Weight, Todos, Anniversary, and Jambool

The month of September: a summary... I struggled but succeeded in maintaining last month's weight loss, I found a todo app that works for me, and Forrest and I celebrated our 1-year anniversary. See also WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

LoseIt Weight, 2012-09

Weight: 5 pounds forward, 5 pounds back

I had gotten my weight down to 150 pounds at the start of the month — a weight I haven't been since last year! But then I had trouble not reverting back to my old eating habits while I spent a good chunk of the month visiting with friends in Seattle, so I regained a couple of pounds. I reapplied myself and eventually re-lost the pounds by the end of the month. So it goes.

Getting Things Done

I tried out several todo list apps. They're all very similar, but often missing one key feature or another. I eventually settled on OmniFocus (despite the hefty! price tag) on a personal recommendation. It's awesome! Instead of putting of chores that I know I should do but never feel like, my todo app "makes" me do them. Rent was zero days late! My bathroom countertop is clean! I followed up with terrible, I-really-want-to-avoid places like the DMV! It's been pretty awesome, really.

It works well for me because A) it syncs on both my Mac laptop and my iPhone (if I had non-Mac machines that I used regularly, OmniFocus wouldn't be the right choice), and B) it allows for infinitely nested projects with a rich set of recurring options (which appeals to the OCD in me).

It's not without its faults, but overall I'm glad I bought the licenses for the Mac and iPhone versions of the software.

Our 1-year anniversary

We took two days off work to have a long weekend together to celebrate our 1-year anniversary. It was very nice and relaxing. We had a fun time walking around downtown, strolling through Pike Place Market, etc. Oh, and we also spent the afternoon at the 40th-floor Starbucks, finishing up our wedding thank you cards. :/ But the etiquette rules all agree, we had until one year after the wedding. Perhaps the rules didn't mean it quite so literally, but there you have it. ;)

For the evening of the anniversary itself, we went out to a fancy steakhouse in Seattle, the Metropolitan Grill — best steaks I've ever had. They did not disappoint.

Jambool reunion dinner

Jambool reunion dinner

Near the end of the month, all the ex-Jambool folks got together in San Francisco for a 2-year post-acquisition reunion dinner. It was great to see everyone again and catch up.

Settling In

First full day in California.

At work, I've signed up to be a volunteer ESL tutor at Google. We're partnering with this local program, Building Skills, that gets Googlers to teach English (and computer literacy, if desired) to the janitors that work at Google. I'm pretty excited about this volunteer opportunity, and also nervous since I've never tutored adults.

At work-work, I'm about to be done with our old Jambool code and will start working on Google Checkout code proper. I'm going to miss getting paid to work on Rails; I'll probably start setting aside time to work on my side conlang Rails project again.

At the new house, Forrest has been dealing with utilities guys and movers. Everything should be move-in-able on Monday, which is exciting. I'm looking forward to living in my redwoods!

Back in California

Trees in Bloom at Sunset

We're back in a California, after 4 years in Seattle. Super tired, so I will just leave you with this beautiful* view of orchards in bloom with the sun setting behind the costal range. California sure can be gorgeous when it wants to.

* The view itself was beautiful. It's not the scenery's fault that my iPhone camera wasn't up to the task.

Eating & Cleaning

Short post tonight; I'm tired and about to go to bed.

More of the same today. Worked on cleaning the apartment, went out to the (new) Lunchbox Labs, packed up our desks at work, went out to sushi and a bar, gathered (more of) our stuff from Jerry's, got home late.

Tomorrow will be less food and errands, more cleaning tasks; Monday is our last full day in Seattle, so everything on the "move-out todo list" needs to get finished.

As much as I'll miss Seattle, I'll be glad when we're out of this limbo state and finally settled into our new place.

Laser Tag

I mentioned to my friends that Google was doing some sort of Capture the Flag tournament. However, it looked like they were going to play on an open field, rather than a stealthy obstacle-filled course. I like sneaky & stealthy over speed-is-of-the-essence games.

That let to some reminiscing about laser tag when we were kids. And then we realized that there was nothing stopping us from getting together a group and playing laser tag again. Thus, six of us (me, Forrest, Jerry, Ben, Paul, and Josh) went laser-tagging tonight. :)

We had initially thought it would just be us in the arena, as a private party. But that's not what we had reserved, and anyway only six people isn't really enough for a proper game of laser tag. So we played with some randoms.

In the first two games, there was that one annoying player that always seems to be at laser tag places: the really good shot, who follows after you relentlessly shooting you four times in a row, just waiting until your five-second "reprieve" time is up so they can shoot you again. Really frustrating, and it doesn't seem all that "sporting," either.

But the third game, that guy went home, and it was more fun. Then the fourth game was awesome, because most of us ended up allying against the dozen or so other players. We defended one area against all the other players, plus Josh from our group who remained a lone gunman rather than join our team. And sometimes Paul shot us and then we would shoot him, because he was the "traitor" (an in-joke from playing Betrayal at House on the Hill and some zombie board game).

I definitely enjoyed the cooperation of the teamwork, being able to trust others, and being able to more easily do things together than you could have done alone. We had each others' backs, literally. I think I'd like to get together another South Bay game after we move, but this time explicitly with teams.

Pancake Burger

After our four surprisingly tiring games of laser tag, we were starving and descended upon the nearest Denny's. Although I had burned off enough calories that I could actually "afford" to order a real entree from Denny's (where nearly everything is fried), I ended up ordering a relatively light dinner. You see, I was carefully reserving calories for dessert (which I normally have to skip for calorie or full-stomach reasons).

Forrest, Jerry, and Paul also ordered an unusual dinner: Slam burgers, with pancakes replacing the hamburger bun. The waitress barely batted an eyelash, which was awesome. They did get charged for a short stack of pancakes, but that seems fair. After we finished eating, the cook came by to ask how it was. She said it was a "weird" order. Understatement. But they all praised the pancake burger.

I'm still dubious.

Sleep Cycle App

Sleep Graph

English:

Yesterday I read an article on Lifehacker about Sleep Cycle, an iPhone app that monitors your, well, sleep cycle. It works by being inside the bedsheets — its accelerometer measures your movements while your sleep and infers the sleep phase.

Well, that's what the official site suggest. But I put it on top of the bed, not inside, and underneath my pillow even though the site said that's not a good idea. I checked that there was open space above it, so it wouldn't overheat. I woke up twice during the night (as you can see in the graph above), and each time I checked again that everything was okay. (It was).

...And I like the pretty graphs. :)

Spanish:

Ayer leí un artículo de Lifehacker sobre Sleep Cycle, una aplicación para la iPhone que monitoriza pues, tu, pues, ciclo de sueño. Funciona por estar dentro las sábanas de la cama — su acelerómetro mide los movimientos cuando duermes y infiere la fase del sueño.

Bueno, eso es lo que sugiere el sitio oficial. Pero yo la puse encima de la cama, no dentro, y debajo de la almohada aunque la página web dice el sitio que no es una buena idea. Comprobé que había espacio abierto de arriba, para que no se recalentara. Me desperté dos veces durante la noche (como puedes ver en el gráfico de arriba), y cada vez comprobé de nuevo que todo estaba bien. (Sí fue.)

...Y los gráficos bonitos me encantan. :)

Meeting the Haml Developer

It's a small world — I just ran into the lead developer of Haml, Nathan, at downtown B&N. Friendly guy. Reminded me of Sai from the Conlang-L mailing list, actually.

New Years Day Travels

Traveling back home in New Years Day is looking to be One Of Those Days (TM). So I'm starting to document the fun...

12:00 AM: Happy New Year! I welcome in 2010 in Santa Cruz with Forrest's family while making crepes and drinking cheap champagne. We play Beatlea Rock Band after the stroke of midnight.

1:30 AM: Forrest and I pack up and leave the house. Destination: SFO, for a flight that departs at 6:45 AM.

1:45 AM: Donut run completed successfully. Forrest is now suitably caffeinated for our late night / early morning drive.

2:30 AM: We avoid two deer nommimg on the narrow shoulder of Highway 1. A little while later, we see a dead deer on the side of the road.

3:00 AM: We arrive at SFO. No one is here, surprise surprise. Forrest goes off to park the Jeep for my parents to pick up at a more sane hour while I do the check-in kiosk thing. Our seats have been reassigned so that we're not next to one another anymore, but the kiosk won't let me change them back.

3:30 AM: I settle into the line for security. "Settle" because it won't open until 4:30. Four other people are camped out with me; we wish each other happy new year.

3:45 AM: Forrest arrives from the long-term parking lot and camps with me.

4:30 AM: Right on time, TSA opens up and lets us through without incident. An airport employee buffs the carpet, because... we deserve shiny carpets?

4:45 AM: We found an airport restaurant that's open this early. Too bad they want like $20 for some pre-cooked egg-like dish that I won't even like. So I'm going hungry (for now) while Forrest eats a bacon egg cheese croissant thing. Lack if sleep is getting to me -- I'm beginning to resemble zombie-me. But no svn-commits on my brain, yet.

5:30 AM: I kill half an hour doing a self portrait (of how I feel)on my iPhone while Forrest tries to straighten out why he's assigned a non-existent seat.

5:45 AM: The restaurant I'm waiting for finally opens. They told me they didn't know when they'd open -- apparently they had no cash and couldn't make the decision to open accepting just credit cards without over-the-phone approval for some manager. Clam chowder was pretty decent, though.

6:20 AM: We board the plane in our original seats. Woohoo! Fingers crossed for an uneventful rest of the trip...

10:00 AM: By plane, train, and automobus, we have arrived home! Very tired. Going to sleep now. FSF for dinner, mmm...

Israesisat a Ir

Zrishelhei a tie-ikath-rae zreshatalh a ne atein. Klhime a iakor-rae ateilh. Lhike Thores na ateilh atezon a oishe. Mazrisi kaixei na Sheri-an ezrolhin Zelata. Tezei a lho-rae atei tie israesisatan.

English Translation:

I interviewed at a second company this morning.

Zrishelhei a tie-ikath-rae zreshatalh a ne atein.

interview that this-morning-at company-did that is-second me

I read at a cafe.

Klhime a iakor-rae ateilh.

read that café-at I-did

Forrest and I ate a tasty dinner.

Lhike Thores na ateilh atezon a oishe.

eat Forrest and I-did dinner that is-tasty

We played a Zelda game with Jerry.

Mazrisi kaixei na Sheri-an ezrolhin Zelata.

play we and Jerry-did game Zelda

I am writing this journal entry now.

Tezei a lho-rae atei tie israesisatan.

write that now-at I this journal-piece

Words like this were coined for this entry; words like this demonstrate new grammar needed for this entry.

[Lhenazi information]

No Amazon Offer

My Daily Stats

Exercise	Food	Spanish	Writing	Conlanging
Steps	Calories	Time	Words	Activities
15,900	1730	Pandora station (1-2 hours)	–	Lhenazi font & keyboard layout

So 2 weeks after my last interview with Amazon, I finally heard back, and it's a no-go. :( I'll continue my search elsewhere. *sigh*

Lhenazi Font & Eating Poorly

My Daily Stats

Exercise	Food	Spanish	Writing	Conlanging
Steps	Calories	Time	Words	Activities
5500	1050 ± 200	–	–	Lhenazi font

On Tuesday, I spent several hours at a cafe creating a handwritten script for my new conlang. Yesterday, I spent several hours at a cafe creating a font for my new conlang! I have some more cleanup work to do with it, but it's almost done already:

After closing time, I walked over to Jerry's for some True Blood and Left 4 Dead. Vampires good, zombies bad. :) By the time we were done with that, it was like 2 AM and I bummed a ride home. Thus only 5k steps, whereas I probably would have had closer to 8k if I'd walked home too. Ah well, there's always tomorrow, as the old DDR machine says.

And about those calories... My "target" is 1200 calories per day. It may look like I did well yesterday... except that here's the list of healthy things I ate:

• 3 slices of gouda
• 6 oz milk
• 12 oz mocha
• molasses cookie
• croissant
• Mirror Pond pale ale
• coffee w/cream & sugar

So yeah. Tasty, but not so good, eh? Damn Caffe Ladro and their bakery! It's out to get me, clearly. ;)

Handwriting for Lhenazi

My Daily Stats

Exercise	Food	Spanish	Writing	Conlanging
Steps	Calories	Time	Words	Activities
9,600	1400 ± 200	–	–	Lhenazi handwriting

Lhenazi Handwriting

I walked to Fremont Coffee yesterday evening and spent 2 hours there creating a writing system for my new conlang Lhenazi. It's a syllabary, which means that each "letter" is actually a consonant plus a vowel sound. So you can't write "t" by itself; you have to write "ta," "to," etc. This works well for languages that only allow simple syllable structures made up of consonant-vowel pairs. Once you start allowing complex clusters like English's "strengths," a syllabary just isn't going to cut it.

At 9 PM, Fremont Coffee closed and kicked me out. I asked the barista if there were any other cafes open later, but she said there weren't. I remembered a Tully's (one that their own website doesn't know about — strange, no?) on the way back home, so I walked over there to check it out. But it had closed at 9 too.

I called up my mom for Yelp "ground support" and discovered that Caffe Ladro has a location open until 11 PM across the street from Fremont Coffee. What a lying barista! ;) So I walked back to Caffe Ladro (I was walking for the exercise anyway...) and enjoyed myself some more time finishing up the script for Lhenazi. I also enjoyed me some delicious cranberry pecan muffin made at the> cafe. Mmm!

What took so long at these cafes? "Evolving" my syllabary! Syllabaries (and other writing systems, too) often come from little pictograms that eventually begin to stand for the sound of the item drawn instead of the item itself. So I developed my script by drawing little pictures for all 52 possible syllables, then wrote drew those pictures repeatedly until they "eroded" into abstract, simple shapes. It sounds tedious, but it was actually surprisingly fun. I did the whole thing in 4 hours!

Conlanging & Dead Car

My Daily Stats

Exercise	Food	Spanish	Writing	Conlanging
Steps	Calories	Time	Words	Activities
13,700	too many	Los Amantes del Círculo Polar (1:48h)	0 :(	Lhenazi grammar (word order, possession, adjectives)

I went to bed late last night but still got up at 10:20 AM, when the sun got too annoying. I've intentionally left the blinds open to get me up, you see.

I worked on my new conlang Lhenazi, which I've been having a lot of fun with. It's a new language that belongs with my NaNoWriMo trilogy, and will suffer less from being created in the time before I had studied linguistics. I still love my old Asha'ille, but it definitely has its "because I like it" rather than "because it's linguistically sound" moments. ;)

Then Steve and I went over to Jerry's, where there was more conlanging (on my part, anyway), then pizza dough and taco pizza and zombies.

I walked to Jerry's and back, so that's how my 10k+ step goal was reached for the day. I really need to walk more, I says to myself. And Fate is listening! Fate says, okay, let's make your car stop running while you're in the middle of driving. That'll get you walking more. Helpful ol' Fate.

Forrest's off on his backpacking trip as of tomorrow, so he can't exactly fix my car for me. But Jerry says that he should have time to look at it on Wednesday. Hopefully it's something easily fixable...

Month and a Half of Doing Very Little

Lunch in the Backyard

What's been going on since I last posted a month and a half ago? Well, Forrest was away in California visiting his family, backpacking, and road-tripping it up. While he was gone, my days mostly consisted of work, bookstores, Battlestar Galactica, and more bookstores. I sure am exciting when left to my own devices! ;)

The weather was extremely nice while Forrest was gone, though. (He's brought the rain back with him, but I'll forgive him since I'm glad he's finally home. :)) But while the sunny not-too-hot weather lasted, I did try to enjoy it a little. For instance, I fixed myself lunch (that is, I heated up some frozen Trader Joe's food) and ate it in the backyard while reading a book. Very pleasant afternoon, that was.

Amy Finally Killed My Spider Plant

In less good news, my cat Amy finally killed my spider plant. A friend from work had given me a cutting of his spider plant a while back. I was proud of myself for not having killed it yet despite weeks on end of neglect, followed by guilt-ridden waterings. ;) Then I started noticing that its leaves had little punctures in them. Little cat-tooth-sized punctures. But I never caught either cat in the act.

Then one night, I was woken up around 3 AM by this great crashing, breaking sound. I jumped out of bed to see what the cats had broken this time. (They already have one ex-vase to their credit.) Amy was slinking out of the kitchen, and in the sink was the broken terra cotta pot that had held my spider plant.

The next morning, I transplanted it to the backyard. I haven't checked on it since then, so it's probably very dead by now. :(

Too Much Knotweed

I don't love all plants, though. For instance, knotweed must die. Japanese knotweed is a nasty, nasty invasive that grows on our neighbor's property and, along with their bamboo, sneaks under the fence and sprouts up all over our yard. It can grow 1 foot per week, and that's bushy too, not just straight up! It's Bad Times™.

So I spent some time hacking it all down. The photo is a pile from one afternoon's murderous knotweed rampage. Muahaha!

Strawberries on the Vine

Back to good plants. Like strawberries. Everybody likes strawberries! Last year, some critter was liking our strawberries, unfortunately. Just as the berries started to turn red, but before they were actually ripe enough for people to eat, something would munch holes in them and let the rest rot. So we didn't get to eat any of last year's crop.

We never did find out if the culprit was slugs or birds or what. In any case, they seem to be ignoring this year's strawberries. Yay! :) So we've enjoyed the handful of strawberries that the plants have produced so far. They're small but very flavorful.

Seattle Skyline from Blake Island

Finally, two weeks ago my team at work went out to Blake Island on a manager's 50' boat, the Henry Young, as a morale event. I have a whole set of photos from the trip.

Cross-Country Skiing is Painful!

So yes, cross-country skiing is fun. But it's also painful the next day! I swear, all of my muscles hurt. Even my triceps. Silly little triceps. Every time I move, something aches. I think I'll deal with this by reading about skiing, rather than actually skiing, at least until next weekend. :)

Us: 1, Rats: 0

Dead Rat in Trap

A couple nights ago, Forrest went into the pantry/laundry room and discovered a rat staring back at him from atop the water heater. So over the weekend we spent the better part of a day moving all the pantry food into the kitchen or throwing it out (Pasta Roni from 2003, I miss you!). As far as we could tell, the rat(s) had only gnawed on a bag of rice.

We bought some nasty-powerful rat traps and baited them with peanut butter (per my dad's suggestion) for a couple of nights without arming the traps, so the rats would be complacent and unsuspecting. Last night, Forrest finally armed the traps for the first time. Around 1 AM, Forrest woke up, saying that he'd though he had heard a commotion and a rat-squeal from the pantry. It being 1 AM, he decided to go back to sleep and check the trap in the morning.

As you can see from the photo, we got the sucker! Please note that both Forrest and I had rats as pets when we were kids, so it's not that we hate rats indiscriminately. We just don't want rats living in our pantry, or worse, infiltrating the rest of the house.

We're hoping it was just this one rat — it's a small female, so maybe it was working on setting up a nest. We're hoping there isn't a colony of rats ready to move in to our pantry. But we'll be setting more traps tonight, just in case.

Happy Thanksgiving

My First Thanksgiving on My Own

This is the very first year I've not gone home for Thanksgiving. It feels weird. But Forrest, Jerry, and I made a pretty good showing at our Thanksgiving dinner. They cooked most of the food — I only contributed Stove Top stuffing and fudge-in-a-box — but I kept them supplied with clean knives, pots, pans, measuring cups, etc by washing everything as they cooked.

We have sooooo much leftovers now! We, um, possibly had too much food: roasted turkey (only 8 pounds!), stuffing (both in-bird and on-stove), mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, lefse, waldorf salad, peas and pearl onions, pumpkin pie, a mini cranberry tart-pie-thing, fudge, chips, milk, Dr. Pepper, Johannesburg Riesling, Franciscan Merlot (2004 vintage, a little too young), and some mead. And we still need to make turkey carcass soup!

Watching My Bus Drive Away

I woke up late, looked at the clock, saw I had 13 minutes to get to my scheduled company bus pickup, and jumped up out of bed. So I'm bleary and tired, rushing around getting ready. I drive over to where the bus will pick me up, since I don't have 20 minutes to spare to walk there. As I'm parking a block from the bus stop, the bus comes by, picks up the people waiting for it, and drives off. Arrrrg!

So I drove to work today, which means no morning NaNo word count. :( Plus I feel groggy. Bleh. JIT mocha to the rescue!

Fourth of July Weekend

Vik'domeerpeni vedá'gejhír vás'vanuna alunsa Fourth of July tei mlen'i ejh kedá. Énivkeni ne do'kénillevniyejhlo dovik'jhor vanuna t'larúnith keniriv tei mlen'i pali kik. Vik'éjhillevpeni ne nes di'adhen eg gunál, t'ves teir jhor'éjhilleth alunsa vel'das t'no. :) [explanation]

That is:

I've just returned from a great Fourth of July weekend with my SO. Can't wait 'til we see each other again in a week, when we all go camping with my family. I've been looking forward to it for a while, and hopefully it'll be enjoyable for all concerned. :)

Bia Sharídidm

di'adhen [di'ADEn] future. from di'ay

do– [do] prefix for embedded v* phrases; does not apply to closing k*

éniv ['EnIv] to wait. from *env

gejhír [gE'Zir] great, wonderful. from gir, *jh

gunál [gu'nAl] a while, a long time. from gir, chuna

keniriv [kEnI'rIv] to visit, to stay temporarily. from –k–, loriv

larún [lA'run] tree. from loriv, cyirún

vanuna [vA'nun@] week(lit. seven-days). from valn, chuna

vás'vanuna ['vAsvA"nun@] weekend. from vastille, vanuna

éjhillev ne nes di'adhen to look forward to it (lit. to enjoy this future)