Things Break, and Get Fixed.

Let's get this out of the way first, I bought new glasses. I was vacillating between Italian skinny suit wearer and 50s scientist. I decided to go with the 50s scientist look. Now I have to beef up my wardrobe to match the glasses. Guess I'll be wearing lab coats from now on.

It's been a time of breaking and fixing. This week we had horribly long hours at work due to system upgrades that broke in unforeseen ways. I won't go in to details because nobody wants to hear about messy IT details. Suffice it to say that my boss's boss's boss's boss (yes we have that much hierarchy and more) wanted updates all the time. It wasn't any systems I was responsible for that broke, but we were the ones suffering the side effects. The only good outcome is that my name gets more notice higher up the pay grades as the person who 'takes care of things', this will help when the Portland move has to get approval by food chain.

This was also a week where other things were fixed. My motorcycle finally got fixed from the accident I had over two months ago. This means I'm finally finished with the annoying "Your lamp is not working!" warning that by moto has been telling me about for months. Also my shifter is now fixed and I'm no longer cutting holes in my boots. This means I get to use my new boots, woo! Sadly I think they messed up my clutch settings along the way :(

Next week is going to be exciting, Mario and Nicki are landing Friday to stay for a week and a half. Nicki has been here before so I'm sure it's all ho-hum for her, but Mario has never been to San Diego. Actually I don't think Mario has been much further than Quebec, Ontario and Vermont so this should be pretty cool. The only thing we need to figure out is how to get a hold of a vehicle that seats four, that or we travel via Smart car and motorcycle all the time. I think we'll work on the rental car idea.

Kat and I dodged a bullet last night. We were give free tickets to a harbour cruise by friends of ours, they won the tickets and couldn't go. We dressed up in white, which was required, and headed downtown for the evening. We quickly realized one of the reasons we don't go downtown very often is the dearth of parking. We ended up parking somewhere that was questionable, but was better than spending another 20 minutes looking for approved parking.

• Then we realized the line to embark was huge.
• Then we spent an hour in line waiting (poor Kat was in heels).
• Then we got on and it was a 'booze cruise'.
• Then we noticed there was nowhere to sit that wasn't already taken.
• Then we realized once the boat left there was no getting off for three hours.

Three hours of being stuck on a boat with a bunch of drunk people, loud music and no chairs=get the hell off the boat. We had a nice supper in a new Italian restaurant in Mission Hills instead. Yes we are getting old, but happily Kat and I are still simpatico in regards to what we think is entertaining.

Our friend Amanda who first introduced us to Portland (we went there to visit her) has continued to send us pro-Portland information in the mail, which we appreciate. The latest tidbit from Portland that we read, and resonates with the way we feel, is the '20 minute neighborhood':

A 20-minute neighborhood is a place with convenient, safe, and pedestrian-oriented access to the places people need to go to and the services people use nearly every day: transit, shopping, quality food, school, parks, and social activities, that is near and adjacent to housing. In other words, a 20-minute neighborhood is another name for a walkable environment.

Links to more detail here (PDF file) and here (blog entry). I believe I've had conversations regarding exactly those ideas with my mother, since we both like the urban environments, also, almost all the places Kat and I have lived meet those criteria. Without giving it a nice sound-bite name we've been living that idea for ages. More reasons to love Portland :)

Designers and bankers, sometimes both lack a connection to reality

It's been a mixed week. We got a notice from the IRS regarding out 2008 taxes, turns out our accountant messed up and we owe another $500. Our cat decided to urinate on the couch again. I think my motorcycle helmet is the causing me acne like a 16yr old and I just spent 1/2 hr deciding on new glasses just to find out the place doesn't take my insurance. Oh yes, the kitty has now racked up over $1,000 in vet bills.

On the plus side I had a good mountain bike ride on Wednesday and a good road ride back from work yesterday and Kat and I had a really nice supper Thursday night, and it was free. I think overall it's been a positive week.

On the ride back from work on Friday a random driver rolled down their window and declared "Croatia!". I happened to be wearing the 2002 Croatian world cup jersey for a biking shirt. She is only the third person ever to recognize the jersey. Sadly my Nigerian jersey has never been recognized by anybody and *that* one stands out.

I forgot to mention that the insurance company got back to me with my check for the damage to the motorcycle. They actually sent me a cheque for more money than the BMW shop quoted the repairs for, which is pretty shocking considering the quote. I think their approach is to give you more money than you asked for and then hope they never hear from you again. Fair enough. I've replaced the pants and boots and I'm waiting for all the parts to come in so they can fix the rest of the motorcycle. It'll be nice to be able to shift in a normal manner again rather than having to hook the sole of my boot under a sharp piece of metal, which is what I have to do now. I didn't realize it until last week, but I'm wearing a hole in the thick leather of my boots by shifting like that.

not my picture

As some of you may know, Kat and I appreciate designer things. A well thought out, good quality item is (in my mind) well worth the extra cash you have to cough up for it. Our Cameleon couch is one thing that falls in to that category. We also subscribe to Dwell magazine because we like to look at how people use small spaces and 'green' design for houses. I find that only 5% of design appeals to me, mostly I just don't agree with peoples design esthetic which is fine because that is the joy of artistic things, you can differ in opinion. Some times though I think that designers seem to forget about reality and get caught up in their own heads. A recent list of chairs in Dwell pointed out this as a 'designer' chair (follow link or look to the right). Oh please, what the hell is that? It's ugly, unfinished and boring. I don't care if the wood is cured using a unique mixture of yak and panda piss and it hum lullabies to you when you sit in it. It's ugly, unfinished and boring. Somebody take that designer outside and slap him around with a reality stick.

It reminds me of a conversation I once had with a designer/artist who was telling me about his coffee table he designed that had grass under the glass top of the table.

me - Interesting, how do you handle the drainage?
him - What?
me - You're going to have to water the grass, so how do you handle the water drainage?
him - looks confused, then adopts the long suffering look of an a miss-understood artist dealing with a Philistine

The conversation dried up after that. Actually, that conversation was with an ex-girlfriend's boyfriend so there were all kinds of extra layers of uncomfortable.

On a lighter note I just got back from the bike shop where I had to get my rear wheel trued on my road bike. There were two cute ladies working at the shop and both of them getting dirty and fixing bikes, how hot is that?

Of Bread and Portland

Green Dragon Brew Pub

We're back from Portland; loved it there again. We had a lovely time visiting Amanda and Ryan, they put us up in their spare bedroom and acted as tour guides to all the cool, hip places around their neighborhood. Portland has a lot of cool and hip places: sustainable sushi, brew pubs, movie theatres that let you buy and drink beer, mass transit that goes out to the airport. It's a great place to be.

The weather was bright and sunny, in contrast to San Diego, which was overcast while we were gone. Good timing on our part. Kat has been judiciously keeping to her new exercise regime (and I've been joining when possible) so while we were in Portland we took long walks and Kat and Amanda did yoga.

We liked the area where Ryan and Amanda live, with the old Victorian style housing, communities and an organic blend of residential and commercial. We also visited Ryan's cousin's place, which is a renovated condo downtown with huge, floor-to-ceiling glass windows that span one entire side of the living area. Very nice as well. Seems Portland has it all.  ;)

There was a lot of "when are we moving here?" questions being asked. We are looking in to it. I'd love to work remotely, there are a few of my co-workers who do that.  They fly in a week every month or two for meetings that have to be done face-to-face. I could live with that. Cheaper living conditions, flights to rack up frequent flier points, working from home, what is not to love? Of course working from home may drive me nuts due to lack of interaction with other people. I know I can be efficient working at home, I do it occasionally now, but not sure what would happen if I worked from home for weeks on end: Kat would come home from a hard day wanting to relax and I'd be  "WE MUST GO OUT!".

Update since I wrote this: I spoke with my boss about working remotely and he thinks we may be able to work it out. I guess that is one benefit about being employed by a flexible large company

My department has moved buildings, so now we are in a nicer one. Not the top of the line building that some other, more important, groups are in, but better than we had. I get the feeling IT is at the butt end of list when it comes to making employees comfortable. After all, we aren't really revenue generating, we're nothing but an expense. Since we are no longer near a place for acceptable coffee I moved the espresso maker Kat bought a while back in to my office but I have still to work out where everything goes. This week I realized that I'd stored my lunch food, coffee and my towel in the same drawer. My towel smelled of coffee and banana. It wasn't bad, just disconcerting.

Kat made bread last week, it was very successful. She picked up a book that has a different way of making bread. Rather than mix, pulverize, recover, pulverize, ignore, pulverize, it includes a lot of waiting. I'll let Kat describe it better since - (This is Kat, I'm taking over this post...)

The book is "My Bread" by Jim Lahey, and the technique he describes is not really "new". In fact, it's very old. The concept of letting a very moist dough rise for up to 24 hours before baking it inside a cast iron pot in the oven, dates from the Roman era. I highly recommend the book and the technique. It's summer now of course, which means I'm not keen to bake a lot right now, but I'm eager to try a cinnamon-raisin recipe next. Okay, I'll hand this back to Phillip.....

... The results were lovely, good crisp crust and tasty spongy interior. The crust was very crisp, so crisp that I didn't realize I'd sliced up the roof of my mouth and tongue until I took a sip of wine. Ouch. (Kat again....)  He exaggerates. It was excellent bread. Especially for my first try! (/ end Kat)

One of the many reasons I love Kat is because she is a grounded, down to earth kind of person. She is taking 'Spa Techniques' in school right now and is covering such things as wraps and hot stone. Body wraps sounded vaguely interesting until Kat told me that it essentially immobilizes you and then they leave you for 20 min. I'm suddenly no longer interested. She was saying that the job of the massage therapist is to sit there and pay attention to the client for the 20 minutes that they are immobilized (which makes sense, what happens if sneeze then fall off the table?). In class people were channeling energy with dance and tracing glyphs over the wrapped person ... um, okay. I think I'd prefer the person to check facebook rather than tracing some bizarre glyphs over me while I'm stuck there.

Her hot stone class was talking about how the massage therapist should choose stones that 'speak' to them. If I told people that I was connecting with stones and that they were speaking to me they'd assume I'd fallen off my bike and taken a head wound. Kat figured she'd find stones that were a good weight and were nice and smooth. See why I love her?

We've booked our flights back home, so we will be sending emails to people letting them know when we will be back in town. I'm excited about re-purposing my grass cutting boots back in to the winter boots they were originally made to be :)