A Bit of Oddness

Came across this bit of trivia while surfing: While sitting down, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Continue doing this and try to draw the number six in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.

Construction Day 6

End of day six, and pretty much the end of the demolition phase. The front half of the house is completely opened up, and you can see clear to the ceiling. The framing phase starts tomorrow.

Unfortunately I still don't have the final plans yet, so things may slow down if I can't get it asap. We've been making some last minute tweaks and getting it all into an official AutoCAD drawing is taking a bit longer than anticipated. In principal, this is the kind of thing that should have been completed before we started construction, but our designer gave us such amazing ideas that we had to incorporate them.

Construction Day 3

Taken this morning... The demolition continues.

Construction Begins!

Woo-hoo! The remodel is now officially under way! Stopped by the house early this morning and watched them take a sledgehammer and pickaxe to the kitchen.

Refracted Sunshine

After a couple days of heavy rain it was nice to finally get a break. Drove around the corner from the house and saw the rainbow, which brought a smile to my face, even if everything else was a dreary gray.

Surf's Up

Went to Pacifica to get a quote on some cabinets today and stopped to admire the immense waves that were coming in. Made me wish I'd brought my camera with me. Mother nature can be totally awe inspiring when she wants to be. I was mesmerized by the chaos and power of the waves until the cold drove me back to the warmth of the car.

And a Happy New Year!

Best of luck to everyone, and may you hold true to all your resolutions!

Personally, I can't wait for the year to get started. I still need to finalize a bunch of things for the house remodel, but can't since many of the stores and people I'm working with have been on vacation for the past week or so.

Merry Christmas!

圣诞快乐
Joyeux Noël!
C Pождеством
Frohe Weihnachten!
Maligayang Pasko!
Selamat Hari Natal!

Woosh

Went to Sugar Bowl today for my first day of snowboarding this season. I have fond memories of Sugar Bowl as this was where I first really learned how to snowboard oh so long ago.

Unlike the powder of memory though, the snow cover was pretty sparse. The storm that blew through last week must have melted away or missed Sugar Bowl completely.

Nevertheless, it was a beautiful day, there were no crowds, and the runs off Lincoln were good enough to occupy me for much of the day.

Disappointment in a Cup

I've been a big fan of Barefoot Coffee Roasters ever since the wife discovered the place. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that they've changed my life -- how I've thought of coffee specifically -- and I've been recommending it to friends at every opportunity.

You can surely imagine my sadness and disappointment then when I say that I can no longer recommend Barefoot. They've recently redone their menu, increased their prices, and changed their source for milk. I can handle the first two, but that third is a killer.

Now I'm paying more for less (smaller cups) for lattes that taste worst (mainly due to the milk).

Woe!

Their claim is their new specially-formulated-for-Barefoot milk by the Strauss Family Farms is superior, but my tongue begs to differ. I can only dream of the days when they served Clover's Extra Rich Milk.

I guess I should point out that Barefoot still makes good coffee. It's probably still the best in the area, but they no longer make great coffee.

White Elephant Waste

I've been to two white elephant gift exchanges so far this Christmas season and have friends that seem to be going to one at least once a week. The rise in popularity of white elephants has also coincided with the decline in popularity of secret santas, at least in this neck of the woods.

I have to say I prefer secret santa gift exchanges more, because you can then put some thought into what the recipient might like. White elephants, on the other hand, seem to be an exercise in finding the most generic gift that would appeal to the biggest audience.

More often than not, white elephant gifts are just kitschy items that you play with for a while before it gets retired to the junk pile, and I think this just contributes to the feeding frenzy of Christmas-time consumerism.

I'm going to avoid going off on a tangent on waste and consumerism here, but if you're interested, just google it. Celebrate Discardia!

I think from now on, if I'm participating in a white elephant, I'm going to follow a couple simple rules:

• Something old: instead of buying something new, I'll try to regift instead.
• Something new: if I have to buy something new, it'll be something consumable, like a bottle of wine or a box of chocolates. Something that won't just sit on a table or end up in the garbage can or be set aside for regifting...

A journey of a thousand miles...

... begins with a single step. And for our remodel project, that step was taken a long, long time ago. We have been thinking about it for what seems like forever and started working with an architect in July 2006.

And now, it looks like we're actually going to begin construction! It took two tries, but we finally got our permit to begin the job from the Los Altos building department yesterday.

Free Rice

My sister sent me a link to FreeRice and I thought I'd share the joy. And by joy I mean a great time suck.

The whole rice thing is sort of a silly gimmick, but the vocab quiz itself is fairly addicting. The highest vocab level I've gotten so far is 48. What's yours?

Gobble Gobble

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

The Perfect Bag

Camera bag, that is. I'd been looking for one before leaving on our honeymoon because the one I had at that time could not hold a guide book in addition to my Nikon D40. As I hunted around, I realized I also really wanted it to be big enough to fit my flash, Gorillapod, a ball head for the Gorillapod, and a bottle of water, yet still be small and light.

After a few false starts, I finally discovered the Tamrac Messenger 4, which met all my criterias. After traveling with it for the past two months, I've been more than happy with the way it's performed. It's even survived a soaking when I got caught outdoors in a flash thunderstorm.

I'm Baaaack!

We're finally back home after our month-long honeymoon, and I have to say it feels good to sleep in our own bed again. Not that I would have said no to traveling for another month or two, mind you, but it's good to be home.

The biggest surprise for me was how comfortable I felt in France. I've always known that I liked France after my last trip there in 2001, but after having traveled so much, to Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and Greece recently, I've come to realize just how "right" France (and Paris in particular) feels to me.

The wife had planned our time in France, and she'd originally thought to spend the whole week in Paris, but changed things around when I said that was just too much time since we'd both been in Paris before. I was wrong. Nevertheless, I couldn't have been happier with her final itinerary, since that would mean we would never have gone to Troisgois.

Troisgros

After 2 days of gray, overcast skies, the clouds have finally parted and allowed the sun to come out and play, and it's been glorious.

We drove down from Paris to Roanne, and we're staying at Troisgros tonight; a boutique hotel and restaurant with a Michelin three star rating. As you would expect, dinner was amazing, and the main course, a beef dish, was nothing short of mind-blowing. Normally, I'd reserve that for meat that's so tender that it just melts in your mouth like butter. And while this dish had a little of that, what made it so amazing was the texture and how it was just a joy to chew. It had the perfect resistance for chewing, and every bite just delicious. I don't know how else to describe it.

I'd mention how well appointed the room is, but I'm honestly just too satiated to write any more.

Good Read

Just finished Judas Unchained, the sequel (and finale) to Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton, and I can't recommend them highly enough. It's space opera at its best. The first book starts with dozens of major characters, each with their own thread that slowly but surely links up with one another until they all meet in book two in a tremendous climax that doesn't disappoint.

Habitat

I spent yesterday volunteering with Habitat for Humanity in San Jose. This was my first time with them, and all in all it was a pretty fun time. I floated around for most of the morning as there were more volunteers than work, and got to learn a little about plumbing and putting up siding. In the afternoon, I found myself on the roof again as I worked on nailing tar paper to the roof.

One Bad Apple

Had a rather infuriating visitor tonight. Answered a knock at the door around 8pm and found some girl who identified herself as a Sierra Club member looking for signatures and donations. I figured I'd give her a chance since I'm a fan of the Sierra Club's work, so I listened to her spiel about global warming and Sierra Club's effort to pass S.309 in the Senate. I offered to sign her petition, but declined to donate.

As much as I'd like to support all efforts to combat global warming, and as much as I appreciate the grass roots efforts to raise awareness of the Issue, I definitely do not appreciate being guilt tripped/insulted because I'm not willing to donate. Accusing me of lying about my beliefs is just not acceptable.

WTF, Sierra Club? Please train the people you send out a little bit better. Personally, I don't like giving money to people who come to my door. When I donate, I'd like to make sure it goes directly to the organization I'm donating to. This experience has definitely given me a negative impression of the Sierra Club.