Hello all,
Maybe some day we will be better about updating regularly. Because it has been so long since our last update, I am going to give an update by week then an overall update.
Friday Oct. 6th – 12th :
Friday night Oliver and I got together with his cousin Steve and Steve’s wife Holly. They only live about 10 minutes away so we went over for dinner and played games (Steve is a board game fanatic). We had a great time and have actually hung out again since. On Saturday we met up with my Dad’s cousin Zae, her two daughters, Sarah and Mykela, and Mykela’s boyfriend Michael (Yes, the Montagues will all find the humor in Mykela dating a guy named Michael). We met them at a restaurant near us for lunch. It had been a long time since seeing any of them so it was nice to catch up and find out what they are up to these days. For those interested in their life update, read the next paragraph.
Sarah and Mykela are living together in Downtown San Jose. Sarah is a personal trainer at a gym in the area and Mykela (I hope I have this right) works for the 49ers at Levi’s Stadium in HR or marketing… I think. Zae is doing well and still working at the same place to my knowledge. Zae and Mykela were inspired by my parents and have a shared cat. Mykela and her boyfriend had just taken a trip to Vietnam where they were able to stay with some extended family of Michael’s. The pictures and their stories made it sound awesome. They all seemed to be happy and healthy and doing well.
Sunday I think we hung out and relaxed (it’s been a while). Monday we got together with a guy Oliver met at work, Lucas. We met at a park and introduced him to Kubb (for those unfamiliar…. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubb ). It was really nice meeting him because he is new here too (he is from North Carolina) and eager to try and make friends, like us. We went through our daily motions for the rest of the week, nothing crazy.
Friday Oct. 13th – 19th:
Gonna be honest with you all, we don’t remember what we did. I think we just had a quiet weekend. On the 16th, a Monday, we went with Lucas and his girlfriend (work Lucas, we haven’t contacted apartment Lucas) to Dave and Busters. For those unfamiliar, Dave and Busters has food, drinks, and arcade games. We all played games for a while and got drinks then went to Olive Garden for dinner. It was nice to hang out with Lucas again and meet is girlfriend. She is also transferring to school here is it nice to have that in common. We are going to try and do stuff with them again. They are really into video games so we might try and do something based around that.
Friday Oct. 20th – 26th:
Friday… I hurt myself. I have an issue where my ribs slip out of place a little bit. It has happened before and I have done various things (chiropractic-esque) to get them fix but it is keeps happening. Anyway, no real cause, Friday night I started to notice it. Unfortunately, we had planned to go to Santa Cruz to visit Oliver’s friend Connor on Saturday. I was not up for it so Oliver went for a while instead. On Sunday, my body was freaking out less and my ribs weren’t hurting so we went on a small adventure. Just north of us is a small town, Alviso. Alviso sits just on the very south tip of the bay and used to be a port. Eventually, the port was no longer used and the end of the bay was turned into various salt ponds. Now I will let you all do more research on this if you want but here is my small understanding. For various environmental reasons, they are trying to get rid of the salt ponds and reincorporate the area into the bay. However, they are still there for now and there are a few parks along/through the ponds. We went to one of the big ones in Alviso where there are paths throughout the ponds. We didn’t get to explore very far though because about 20 feet into the main trail we saw what looked like snow covering the pond with people walking out in the middle of it. We ended up walking around on the salt covered pond for about an hour and failed to explore further but we very excited to keep going back and exploring it more. It is definitely where we will be taking people when they visit. We took a tone of pictures and will link them bellow. Overall, we had a very calm weekend because my ribs were bugging me. Monday I had a doctor’s appointment with my new doctor here and she did something to help with the pain/discomfort. I have been taking it easy this week though and I am looking to find a Physical Therapist here to see if there is something that I can do to keep it from continuing to happen. Thursday night, we went out with Steve and Holly. We met them for dinner at an outdoor Mexican restaurant which was really fun. We then all went to the Winchester Mystery House. The Winchester Mystery House is a house, shocker, that was owned by the widow of the founder of Winchester Repeating Arms Company (rifles). They were called “The gun that won the West”. I will allow you to do more research into that if desired. Anyway, after Mrs. Winchester became a widow, she went to a Medium on the East Coast whom was known to take advantage of rich widows. Mrs. W went a little nuts and was told that she needed to buy some property with her millions to keep the spirits/ghosts of those killed by the rifles her husband made from killing her/to keep them happy. (She made about $1000 dollars a day in the early 1900’s being over $23,000 today from her 50% ownership of the company. She also was also left with $20.5 million). So she bought this house and built on it for 32 years straight, 24/7 until she died (or so the tale goes). Because of this, the house has some oddities such as staircases going nowhere and doors that open into walls. Now Steve had done tours before but the rest of us hadn’t. We signed up for the “candle light tour” which is only in October. That was a mistake. It was more of a haunted house where the tour guide told the group stories about the house in a “scary” fashion and they had people jumping out, etc. So unfortunately, we weren’t able to really see much of the actual house because it was so dark. Steve said that this was very different and to come back not in October and sometime in the Winter (it was brutally hot in there). Overall it was fun but not really what we expected.
PRESENT WEEKEND… Finally: (kind of…)
Friday night we hung out at the apartment. Saturday we had a lazy morning then went out for a walk/hike to the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Steven’s Canyon. We don’t know who this Steven guy is but he seems important. It was warm out but absolutely beautiful. We took a lot of pictures and like the salt pond ones, have then accessible below. It was a nice adventure. We came back and swam because that’s what we do, then attempted to go out to dinner. We tried to go to a very popular Korean BBQ place but it was very popular and had an hour and a half wait. So instead we roamed around the area we were in (strip mall of restaurants) and ended up going to an Indian place. It was good and bad. We tried two things we had never had before. Bad: Hannah spilled water all over because she wasn’t paying attention. Good: The Indian bread we got. Not Naan. It was so good. We also ate a goat curry with these fermented rice noodles that we interesting but not our favorite and a spicy chicken dish in an Indian gravy that we ate with that bread. That was delicious. We definitely made fools of ourselves when we struggled to figure out that they had given us plates but it was good. Today (Sunday), we went to get Oliver a haircut then went to a different farmers market than we usually go to in Milpitas. It was interesting because there was mostly Asian produce. We got a few things that we needed and a few things to try like raw peanuts and jujubes. Got In n Out because we could then came back to the apartment where I took an hour long nap. Then we did stuff around the apartment and here we are. Writing updates.
Well, that’s the walk through of what we have been doing. Other things happening. I am done with college applications. I have heard back from both online schools, Penn State and University of Illinois Springfield and I have been accepted to both. From Illinois I got my credit transfer information and I would be able to start as a Senior which is great because it would be possible for me to graduate in maybe only two semesters. Penn State I need to find out about. I am waiting to hear back from Santa Clara University but I don’t have very high hopes. I have decided to only apply for summer internships at the moment so that when I start school again, I can focus on that instead of doing a co-op position and starting a new school. Then the second semester I am in school I will try to do a co-op position if I think I can handle it. Oliver is putting my resume onto the pile at his work and I am working on apply to others for internships. Other than that, I am still working on trying to do dog walking and maybe so other kind of odd job until I start school. It has been warm, sunny, and nothing like fall in Washington. We miss it a lot. Overall we are happy healthy (except for the rib) and continuing to do fun things here. Love and miss you all and we will do another update this next week after my mom visits again.
Hannah
Another day, another dollar. I am not sure what Hannah is writing, so I apologize for overlaps. But then again, Homer (Odyssey, not Simpson) used similar techniques to remember his stories (rosy-fingered dawn). Things on our end are good, always sunny (quite literally, always sunny down here, it is very odd). We have done a few things since our last website update and I have listed them in order of importance below.
We visited, as I'm sure Hannah will have mentioned, the salt ponds of Alviso. That was utterly insane. I cannot describe how amazing it was to walk on acres and acres of salt. The pictures cannot do it complete justice. Come visit us, less to see us, and more to see the salt. Because it is absolutely crazy. It looks like a field of snow, but it is 90 degrees out and the ground is hard. Except where it is thin and then the ground is somewhat bendy. Definitely will be back. Plus, the pink water is interesting. But mostly the salt. Reminded me of the halcyon days of my youth working in the gypsy salt mines in the old country (just kidding, that one was for my dad).
We ate unroasted peanuts. I, knowing far less than I think I do, thought that peanuts just came in the shell as a hard little nut. Hannah was interested in getting some unroasted peanuts in shell and I was nonplussed, thinking what's so interesting about a peanut in a shell. It turns out unroasted peanuts are crazy (not as crazy as the salt ponds and the excitement veneer of unroasted peanuts is certainly thinner than them as well). They taste and feel kind of like water chestnuts to me. I was very surprised and to say the least we are going to roast the peanuts and make peanut butter.
We went to the Winchester House with my cousin Steve and his wife Holly. Hannah will likely give the back story to those unfamiliar. Of course, we were hoping for a more architectural tour of the house, instead of getting a heavy handed haunted house. The highlight of the tour for me was that most of the rest of our tour group were from a program for troubled youth. They were rowdy at points, but they had a couple of guys in charge of the program who came along with. During the buildup to one "spooky" scene, a rather large 18 or 19 year old guy, huge and gruff, said to his leader, "Hold my hand!" The leader, equally gruffly, replied, "No!" But it was nice to see Steve and Holly and we are interested in going back to the Winchester House for a daytime architectural tour.
Work work work work. Arbeit macht frei. All work and no play makes Oliver a dull boy. But work is going well. No secret website section, as of yet, alas. I am starting on real projects, more or less. Currently, we are building up to a product release and so my team is mostly working on testing and bug fixes. But none of our code changed for the product release, so there is not a lot of stress associated with any of the work now. I have been enjoying the fun of working for a big company, in that I got a new desktop computer. Which is great. I installed Linux on it and had to go through a million approvals to get what I wanted on it. But currently, my machine will not recognize two monitors. So, I thought, I will contact my friendly IT support. They very graciously took control of my computer, told me I wasn't on the correct domain (I was), locked me out of all my files and created a different user account for me to use, and when I told them that I needed access to my old files, they said I could only do if I had root (administrator for those in Windows world) permissions. I had already applied for root permission. Which had gone to my bosses boss and I didn't hear anything. I asked IT support to just move my old files to my new user account and then I would be happy. They said, "Sorry, we can't do that because it's a security issue." I asked them what security issue my files, created on my work computer by me, that I had control of minutes earlier, could possibly create. They told me it was above my paygrade and ended the phone call. My boss's boss did approve my request for root access. Now I am waiting for IT support to approve my boss's boss's request to grant me root access. I don't have access to my old files. I still can only use one monitor. But, on the other hand they also bought me monitors, a laptop, a desktop, several solutions to connecting to the monitors, and they pay my paycheck so I'm not really upset. Somehow I let it slide.
In other work news, I entered a company innovation competition with a large cash prize, seed money, and time to develop an idea into a product or solution. I highly doubt I am going to win, but I feel good for having prepared my piece and at least trying. The idea is long, largely boring, and incredibly evangelical so I shall skip it here. It was an idea that I mulled and developed with a professor in my senior year for independent study. If anyone wishes to talk about it, I am more than happy to at your leisure.
I am learning more about my coworkers, nice people all. I found out I am the only person on my team who speaks less than four languages (I only speak English, and Bad English). I am also the only person on my team who came to the United States before the age of 18. I have found everyone, as I previously mentioned, very helpful and kind.
I went to the doctor to get a physical for the first time since...(when was the last time I got a sports physical in high school?) 2011 or so. I told him all my health issues (99% sinus related) and he in turn introduced me to the miracle of drugs. I will be trying a nasal spray and an antihistamine and seeing if those can conquer the sinus death that surrounds me on occasion (anywhere from once a week to once a month). I don't like taking medications, but I am willing to give it a shot to see if my issue is allergy related or not (in the past allergies have been declared not a problem, but that was a long time ago). This of course will crack up my mom to no end I'm sure because I was supposed to try this same nasal spray some six years ago and I was vehemently opposed, gave it a halfhearted attempt and declared it was not working. But older and wiser now, right?
Well, that's it folks. And now, the end is near, and so I face, the final curtain. My friend, I'll say it clear, thanks for reading. Hope y'all are off on adventures of your own.
Oliver
