was attempting an 8-course meal for 11 people, my most ambitious dinner party ever.
I started the cooking on Thursday morning, making the marinade for duck confit. If you've ever had confit, you know that it's amazing. The reason it's amazing is that it's basically meat slow cooked in salty fat. Mmmmmm, salty fat. I made the marinade thurs morning and let the duck soak in it a little over 24 hrs. The rest of Thursday I had to work, and Thursday night was allocated toward doing all the shopping for all the ingredients.
Took a break from cooking, and saw this! If there weren't duck on the stove, I'd go look for a pot of gold...
Friday I slow cooked the duck in 35 ounces of rendered duck fat. I cooked it for over 12 hours, and then strained the fat, put the duck in a bowl, poured the strained fat over it, and put it in the fridge to chill for another 24 hours. It was looking good. I had to run into work to give an interview, for a guy I think I will end up hiring, and then it was time to run home again and bake the cupcakes. I had also baked a cheesecake with a chocolate wafer crust during the day.
The weather here in the Bay Area has been mostly gorgeous the entirety of 2009, which has translated to most of CA having a drought. But, with all my friends coming in for the weekend, naturally a massive storm system moved into the area, and the resulting downpours caused their flight to be late. So I ended up picking everyone up at 1130pm. They were all hungry, so we stopped at In-N-Out, because you can't get that in NYC and nothing in HMB is open past 10.
Upon arriving at the house, we first held a sleeping arrangments draft. Joel was adamant that Keiko participate in the draft, on the grounds that I should not assume she would want to sleep with me. So I reminded Keiko (who seemed to find this funny) that if she _didn't_ choose my room as her preferred sleeping place, at least 5 guys, 3 of them single, were going to be choosing after her, so she ought to consider carefully how far down this little jokey road she wanted to go.
Much to the disappointment of the aforementioned single guys, Keiko chose my room, and in short order everyone had a place to sleep, and we all bedded down for the night.
The next morning, I got up at 9 and started making a huge whitetrash breakfast for everyone: fruit salad, including marashino cherries, pillsbury cinnamon rolls, french toast, eggs, bacon, hashbrowns (those OreIda ones), and, just to balance all that, we busted open a bottle of Dom Perignon that a student had given me, and toasted to a weekend in Cali.
Dom and whitetrash breakfast- a classic combination
After breakfast, half the group went into town to buy the wine for the meal, and the other half lounged around while I started cooking.
Ed, heading for the ocean. Like one of those newly hatched sea turtles you see on the Nature Channel.
Fortunately, everyone was a veteran of my dinner parties, so no one expected that dinner would actually be served at my projected 8pm timeline. I cooked all day, and even with Joel as sous chef, and occasional drafting of other folks, the first course was not served until 9pm.
Kona looking typically ouroboric, Keiko looking typically slender, me looking typically Stay-Puft Marshmallow Gus.
The theme of the dinner, since it was Valentine's Day, was "red". Here's the food lineup for the evening:
1st course: appetizer-sized patties of a black-eyed pea/roasted red peppers/onion/garlic/spices, rolled in cornmeal and lightly fried, served with jerk beef, and a thick spicy tomato dipping sauce
2nd course: red lentil soup
3rd course: chopped salad of red cabbage, radicchio, red bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, served with a orange based viniagrette (some sweet to balance the bitters from the leafy stuff)
4th course: vegetarian calzones, topped with a vegetarian bolognese sauce (Joel is vegetarian), served with homemade spicy meatballs in a red sauce
5th course: duck confit, served with buttered polenta (to balance the salty of the duck), and radish flowers
6th course: salmon broiled in a red-wine butter, served with roasted red potatoes
7th course: orange slices in a red-wine sauce, with sugared orange zest
8th course: cheesecake with a chocolate-wafer crust, served with a warm mixed berry compote
Pre-dinner "Citadel" is a big hit. Except with Rose, apparently.
And of course, wine with every course. Alex and J-Rob went crazy, and bought a couple bottles of Opus 1. That is some good stuff. We ate and drank until 3am.
The journey begins...
We have a lot of drinking to do...
Time to eat!
Getting tipsy = getting touchy-feely. Keiko handles this with typical Japanese stoicism.
Well, that is to say, those of us who made it to the end, ate and drank until 3am. Since I don't have a table big enough to seat 11 people, we used the makeshift table we made for the dinner party last year. It's a low table, and we sit on cushions japanese-style. It's actually a very nice way to eat a dinner, but it also makes it very easy to tip over and fall asleep.
Here's where we lost people:
J-Rob:
- after course 3: insisted that the dinner was awesome, the wine was awesome, and that "There's no way we'd fall asleep after more wine. Absolutely no way."
J-Rob after course 4.
- We were able to wake him for the 5th course, the duck, although the next day he couldn't remember having eaten it. ("I did? Did I like it? Damn, I wish I could remember...")
- after course 5: tipped over again. We tried to wake him for course 6, but he flipped all of us off and went aggressively fetal.
Keiko:
- after course 5: she went downstairs to bed and said to wake her for course 6, which I did.
- after course 6: she went downstairs to bed and said to wake her for course 7. I was unable to accomplish this successfully. (me, speaking to a mound of covers on the bed: "Orange slices! They're delicious!" Mound of covers: "I can't baby, leave me alone and let me sleep.")
Ed, Alison, and MK:
- after course 7, they all tipped over and lay strewn across the living room floor. Along with J-Rob, it looked like a massacre had occurred in the room.
Alison trying to hang on...
...and failing.
Joel:
- made it through all 8 courses, and about 30 seconds after eating his cheesecake, said: "I have to go to bed. Now."
Right now.
Carrie, Socci, Alex, Rose, and I were chilling out after course 8, and they helped me bus the table and get some dishes going. For Alex and Rose, 330am is an early night, so they were fine. Socci is indestructible. Carrie is surprisingly tough- though, in retrospect, to be married to MK she must be tough.
Interlude:
For those of you who have had the pleasure of listening to the song MK wrote for me and Ed on the road trip- The Ballad of A&E, here's a link to yet another creation of his, which I promise you is worth a listen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0boXx-QMRU0
So, at around 330am, Carrie dragged MK off to bed, and Alex and Rose started getting ready for bed. At that point, Ed woke up, picked himself up from the floor, and went for the common bathroom, which was occupied. Then he came and found me in the kitchen, where Socci and I were loading the dishwasher.
Ed: "Dude, I think I'm going to be sick."
Now, here are some important things you should know about Ed:
1) He likes to eat.
2) He really, really likes to eat.
3) He is like a corgi, in that he will, if given the opportunity, eat and keep eating until he kills himself.
When J-Rob failed to muster anything for course 6 other than obscene hand gestures and low gutteral growling, Ed demanded he be given J-Rob's plate. He polished both his own plate and J-Rob's. Similarly, for course 7, he ate his own, and J-Rob's, AND Keiko's. Add to this the fact that he picked off Alison's plate, my plate, and Keiko's plate throughout some of the other courses, and the math adds up to Ed having something like 10-12 courses, plus about a bottle and a half of wine.
Anyway, back to the story...
Me: "Jesus. Just go outside on the deck there, lean over the side, and heave away right into the bushes."
Ed: "Really? You sure?"
Me: "Uh, it's better than having you be sick in here."
So Ed dutifully went outside, and heaved ho over the railing. I brought him a glass of water, and waited with him for a bit. Then I went back inside and resumed cleaning, and about 15 minutes later he came back inside and was standing next to me in the kitchen. Actually, after a few minutes I noticed that he was not so much standing as leaning over the counter, clutching his chest.
Now, for those of you questioning my powers of observation, I remind you that I am me, pretty unobservant in the best of times, and it is now almost 4am, and I am wasted.
Me: "Uh, dude, are you OK?"
(long pause)
Ed (whispering): "No."
Me: "Dude, what's wrong?"
Ed (whispering): "My chest hurts. I've never felt anything like this."
Me: "Your chest hurts? Is there numbness in your arm?? Shit dude, are you having a heart attack????"
Ed: "No... no... I don't think so. It's just a sharp pain right in my chest. I can barely breathe." He looks up. He is actually crying.
This is the point at which I really start freaking out. Ed is crying, we are not watching sports, Castro is not, to the best of my knowledge, actually dead, so something serious is happening. At this point, Alex, Rose, and Socci all realize something is happening, and crowd into the kitchen.
We decide to pull out the sofabed, and Rose wakes up Alison, who immediately comes to comfort Ed. Pulling out the sofabed requires waking up J-Rob, who is still fetal on the floor right where the bed opens up. Fortunately, after 3 hours of uninterrupted sleep he is less surly, and upon learning what's happening, sobers up quickly.
Now, we have the sofabed pulled out, Ed is fetal on it, Alison is spooning him and trying to calm him down, and he is writhing in pain. The rest of us are drunk and worried, and finally Rose says "We have to dial 9-1-1."
In the end, we had no idea if Ed was dying or what, so we did it. At about 350am, we dialed 9-1-1, and were on the phone with them a bit, and 90 seconds after we hung up, an ambulance and a fire truck showed up at the house. 5 EMTs came trundling up the stairs, and made a semicircle around the sofabed, where Ed was writhing in pain.
What followed was a lengthy interrogation of Ed- questions about his medical history, what had happened over the course of the evening, did he have any allergies, etc. It turned out that just a few days earlier, Ed had gone on Prilosec and Zantac to treat acid reflux, which he is apparently susceptible to.
Then they asked: "What have you had to eat tonight?"
All eyes turned to me.
Me: "Uh, um, well..."
I proceeded to list all the things he'd eaten. As I related the list, I realized that everything had tomatoes, or citrus, or hot peppers, or other acidic ingredients. Plus, we'd been drinking only red wine.
It had never occurred to me to try and pH-balance the meal.
Finally, they took his vitals with a nifty portable machine, at which point we figured out that one guy was being trained by the other guy (EMT tutoring- there's something I don't do).
EMT Trainee: "Your vitals look fine. But we can take you to a hospital. Do you want to go to a hospital?"
Ed: "I don't want to go to a fucking hospital."
EMT Trainee: "Do you want to see a doctor? Your friends can take you- you don't have to ride in the ambulance."
Ed: "I don't want to see a fucking doctor. I don't want to go to the fucking hospital. Just tell me right now: is there any reason to think I'm about to die? Am I dying???"
EMT Trainee (trying not to smile): "No, you're not dying. Your vitals are fine."
Ed: "Can you tell me how long I'm going to be like this???"
EMT Trainee (abjectly failing not to smile): "Well, that depends on your body. Probably what happens is that it's like this for another couple of hours, and then you have a lo-o-o-o-o-ng trip to the bathroom, and then you'll be alright."
Ed: "Fuck."
So the EMTs packed up and left at around 430am, practically giggling. And so me, J-Rob, Alex, Rose, and Socci sat around with Ed watching him periodically writhe in pain. I estimated that we'd start mocking him in ten minutes.
Forecasted time to mockery: 10 min
Actual time to mockery: 1.5 min
Forecast error: (10-1.5)/1.5 = +567%
Oh well, good thing I'm not in forecasting anymore.
I went downstairs to bed at 515am. Joel, Keiko, MK, and Carrie slept through the entire series of events.
Ed (and Alison), almost exactly 12 hours later.
Out of deference to the only real casualty of the evening -Ed's pride- I am not posting any photos of EMTs standing around Ed trying not to smirk as he writhes in pain. He was very adamant about that. You'll just have to picture it for yourself.
And that's how I almost killed Ed. Though, to be fair, I only supplied the rope. Ed's the one who almost hung himself with it.
This year, I celebrated Valentine's Day by helping Ed nearly kill himself...
I invited the whole NYC crew out for a weekend in CA. As it happened, the weekend we all agreed on was Valentine's Day weekend. The plan was:
Friday: everyone arrives on the evening JetBlue flight into SFO.
Saturday: breakfast at the house, I cook all day, and we have a V-Day dinner party
Sunday: we recover from Saturday
Monday: leave early and head to Napa for winetasting tour
Tuesday: more winetasting, and then everyone but Keiko flies out on the redeye
The entire crew was coming: MK & his wife Carrie, Alex & his fiancee Rose, Ed & his GF Alison, and J-Rob and Socci. And Keiko. Counting me and Joel, that's 11 people staying in the house. That's a high population density for the house, but high population for the house = heaven for Kona the Corgi, or as Joel calls her, Kona the Whore-gi:
Kona and Socci
Kona and J-Rob
Kona, Alison, and Ed
Joel and Karen had broken up a couple weeks previous, so he generously volunteered to give up his room as a guestroom, and sleep on the floor of the library. In the days leading up to everyone's arrival, we were frantically trying to get the place ready for all those guests, plus I was trying hard to get started on the cooking for the dinner party. I was attempting an 8-course meal for 11 people, my most ambitious dinner party ever.
I started the cooking on Thursday morning, making the marinade for duck confit. If you've ever had confit, you know that it's amazing. The reason it's amazing is that it's basically meat slow cooked in salty fat. Mmmmmm, salty fat. I made the marinade thurs morning and let the duck soak in it a little over 24 hrs. The rest of Thursday I had to work, and Thursday night was allocated toward doing all the shopping for all the ingredients.
Took a break from cooking, and saw this! If there weren't duck on the stove, I'd go look for a pot of gold...
Friday I slow cooked the duck in 35 ounces of rendered duck fat. I cooked it for over 12 hours, and then strained the fat, put the duck in a bowl, poured the strained fat over it, and put it in the fridge to chill for another 24 hours. It was looking good. I had to run into work to give an interview, for a guy I think I will end up hiring, and then it was time to run home again and bake the cupcakes. I had also baked a cheesecake with a chocolate wafer crust during the day.
The weather here in the Bay Area has been mostly gorgeous the entirety of 2009, which has translated to most of CA having a drought. But, with all my friends coming in for the weekend, naturally a massive storm system moved into the area, and the resulting downpours caused their flight to be late. So I ended up picking everyone up at 1130pm. They were all hungry, so we stopped at In-N-Out, because you can't get that in NYC and nothing in HMB is open past 10.
Upon arriving at the house, we first held a sleeping arrangments draft. Joel was adamant that Keiko participate in the draft, on the grounds that I should not assume she would want to sleep with me. So I reminded Keiko (who seemed to find this funny) that if she _didn't_ choose my room as her preferred sleeping place, at least 5 guys, 3 of them single, were going to be choosing after her, so she ought to consider carefully how far down this little jokey road she wanted to go.
Much to the disappointment of the aforementioned single guys, Keiko chose my room, and in short order everyone had a place to sleep, and we all bedded down for the night.
The next morning, I got up at 9 and started making a huge whitetrash breakfast for everyone: fruit salad, including marashino cherries, pillsbury cinnamon rolls, french toast, eggs, bacon, hashbrowns (those OreIda ones), and, just to balance all that, we busted open a bottle of Dom Perignon that a student had given me, and toasted to a weekend in Cali.
Dom and whitetrash breakfast- a classic combination
After breakfast, half the group went into town to buy the wine for the meal, and the other half lounged around while I started cooking.
Ed, heading for the ocean. Like one of those newly hatched sea turtles you see on the Nature Channel.
Fortunately, everyone was a veteran of my dinner parties, so no one expected that dinner would actually be served at my projected 8pm timeline. I cooked all day, and even with Joel as sous chef, and occasional drafting of other folks, the first course was not served until 9pm.
Kona looking typically ouroboric, Keiko looking typically slender, me looking typically Stay-Puft Marshmallow Gus.
The theme of the dinner, since it was Valentine's Day, was "red". Here's the food lineup for the evening:
1st course: appetizer-sized patties of a black-eyed pea/roasted red peppers/onion/garlic/spices, rolled in cornmeal and lightly fried, served with jerk beef, and a thick spicy tomato dipping sauce
2nd course: red lentil soup
3rd course: chopped salad of red cabbage, radicchio, red bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, served with a orange based viniagrette (some sweet to balance the bitters from the leafy stuff)
4th course: vegetarian calzones, topped with a vegetarian bolognese sauce (Joel is vegetarian), served with homemade spicy meatballs in a red sauce
5th course: duck confit, served with buttered polenta (to balance the salty of the duck), and radish flowers
6th course: salmon broiled in a red-wine butter, served with roasted red potatoes
7th course: orange slices in a red-wine sauce, with sugared orange zest
8th course: cheesecake with a chocolate-wafer crust, served with a warm mixed berry compote
Pre-dinner "Citadel" is a big hit. Except with Rose, apparently.
And of course, wine with every course. Alex and J-Rob went crazy, and bought a couple bottles of Opus 1. That is some good stuff. We ate and drank until 3am.
The journey begins...
We have a lot of drinking to do...
Time to eat!
Getting tipsy = getting touchy-feely. Keiko handles this with typical Japanese stoicism.
Well, that is to say, those of us who made it to the end, ate and drank until 3am. Since I don't have a table big enough to seat 11 people, we used the makeshift table we made for the dinner party last year. It's a low table, and we sit on cushions japanese-style. It's actually a very nice way to eat a dinner, but it also makes it very easy to tip over and fall asleep.
Here's where we lost people:
J-Rob:
- after course 3: insisted that the dinner was awesome, the wine was awesome, and that "There's no way we'd fall asleep after more wine. Absolutely no way."
J-Rob after course 4.
- We were able to wake him for the 5th course, the duck, although the next day he couldn't remember having eaten it. ("I did? Did I like it? Damn, I wish I could remember...")
- after course 5: tipped over again. We tried to wake him for course 6, but he flipped all of us off and went aggressively fetal.
Keiko:
- after course 5: she went downstairs to bed and said to wake her for course 6, which I did.
- after course 6: she went downstairs to bed and said to wake her for course 7. I was unable to accomplish this successfully. (me, speaking to a mound of covers on the bed: "Orange slices! They're delicious!" Mound of covers: "I can't baby, leave me alone and let me sleep.")
Ed, Alison, and MK:
- after course 7, they all tipped over and lay strewn across the living room floor. Along with J-Rob, it looked like a massacre had occurred in the room.
Alison trying to hang on...
...and failing.
Joel:
- made it through all 8 courses, and about 30 seconds after eating his cheesecake, said: "I have to go to bed. Now."
Right now.
Carrie, Socci, Alex, Rose, and I were chilling out after course 8, and they helped me bus the table and get some dishes going. For Alex and Rose, 330am is an early night, so they were fine. Socci is indestructible. Carrie is surprisingly tough- though, in retrospect, to be married to MK she must be tough.
Interlude:
For those of you who have had the pleasure of listening to the song MK wrote for me and Ed on the road trip- The Ballad of A&E, here's a link to yet another creation of his, which I promise you is worth a listen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0boXx-QMRU0
So, at around 330am, Carrie dragged MK off to bed, and Alex and Rose started getting ready for bed. At that point, Ed woke up, picked himself up from the floor, and went for the common bathroom, which was occupied. Then he came and found me in the kitchen, where Socci and I were loading the dishwasher.
Ed: "Dude, I think I'm going to be sick."
Now, here are some important things you should know about Ed:
1) He likes to eat.
2) He really, really likes to eat.
3) He is like a corgi, in that he will, if given the opportunity, eat and keep eating until he kills himself.
When J-Rob failed to muster anything for course 6 other than obscene hand gestures and low gutteral growling, Ed demanded he be given J-Rob's plate. He polished both his own plate and J-Rob's. Similarly, for course 7, he ate his own, and J-Rob's, AND Keiko's. Add to this the fact that he picked off Alison's plate, my plate, and Keiko's plate throughout some of the other courses, and the math adds up to Ed having something like 10-12 courses, plus about a bottle and a half of wine.
Anyway, back to the story...
Me: "Jesus. Just go outside on the deck there, lean over the side, and heave away right into the bushes."
Ed: "Really? You sure?"
Me: "Uh, it's better than having you be sick in here."
So Ed dutifully went outside, and heaved ho over the railing. I brought him a glass of water, and waited with him for a bit. Then I went back inside and resumed cleaning, and about 15 minutes later he came back inside and was standing next to me in the kitchen. Actually, after a few minutes I noticed that he was not so much standing as leaning over the counter, clutching his chest.
Now, for those of you questioning my powers of observation, I remind you that I am me, pretty unobservant in the best of times, and it is now almost 4am, and I am wasted.
Me: "Uh, dude, are you OK?"
(long pause)
Ed (whispering): "No."
Me: "Dude, what's wrong?"
Ed (whispering): "My chest hurts. I've never felt anything like this."
Me: "Your chest hurts? Is there numbness in your arm?? Shit dude, are you having a heart attack????"
Ed: "No... no... I don't think so. It's just a sharp pain right in my chest. I can barely breathe." He looks up. He is actually crying.
This is the point at which I really start freaking out. Ed is crying, we are not watching sports, Castro is not, to the best of my knowledge, actually dead, so something serious is happening. At this point, Alex, Rose, and Socci all realize something is happening, and crowd into the kitchen.
We decide to pull out the sofabed, and Rose wakes up Alison, who immediately comes to comfort Ed. Pulling out the sofabed requires waking up J-Rob, who is still fetal on the floor right where the bed opens up. Fortunately, after 3 hours of uninterrupted sleep he is less surly, and upon learning what's happening, sobers up quickly.
Now, we have the sofabed pulled out, Ed is fetal on it, Alison is spooning him and trying to calm him down, and he is writhing in pain. The rest of us are drunk and worried, and finally Rose says "We have to dial 9-1-1."
In the end, we had no idea if Ed was dying or what, so we did it. At about 350am, we dialed 9-1-1, and were on the phone with them a bit, and 90 seconds after we hung up, an ambulance and a fire truck showed up at the house. 5 EMTs came trundling up the stairs, and made a semicircle around the sofabed, where Ed was writhing in pain.
What followed was a lengthy interrogation of Ed- questions about his medical history, what had happened over the course of the evening, did he have any allergies, etc. It turned out that just a few days earlier, Ed had gone on Prilosec and Zantac to treat acid reflux, which he is apparently susceptible to.
Then they asked: "What have you had to eat tonight?"
All eyes turned to me.
Me: "Uh, um, well..."
I proceeded to list all the things he'd eaten. As I related the list, I realized that everything had tomatoes, or citrus, or hot peppers, or other acidic ingredients. Plus, we'd been drinking only red wine.
It had never occurred to me to try and pH-balance the meal.
Finally, they took his vitals with a nifty portable machine, at which point we figured out that one guy was being trained by the other guy (EMT tutoring- there's something I don't do).
EMT Trainee: "Your vitals look fine. But we can take you to a hospital. Do you want to go to a hospital?"
Ed: "I don't want to go to a fucking hospital."
EMT Trainee: "Do you want to see a doctor? Your friends can take you- you don't have to ride in the ambulance."
Ed: "I don't want to see a fucking doctor. I don't want to go to the fucking hospital. Just tell me right now: is there any reason to think I'm about to die? Am I dying???"
EMT Trainee (trying not to smile): "No, you're not dying. Your vitals are fine."
Ed: "Can you tell me how long I'm going to be like this???"
EMT Trainee (abjectly failing not to smile): "Well, that depends on your body. Probably what happens is that it's like this for another couple of hours, and then you have a lo-o-o-o-o-ng trip to the bathroom, and then you'll be alright."
Ed: "Fuck."
So the EMTs packed up and left at around 430am, practically giggling. And so me, J-Rob, Alex, Rose, and Socci sat around with Ed watching him periodically writhe in pain. I estimated that we'd start mocking him in ten minutes.
Forecasted time to mockery: 10 min
Actual time to mockery: 1.5 min
Forecast error: (10-1.5)/1.5 = +567%
Oh well, good thing I'm not in forecasting anymore.
I went downstairs to bed at 515am. Joel, Keiko, MK, and Carrie slept through the entire series of events.
Ed (and Alison), almost exactly 12 hours later.
Out of deference to the only real casualty of the evening -Ed's pride- I am not posting any photos of EMTs standing around Ed trying not to smirk as he writhes in pain. He was very adamant about that. You'll just have to picture it for yourself.
And that's how I almost killed Ed. Though, to be fair, I only supplied the rope. Ed's the one who almost hung himself with it.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Seeing your ex on 20/20
So, the other day I got a bunch of messages that all said something to the effect of;
caller: "Uh, I think I just saw Nacole on 20/20, in a piece about dating. You should check it out."
So, I went online the next day, and sure enough, they did a special on finding the right person, and Nacole was in it. The special featured Dr. Helen Fisher, who has divided all people into 4 types: Directors, Explorers, Negotiators, and... something else that I can't remember. Whatever. It's the usual completely arbitrary classification scheme. I took her little test online, using the hypothesis that I would be classified as an explorer, and I was.
It's not clear at all, either from the special, or from Dr. Fisher herself, how the heck this classification helps you find the "right" person, probably because "finding the right person" is inherently an exercise in futility. But hey, it's a very monetizable exercise in futility.
My advice: meet lots of people. Eventually you'll meet one you like enough to want to do the hard work it takes to make a relationship work over the long run. Unfortunately, the first time you hit upon that person, it's unlikely they'll view you precisely the same way, so you have to iterate this process until you find someone you like enough to want to do the hard work it takes to make a relationship work over the long run, AND they like you enough to want to do the hard work it takes to make a relationship work over the long run. At that point, you get married/cohabitate until one of you dies/Thelma&Louise it off a cliff, whatever.
Of course, I'm more or less the last one of my friends to get married, so it's entirely possible that there's no one on earth less qualified to be dispensing dating advice than I am. I mean, my exes are going on dates on national TV, for Chrissake.
Anyway, apparently she went to some big singles mixer that Dr. Fisher hosted, and was one of 4 women and 4 men picked to go on a series of camera dates, in order to see if "something special" would develop. Dr. Fisher cleverly avoided saying that her algorithm for matching the men and women would have any success in predicting this.
Sure enough, only 1 of the 4 couples were still together at the time of the airing of the special, and it wasn't Nacole and Jason. Though, they went on a nice date to a cooking class. There was a funny (for me) moment during it...
Nacole: "This is fun! I've never made breaded chicken before."
[Side note: for the first 5 years I dated Nacole, she was on this super extreme diet where chicken was one of like half a dozen things she could eat. One or the other of us cooked chicken about 400 different ways. In retrospect, none of them were "breaded".]
Jason (affecting shock, as if he has, ever in his life, made breaded chicken): "Really??"
Nacole (pausing in her vigorous stirring): "No." (whipping around to face him) "Have YOU ever made breaded chicken?"
Jason (clearly caught off guard that Nacole has challenged his authority): "Uh, yeah" (quickly turns away and goes back to stirring)
I laughed and laughed. "Dude," I thought, "You better learn quickly that she's not gonna let you get away with that kind of bullshit."
Sadly, the spark apparently just wasn't there for them. Presumably Jason is out there right now looking for some doe-eyed blond who'll just gaze at him adoringly and believe him when he says he's made breaded chicken. Though, I guess next time he uses that line it'll actually be true.
So, if you feel you might be amused watching such things, you can see it online on the 20/20 website, under the special "Why Him, Why Her?", which aired on 1/30. The bit I wrote about is in "Part 2: Love is in the Air: Creating Chemistry".
One of the many reasons I lean toward theism over atheism is that life is so utterly ridiculous, it just has to be the product of some higher intelligence. A higher intelligence with a really impish sense of humor.
caller: "Uh, I think I just saw Nacole on 20/20, in a piece about dating. You should check it out."
So, I went online the next day, and sure enough, they did a special on finding the right person, and Nacole was in it. The special featured Dr. Helen Fisher, who has divided all people into 4 types: Directors, Explorers, Negotiators, and... something else that I can't remember. Whatever. It's the usual completely arbitrary classification scheme. I took her little test online, using the hypothesis that I would be classified as an explorer, and I was.
It's not clear at all, either from the special, or from Dr. Fisher herself, how the heck this classification helps you find the "right" person, probably because "finding the right person" is inherently an exercise in futility. But hey, it's a very monetizable exercise in futility.
My advice: meet lots of people. Eventually you'll meet one you like enough to want to do the hard work it takes to make a relationship work over the long run. Unfortunately, the first time you hit upon that person, it's unlikely they'll view you precisely the same way, so you have to iterate this process until you find someone you like enough to want to do the hard work it takes to make a relationship work over the long run, AND they like you enough to want to do the hard work it takes to make a relationship work over the long run. At that point, you get married/cohabitate until one of you dies/Thelma&Louise it off a cliff, whatever.
Of course, I'm more or less the last one of my friends to get married, so it's entirely possible that there's no one on earth less qualified to be dispensing dating advice than I am. I mean, my exes are going on dates on national TV, for Chrissake.
Anyway, apparently she went to some big singles mixer that Dr. Fisher hosted, and was one of 4 women and 4 men picked to go on a series of camera dates, in order to see if "something special" would develop. Dr. Fisher cleverly avoided saying that her algorithm for matching the men and women would have any success in predicting this.
Sure enough, only 1 of the 4 couples were still together at the time of the airing of the special, and it wasn't Nacole and Jason. Though, they went on a nice date to a cooking class. There was a funny (for me) moment during it...
Nacole: "This is fun! I've never made breaded chicken before."
[Side note: for the first 5 years I dated Nacole, she was on this super extreme diet where chicken was one of like half a dozen things she could eat. One or the other of us cooked chicken about 400 different ways. In retrospect, none of them were "breaded".]
Jason (affecting shock, as if he has, ever in his life, made breaded chicken): "Really??"
Nacole (pausing in her vigorous stirring): "No." (whipping around to face him) "Have YOU ever made breaded chicken?"
Jason (clearly caught off guard that Nacole has challenged his authority): "Uh, yeah" (quickly turns away and goes back to stirring)
I laughed and laughed. "Dude," I thought, "You better learn quickly that she's not gonna let you get away with that kind of bullshit."
Sadly, the spark apparently just wasn't there for them. Presumably Jason is out there right now looking for some doe-eyed blond who'll just gaze at him adoringly and believe him when he says he's made breaded chicken. Though, I guess next time he uses that line it'll actually be true.
So, if you feel you might be amused watching such things, you can see it online on the 20/20 website, under the special "Why Him, Why Her?", which aired on 1/30. The bit I wrote about is in "Part 2: Love is in the Air: Creating Chemistry".
One of the many reasons I lean toward theism over atheism is that life is so utterly ridiculous, it just has to be the product of some higher intelligence. A higher intelligence with a really impish sense of humor.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Gran Torino, and getting older
So, you may have noticed that I haven't been blogging as much. More or less since August, every time I've thought about blogging, I've thought: "I should do something business development related instead. I can blog later." The result is that I've been terribly inconsistent with the blogging, but the tutoring business is growing 110% year over year 4 months into year 2. Given the small base, that's not worth a ticker-tape parade, but in the worst economy since the Great Depression, I'll take it.
I'm not typically one for new year's resolutions, but this year I decided that the goal would be to "be more effective." I've quanitfied that by saying:
- work out 2x/wk
- get 30 min of cardio 4x/wk
- read 30 min/day 6x/wk
- cook one new recipe 1x/wk
- do 30 min of bus dev 5x/wk
- do 30 min of tutoring prep 5x/wk
The goal is to hit each of those weekly goals 45 out of the 52 weeks this year. I'm off to a shaky start, but just having the goals explicit (and having a spreadsheet to track it all in), has made me do more of all those things than I would have done otherwise. As of this morning, I'm adding:
- do 1 blog entry per week
Since I'm stuck here at work every Saturday morning (waking up at 7am on Saturdays SUCKS, btw) proctoring practice tests, saturday mornings are going to be blogtime. And so I begin today.
Keiko came out for NYE. I hung out with Laszlo and GA and Li and Em while I was waiting for Keiko to land, so I got to watch East Coast NYE on TV. Keiko landed at 1030pm, so we just went back to the beachhouse. We had been kicking around the idea of sitting on a blanket on the beach and drinking champagne there, but it was chilly and damp, so we listened to the waves crashing from the deck and drank the champagne there. It was nice- extremely mellow. We were in bed by 130am. But I figure last year we did the NYC party-until-4am thing so it all averages out.
Keiko wanted to see Gran Torino, so we went while she was here. It was quite good, and would lend itself to a drinking game whereby you have to take a drink every time there's a racial slur uttered. When the movie is over, you can play the get-my-stomach-pumped game; I swear every racial slur I've ever heard is uttered in that movie at least 3 times. Clint Eastwood does a good job of playing a cranky old man, but it's not clear that much actual acting was involved.
We saw it with Joel and Karen. As we were leaving, the following exchange occurred:
Me: "I thought it was pretty good. What did you guys think?"
Karen: "I really liked it!"
Joel: "Enh, it was OK I guess."
Keiko: "Clint Eastwood wears the same sweatpants you do baby, he just wears them pulled up a little higher."
(pause)
Me: "He wears them pulled up a LOT higher, thank you very much, and now I can never wear sweatpants ever again. I hope you're satisfied."
Keiko: "I love you babe."
Me: (grrrrr)
OK, granted, I got those sweatpants in high school, which means they're from the mid-eighties, and the elastic is worn, so I do have to wear them a little ligher than normal to keep them from falling off, but goddammit, I AM NOT A CRANKY CURMUDGEON WITH PANTS PULLED UP TO MY RIBCAGE!
hmph.
I'm not typically one for new year's resolutions, but this year I decided that the goal would be to "be more effective." I've quanitfied that by saying:
- work out 2x/wk
- get 30 min of cardio 4x/wk
- read 30 min/day 6x/wk
- cook one new recipe 1x/wk
- do 30 min of bus dev 5x/wk
- do 30 min of tutoring prep 5x/wk
The goal is to hit each of those weekly goals 45 out of the 52 weeks this year. I'm off to a shaky start, but just having the goals explicit (and having a spreadsheet to track it all in), has made me do more of all those things than I would have done otherwise. As of this morning, I'm adding:
- do 1 blog entry per week
Since I'm stuck here at work every Saturday morning (waking up at 7am on Saturdays SUCKS, btw) proctoring practice tests, saturday mornings are going to be blogtime. And so I begin today.
Keiko came out for NYE. I hung out with Laszlo and GA and Li and Em while I was waiting for Keiko to land, so I got to watch East Coast NYE on TV. Keiko landed at 1030pm, so we just went back to the beachhouse. We had been kicking around the idea of sitting on a blanket on the beach and drinking champagne there, but it was chilly and damp, so we listened to the waves crashing from the deck and drank the champagne there. It was nice- extremely mellow. We were in bed by 130am. But I figure last year we did the NYC party-until-4am thing so it all averages out.
Keiko wanted to see Gran Torino, so we went while she was here. It was quite good, and would lend itself to a drinking game whereby you have to take a drink every time there's a racial slur uttered. When the movie is over, you can play the get-my-stomach-pumped game; I swear every racial slur I've ever heard is uttered in that movie at least 3 times. Clint Eastwood does a good job of playing a cranky old man, but it's not clear that much actual acting was involved.
We saw it with Joel and Karen. As we were leaving, the following exchange occurred:
Me: "I thought it was pretty good. What did you guys think?"
Karen: "I really liked it!"
Joel: "Enh, it was OK I guess."
Keiko: "Clint Eastwood wears the same sweatpants you do baby, he just wears them pulled up a little higher."
(pause)
Me: "He wears them pulled up a LOT higher, thank you very much, and now I can never wear sweatpants ever again. I hope you're satisfied."
Keiko: "I love you babe."
Me: (grrrrr)
OK, granted, I got those sweatpants in high school, which means they're from the mid-eighties, and the elastic is worn, so I do have to wear them a little ligher than normal to keep them from falling off, but goddammit, I AM NOT A CRANKY CURMUDGEON WITH PANTS PULLED UP TO MY RIBCAGE!
hmph.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
A Weekend in Japantown...
A post I started a month ago and never finished...
A few weeks ago I finally got around to reading "Of Mice and Men", which I enjoyed quite a bit, even if it was depressing as hell. I mention that b/c Keiko came out this past weekend, and we had big plans in store: go clubbing, maybe take a dinner cruise on the Bay, etc. Sadly, all our big plans came to naught...
It started Saturday morning. I had to work 830-130, so after flying cross-country Keiko had to wake up at 7am to go into the office with me, so we could head up to the city from there. I had to give an SAT at 830, and then a GRE at 10. The GRE was going to be my very first meeting with the student, and since the SAT kid was in the office, I figured I would set up the GRE student down at the end of the hallway. This office is an empty wasteland on weekends, so I figured she'd be undisturbed. I've done this same thing before on several occasions with my other GRE student and not had a problem.
So the GRE student shows up, I set her up at the end of the hall, and start her on the first section, which goes fine. About 5 minutes into the second section, a small army of cleaning guys shows up. I've never seen them before; the usual weekend cleaning happens on Sunday afternoon.
Upon questioning them, it turns out that they're here to steam vacuum the carpets. In the hallways. And, this building is just one of several they have to do on a pretty tight schedule, so they have to do it now. Apparently this happens monthly, and of course today is the day. After some discussion, they agree to start at the opposite end of the floor. Whereupon, they begin steam cleaning the carpets using a cleaner apparently powered by a Saturn IV liquid-oxygen booster rocket. It is, in a word, deafening.
Not good.
Never one to surrender to adversity, [side note: I first typed this sentence: "Never one to surrender to diversity". It was almost worth leaving it.] I quickly cast about for a solution. There's a 3rd floor to the building, which I had never gone to, so I went up there and discovered that although most of it was controlled-access, there was a single long corridor that had a quiet nook at the end of it.
Now, the building is in the middle of having the elevators replaced, and the 3rd-floor lobby had a ton of construction equipment, but there were no people and the construction seems to happen during the week, so I figured I had my solution.
When the GRE student finished the section she was working on, I apologized for the presence of the 3 million decibel cleaning crew, and said I'd move her up to the 3rd floor, where I assured her it would be quiet. Keiko helped me execute the maneuver, and in no time we had her working in a nice, quiet, somewhat creepily dark empty hallway.
Problem solved.
Having solved this problem, I now moved to solve another problem. Since Keiko and I were going to be up in the city the next 2 days, I wasn't going to be around to let my Bio tutor in the next day to teach the lesson he needed to teach. My tutor attends Stanford business school, which is only 10 minutes away, so I left Keiko with the timers for the GRE student and the SAT student in my office, figuring at worst she would have to give the 5 minute warnings, and then dashed out to go drop off the office key to my bio tutor. Round trip: 20 minutes tops.
Well, despite missing my turn on the way to drop off the key, with some aggressive driving I managed to make it back in precisely 20 minutes, only to discover the following:
Apparently, the reason I hadn't seen anyone when I went up to check the 3rd floor was that the elevator construction crew just happened to be on lunch break. They came back approximately 5 minutes after I left, and proceeded to begin running compressed air machinery, banging on things, and yelling at each other in Spanish. Which, it turns out, was more distracting for the GRE student than the constant drone of the 747 engine that the cleaning crew on the 2nd floor was using.
So, the GRE student had come down to ask to be moved back to the 2nd floor. So Keiko did an emergency search and found an office on the floor that had its door unlocked, and put her in there. But, in the transfer of the mobile table with the GRE student's test and stuff, Keiko had put the student's chair upside down on the table, covering the scratch paper I'd left her.
So, when the student started up her section again in the office, she was now without scratch paper for the math sections, causing her to come back out and ask Keiko for scratch paper. Since Keiko didn't have any, she told the student to just write on the test. A simple solution, except it contradicted what I'd gone out of my way to instruct the student before she began the test. Of course, there was no way Keiko would have known that, but it annoyed the student. Keiko ended up finding my physics notebook in the kitchen and ripping pages out of that. So the GRE student finally got her situation straightened out, but in the course of dealing with all this, Keiko neglected to give the SAT student her 5 minute warning, which made her run out of time on one of her sections.
And all of this happened in the 20 minutes I was away. Poor Keiko was stressed out when I got back. Not a good morning.
Eventually both students finished their tests, and the GRE student I had a long talk with. I told her I wouldn't charge her for the test, and after talking a while she seemed fine. But we ended up leaving the office at nearly 4, versus at 1, so by the time we got to SF we were exhausted, and our big plans for hitting the town became dinner and "Pineapple Express". Which, it must be said, was pretty funny.
Dinner was at a restaurant called Kappa. It's virtually impossible to find- it's a tiny place that seats only ten at a wooden bar. There's no sign outside at all; when you find the outer door, on the upper level of an outdoor shopping area, which primarily leads to a much larger restaurant that has lots of big, obvious signage, there is a secret side inner side door that has a tiny (palm-sized) sign that says Kappa on it.
Going through that door you pass through a narrow curtain into a space barely big enough for me and Keiko to stand in simultaneously, and are immediately faced with two other curtains right next to each other at a V-shaped angle. Pass through the one on the left and you end up in a tiny kitchen. Pass through the one on the right and you find the tiny eating area.
There's one cook, and one waitress. She's dressed in a formal kimono, and she'll warn you right off the bat that they don't serve sushi here, and ask if you're OK with that. What they serve is very traditional Japanese cooking, like what you might find in someone's house. Some of the stuff we had Keiko said her mom makes. The food was quite good overall; I even tried a bunch of new stuff, and enjoyed it. If anyone's ever thinking about going, let me know and I'll explain how to find the secret door.
We stayed at the Kabuki Hotel in Japantown, which is quite nice. I got a deal on a suite which was, well, sweet. A huge room- tatami mats, a japanese futon, a japanese soaking tub, a rock garden with bamboo. In the room. Very nice.
Sunday began as you might expect- by the time we emerged into the light of day it was already afternoon. After a light lunch, we handed the car off to Joel, who met us in the city, and then went for a lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ng walk. We went down through Cow Hollow, went into an open house of a condo with a spectacular view of the Bay, continued down into the Marina, Municipal pier, Fisherman's Wharf, Ghiradelli square, then Columbus Ave, Lombard St, Russian Hill, and then back into Japantown.
When you factor in all the hills, plus a stop for margaritas (don't get drinks on the Wharf- they suck ass), our walk turned out to be about 5 hours long, up and down a lot of steep hills. So, by the time we got back we were exhausted and starving, and another night in which we had big plans to hit the town became dinner, crepes, crazy Japanese photo booth, and then long bath in the soaking tub.
There is nothing more Japanese than the crazy photo booth. It is a riot of bright colors, Japanese pop, and high-pitched Japanese girl voices shrieking instructions at you. Also, all the directions on the screen are in Japanese. It really helps to have a Japanese person with you when you use the booth. The pictures get taken inside the booth, and then you come back outside and around to the side of the thing where there is a screen where you pick which photos you like, pick a background, and decorate the living shit out of the pictures.
Being a Japanese creation, the picture-taking happens with ruthless efficiency, whether you're ready or not, and each booth has a decorating screen on each side of it, so the total machine can be processing 3 different groups of people simultaneously: the people inside doing the picture-taking, and 1 group of people on each side of the booth doing the manic decorating. And all the while crazy Japan-pop is playing and Japanese schoolgirls are shrieking instructions at you.
Here is the result of our turn in the machine:
Monday, we managed to get out of the room by check-out time, and then went and had breakfast at New Minny's Restaurant. A bit risky, ordering my favorite trailer-park breakfast items from an Asian restaurant, but I was satisfied. And, while I'll eat Asian food for lunch and dinner every day, I can't eat Asian food for breakfast. The white half of me dominates until lunchtime.
After that, we just went for a walk (a much shorter one). It was a beautiful weekend in SF- 75 degrees and totally sunny. I'm coming to the conclusion that the best times to visit SF are mid April-mid June, and mid September-mid November. Which just happen to be the busiest times of the year for tutoring. Sigh.
For dinner, we picked up super-fancy cupcakes from Sprinkles (highly recommended to those who like cupcakes), and headed over to Laura and Dmitri's. Kate and Max, my godchildren, get really excited to see Keiko. Well, technically, Kate gets really excited to see Keiko, and Max gets really excited about anything Kate gets really excited about, but either way it means a wild time of running, throwing, catching, and then watching Thomas the Train. We take Thomas the Train VERY seriously. And woe betide the godfather who mistakes James (the red one, I think) for Percy (the green one, I think). Such gauche behavior merits the sternest admonishment a 2 year old can give.
After dinner, it was off to the airport, after a weekend both more, and less, whirlwind than planned. Best laid plans, and all that. BTW, I never knew "Of Mice and Men" was so depressing. I loved it, and highly recommend it to everyone else who never had to read it in high school...
A few weeks ago I finally got around to reading "Of Mice and Men", which I enjoyed quite a bit, even if it was depressing as hell. I mention that b/c Keiko came out this past weekend, and we had big plans in store: go clubbing, maybe take a dinner cruise on the Bay, etc. Sadly, all our big plans came to naught...
It started Saturday morning. I had to work 830-130, so after flying cross-country Keiko had to wake up at 7am to go into the office with me, so we could head up to the city from there. I had to give an SAT at 830, and then a GRE at 10. The GRE was going to be my very first meeting with the student, and since the SAT kid was in the office, I figured I would set up the GRE student down at the end of the hallway. This office is an empty wasteland on weekends, so I figured she'd be undisturbed. I've done this same thing before on several occasions with my other GRE student and not had a problem.
So the GRE student shows up, I set her up at the end of the hall, and start her on the first section, which goes fine. About 5 minutes into the second section, a small army of cleaning guys shows up. I've never seen them before; the usual weekend cleaning happens on Sunday afternoon.
Upon questioning them, it turns out that they're here to steam vacuum the carpets. In the hallways. And, this building is just one of several they have to do on a pretty tight schedule, so they have to do it now. Apparently this happens monthly, and of course today is the day. After some discussion, they agree to start at the opposite end of the floor. Whereupon, they begin steam cleaning the carpets using a cleaner apparently powered by a Saturn IV liquid-oxygen booster rocket. It is, in a word, deafening.
Not good.
Never one to surrender to adversity, [side note: I first typed this sentence: "Never one to surrender to diversity". It was almost worth leaving it.] I quickly cast about for a solution. There's a 3rd floor to the building, which I had never gone to, so I went up there and discovered that although most of it was controlled-access, there was a single long corridor that had a quiet nook at the end of it.
Now, the building is in the middle of having the elevators replaced, and the 3rd-floor lobby had a ton of construction equipment, but there were no people and the construction seems to happen during the week, so I figured I had my solution.
When the GRE student finished the section she was working on, I apologized for the presence of the 3 million decibel cleaning crew, and said I'd move her up to the 3rd floor, where I assured her it would be quiet. Keiko helped me execute the maneuver, and in no time we had her working in a nice, quiet, somewhat creepily dark empty hallway.
Problem solved.
Having solved this problem, I now moved to solve another problem. Since Keiko and I were going to be up in the city the next 2 days, I wasn't going to be around to let my Bio tutor in the next day to teach the lesson he needed to teach. My tutor attends Stanford business school, which is only 10 minutes away, so I left Keiko with the timers for the GRE student and the SAT student in my office, figuring at worst she would have to give the 5 minute warnings, and then dashed out to go drop off the office key to my bio tutor. Round trip: 20 minutes tops.
Well, despite missing my turn on the way to drop off the key, with some aggressive driving I managed to make it back in precisely 20 minutes, only to discover the following:
Apparently, the reason I hadn't seen anyone when I went up to check the 3rd floor was that the elevator construction crew just happened to be on lunch break. They came back approximately 5 minutes after I left, and proceeded to begin running compressed air machinery, banging on things, and yelling at each other in Spanish. Which, it turns out, was more distracting for the GRE student than the constant drone of the 747 engine that the cleaning crew on the 2nd floor was using.
So, the GRE student had come down to ask to be moved back to the 2nd floor. So Keiko did an emergency search and found an office on the floor that had its door unlocked, and put her in there. But, in the transfer of the mobile table with the GRE student's test and stuff, Keiko had put the student's chair upside down on the table, covering the scratch paper I'd left her.
So, when the student started up her section again in the office, she was now without scratch paper for the math sections, causing her to come back out and ask Keiko for scratch paper. Since Keiko didn't have any, she told the student to just write on the test. A simple solution, except it contradicted what I'd gone out of my way to instruct the student before she began the test. Of course, there was no way Keiko would have known that, but it annoyed the student. Keiko ended up finding my physics notebook in the kitchen and ripping pages out of that. So the GRE student finally got her situation straightened out, but in the course of dealing with all this, Keiko neglected to give the SAT student her 5 minute warning, which made her run out of time on one of her sections.
And all of this happened in the 20 minutes I was away. Poor Keiko was stressed out when I got back. Not a good morning.
Eventually both students finished their tests, and the GRE student I had a long talk with. I told her I wouldn't charge her for the test, and after talking a while she seemed fine. But we ended up leaving the office at nearly 4, versus at 1, so by the time we got to SF we were exhausted, and our big plans for hitting the town became dinner and "Pineapple Express". Which, it must be said, was pretty funny.
Dinner was at a restaurant called Kappa. It's virtually impossible to find- it's a tiny place that seats only ten at a wooden bar. There's no sign outside at all; when you find the outer door, on the upper level of an outdoor shopping area, which primarily leads to a much larger restaurant that has lots of big, obvious signage, there is a secret side inner side door that has a tiny (palm-sized) sign that says Kappa on it.
Going through that door you pass through a narrow curtain into a space barely big enough for me and Keiko to stand in simultaneously, and are immediately faced with two other curtains right next to each other at a V-shaped angle. Pass through the one on the left and you end up in a tiny kitchen. Pass through the one on the right and you find the tiny eating area.
There's one cook, and one waitress. She's dressed in a formal kimono, and she'll warn you right off the bat that they don't serve sushi here, and ask if you're OK with that. What they serve is very traditional Japanese cooking, like what you might find in someone's house. Some of the stuff we had Keiko said her mom makes. The food was quite good overall; I even tried a bunch of new stuff, and enjoyed it. If anyone's ever thinking about going, let me know and I'll explain how to find the secret door.
We stayed at the Kabuki Hotel in Japantown, which is quite nice. I got a deal on a suite which was, well, sweet. A huge room- tatami mats, a japanese futon, a japanese soaking tub, a rock garden with bamboo. In the room. Very nice.
Sunday began as you might expect- by the time we emerged into the light of day it was already afternoon. After a light lunch, we handed the car off to Joel, who met us in the city, and then went for a lo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ng walk. We went down through Cow Hollow, went into an open house of a condo with a spectacular view of the Bay, continued down into the Marina, Municipal pier, Fisherman's Wharf, Ghiradelli square, then Columbus Ave, Lombard St, Russian Hill, and then back into Japantown.
When you factor in all the hills, plus a stop for margaritas (don't get drinks on the Wharf- they suck ass), our walk turned out to be about 5 hours long, up and down a lot of steep hills. So, by the time we got back we were exhausted and starving, and another night in which we had big plans to hit the town became dinner, crepes, crazy Japanese photo booth, and then long bath in the soaking tub.
There is nothing more Japanese than the crazy photo booth. It is a riot of bright colors, Japanese pop, and high-pitched Japanese girl voices shrieking instructions at you. Also, all the directions on the screen are in Japanese. It really helps to have a Japanese person with you when you use the booth. The pictures get taken inside the booth, and then you come back outside and around to the side of the thing where there is a screen where you pick which photos you like, pick a background, and decorate the living shit out of the pictures.
Being a Japanese creation, the picture-taking happens with ruthless efficiency, whether you're ready or not, and each booth has a decorating screen on each side of it, so the total machine can be processing 3 different groups of people simultaneously: the people inside doing the picture-taking, and 1 group of people on each side of the booth doing the manic decorating. And all the while crazy Japan-pop is playing and Japanese schoolgirls are shrieking instructions at you.
Here is the result of our turn in the machine:
Monday, we managed to get out of the room by check-out time, and then went and had breakfast at New Minny's Restaurant. A bit risky, ordering my favorite trailer-park breakfast items from an Asian restaurant, but I was satisfied. And, while I'll eat Asian food for lunch and dinner every day, I can't eat Asian food for breakfast. The white half of me dominates until lunchtime.
After that, we just went for a walk (a much shorter one). It was a beautiful weekend in SF- 75 degrees and totally sunny. I'm coming to the conclusion that the best times to visit SF are mid April-mid June, and mid September-mid November. Which just happen to be the busiest times of the year for tutoring. Sigh.
For dinner, we picked up super-fancy cupcakes from Sprinkles (highly recommended to those who like cupcakes), and headed over to Laura and Dmitri's. Kate and Max, my godchildren, get really excited to see Keiko. Well, technically, Kate gets really excited to see Keiko, and Max gets really excited about anything Kate gets really excited about, but either way it means a wild time of running, throwing, catching, and then watching Thomas the Train. We take Thomas the Train VERY seriously. And woe betide the godfather who mistakes James (the red one, I think) for Percy (the green one, I think). Such gauche behavior merits the sternest admonishment a 2 year old can give.
After dinner, it was off to the airport, after a weekend both more, and less, whirlwind than planned. Best laid plans, and all that. BTW, I never knew "Of Mice and Men" was so depressing. I loved it, and highly recommend it to everyone else who never had to read it in high school...
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