Monthly Archives: July 2007

Kaisa Comes to California

My sister came to visit me in California! 😀

Highlights of the trip thus far

Her flight from GRB->MSP was delayed nearly 2 hours due to weather in Minneapolis, but there was no way she could have missed her connecting flight: She got off the plane, read the monitor to find her next gate, turned around and got back on it 🙂 Pretty sweet coincidence!
Dennys for supper at 9pm. I don’t know my own city to know where else to go!
Jason & I still had to work an 8 hr day today, so Kaisa was on her own at our apartment. She accomplished much:
- Finished a book for AP English
- Cleaned my bathroom, which was, and I quote, “gross.”
  ::hangs head in shame:: Thanks for cleaning up for me, Kaisa! Love you!
Salsa Chicken, made from scratch according to secret recipe ~~found at the first hit here~~ passed down from generation to generation in our family since 2007. It’s actually quite good, despite being ridiculously simple to make, and me forgetting to put the cheese on top this time.
She has to post responses to every chapter of the book she read on her teacher’s blog. Yuck… I took a nap while she borrowed my laptop 🙂
Going to San Francisco tomorrow!

It took me 5 hours to get to work today

1: Wake up in Portland, OR, 4:05am
2: Drive to the airport parking lot
3: Take the shuttle bus to the airport proper
4: Breakfast in the line to check in / outside the security checkpoint. Jeni recommends not drinking the coffee. Do it anyways for the caffeine. It wasn’t as bad as she said, but it wasn’t good, either 🙂 Muffin was good.
5: Arrive at gate to discover that you have been upgraded from boarding group C: “Steerage” to boarding group B: “People who have a slight chance of a preferred seat if they sit in the back of the plane”. I got a window, it was sweet.
6: Fly to San Jose, finishing book “Sphere”, and listening to 88-year-old first-generation Italian American woman tell me the story of her family. Twice. She was interesting to listen to though. I hope I am as active when I reach 88, though preferably with either a better short-term memory or someone with as poor a short-term memory as me to talk with…
7: Arrive San Jose airport, traverse to “Ground Transportation”
8: Get on the 10 to Santa Clara Caltrain. Be instantly reminded of everything you dislike about California, all rolled into one girl yelling into her cellphone:

It’s my birthday in 5 months.
(Pause)
It’s my birthday in 5 months.
Oh my god, I’m going to be 19. Ewww.
(Remainder of conversation deleted due to inability to filter intelligible discourse from the expletives.)

9: Transfer to the 60. Save $1.75 because the coin machine is jammed.
10: Disembark at Scott & Walsh. Walk to work.
11: Wish it were still Portland

Flying to Portland

1: Take the 60 from Scott and Walsh to the Santa Clara Transit Center.
2: Transfer to the 10 to the airport.
3: Check in.
4: Find out why Southwest is so cheap- they don’t even bother assigning seats. Wow. I guess that makes it easier to overbook…
5: Wait for the plane. 20 extra minutes. 🙁

Crash and Burn

Bike crash and landscaping burn, that is. Seems Jason just wasn’t satisfied with his nice newly patched tubes and realigned derailer. After so many crappy rides to work, a nice one for a change just wasn’t enough excitement. So… He crashed it. Don’t worry, he’s fine, just a little dirty. If you look closely here, you can see a leaf in his seat quick release, a very dirty and banged up pedal, and even a drooping chain that is pretty clearly not on a gear. Nice work, Jason!

btw, Did anybody get the movie reference? Please tell me I’m not the only nerd on this site…

[Edit 7/17/07 09:31a]: not new tires, but rather, newly patched tubes. (Insert internet tubes joke here: _________) [/Edit]

[Edit 7/17/07 8:11p]: My apologies to Jason… I did not mean to be mean; I think I was too excited over making up a movie reference to my limited repertoire to think about how that was probably not the most tactful way to title this entry & tone to write it in… Sorry! [/Edit]

Worse Than Thumbtacks

So on the way home from work on Friday, Jason made an interesting discovery. There exists a plant whose seed pods or stalks or something that you could find lying in the road have extremely long thorns the size of thumbtacks. This part of said plant apparently also has a penchant for bike tires. So much so, in fact, that Jason popped not one, but both of his bike tires on it. And thus ensued some 3 or more hours of finding leaks, patching holes, finding more leaks, buying more patches, patching more holes, replacing tires, and readjusting things until finally, around 11:30pm, his bike was restored to fully working order. Moral of the story: Mother Nature is always out to catch the unwary traveller… especially the environmentally-friendly biker…

Fireworks Over San Francisco

Happy 4th of July Everyone! Jason and I took the Caltrain up to San Francisco to see the fireworks tonight. (See photo 😉 ) It was a fun trip, though in all honesty, the fireworks were not significantly better than what we had at home in Green Bay or Madison. I haven’t actually seen Madison’s first hand, but I hear they are more like Seattle’s last summer: pretty sweet and choreographed to music. I wish I could have been there to see yours, Mason… Anyhow, it was a fun afternoon away from work, and for a pleasant change, the Caltrain and Muni were working pretty slick, and we’re getting home as slickly as we got here. I like!

Worst Bike Ever

Walmart. $80. I thought I would be titling this post “Sweet New Ride”… But then I actually rode it. It’s going to be a long 7 weeks if I cant find some way to fix or exchange it…

The Spark Between

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