The birdbath in our backyard is often frequented by sparrows and house finches, but the other day came our largest visitor yet—a hawk!
From Nori’s Northern California Nature Guide, this appears to be a Cooper’s Hawk, often seen in urban gardens with feeders, and known to prey on house sparrows. Bathers beware!
Nowadays if I walk out the door without my camera, something feels amiss, as if I’ve forgotten my wallet or keys. I wouldn’t be surprised if people I’ve briefly met remember me as “the guy with the camera”, and I’m sure my friends are so accustomed to my carrying around a camera that they no longer even see it hanging from my shoulder. I’m always taking pictures.
Figuring out whence this habit was formed is an exercise in retrospection. A natural starting point is my online gallery, the earliest pictures of which date back to the autumn of 2000 when I bought my first digital camera (ye olde Powershot S30).
But the real answer lies on the bookshelf, where a couple of albums containing pictures of the paper incarnation tell the tale of my last weeks of high school, when a girl agreed to be my date even though she was to leave the country in 18 days.
During our time together, we embodied “carpe diem”, and the knowledge that it would end only made us enjoy it more. But in the back of my mind I realized that when it did come time to part ways, all we would be left with was our memories. And so I began my photo diary, born of the wish to preserve that which is transient.
The 18 days passed and the girl moved away, but the habit remains to this day, 12 years later. I had almost come to take for granted the fact that I wasn’t always the guy with the camera, had almost forgotten that he was born from events in my life. Luckily, the pictures tell the story.
It probably also helps that in the end, the girl came back. :o)
With the excitement of the upcoming addition to our family, Nori wanted to share our fun and experiences, so she started a baby blog where we’ll be posting all things baby!
This will be the first generation of kids that can say that their parents blogged about them. It’s almost dizzying to imagine how different their lives will be from our own. The few memories I have of my early childhood I owe to the pictures and videos that my parents took. With today’s ease of capturing and storing information, families who are diligent about babyjournalism (like the Bozarths) will offer their kids a wealth of memories. Perhaps this generation will remember what it was like to be 4 years old.
What’s also intriguing is the shape that education might take in this century. As clichéd as the term “Information Age” might feel by now, we’ve gone from libraries to computers connected through phone lines to mobile phones that talk to satellites, all in a span of 20 years. If progress in society can be linked to the ease with which culture and information is exchanged, I’m excited about the world that today’s kids will grow up in.
Today Nori harvested a batch of compost that we had been contributing to over the past 3 months. A portion of it is coffee grounds, which admittedly don’t look very different from soil to begin with, but it also includes things like egg shells, fruit skins, and vegetable scraps. The result definitely exceeded my expectations. Nori will use the nutrient rich goodness for her growing vegetable garden, which includes green onions, basil, sage, thyme, taragon, rosemary, chives, Swiss chard, Italian parsley, cilantro, lettuce, tomatoes, lemons, and even grapes!
The key to faster composting is the hard work of these little red worms. Nori puts a lot of care into what she feeds them—crushing, peeling, deseeding, and chopping up the food so that it’s easily digestable. For a time we were afraid that they had drowned because we didn’t have a place to shelter the compost bin from the rain in our old apartment. Thankfully, the little guys are alive, squirming, and even reproducing. It’s a self-sustaining community!
Happy worms
After a mediocre experience with one CSA service last year, we’re trying Farm Fresh to You on Phil and Vanessa’s recommendation, and our first shipment came in today. We’re quite pleased with the freshness of the produce, and happy to be able to support local agriculture. Not only is it (arguably) better for the environment, but based on evolutionary principles, vegetables grown in season in the surrounding area should be better for you as well. Gotta love those win-win situations!
I’m also amazed at the variety of vegetables that are locally grown. With this week’s shipment came a few heads of “romanesco”, a relative of cauliflower which originally comes from Italy. I think I see the golden ratio …
The love/hate relationship you have with a home that you own, as opposed to a place that you rent, is that you have more liberties to make improvements, but you also have the responsibility to fix problems that arise.
What I’ve found, though, is that the latter empowers you to better do the former.
For example, the fact that our home warranty service absolutely sucks is actually a blessing in disguise. Only once did the service work the way we expected: when the dryer stopped working, they paid for the cost to replace of the faulty motor. Other times, however, they always gave a ridiculous excuse for adding extra fees or refusing to resolve the problem. In order to fix the leaky faucet, there would have been a $100 charge to “move the obstructing garbage disposal”, and in order to fix the faulty wire between the thermostat and the central heater, we would have had to first “remove the obstructing wall”.
Instead of playing their game, we decided to tackle the problems ourselves. Before our tenants moved in, we got under the sink and figured out how to replace the faucet, getting to know all of the pipes, valves, adapters, etc. without removing the garbage disposal. Last weekend, we took on the task of rewiring the connection between the central heating unit in the basement and the thermostat upstairs—and yes, we did it without removing any walls.
Each time we took things apart, I was surprised to find how simple the underlying components are, and how straightforward it is to work with them. The initial image I had of a picture -perfect, don’t-mess-with-it house has gradually evolved into system of pipes, wires, drywall, and wooden beams which we can fiddle with and drill holes in. And the satisfaction that comes with it is akin to debugging a piece of new software and figuring out all the basic components with which it’s built. (Obviously, I make no attempts to deny the fact that I’m a huge nerd.)
Since then we’ve done more and more to the house to make it our own. We’ve built shelves into doorways, installed doors, fixed locks, replaced more faucets, swapped and installed new ceiling lights, changed blinds, moved cable outlets … and the list continues to grow. I’ve finally begun to understand my dad’s passion for construction and remodeling—perhaps I’ve always had it as well, but until now had only understood it in terms of software.
For a while I had stopped participating in the tradition of making New Year’s resolutions, partly because I usually forgot about them within a couple of weeks, and partly because I felt it was arbitrary to set goals to improve oneself only once a year.
But neither is a good excuse not to make resolutions—in fact, they both present motivations to try harder. So after a long hiatus, I’ve once again taken on the challenge of New Year’s resolutions. (Actually, the real reason is that Nori was excited about doing so. ;o)
This time, though, I have a plan for defeating defeat. My approach this year is to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and the philosophy I’ve adopted is “moderate consistency”.
For example, one of my resolutions this year is to get back onto an exercise schedule. For something like exercise, revolutionary goals certainly work. Before moving to Japan in 2006, I would spend an hour at the gym every day, and in Japan Nori and I would run 2 or 3 times a week to train for the marathon. Similarly, John made a revolutionary goal to have a six pack by his wedding day, and thus started a daily workout routine.
We’ve run the marathon, though, and don’t have plans to run another. So in place of a revolutionary goal, I’ve made an evolutionary plan for accomplishing this year’s resolution. Applying the philosophy of “moderate consistency” , my approach is to go to the gym at least two times a week, even if it’s just for 15 to 20 minutes. The idea is to not let excuses get in the way—no matter how busy I get, 15 minutes isn’t too much to ask.
The plan’s been working, and I may have just found the key to self improvement in an increasingly busy lifestyle (for myself, at least). It makes me wonder whether I can apply the principle to other goals. Some candidates might be to consistently post moderately interesting updates to my blog, or consistently get moderately drunk with friends.
Ah, the arduous road to mediocrity. :o)
Having moved 15 times in the last 11 years, I’ve called many different places “home”. And though I’m fortunate enough that “home” was always a place I looked forward to, it was nevertheless transient—I knew that in about a year, “home” would come to mean some place else.
Home number 16 is different. Yes … we bought it! And it certainly wasn’t easy.
Our search started in early September, when signs of the declining housing market finally seemed to have reached our area (which, in San Francisco, meant that the prices were simply “not rising as quickly”). We would scan the listings of various real estate sites, keep a running list of candidates, and make maps and schedules of open houses to visit.
We saw a lot of houses, but none were what we really wanted. While we weren’t ready to take on the challenge of a fixer-upper, the renovated apartments were sterile and lacking in character. Interestingly, we stumbled upon the only house that we liked serendipitously, as it wasn’t yet posted on any of the listings we had checked.
It was an old Edwardian style house, but renovated in a way that retained the original character. Nori’s face lit up as she entered the roomy kitchen with sunlight streaming through the windows. Then she walked out into the backyard and saw the terraced garden that lead up to a deck with a bougainvillea growing along the fence … and I knew it was the one.
Hence began the whirlwind that is buying a home. We found a great real estate agent that was able to help us wade through San Francisco’s complex real estate and rent law. We flew my family’s Feng Shui consultant, along with my mom as a translator, up from southern California to evaluate the house. We made an offer, were rejected, and fought to be considered for a counter offer. Our second offer had a higher price tag, but apparently not high enough, as we were placed second-in-line as the backup offer.
As weeks passed and the contingencies for the accepted offer were supposed to have expired, we heard no news. Although I was staunchly hopeful that our backup offer would go into contract, we had to be realistic, and so we continued our search. But we found ourselves comparing the houses we saw to the one we made an offer on, and none of them measured up to it. In late October, we resigned ourselves to taking a rest from house hunting as we headed to Japan for a two week visit, with plans to continue the search when we returned.
The morning after we arrived in Japan, we received an email from our agent saying that the first offer had fallen through, and that our offer was in contract! Naturally we were elated, but at the same time a bit frantic. Of all the times for the closing process to begin, it happened to be when we were across the sea, largely unprepared. During those two weeks in Japan, I would wake up in the wee hours of the morning to catch the tail end of the business day in California and negotiate between two different loan agents by email while scavenging for electronic versions of the documents they requested. (Luckily, I had saved many of them in my Gmail account—shameless plug!)
After returning from Japan, my negotiations with the loan agents continued as we watched the mortgage rates rise and fall erratically. One week before our closing date, we finally chose one loan package and locked in a rate. All that was left for us to do was sign the papers and wire the down payment.
But the fun didn’t stop there. Although we had sufficient funds for the down payment in our bank account, news broke out that the bank itself (Citibank) was in trouble. With a large portion of our down payment (over the federally insurable amount) at risk of disappearing into the ether, we were denied even the peace of certainty that we could pay the down payment. I rushed over to the bank to immediately wire the money, but it was half an hour passed the Friday deadline, and the transaction wasn’t set to take place until Monday morning. Needless to say, I nervously followed the news of what was to happen with the bank that weekend.
In the end, it all worked out, and three months after we began our search, we picked up the keys to a home that we couldn’t be happier with. We moved in without a hitch with the help of our gracious friends, and have already gotten to know our new neighbors.
Nori now spends a large part of the day in the sunny kitchen, enjoying watching families of sparrows play in the birdbath and dart around the branches of the bougainvillea. She even set up a temporary desk there to study for her finals.
I think this will be “home” for a long time.
