Sam's L33t Journal

Liz and Eli were married last Sunday on the floor of the US Senate. (Actually the model Senate at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate in Boston.) Was really great to be able to join them for the happy event.

(Also was an opportunity for Julie to give me a quick tour of her new lab after. Seemed like a pretty cool setup, though one bio lab seems much like another to me.)

Mary looked after Eris for the afternoon again while we were at the wedding. She brought over another gingerbread house for them to decorate, among other treats. So we're up to our ears in sweets, a state of affairs likely to persist through the holiday season.

I'm getting ready for the transition to new team at work, but the hard parts of the transition are now done. Leaves a little room for relaxation before the turn of the year.

The winter concert at the kid's school is tomorrow.

Friday: Went to one of WMBR's 50 Years of Boston Rock concert series at Cuisine en Locale at Anthony's (up on Highland in Somerville). Very cool venue. Mistle Thrush did not disappoint, all the music was great, and the sheer quantity of getting the band back together made for a fun atmosphere.

Saturday: Thomas and Melissa (friends from SCA dance) got married. Julie and I went to their wedding at St. James's Episcopal Church near Porter Square (my first time attending a church wedding ceremony). They had some cool wedding clothes (which Melissa made herself, including some really elaborate and beautiful embroidery), and there was a reception afterwards at the German-American Club in Walpole with board games and cake. (The German-American Club is a pretty cool event venue, I'd been there previously for SCA events. Aside from the usual things that would recommend a venue for large events, they have excellent beer and they're the only event venue I've seen with a cash bar that doesn't charge captive audience prices.) It was a wonderful time, and a very heart-warming occasion. Best wishes to the happy couple!

Sunday: Xave ran the game he wrote for Iron GM at Intercon again, so I had a chance to play it. Was fun.

This week is going to be busy in a good way, too. Yelp Elite fall party this evening, Rosh Hashana dinner with family on Wednesday, Fluff Festival next Saturday. The weather is getting colder and fall festivities abound!

Last weekend was DJ and Michelle's wedding. I was honored to be in the wedding party. Many congratulations to the happy couple!

Work is still crazy. Last week got my promo feedback. The bad news is that I didn't get promoted, even though I'd thought my case was strong enough this time. The good news is I got more positive and more specific feedback than my last attempt: Work on larger projects with a broader scope, show leadership by doing things that facilitate / coordinate the efforts of a larger group. I've made some adjustments to my plans with those priorities in mind, and last week was wildly productive. I hope I can maintain that rate of productivity.

Today, I participated in a discussion of the book Oryx and Crake for the C-Realm Podcast. The book is worth reading if you like dystopian / apocalyptic fiction. Just checked the sequel out from the library.

The book group at work just finished a book of Joel Spolsky's essays, which was interesting but probably not very helpful in my day-to-day work. But our next choice is Working Effectively With Legacy Code, which I expect will be mind-explodingly relevant.

The weather is summery this weekend. Today was a beautiful day for biking, and I made it home just in time to avoid a torrential late-afternoon downpour. Temps getting up near 80 on Monday.

Julie is away this weekend visiting her folks for Mother's Day. Next weekend is my cousin Ben's wedding.

Not too much to report this week. I continue to be busy. Thank you notes have now been mailed. Work is going pretty well.

Going to Cleveland for Thanksgiving break all of next week.

My exercise routine was interrupted this week after a business crisis at Fitness Together. They're closed this week and opening under new management the next. My trainer is planning to move across the country in January, so I'll be working with someone new soon. But hopefully can continue to make progress on that after these few weeks of rest.

We're back!

Actually, we were back last week, but I haven't gotten around to sitting down and writing a post. Getting back to work was interesting. My new workplace at the expanded Google Cambridge office is pretty great.

Our return trip wasn't so bad, jet-lag-wise, though the long day of travel Sunday was pretty hard (5 hours of sleep, wake up at 4AM, then 28.5 hours awake with only intermittent naps on plane and train before bed at 8:30PM).

And the trip was awesome! We stayed in a little inn (Tama Ryokan in Shinjuku) and took in many of the sights of the city. We viewed the night skyline and several fireworks shows from the top of Tokyo Skytree. We saw the start of the summer festival in Chiba City, and the giant shrine at Narita. We had the chance to visit my host-mom and see some of my old haunts from study away (though the university was apparently closed at the time). We ate lots of great street food, amazing pastry and coffee at cute cafes, elaborate desserts, fancy sushi (near Tokyo's famous fish market) and convenient sushi (at Genki Sushi, where orders are placed on a touch-screen display and whisked to your seat via trays on a magnetic rail), and delicious grilled eel.

We took a day-trip to Hakone, visiting the teahouse at Amazake Chaya and taking sightseeing ferry across Lake Ashi, but unfortunately arriving at Owakudani a bit too late to do anything aside from take a quick look at the view and immediately catch the last ropeway car out. But still had an amazing evening at the Hakone Yuryo hot springs (arriving just in time to stay out of a dramatic thunderstorm), with its beautiful baths and a restaurant with charcoal hearths set into the center of the tables and the most delicious roasted fish I've ever had.

We ventured out to Itabashi to seek out the izakaya of a famous Iranian-Japanese portrait artist, only to find the shop closed, the owner out of town for a television appearance. But we found a lovely izakaya around the corner, Izakaya Hanami, an exceptionally clean (hard to find non-smoking izakayas), pretty, and welcoming shop that was clearly a labor of love for the proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Tadashi. The shop was decorated with model trains and train photographs taken by Mr. Tadashi, a train enthusiast and former railroad engineer. The proprietors and all the regulars were very kind to us wayward tourists and were very patient with my limited Japanese.

The only downsides to the trip were the weather (unusually hot and humid, not cooling down until close to the end of the trip) and that I came down with a throat infection in the middle of it (requiring a trip to the doctor, made me glad that Google provides really top-of-the-line trip insurance for its employees). Nothing that could really mar a great vacation.

It was wonderful for us to be able to take some time together without any worries about chores or work (for the most part, Julie managed to call in to at least one meeting).

Since getting back, I've set up at my new office, started in on post-wedding chores, and done a bit of cooking (our vegetable deliveries resumed on Friday, and earlier in the week I made madeleines).

Going to be married in two days. Moving from planning to implementation.

DJ and Michelle announced their engagement a few days ago.

Kelcy and David (friends from Olin) are getting married a week after me.

Coincidentally, this is my last day at the ITA Office (aka Google-US-CAM-141). More than five years, quite a long time. It's the end of an era.

I'm back from camp!

My week away from everything was very relaxing. Mainly, I did a lot of reading. My reading list:

• VALIS by Phillip K Dick: Phillip K Dick's book about how Phillip K Dick is crazy
• REAMDE by Neal Stephenson: My one Neal Stephenson book per year, a pretty quick read for a thousand page book
• 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson: Weird-topian sci-fi, good, very strange
• Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber: Fascinating economic history, really cuts to the heart of some of what's wrong about modern economics
• Cooked by Michael Pollan: Not as good as The Omnivore's Dilemma, but if you liked that you'll probably like this as well
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi: Dystopian biopunk novel, suspenseful, clever, and disturbing

I also spent some time watching the wildlife (unusually bold deer, a mother duck herding a dozen ducklings, a very angry sparrow attacking a fleeing squirrel), went on a shopping trip to Wolfeboro, played cribbage, and had some long conversations with my parents.

I was back from camp last Saturday, and went immediately back to being completely swamped with work and wedding logistics.

It's been good weather for biking, so I've been enjoying my new Hubway membership.

My birthday was yesterday, Julie treated me to a lovely birthday dinner at TW Foods.

Getting married in a month!

My vacation last weekend to San Francisco for my cousin David's wedding was pretty great. Why am I not getting to posting about that until this weekend? Well, I started getting sick on Monday, and arrived home late Wednesday to the lethal combo of killer cold, jet lag, and sudden 90-degree weather. And I've been doing a bunch of cleaning prior to housemate switchover (DJ's departure and Josh's arrival). (A bit of cooking, too.) And trying to hit the ground running as soon as I got back to work. So I've been fairly flattened.

All the wedding festivities were very fun, though. A great dinner with the family, a picnic on Angel Island, late-night pre-wedding karaoke, and the ceremony itself, held on the Eureka (a museum ferry-boat docked off of Hyde Street Pier). The ceremony was amazing, if a bit windy, and the reception was incredibly fancy. Hard act to follow.

The rest of the vacation was pretty great, too. Did some shopping, met a long-time acquaintance for the first time in person (chiaki777, glad we had the chance to meet!), visited Berkeley (and spent much of that time hanging out in a cafe near the UC Berkeley campus, helping Julie hack on some debugging related to one of her projects), visited the Museum of the Long Now again, ate some amazing food. The area around Fort Mason is beautiful, too, and walking along the shore in the morning before the crowds get thick is quite pleasant.

I was very glad to be able to convince Julie to take a bit of a vacation. We both like San Francisco quite a bit, it's such a great city to walk around. We've both been before, but this was our first time visiting together.

As for my own wedding, invitations are out, yay! Still many logistical details to pin down, but stuff is getting done.

Took a mini-vacation to NYC this weekend, which was fun. Saw some friends and family (Aunt Ellen and Uncle Mark and their family, also my other cousin Ben and his fiancée), ate bagels and borscht, visited The Cloisters, caught a photography exhibition done by one of my cousins, drank lots of coffee, talked a lot about weddings.

Wedding planning has begun in earnest. There are a lot of logistics to figure out, but even focusing on the big structure of where and when is a lot of work. Everyone's asking me if we've decided on a date, we're pinning that down as quickly as we can.

Last Tuesday: Talked books with a crowd of Charles Stross fans at CBC, briefly said hello to Stross himself.

Wednesday: Dinner with my family at Piccolo Nido. The food is fantastic.

Thursday: DDR and Rock Band with Nurit.

Friday-Sunday: Trip to Maine with family for cousin's wedding. The wedding ceremony was beautiful, the reception had home-brewed beer and wedding cupcakes, the newlyweds make quite an adorable couple. Was awesome, got in a nice hike by the seaside with my parents, too.

Sunday afternoon: DJ is now moved in at the Grotto. Went to see the sand sculptures on Revere Beach with DJ, DJ's mom, and Ginneh. Ginneh is departing for Texas later this week, I hope she'll still find time to visit Boston.

Today: Went to see Inception with Julia. Amazing, mind-bending film. Go see it. (And then read this and this and this.)