Life

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut used the phase "So it goes…" to casually talk about death.  While every obituary writer in the world is now penning this as the title of Vonnegut’s obituary, I think his death is anything but a casual event for me. Vonnegut’s writing was first introduced to me in junior high…

Apparently our agent went to present our offer on the house we want yesterday amidst eight other competing offers.  He made his best pitch and we got the house.  So we’re pretty excited  Here’s a flickr photoset of the new house.  Note that real estate photographers tend to use wide angle lenses to make rooms…

United managed to fly my dogs to me without injuring them!  Though I didn’t appreciate the 4 hour delay for mechanical difficulties, the dogs seemed to come through unscathed, and held it the entire way.  I had a friend Derick, who coincidentally was on the same plane.  I pointed out that he got to go…

It’s becoming a routine occurence that I’m scheduled to get on a plane and it’s oversold.  I’m offered a free ticket anywhere in the continental US, or a $300 flight voucher, if I’ll just give up my seat.  The problem of course is that I always have somewhere to be.  It’s never a good deal…

We had to hit the hospital for some tests for Moishe.  Nothing life threatening, but still the tests involved a trip to the OR, a camera and a tube stuck down our son’s throat for 24 hours, and a day and a half in the hospital. Suddenly Sarah’s phone started ringing.  Our circle of friends…

I’ve already secured and populated our DC apartment, and we’re going to sell our DC house to get one in San Francisco.  The DC realtor got furniture for it after we moved out, and sent us photos.  It’s not our style, but then our style would have impaired the selling of the house.  If you’ve…

My precious server, a machine I built by hand, did not survive the move.  It had everything on it, my Quicken with the family’s entire finances, all my unprocessed photos from Pakistan, our MP3 collection, and my entire online poker history, every hand. I’m not a hardware guy, so the fact that I built this…

Believe it or not, there’s a family of three that can live out of that collection of suitcases.  I didn’t think it was possible, but when we came out to San Jose this is all we brought.  Of course it fell apart immediately, as we started buying things we needed, like baby bottle cleaning brushes…

It’s time I unloaded a secret I’ve been keeping to myself for months.  It’s been tearing at me, knowing the truth about myself but unable to tell anyone.  Little by little, I realized what I was becoming, and slowly, I confessed the truth to select people.  I started with my small group of friends and family, then one by one, I took my coworkers aside and told them.

It wasn’t easy, and I was prepared for some negative reactions, but I never got a single one.  Every one of you that I’ve told so far has been extremely understanding and generous.  My confession is that…

So as I mentioned, we’re busily selling most all of our books and CDs on Amazon.  (Note that all sales are on temporary hiatus, as we’re too busy to ship)  We’re up to about $2,100.  Sarah has set up an assembly line in our dining room.  Early on, before I was helping, she was listing,…