Today was day two in the San Francisco Bay area. We're staying at Shelly's (Jason's aunt) house in San Marino which is just outside San Francisco. She's an avid Pez collector and so has displays of her collection all over the house which is quite spectacular.
Today was the day reserved for the wine-tasting portion of our trip. As Shelly is also a wine connoisseur we had a pretty decent tour guide around Napa Valley and the surrounding areas. The day turned out to be nice and warm; perfect California wine-tasting weather as far as I'm concerned.
We just landed at Oakland airport and are on our way to San Franciscio. Jason's Aunt Sheryl was nice enough to pick us up and is letting us stay with her while we're in town to save some money.
Our first stop is going to be Golden Gate bridge and a fort which is apparently below the bridge. I've been to San Francisco enough times that I don't need to do all of the touristy type stuff but the bridge is a must. We'll also be checking at a new museum that opened recently at Gold Gate Park. After that we'll be going to the Pez museum! ;-)
I've been meaning to write about this for a while now so forgive me if speaking of Christmas is a bit dated...
For Christmas Sari, Roland, Kirsten and I went over to a house that my parents were house-sitting for. My mum cooked a lovely dinner and the whole evening was really nice. Though I did a reasonable job of containing myself I was very excited about opening presents. That same child-like eagerness has always been there even if it's gotten less and less apparent as I've gotten older. When the time finally came I calmly moved to the living room and sat down waiting for the "onslaught". Little did I know that my mum had a sneaky trick up her sleeve. The Nintendo Wii, a new video game console if you haven't heard, was released in mid-November and I had been craving one ever since. Unfortunately, they were horribly impossible to find so I pretty much decided to hold off buying one until they were made more available (they're still hard to find, by the way). After opening a few presents she handed me one which I opened (very carefully). To my surprise (and dismay) it was a copy of a video game for the Nintendo Wii. Historically my parents have insisted on NOT buying me video games for Christmas in favor of more"productive" toys like LEGOs, for example, so this was quite a surprise. I immediately thought that this was her way of making peace with video games, though without a the system to go with it I was out of luck. A very nice gesture but she didn't quite understand that I needed more to be able to use the new game. I wrote it off as an honest mistake and figured I would buy the system eventually anyway. Not a big deal at all. Our Christmas continued and later on I opened another present only to find that it was the strategy guide for the game. She sure knew how to rub it in my face. I tried so hard to sound grateful but I'm afraid the disappointment and frustration in my voice was easily heard. She then handed me a couple more which ended up being extra controllers for the system. Even at this point I had no idea what was coming. About fifteen minutes later my mum said something along the lines of, "Okay, one more." She proceeded to hand me a reasonable sized box which had a bit of weight to it. It wasn't until that point that I realized this whole charade she was putting me through was all a game (which my dad was in on too, incidentally). I opened up the package and low and behold there's a brand-new Wii system. What a nice surprise! And she played it all off so well. It turns out that she knew somebody that worked for Nintendo so was able to get one pretty easily. Well done mum! Well done!
I posted recently about getting a promotion at Amazon and how different the new position is compared to my old position. I started my fifth week with my new team, called FXM for Fulfillment Exception Management, and thought I'd give a brief update. |Week #|Activities|% of tasks for new team| |------|----------|-----------------------| |1 |Wrap up chores from previous position|0%| |2 |AWS Hack Attack class|5%| |3 |Finish job management system migration|100%|
We talked to Caleb tonight (Sari's cousin) and he asked us if he could stay with us when he comes to town with his band at the end of this month. Oh yeah... he's in this heavy-metal band that's actually doing well enough to tour. He's going to be touring from Mexico to Canada over the summer. In the mean time he's hitting Seattle for two shows. Here are some videos of them performing:
That was a bit of a tangent...
I was at home Friday night and noticed that the house was starting to get cold. I didn't really think about it until later on when I tried to turn the heat up and have nothing happen. The whole "you need to put oil in your oil furnace" thing had finally caught up with me.
We moved into our new house last July and ever since I had been putting off organizing an oil company to come fill up our tank regularly. When the tank dried up so did our heat. Back in September we had a company called Rossoe accidentally (on purpose) deliver some oil to our house meaning to deliver it to our neighbors. Needless to say I wasn't too impressed with how that whole situation went down. Unfortunately, as it was a Saturday they were they only companies able to help us out. I've been determined not to use them for our oil company but as my pride comes second to a warm home I swallowed it and called them up. They filled our oil tank Saturday afternoon and when we got home from dinner and a play we were able to reset the furnace and have a warm house again. For those of you out there that have an oil furnace take my advice. Don't let it dry up. It sucks!
After two years of being an assistant manager for a few Starbucks stores in Bellingham and the Seattle area Kirsten is being promoted to a manager! Starting in March she'll be the manager of the Fremont store, just her style.
To celebrate we went out and had some crab. Congrats Kirsten!
For the last two years I've been working for a support team. Basically what that entailed was dealing with problems related to the 5 different teams that we supported. Every three months or so we would start supporting a new team out of the five so we could get our hands wet with their software and learn how all the pieces work together. My official title was "Support Engineer".
Now that I've been promoted I'm actually working on one of the teams that my previous team supported. Instead of doing support work I'm now writing code and handling more complicated issues and projects. I already know everybody on the team and the manager, Mike Bundy, has been great with making me feel welcome. there are only 6 people on the team with one person leaving on Monday so it's very tight-knit. Definitely a step in the right direction. I've been asked by several people what my long-term goals are at Amazon. For the last two years it's been simply to get to where I am now. I have absolutely no idea where I want to go from here! :)
One of my new years resolutions is to do my best to stay in touch with the people that I care about. Historically I'm horrible about keeping in touch but I'm slowly getting better at it. When I've tried in the past I've done an all or nothing approach which generally works for a little while but then I fall back into the same old, bad habits. I've decided to take baby-steps this time. My first step is to respond to emails within a few days (so far so good). I think my second step will be to try and call somebody I haven't talked to in a while at least once a month. So far I missed January but I talked to my friend David Clawson for about 45 minutes the other night which was very cool. I haven't heard from him in ages so it was a real pleasure. My next step is to email Leanne Grimsby and Amy Olson, both of which I haven't talked to in ages.
My dad just sent me a video of 12 year-old drumming prodigy Tony Royster Jr. and it inspired me to look for some videos of my favorite drummer Carter Beauford of the Dave Matthews Band.
If you want to see more check out this list on YouTube.