Semiannual blog post

Dear internet,

I'm not dead, and to prove it, here's a quick update on what I've been up to for the last few months.

Love,
Bruce

My sister Kristy got back from her mission to Texas in December (after being away for a year and a half), and we flew her down to visit us. We spent a day in San Francisco, including a few rides on the trolley. We (Karren and I) also decided to never go to Fisherman's Wharf again. It's just a noisy tourist trap.

We've been trying to eat better, and one facet of that has been making (and happily eating!) honey wheat bread. The bread maker doesn't handle it well, so we do it the old fashioned way: kneading it by hand.

Karren's friends Erin and Ty came to San Francisco on vacation, and we met up with them at Ghirardelli Square for some yummy ice cream and chocolate. I've heard a lot about them, so it was fun to meet them (On our way there, Karren and I wore the smittens that my sister-in-law Amanda made for us for Christmas. They're mittens: one for each person, and then one big one with two openings so that you hand hold hands. :)

I gave Karren Zubbles (colored bubbles) for Christmas, so we had fun playing with them one afternoon.

Karren chopped off the end of her finger. She called me at work one day asking when I was coming home. I said "in about 30 minutes", and she said, "Do you think you can come right now? I chopped off the end of my finger. Don't worry; I think it's still attached." I came home, and we ended up going to urgent care because it wouldn't quit bleeding. The culprit: butternut squash. (And, for the record, the end of her finger was not still attached, as you can see in the picture below.) She got mostly skin, and her finger healed up four weeks to the day after the cut.

We went on a bike ride along the coast in Monterey for Karren's birthday, and then went people watching in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The Pebble Beach golf tournament was in full swing, so there were lots of rich people hanging around. (Also, lots of Ferraris: we saw three of these on the same street.)

We went hiking in Sunol Wilderness area (by Pleasanton, in the East Bay) a couple Saturdays ago. It was really pretty, and we saw cows, squirrels, lots of turtles, and some poppies.

While we were there, Karren had her first up-close bovine experience:

This past weekend we flew to Utah and drove to Idaho to visit my grandparents, whom Karren hadn't yet met. On the way (ok, out of the way) we picked up Kristy. We also visited some aunts and uncles while we were there. We drove back down to Salt Lake City yesterday and had lunch with my aunts and uncles and David and Shanna. It was fun to see everyone, but we were really glad to be home to sleep in our own bed last night.

Karren and I are settling into married life, and it's been wonderful so far. We're looking forward to many more adventures together.

Spice shelves

Our kitchen is really small, so Karren and I made some shelves for our spices to add a little more storage space. And some color. :)

The problem

Six coats of paint: 2 primer, 3 red, 1 clear finish

How to dry paint when you don't have a garage

The solution

We had to stealthily drill holes in the wall during quiet time at our apartments. Well, somewhat stealthily.

Ta-da!

Karren helped. It was a team project. I'm just in the pictures to get the credit.

Oooooh! Shiny!

Just in case you want to get some cool shelves like ours, here's a handy guide to how to make and mount shelves:

1. Buy oak boards, angle brackets, and screws at Lowe's in California.
2. Fly them to Portland so you can use your dad's table saw, drill press, and random orbit sander.
3. Fly them back to California.
4. Figure out how to covertly paint and dry them without arousing the suspicions of the landlord or turning your carpet red.
5. Paint them with primer. Let them dry in your living room.
6. Sand.
7. Paint them with primer. Let them dry in your living room.
8. Sand.
9. Paint them with red paint. Let them dry in your outside storage unit.
10. Sand.
11. Paint them with red paint. Let them dry in the shower.
12. Sand.
13. Paint them with red paint. (back to the living room)
14. DON'T SAND! It will ruin the shinys!
15. Paint them with water-based satin polyurethane (to prevent spices from sticking to the tacky oil-based paint).
16. Attach the mounting hardware to the shelves.
17. Drill holes in your wall.
18. Buy drywall anchors and install them in the holes.
19. Notice that the wall in your kitchen is not straight.
20. Buy washers to fill the gap between the angle brackets and the wall (see previous item).
21. Screw the shelves into the wall.
22. Beautifully arrange your spice collection on the shelves, taking into account size, color, container type, spice family, and lexicographic order.
23. Run around like it's Christmas, high-fiving everyone in the apartment (i.e. your wife).

I got married

Two months ago. I guess I haven't posted in a while.

Gripes about finding housing

Karren and I are getting married a month from today, and we have no idea where we're going to live. (OK, maybe we have some idea, but haven't chosen a place.) We've been looking for housing, and I've noticed a few things about the process. Before I get all negative, though, I have one positive thing to say:

PadMapper (http://www.padmapper.com/) is awesome. Like, really awesome. If you need to find an apartment, you should use it.

OK, maybe one more: the internet is awesome. It's amazing that I can see hundreds of listings, with pictures and descriptions, and have my computer automatically filter them by criteria that I care about and plot them on a map. That's really cool!

Now that I've gotten all of that positive stuff out of the way, here are the promised gripes:

• I wish there were an easy way to find places with features that we care about. You can search by number of bedrooms, or price, or square feet, which is great, but what about things like:
  • Washer/dryer in the unit
  • Dishwasher
  • "Nice" (good paint/floors/carpet/appliances/cabinets)
  • Kitchen fits more than half of a person and has more than 1 square foot of counter space
    
• Everyone seems to think that their property is "adorable", "cute", "lovely", or "charming". Uh huh.
  
• Why can't they show pictures of, well, you know, the actual apartment in the apartment listing? I mean, it's really great that the community has a nice sign with flowers in front, but I care a lot more about what our kitchen will look like. Or our bedroom. Or even the closet. I don't really care that much about the pool, the fitness center, the road, the office awning, the sidewalk, the lounge, random bushes, or any of the other things that everyone seems to include pictures of instead of the actual place that we're going to live.
• While we're on the subject of pictures, why can't they be bigger than a postage stamp? It's not 1995 anymore; big pictures won't break the internets.
• A 500-square-foot apartment is not "LARGE".
  
• All caps isn't acceptable. The probability of me reading your listing goes up dramatically if you use some lowercase letters every once in a while.

Hopefully we'll find a place soon.

(And if you know of a nice place with a washer and dryer and dishwasher for [preferably quite a bit] under $1600 between Menlo Park and San Jose, let me know!)