In November 2008 on Election Day my battery failed to hold its charge a reasonable amount of time. Trip to Genius bar in Valley Fair + AppleCare → Free replacement. That’s a savings of ~ $100. Yes we can, indeed.

Time passed, in the words of Sid Meier’s Civilzation (tm), and my Employer gave me a MacBook Pro. I handed my old one down to my girlfriend who has used it with great dedication since. On June 20th she IM’d me and said that the video seemed to have gone wonky, scanlines showing up, machine needed to shut down.

We took it to the genius bar on Stockton the 20th of June, Applecare expired on the 21st.

I could feel the air of a displaced bullet swishing past.

They replaced the battery (it had recently moved to holding charge for ~5 minutes), logic board, as well as the video unit. Cost? $0.00. That’s savings of ~$300.00.

So, for the outlay of another hundred, I saved myself at least $400 in repair, PLUS I got 90 days extra coverage for work done (even now that it’s past the AppleCare horizon). I told her to start saving for that new MBP, but she can still type this one into the ground, thanks to the AppleCare investment.

Then, Sunday night I went to do another Goodwill run and as I drove out of the garage I heard something that wasn’t right. I stopped the car and looked out, my tire was barely full. I limped to the Shell across the street and filled it back up. A quick test showed I was losing about 10 Psi per evening. I filled it up and headed down to the Discount Tire in Redwood City. Thanks to my warranty a brand new replacement Michelin was $0.00. This is much less than the cost of one tire. $25 bucks to renew the certification and labor had me back on the road, safe and sure 40 minutes later.

Oh yes, and I noticed some scratches in my hardwood floor the other day that appear to be where some equipment with pointy ends had rested during the upgrade installation of my place. Warranty! Wha-bam. A very expensive contractor who specializes in slat color matching is coming next Thursday.

I know most of the time paying for warranties is a tool whereby to exploit the rubes, but lately, this rube has struck back. A win for one of us is a win for all. Bask with me, won’t you?

Now this is normally where I put something really cool of the house that I took with the Flip in the blog post.

But honestly, my filming skill was so crappy and jerky i gave myself a seizure halfway through. So, here’s a snippet of Lauren and I getting an early dinner after doing the walkthru.

Here’s a still that Lauren took

At 7:00, after being crammed in with the tired, the huddled masses, you step out into a windy tunnel or a funky-smelling stop and hurry home through the ænemic late-winter (or permanent, in the case of SF) cold back home. You replay the winnings and failings of the day and hope that you have enough ingredients at home for dinner so that you don’t have to go to Safeway and wait in that line (“I hear there’s an unemployment crisis, why can they not staff a few more people at rush hour”). You wonder why that woman gave you the stink eye, what, did she think she could stand in the entry doorway and not get jostled in a packed train?

Some times you wonder if you can bear it again.¹

The other day I suggested to meet Lauren at the Chuch street stop. I waited for her on the bridge that spans over the two train tracks. The rumble of the trains thrummed beneath my feet, the 70’s vintage orange tile rested aginst my leg and I watched the trains dart under the visual horizon of the tunnels’ edges and on to places like West Portal and the Embarcadero.

But one of those trains was different, it was carrying my sweetheart. If you’ve never waiting a sweetheart on a train, it’s a unique thing. It makes you feel rather Edwardian, even if the present generation are a good deal less sooty. When she stepped out I saw her and made a great-big side to side wave.

And so you wait, asking is this the one? Is she in the foremost or aftmost car? And then, brought from a reverie amidst these thoughts, you see her leave the sniffling sardines behind. She’s thinking those quotidian thoughts but this day is different: home was waiting for her here.

I threw a big side to side wave and a smile. She looked about for me on the platform but then heard her name, and saw the wave and I saw the post-train shuffle melt away and turn into a great big smile. Between the souls headed smoothly up the escalator or trudging up the stairs in those thoughts about dinner, cold wind, and Kleenex was a person who was about to be held, greeted warmly, and told the sweetest and tend’rest of nothings.

I felt so lucky to know she was as eager for the peace we share as I was. She walked across the catwalk and I pulled her in close to me, smelling her shampoo and feeling her face on my shoulder.

The electronic bell chimed, and another tube of the everyone else rolled through on to places like Glen Park and Montgomery Station. We remained.

1. I’ll take that over a car commute any day, though.

Keenly aperçu by a friend of mine to the question “Why the stereotypes about gays knowing so much about drapery and track lighting.”

Well, just to show that if you make anything nerdy enough, I will do it, here’s the Google SketchUp of my future residence. Yes, it’s to scale. I don’t think it’s too bad for a first stab at the tool.

As our move in date approaches, as we choose flooring and carpet, we’re starting to have some panic about what happens when an Austin-sized lifestyle and set of accoutrements meets San Francisco space restriction. As a means to try to figure out what we can and cannot do, I’ve set up this drawing.

“Hm, that LazyBoy just won’t fit!”

or

“Hm, maybe we can use a flop-down ironing board as a dining table?”

We have many, many one-way streets, streets to be shared with streetcars, iPhone senses-numbed hipsters wandering across intersections, drunken street-people, horizon-obliterating hills, a non-gridded layout, and few free parking spaces.

Therefore, when a tourist, or any other sane person, goes down a street and sees a herd of lanyard-wearing tourists crossing a square you mean to traverse that seems to have suddenly changed bearing from southwest to dead south with double-parked cabs on the right lane and the left lane is marked exclusively for highway access s/he might let off the gas or tap the brake and …

HONK!

I’ve decided the ability to negate all the legitimate reasons for hesitation and punch through with no doubt at 10 miles over the speed limit is the shibboleth of San Francisco drivers. Just as saying “Man-Chack-Uh” in Austin, or pronouncing “Houston” in NYC like the city in Texas earns you derision and sneers, deciding not to bore across a crosswalk at 50 MPH with pedestrians in view up a blind hill crest marks you as “no from ‘round here.”

Regrettably there’s no retro-honk. You know, when someone honks at you for stopping for a wheelchair-using citizen. You’d love to say “Listen, Jackass, I’m in the moral right.” But that’s just not how it works.

It’s not actually like they were trying to tell you to do the wrong thing, they were just trying hard to aurally re-assert “hey, I’m local, g-money.”

On Tuesday I signed and initialed many, many pages of paper which established my intention and permission to take possession of a few hundred square feet of San Francisco real estate. Having never bought a house before, this was some interesting times.

This last November when RubyConf came around I flirted with the idea “Maybe I could buy a place to live instead of renting…” Thanks to my sister putting me in connection with a realtor in the Silicon Valley who put me in contact with my AWESOME realtor Vanessa Gamp and the AWESOME financial help of Mike Ervin, we were able to put in a bid and go into contract on a new condo development in San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) district. It was a weird cycle of heartbreaks and hopes, dreams and despair, imaginings and scratching off. We saw about 20 properties since our move but none of them really made the right sense emotionally or financially.

I guess that’s a weird thing no one tells you about buying a home, it’s an X-Y axis between money and “satisfaction.” We just never got to the right balance of the two, until last Tuesday when Vanessa called me, in an agitated state. She wanted Lauren and I to drop everything and see “this great place.” So, come 4:30 we were outside, went in, and saw the place that “just felt right.”

Two of my friends, Ryan and Patrick gave great advice:

Said Ryan: When you find it, you just have to be ready to say, I just walked in here, but it’s right, let’s buy this very expensive thing.

Said Patrick: You have to love it, and you have to be able to walk away.

Upon entering and knowing the neighborhood, we loved it, and we were ready. The question was, would we have the opportunity to walk away, or would it be plucked. A few days later, our offer was accepted. A day later these photos were taken.

A few quick words to those who don’t know SF….

SoMa was formerly the realm of warehouses and, later, drug addicts, but come the new ball park, the endemic startup culture, and the growth of the Mission Bay biomedical research complex, all that has changed (for about a decade now). The unit is 2 blocks to Sony’s Metreon building, 2 blocks to the W hotel, near many fine restaurants, 3 blocks to the SF MOMA, 4 blocks to the Bloomingdales / Westfield center, 5 blocks to Market street, and 7 blocks to the Union Square shopping Mecca. We’ll be able to walk to some of the best features of this city of Gold and Fire.

As a bonus, we’re walking distance to transit which will help us embrace a walkable lifestyle. We’re also a quarter block away from Whole Foods, but having seen a tub of fruit there for $10, I’m thinking that may be a rare visit. Lastly, we’re just two right turns away from heading into freeway access should we want / need to visit the Peninsula or the South Bay.

But who cares about words, it’s all about the pictures. So here they are, from my iPhone.

My Future Home

I look back at that and think “Gosh, 2006.” The world was so different then. Lauren and I were in the earliest, most tentative parts of our relationship. We were going to test the strength of our relationship in the crucible of relocation, confusion, and new things.

And I was weary of the Bay Area. I was so tired of the traffic, of the dumpy airport, of vast fields of nothing to do. I was tired of the weight I was gaining, I was tired of the rain, tired of the struggle to make ends meet, just plain old tired. I needed to get away a while.

And I did. I ran back to the place that’s my healing place: Austin. Austin worked its magic, its lazy river heart washed out the toxic bits of mean and hard that had become embedded in me. Yoga, distance, Ruby, quiet, and the steady growing bond between Lauren and I changed me.

And then came schooling again, I reconnected with the learning, growing heart of me. I know this is not a part that I can ever leave to languish ever again. I re-learned mathematics and computer science. I learned new programming lanugages and then came Latin.

And I met wonderful people, from Ryan and Jamie, Matt and Nicole, Alfredo and Nicole, Marcus, Juan and Letty, my sister and brother-in-law and their sweet dog, the programmers of Sodade coffee house, my office mates…all of you animate the days of events and in giving yourself to my life gave my life color and flourish. I saw my sister wed, the gentlest-minded man I knew as a student wed and bring forth a sweet little girl, my best friend married and now has a young son. The sister of a friend I lost and I found each other again, and her life seems to be blossoming beautifully, a marriage looming next year. It’s been wonderful to be close to you all to see these events and positive unfoldings.

And I finished years-long work at my job. Things that were impossible, and unthinkable, slowly stones were broken by the slow dropping of water.

And adversities came: lung infections and appendicitis, but Lauren and I nursed each other, and those great friends mentioned above were there too.

Ultimately my animus returned back to the way it was in 2000 when I left Austin.

And in my world came new friends. We danced the nights away to the pulse of swing, we even dared Karaoke, I ran a 5K. I grew back into the healthy person I had let myself slip from. OK, well, I admit I still love the Chik-Fil-A too much and the Tex-Mex as well.

But this healing place, as big as it is, as tender and loving as it is — it and I need to separate for a while. I need to leave the summer heat and I want to go back to the bigness of a city, the biggest city I’ve ever loved: San Francisco.

When I was in 6th grade my Dad took my family there. The diners, the air, the bay, the tall buildings. I’ve loved the city on the Golden Gate since I before I was a teenager. It feels like going back is just giving into a fate that I’ve been fighting for a decade or two.

As I look back and consider going back to the place I’d lived before, I have to ask “Who was I then when I lived there?” My old romomate is now a father with a beautiful family. My haunts are not for he nocturnal eyeing and trading of phone numbers any more. I feel a break from my amor fati, my sickness unto death, my existentialist metaphor. So many of the things I sought there once I seek no more.

It’s a new day, a new time in this unknown but familiar city. I see something new this time, I see a place of boundless opportunity. It’s to that San Francisco I go. It’s there I go with the most loving girl I’ve ever known, it’s there I go to make, what I hope will be, our home.

And it’s scary there, the stakes high, the competition fierce. But I know that I can’t stay in my beloved Austin forever, I need the bigger confluence of this far-away place.

To the city I must say farewell, to the friends we have here, you are the best part of the friendly heart of my native state. You come with us in photos and memories and cards. I suspect my next post will be written with the Pacific to my left. Merry Christmas to all and Happy New Year as well.

Let me close with the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a work I studied this year whose beauty and wisdom is only matched by its silliness and brutality.

My mind moves me to speak of changed forms in new bodies

Ego ipse quoque mutabo

• Sources

• Homage

Thanks to Julia for the footage…

I even got an unsolicited Facebook message saying “Are you losing weight?.” Music, pure music, to my fatty, fat, fat ears.

So here’s where I am in the scaling up from Couch to 5K: I now do 3 pairs of run-5/walk-2. This was going along swimmingly until last week when SHIN SPLITS OH MY FREAKING GOOAAAGGUUH THIS HURTS entered my life. With that extra minute of running (time three), something really started bugging my shins. So I had to take last week off.

I was worried about getting back on the bandwagon but I got some great advice and found a real-deal, rubbery-bouncy track to run on here in North Austin. So, today I headed over to the middle school and did the afore-described program without incident.

Good motivators also came last week during Lauren’s birthday festivities.

I reached into my closet and put on my size 36 jeans — I put them on and it wasn’t pinchy at all when I wore them. I then tried on a pair of size 36 slacks and — again — I was able to wear them. So for Lauren’s birthday I ate steak and cheesecake (uh, not a highlight in a fitness régime) in size 36 pants.

This puts me about 205-6 down from 214. I hope to break the 200 barrier before Thanksgiving.