Tag: personal

berkeley recon

I took the train up to Berkeley yesterday to reconnoiter the climbing and yoga situations, to look for a credit union, to try to get cheap BART tickets, and generally to get the hell out of the house.

I was at least partially successful. Since I planned to do so much, and I needed to get from one side of Berkeley (campus) to the other (climbing/yoga), I was heavily laden. Honestly, I looked mostly like a Sherpa: big backpack with yoga mat threaded through, bike, helmet, and all, trying to look nonchalant on the train, exuding I-do-this-everyday vibes.

In truth, having all that stuff was a royal pain. One of the first things I did when I got to campus was find a bike shop (co-op, actually, employee-owned, as they were eager to tell me) and buy some bungee cords so I could strap the mat to the cargo rack. I also picked up a nifty bolt-on (read: marginally more difficult to steal), collapsible metal basket that I hope to use on our bike shopping trips. I then found the Berkeley credit union, called “C.U.B.S.,” (I’ll leave the acronym as an exercise for the reader). It was actually very sketchy; kind of a hole-in-the-wall in Sproul Plaza, which is a kind of on-campus strip mall integrated into libraries and stuff. Think the UT west mall with restaurants and pushy special interest groups, and you’ll get the general idea. In any case, I wasn’t very impressed with the place (the credit union, that is), and I’m seriously considering just signing up with Washington Mutual because their ATMs seem to be ubiquitous nationwide and they have sophisticated online stuff. As it stands, I’ve still just got all my money at the UT credit union, which proves how much it really doesn’t matter where your bank is physically located these days.

My plan was to then go to the Cal ID card office to get my “class pass,” a very weak nickname for the pass that gets you free on all the campus buses and also a lot of other bay area buses, mostly in SF. This plan was stymied by a quarter-mile-long line of freshman waiting to get their IDs. I was then stymied by another line at the post office trying to mail off my watch to get repaired. At this point I’d had enough of downtown, and started biking in the direction of the Ashby warehouse district where reside Berkeley Ironworks and 7th Heaven Yoga. I went ahead and signed up for a monthly membership at the climbing gym ($60/mo, ouch). It’s a great gym, but it’s out of the way and not cheap. I hope that I find some climbing partners soon to help motivate me and/or drive me there. It took about 15-20mins by bike to get there from campus. In any case, I climbed, mostly alone (sniff), but it felt good.

At 6 I went to the yoga place for a mediocre class called “Ashtanga Vinyasa.” It was supposed to be for advanced students, but it still wasn’t real ashtanga. I think what I’m going to have to do is buckle down and just do it by myself. The simple truth is I can do it by myself and I should, rather than letting time, distance, and expense be an excuse for not doing it at all. Our deck and the Berkeley rec centers have all the equipment I need: wood floors.

The evening was rounded out by a nerve-wracking ride up Ashby to the BART station in near darkness, the hour on the train, and more scary biking in the dark (need a decent light, I know). I got in about nine, ate, then collapsed in bed. A bit too much exertion for an everyday routine. Just maybe.

school days are here again

We got back on Sunday from Texas. I’d tell you all the stuff we did, but Cameron already wrote a great description. The only parts not included are the excellent dinner we had in Dallas the night we arrived to celebrate Susan’s birthday at a place called Iris, and some modest ranch-type work that we accomplished on Friday (fixing lights, planting gardens, driving tractors, waterskiing, the usual).

So now I’ve entered my last week of this odd year that started last August. The year without a plan (well, there were plans, but the were all just theoretical. Almost unbelievably, everything went off without a hitch. I found a job, a great one, at Apple. It only took a couple of months. I reapplied to grad schools, and actually got in this time, to Stanford and Berkeley, the place I wanted to go to all along. It’s almost like the entire net effect of the year was to transpose me from being about to start my Ph.D. in Seattle to me being about to start my Ph.D. here.

In any case, in less than a week I’ll start classes again. I wonder how different it will feel, how much the same. It’s an adventure but also a relief… new place, new people, but also going back to the life of a student, even if it is a student with a long commute for this year.

MI->CA->TX

The last couple days of Michigan were good. We went out kayaking on the Huron river that runs through Ann Arbor. It was pretty, despite running through the middle of town, mostly because it was lined with parks on either shore. Try as I might, I couldn’t manage to flip my kayak, either, which bodes well for future adventures. After kayaking we tried and failed to get sushi (the place was closed–again). We ended up heading home, puttered a tad, then started making dinner. We found some fresh, wild Coho salmon at Whole Foods for $10/lb and couldn’t pass it up. Plus, Ali had never had the parmesan-crusted spinach-mascarpone-stuffed salmon that we love so much, so we just had to make it. It turned out pretty damned well, but I did over-cook the salmon slightly. I blame it on the unfamiliar oven.

We then went out to Dominic’s, a local dive, to have some sangria in the early evening. Funny story about Dominic’s that Ali told me: apparently, there used to be two Dominic’s, but one was bought. The new owner was going to run it much as it had been, which is to say, a place to get pizza and beer. He was too cheap to get an entirely new sign, so he just took off the last two letters and added an ‘o’–Domino’s. And that’s where it all began.

When we got home we spent a shameful amount of time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. We didn’t mean to spend so long, but just after we’d finished two of the hardest missions in the game and went to save, the game crashed. And not only did it crash, it ate all the save games for GTA on the memory card. So we went from being more than halfway through the game to zero. I felt this was partially my fault, so it was clearly necessary to stay up until 2:30 regaining ground.

Sunday started late, and we headed out to pick blueberries. It was fun, if a little hot and thorny. I’ve never quite reconciled the taste and texture of blueberries. They are great, but have the inherent texture of soggy bran flakes. After picking, we went to the Ann Arbor rock-climbing gym, which kicked quite a bit of ass. It was huge, both in total square footage and height (55ft), considerably taller than Grand Ledge or, for that matter, Riemer’s Ranch. They also didn’t mess around on their ratings. I struggled up a couple of climbs rated at 5.11- that were a lot of fun but very tough. I guess I’ve been bouldering too much.

We headed home to turn our three pounds of blueberries into a pie. I was in charge of the crust and Ali did the filling. He succeeded, I failed. I suspect my downfall was a combination of two damning mistakes: first, I obstinately ignored proscriptions to use actual vegetable shortening (a.k.a. trans-fat, slayer of babies, raper of the Virgin Mary) when mixing the crust. I knew that it would make the crust “flake.” I knew that all proper pies used it. It was a sad example of when dogma blinds the faithful and causes them to do grossly immoral things. Compare my misstep to ethnic cleansing or the like. My second mistake was impatience. The evening was waning and we desperately wanted to make it out to the sushi place before it closed. So, instead of first chilling the dough overnight, then putting it in the pan, then chilling it some more, we just threw it in the freezer for 20 minutes. The pie still looked good; Ali has pictures which he should upload so I can demonstratively post them here. Taken on filling alone, the pie was delicious. The crust was a buttery oddity that I hope did not too much distract from the glory of the fresh berries.

After pulling the pie out of the oven, we were off to the best of the thirteen sushi restaurants in Ann Arbor, the name of which of course escapes me (Ali?). The important thing was that we had coupons. Hence, we ordered the $60 chef’s choice sushi boat, which came out on an honest-to-goodness little wooden boat (of which also I have a picture, but I’ll need to figure out how to get it out of my phone to show you). It took us a good hour or so to work our way through it all. The salmon was probably the pinnacle. We stumbled home with bulging guts, fuller on sushi than anyone should properly be, and playing GTA until the swelling had receded sufficiently to tolerate the addition of a slice of pie. Sleep.

On Monday we mostly wandered around downtown some more, and then I had someone I’d never met cut off almost all of my hair. I’m a punk rocker now, with potentially spiky hair that signals to all around me the latent rebellion in every move I make. I say potentially spiky because I do not actually possess the Crisco-like “product” necessary to make my hair dance and do tricks. But once I do, I know that before God and all that is Holy, it must be applied starting from the back and moving to the front. Amen. Hallelujah. I’m sure I’ll get a picture here for you of my new look soon enough.

I spent about nine hours on Monday night (made interminable by the fact my many planes were chasing the sun), getting in about midnight. Slept, woke, left at 8:45 to catch another few flights out to Texas. I’ll pick up that thread later.

a slightly warmer michigan

I’m in Michigan (Ann Arbor in particular) this weekend visiting Ali at UM and generally having a blast. I left midday Thursday packed only in my fabulous green duffel bag (such a perfect size!). I brought with me just one book: Quicksilver, the new Neal Stephenson book set (mostly) in 17th century Europe. My goal was to plow through as much of it as possible, at least enough to make it to what Leslie claimed was the better half. I did indeed finally make it out of courtier’s and Royal Society London to the Grand Turk’s siege on Vienna, which was laden with harem girls, ostriches, and Hedwig-style genital mishaps. Hopefully the going won’t be so slow from here on out.

Yesterday we mostly spent climbing. We didn’t actually climb until after spending a few hours locating sunglasses, nailclippers, and lunch. Then we spent about 2.5 hours on a 1.5 hour drive because of some lovely traffic jams on the way out to “Grand Ledge,” which pretty much describes the climbing place. It had quite a few routes on it, but it was pretty much just a ledge. Optimistically 30 ft tall or so, no bolts, all protected by affixing webbing to the trees at the top then hiking down and toproping. Still, it was a lot of fun. The rock was very soft sandstone, wet in places and with lots of water seeping through. This was good in that it wasn’t hard on your hands, and it was very sticky where dry, but it also meant that a lot of it was muddy/dusty/an annoying combination of both. We ended up trying 5 or 6 climbs each. The highlights were a nice little crack that needed only foot jams (5.10, I think), and a cool, very easy roof that might have been overrated at 5.10 called “Doug’s Roof.” Ali did an admirable job of making incremental progress, well past the crux to the big, overhanging jug-haul that is the second half of the climb. We bugged out at about 7pm and headed back in for dinner.

Dinner was going to be seared ahi burgers, but we were rebuffed by a 1hr wait for a table, so ended up at Arbor Brewing Company, a brew pub down the street. I had a mediocre black bean burger and some excellent beer. First, a pint heifeweisen that was cool and lemony and delicious. Then, we got the 10-beer sampler and plowed through it heroically. The most interesting thing, I thought, was a smoked beer, which was really more than anything else like drinking canadian bacon. Try it if you get the chance.

We stumbled on from there to a cafe with live jazz for coffee/chai, then on to a cute little independent video store where I picked out Glengary Glen Ross for the evening’s denouement. Ali did not seem pleased after I inflicted it on him. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

berkeley food #1: ethiopia restaurant

2955 Telegraph Ave
Berkeley, CA 94705
(510) 843-1992

Yesterday, George and I went up to Berkeley to investigate the local climbing gym and take a class at Berkeley’s only ashtanga yoga studio, with plans to get dinner somewhere afterward.

The climbing gym was very nice. 45-foot lead walls, many, many routes, a complete attached fitness center, showers, everything. Along with the niceness came a nice pricetag: $60/mo. I suppose if I’m able to get down to it several times a week that will make sense for me, but a lower student rate would have been nice. We didn’t actually climb, since there was no time before the yoga class started at 5.

7th Heaven was great. It had all the things yoga studios that I’ve seen in the bay so far lacked. Multiple rooms, nice, hard-wood floors, heaters, a broad selection of classes. The classes run $12 a pop, or $10 if you’re a student. A reasonable discount, I guess… I paid $8/class at Yoga Yoga in Austin. Unfortunately, the ashtanga class we came in for had been cancelled, so we went to a “Vinyasa flow” class instead, which was good, but not quite as punishing as I’d like.

After yoga, wiped out and ravenous, we started trolling around Berkeley for a restaurant. What we found was Ethiopia Restaurant. The place was nearly empty when we walked in, and it never got much fuller. I always feel a little out of place eating Ethiopian, because I seem to inevitably be part of the only white table in the place. Still, the waitress was very nice and conversational, helped us pick something from the menu where our experience flagged, and came back several times to check on us. We ended up with a family-style combination of two combinations: vegetarian and meat. I don’t know exactly what it was called, but it was basically a huge plate with about eight different things on it ranging from mild lentils to spicy red lentils, spicy chicken, cabbage, spinach, and lamb all spread over a giant piece of injera bread. There were no utensils–just an accompanying basket of little rolled-up slices of injera you use (we guessed) to just scoop the different things up, curry-style. The food was delicious. It went across the whole range of spicy to mild, and it all had a slow-cooked taste and heartiness that really hit the spot after yoga. I also tried an Ethiopian Bedele beer, which I’ll just say was yummy because I’m really not qualified to describe beer in more complex terms.

It ocurred to me during dinner that I would probably be eating at many, many different and great restaurants while at Berkeley. So I decided to set a goal: before I graduate, try to eat at 100 different restaurants. And I’m going to try to write a little about each of them up here when I do. So consider “Ethiopia Restaurant” #1 / 100.

endings and beginnings

It’s now tuesday. It’s been a busy week.

Friday was my last day at Apple. It was only a little surreal. Much different than a last day of school, where everyone is getting ready to wrap things up. You walk around the halls, everyone sort of going about their business as normal, but you suddenly feel like a visitor, an outsider. My team (four people) had lunch together at a decent sushi place; I didn’t have to pay. I expected an exit interview or something, but the HR people were a little slow and never got one scheduled. So I grabbed the last few things of mine from the office, handed my badge over to my boss, and drove away. It was a little sad, but mostly just exciting.

We started packing up things in the apartment on Wednesday. By Friday we were mostly done. Leslie had some teacher certification test on Saturday morning, the day our lease started, so our plan was to head to Fremont after her test, sign all the papers, then bring a u-haul back down to Santa Clara to move everything. The plan went great until we got to the “bring a truck back” part. We called about ten different u-haul and budget rental places, and none of them had an appropriately-sized truck for us to use. Granted, it was a saturday in the middle of the summer, but there are just so many truck rental places, you’d think there’d be a glut of trucks.

We decided to head back home (still Santa Clara at this point) to get lunch, and planned on reserving a truck for Sunday. Leslie had a craving for In-n-Out, so we headed over to the one nearest of apartment. On the way, we spotted a Budget truck place, and resolved to at least drop by and check to see if they had any trucks for rent. It turned out they did, and so while I scarfed my double-double (ack. arteries. clogging.), Leslie stepped up to fill out the paperwork necessary. First he asked for a driver’s license; she handed hers over. Then the guy asked, “so who’s actually going to be driving the truck?” to which Leslie responded, “me.” You see, every other time I’ve moved, it’s either been alone, or with a girl who thought it was my job to drive the truck. Leslie is not inhibited in any such way, so she decided to do the driving this time around.

We took the truck home and called Phil over to help us. Jeff, my big, strong brother, and George (also big and strong) both managed to be out of town for the day. So we were only three, and it was 3:00pm, when we started the move. It went well enough. We had to be a little creative to fit it in the 15-foot truck, but it was no real struggle. Phil was great and helped for over three hours before heading out to SF for the evening. At about 6:45 we got everything in the truck and drove to Fremont. We arrived a little after seven, already pretty exhausted. Did I mention the truck had to be returned by 8am Sunday morning? So we started to unpack. And we unpacked. And unpacked. We made many, many, trips from truck to apartment. At least a hundred. So many trips. So tired. The hardest items for us to do alone were the couch and the tabletop. Luckily, friendly passersby were able to give us a hand with each of them. Nearly delirious with exhaustion, we finished at about ten.

What better state of mind than delerium to drive a giant truck? So Leslie climbed back behind the wheel and we headed back down to Santa Clara, filled it up with diesel, and dropped it off at Budget. We were getting a bit giggly at this point, but we did make it back to Fremont, stopping on the way for some questionable milk and powdered doughnuts at the “Foodmaxx.” We collapse on the living room floor of our new place, nestled between boxes and furniture that coated every horizontal surface, guzzled coke and milk, doughnuts and corn chips until our blood sugar rose enough to get us upstairs. Lacking a shower curtain, we took turns in the bathtub doing our best to get clean, then collapsed in bed. I’ll save the events since then for another post…

90th birthdays and eve ensler

This Saturday I went to my paternal grandfather’s 90th birthday. My aunt had rented a swank little party room in an ocean-view restaurant in Pacifica. The whole gang was there: the three children (Rich, my dad, Don, his twin brother (younger by 5 minutes), and Laurie (little sister)). Their spouses were each their, and all the kids except one. This is a rare collection of Klingners and it was pretty cool to see everyone. My Dad was going picture crazy, so I expect some pictures of the event to show up soon on my parents’ new gallery.

On Sunday, I mostly relaxed, burned transcoded netflix DVDs and played Sim City 4, in which Leslie and I are recreating great communist capitals of the past in idyllic green virtualness. You’ll all be happy to hear Bejing has topped 30,000 citizens.

In the evening we headed into SF for dinner at a random excellent tandoori kitchen with Jeff and George followed by Eve Ensler’s new “play” The Good Body. The tickets were our present to George for his 23rd. It was entertaining. I don’t think I’m allowed to critique it in detail given my Y chromosome, but I will go as far as saying that I liked the Vagina Monologues better.

4 more work days. Today I called Comcast (sigh) to set up our cable and internet in our new apartment. I had long entertained notions of getting satellite TV and DSL, but it’s hard to make that economical, especially when you don’t know if your balcony will even work for satellite. I’ll postpone my dreams of Speakeasy for another year. I think of it as all part of acting financially like the grad student I’ll be in a month.

4141 Stevenson Blvd

Yesterday we struck out from our suburban wasteland to another suburban wasteland, slightly to the north and east. We knew where we wanted our apartment to be: somewhere inside a box described by Trader Joe’s, the BART station, and two major on-ramps to 680, which Leslie will be using to get to work. We tooled around all through the area, stopping at 5 or 6 places. Our options seemed to be of two strains: towards the middle of Fremont in 1970’s era apartments that universally lacked in-apartment laundry facilities, or right next to the BART station in brand-new, soulless giant complexes that, while they have in-apartment laundry, cost about $300/mo too much. We ultimately decided on a place owned by the same management company as our current apartment–they’ve been very good here in Santa Clara. The place is huge (over 1100 sqft), and for about the same as our current place was before they hiked the rate.

We move in two weeks. I’ll be investigating the possibilities of DSL and satellite television in the intervening time…

a taste of north bay

Over the long weekend, a friend of ours took us up to her home town about 2 hours north of SF, Sebastopol. The highlights included picking and eating massive quantities of fresh berries, eating pies and cakes made from said berries, enjoying said berries over home-made waffles, and staining jeans with said berries. Also there were lots of cute pets, from bipolar dogs to slutty cats, and a guest house née water tower that served as abode for a couple of nights.

On the 3rd we watched Sebastopol’s lovely fireworks show while gorging ourselves on peanut butter M&Ms, Jolly Ranchers, and Goldfish. On the 4th we threw a show of our own in the back yard, the highlight of which was the dog that interpreted the fireworks as its mortal enemy, to be eaten and pawed at all costs.

I’m back at work now, my third-to-last week, tying up loose ends and generally explaining to a lot of people why I’m leaving. Its not so bad. overt’s new look is almost done–I’ve got the stylesheet all done, and now I just need to write a script to copy all the entries over from postnuke to wordpress.

twist and shout

Yesterday at the climbing gym I fell a bit funny off a boulder problem and twisted my ankle. It’s not severe, but it sure does make it a pain to walk. Immediately after I hit the ground and felt my ankle going all wonky, I tried to crumple up into a ball to minimize the injury. I think it worked. After hopping flamboyantly over to the front desk to get some ice to put on it, i lay down on my back for a good 10 minutes holding my ankle up in the air, contemplating the fate of the impending long weekend. I checked out my ankle and didn’t notice too much swelling, so I went, kangaroo-amputee style, to my car for a dangerous drive home, using my heel on the brake and gas, praying that I wouldn’t be called upon for any sort of evasive maneuvers. And I’ve been trying to keep it above my heart and iced ever since. This is, believe it or not, the most serious injury I’ve ever had climbing, in the 11 years or so I’ve been at it.

So, needless to say, with my 8 remaining sick days and 3 weeks of work to use them in, I’m at home today resting. My plan is to try to tackle the CSS for the new site, and (who knows?) maybe try to get it up today. I wont bore you with the geeky minutiae. Suffice it to say that my web programming knowledge is crusty and old fashioned, and all the kids today with their divs and their stylesheets are starting to make me look bad. Like a pathetic middle-aged man tinkering on an ’82 firebird parked conspicuously far out on his driveway, trying to recapture the mechanical wizardry of his youth, I will force upon my readers yet another revision of overt in an effort to prove that I still have The Right Stuff. Look out.