Babies! (Not ours, luckily!)

Well, last Friday my sister Fia had her first baby, Jayden Rohan, at 11pm! Apparently she was only in the hospital for 20 minutes before she had it! So it was a reasonably quick labour, with no painkillers which is pretty brave. I swear he looks exactly like her with the same lips, nose and hair! Congrats, Fia!

So, today I got a text from Dad who has finally managed to go and visit. Quote: "Jayden is gorgeous and Fia is smitten"! Actually, I think Dad is smitten! Which is great. It's the first grandchild in our family, and my grandma now has two great-grandchildren! (My cousin Anneke and her husband Wouter also have a gorgeous little boy called Gawain who is 6 months older than Jayden. ) Fia is at her home in Fielding now if any NZ family and friends wish to visit, I'm sure she'd love to see you all.

Pillowfight!

On Valentines' Day for the past few years, hundreds (if not thousands) of people have come to the corner of Market and Embarcadero streets in San Francisco, armed with pillows. On the stroke of 6pm, as the clock in the Ferry Building strikes, the whole place erupts into a huge pillowfight! Feathers fly everywhere and everyone shrieks and laughs and waves their cameras. The rule is that you can't hit anyone with a camera, and you can only hit people with your pillow. It's very fun. People dress up.

Anyway, Monica (my new intern who is awesome) and I rushed down Market Street after work, getting there just as everything started! We met Brendan who was carrying the pillows, and rushed into the fray. I want to show you all the videos, but it's probably best if I just do some photos for now....









It was a bit like a mosh pit....

Unexpected and Surprising Revelations about America

A survey from AIPT (the company that manages our visas) asked me "What are some of the most unexpected or surprising things you have learned during your program?".

Obviously I couldn't think of everything off the top of my head, but here is what I wrote:

• American audiences really love to get involved. It's hard to get a New Zealand audience to do much more than clap.
• Americans in general are very outgoing. I actually can't recall meeting an American who would be "shy" by New Zealand standards.
• Almost every major recreational activity has a specific set of foods associated with it. You can't buy Eggnog at any time other than Christmas, and no-one wants to shell their own peanuts unless there's a baseball game going on.
• Even Americans are sometimes confused about when to tip, and how much. Am I really supposed to tip the postman at Christmas?
• When you have an accent, wait staff are always relieved when they realize you intend to tip them.
• A surprising number of Americans believe New Zealand is in Europe.
• You cannot live without a car in San Jose.
• Californians spend a lot of money on new cars.
• You can get a full license in about a week (for over-18's anyway). In NZ this takes two years.
• Living in America, you actually matter to those big well-known websites. Amazon delivers overnight, Google Maps will give you directions to almost anywhere, and all those tech products which take forever to make it to NZ are right there on NewEgg.com.
• A small soda in MacDonalds is the size of a New Zealand large.
• The physical distance between safe areas and dangerous areas of a city can be frighteningly small.
• In many ways America is like 50 small countries in one. Generalizations and stereotypes rarely apply everywhere.
• You can buy 2000 straws at Costco for the same price as 20 straws at Safeway. Costco is a wonderful store.
• Labels in supermarkets usually list the price-per-pound of things, making it much easier to compare.

A weekend in Tahoe... or The Snowed-Out Trip!

Last weekend we went up to Tahoe... a lot of things went wrong, but we still had fun.

Friday:

I got up at 6am and started work at 7am, managed to drag myself off at 5pm. The joy of 10 hour days with no lunch. Costco had no suitable car batteries, so the guy suggested I walk "a block and a half" down Potrero Road. Now I knew it was a dangerous area.... but it was early evening and I really needed the battery so I decided to go there anyway. It was closer to six blocks along the most dodgy part of the area, between 10th and 16th streets, filled with homeless guys who stared at me as I walked by in the half-light. It was getting darker and darker, and I almost went into a shop to check I was going the right way. But just then I saw an auto shop up the street and went inside.

Luckily for me the bus stop was right across the road, but I still had to carry everything about 4 blocks home, along from market street to the cable car, up California street and home. All 25 pounds of battery plus some tools. Ouch.

So we installed the battery and set off to find chains.... and looked... and looked... we must have been to most of the Walgreens, garages and Rite Aids in the area because we drove around for 3 hours before conceding defeat. :( Heading home, a parking spot was waiting for us. :)

Saturday we got up at 5am and left at 6.30am. We tried to find chains in Vallejo, but every shop there opened at 10am. Luckily the next town wasn't quite as hick, and sold us chains. Finally!

By the time we arrived in Tahoe it was around 11am, so we decided to just play in the snow and go sightseeing.






Which was fun, except that most of the roads were closed as there was so much snow! It was impossible to drive along most of the roads around the lake.

We drove around the Nevada side instead, looking for a place to stop and take pictures. It seems that everything is very commercialized - everyone has private property around the lake so there's almost no public access, just resorts and restaurants. We drove up as far as Glenn Point before we realised that we weren't going to find any nice places to go, and even if we could, there was far too much snow so there would be no roads down there. Only the main roads / highways were actually plowed, and some of the streets. Everything else was under about 5 feet of snow.


This is the "street" the chalet was on - the driveway is on the left. Yes, this is an actual street.



Here's Lake Tahoe. There is quite a bit of melted snow in the water!





The side street we parked on by Lake Tahoe



Lake Tahoe on Sunday when the sun came out!

It's quite funny - right on the border between California and Nevada, are casinos. On one side is a picturesque small town, and the other side is huge casinos! Financially irresponsible signs along the road exhorted visitors to "Cash your pay, spin the wheel!"

However, we also had a minor car incident! We were driving along at about 30 mph when the car in front of us suddenly decided his exit was coming up, but he couldn't stop, so luckily he decided to keep going! Brendan tried to stop, but we also kept sliding! For a long horrifying moment it looked as if we were going to hit the car in front of us, but then we turned into a snow bank and came to a stop. (Luckily all the snow was so soft and powdery that the entire time we were driving around, it was safe to hit into and bounce off! We saw this happen to lots of cars, including ours.) Sitting in the car feeling relieved, I looked out my window and noticed another car's bonnet beside us, not 10cm parallel with our car! The people behind us had also been unable to stop in time, and had grazed our bumper before coming to rest in the snowbank beside us! Luckily no-one was hurt, and nothing was damaged. I have the whole thing on video too! That will be interesting to watch later....

Americans, it seems, not only drive badly in the rain, but also the snow. They keep their following distance at half a car length or less, but drive slower, as if that's going to avoid accidents! It just slows everything down (see post below about rain driving) and causes lots of accidents.

So we went back to the chalet we were staying in with friends from IBM. The owners of the chalet were into bears in a big way... there were 18 figurines of varying shapes and sizes in the lounge alone!


Here is the interior of the chalet - with one of the bears on the left...



Here is the chalet on Saturday.... with Brendan throwing snow



Here is the chalet on Sunday!

Overnight, it snowed so much that our car was completely covered. It snowed all of Saturday and most of Sunday as well. We got up at 6am to go skiing, but the roads were closed. All the skifields were closed. On the bright side, the sun came out for about an hour. We were glad we put our chains on the night before when there was around 5cm of snow, because when we came out in the morning there was 2 feet of snow on and around our car! Talking to the neighbours, they said it was the heaviest snowfall in about 30 years. Insane!


Spot our car! (It's the line on the right.)



Brendan digging out our car - luckily we put the chains on the night before!



Here's the view from the bedroom window in the chalet - lots of icicles.

Eventually around 12 noon on Sunday, the snow plows went through, and we tottered off to Safeway (supermarket) to buy skiing food (i.e. nuts, dried fruit and rice cakes - just like when I was a kid). We also walked a block down the road to see Lake Tahoe while it was actually sunny and a bit clear, which was more than it had been the day before.

Finally we were on the road around 12.30, and it took us until 1.30 pm to get to Sierra snowfields, what felt like 10 miles away. We crawled along, with traffic pretty much at a standstill the entire way. So by the time we actually got to Sierra and put our snow chains back on in record time so we could park in the parking lot, it was closer to 2pm. So we just pottered around and had coffees and looked around and planned for the next trip!


Brendan at Sierra

The weekend coming up is Presidents' weekend - the worst possible time to go. (Long weekend - everyone and their mother will be there.) But hopefully we can go up in a few weeks again.

Californians can't drive in the rain....

My manager has this saying that Californians can't handle driving in the rain... it certainly seems to double the time needed to get anywhere. It's true. They just go to pieces and traffic hits a standstill. Tonight the bus took a full 15 minutes to even move 1 block from my stop! I would ahve walked had I not been wearing heels and it not been pouring down. Luckily I had my umbrella from Brendan, so I was mostly dry.

Ewww... rain also seems to bring out the worst in people on the bus too - everyone's cold and wet and miserable and their umbrellas drag across your knees as they pass, making you start.

So we were planning to go to Tahoe this weekend for a sight-seeing trip, and then we got a call from friends saying, "So we're renting this chalet in Tahoe for the weekend, do you want to come?" I'm really excited. So I wrangled time off early from work by starting at 7am tomorrow so I can leave at 4 (to avoid 8 hours of traffic!), and then Brendan went to our car tonight so we could go shopping, and it needs a new battery. Yay. So I need to somehow track down a car battery, jumper cables and other car paraphernalia and drag it all home on the bus. And you know how much car batteries weigh!

Quote from Brendan

You know, plants are just failed animals. Whenever you eat vegetables you are eating failure.

Brendan is not too pleased that my being vegetarian caused him to miss out on a dinner with fish.

In other news, after yet another 6am screaming match from the people next door, I put in a complaint to the landlord. I need more than 6 hours' sleep a night.

New Year's and other such things...

So it's been a bit quiet on the blog front recently. This is because we've been rather busy! And, I've spent the last week and a half with something that's a severe cold, but won't go away!


Brendan and Tina waiting for Midnight Mass to start

Christmas was fantastic - Brendan and I went to Midnight Mass in Grace Cathedral... aaaaahhhh. So lovely. Absolutely amazing and beautiful, and even nicer than I thought it would be. We had to get there around 9.30 just to get a seat! The men and boys choir sang, and the orchestra played, and Brendan mentioned that at times with the acoustics, it sounded like a soundtrack for a movie! I absolutely enjoyed it. And even Brendan did.

The day before Christmas, we also talked to our families as it's Christmas the day before in NZ. I missed mine a lot that day. For once almost all of them were in 1 place, which almost never happens!


Slightly blurry photo of the cathedral at Christmas which I took earlier in the day of Christmas Eve

On Christmas Day we had a picnic in the park, in the sunshine, and ate the most yummy things we could think of to buy, like cherries and Camembere (sp?) cheese which is Brendan's favourite in all the world, and fed whole crackers to the pigeons just to see what would happen. (They couldn't break them, and had to wait expectantly for someone to step on it.) Only thing is that I took the camera, and forgot the memory card.

After, we went to see a friend for a few hours. We also spent quite a few hours in bed reading the fantastic-ly useful presents from Brendan's dad... thanks for that. A lot. We likes. And then the other day, we also got another parcel in the mail... from Brendan's mum! It contained a bubble-blower among other things, with which Brendan gleefully set about pouring wet bubbles all over me....

The weekend before New Year's, we went down to Pinnacles National Monument. Arounf 45 minutes south of Hollister or 2 hours south of San Francisco. It has extremely weird rock formations as it's an old volcano, and is now moving at a rate of around 2cm a year! The rocks are either pastel pink or pastel green, very odd. It also has cave systems made when water moving through some rocks made others fall on top of them - unfortunately half the caves were closed as it was rare bat maternity season. Some of the caves had smooth polished jasper rocks where thousands of people had brushed past them... so pretty. I immediately thought of my sister Fia, who would have loved them.

(Warning: What Lina calls Pic Spam ahead! I.e., many photos!)


Look! It's a coyote! It wants our food....


This one looks better in close-up. Click on it! Now now now!





The first day we came, it was cloudy, foggy and threatened to rain. The whole park was a mass of white fog and water droplets, and we could barely see anything until around 2 o'clock when the mist lifted for a bit and then just as quickly, closed up again. We were unimpressed until we realised that almost no tourists probably see this, and that it was reasonably pleasant with no heat. So we took lots of photos of raindrops....


We had marshmellows over a campfire in the camping grounds all alone by ourselves, and spend a long and uncomfortable night (for me!) in the car. Note to self: the backseat is not the answer.... the stars were amazing, though.

The next morning was bright and sunny, and I watched Californian quail clucking round the campsite. We walked from one side of the national park to the other, and then back over the high peaks again - a total of around 16 km! It was really nice, and we saw endangered condors (related to turkey vultures, I think) flying around quite close! A rather steep walk in the sun, though - signs everywhere warn to take plenty of water on the exposed trails. In summer, I think the "strenuous" paths would really deserve that designation in the hot San Jose sun!


The entrance to Balcony caves



Part of the caves... the rock on each side was all smooth and polished to a deep magenta where people squeezed past


A huge rock at the exit from Balcony caves!



Balcony cliffs! Look for the people at the bottom




The stunning view from the carpark on the other side of the park - we walked right across!



This photo is for Fia. It is called "The Sphinx".



Compare this view near the top to the day before:



Brendan had to "be available" for work the next day, unfortunately, so we couldn't really stay much longer.

On New Year's Eve we had a small party with our friends from San Jose, who made the trek up and stayed the night. It was really fun, I'm glad they came. At midnight we climbed up onto the roof via the fire escape to do the countdown and watch the fireworks... which were obscured by some tall buildings downtown. It was freezing! Then the neighbour who lives below us came up onto the roof and was very drunk, it was quite hilarious as no-one else was really drinking.



view from our roof!

Funny story from the other day: the neighbour who lives next door to us is somewhat of a saga, as she's 55 and acts as if she's 90, never leaves the house, and is not the brightest of people unfortunately. Her communication to us is mostly in strangely-written letters shoved under the door whenever we complain about such things as 4am shouting matches or rubbish piled outside the door all week, every week. We think she's probably going senile from having lived in the same house 'for 40 years".. making her something like... 17 when she moved in!

So the other day, Brendan tells me the police are outside his door. Whatever for? Well, obvious to everyone else but Sara, if you ask someone to buy you something from a shop and then refuse to pay them because you don't have any money, you shouldn't be surprised if they get mad.

Instead, if you're Sara, you call 911 emergency because the man is standing outside your door, ringing your doorbell, and you've already decided you don't want to pay. The police officer was apparently infinitely patient with her (to the tune of an hour or so!), and when the guy turned up again, told them they would sort it out right there and then. I have a lot of respect for that guy.

Finally, in other news, I have a second new client at work now! The CEO is from NZ, and flies back and forth from Auck every few weeks! They're very nice. I'm pretty excited really. They do interesting search engine stuff. We're having dinner with them on Thursday night. Time to get out my suit!

Right, now I've finally uploaded all the pictures I should really go to the gym before it closes!