Happy Thanksgiving & Pictures from Halloween

Traffic lights in Los Angeles, as seen from a car

Green light

 Lights in Los Angeles seem to work differently from anywhere else in the world.  The green light is deceivingly simple.  Go, it says, go now.  The intersection is yours.  But maybe you want to read on before you do....

The Counter

Next to almost every light is a counter.  Rumor has it the counter was introduced for pedestrians, a probably mythical and certainly now extinct breed of humans that was vastly inferior to drivers.  Drivers have wheels where pedestrians apparently only had legs.  Go figure.

The counter, however, is great for drivers.  It counts down to the point at which the green light will disappear. This gives you, the driver, an accurate estimate of how much you should accelerate:  Numbers over ten, just speed up a bit; number 10 to 5, push down gently but firmly; numbers 4 and 0, come on now -- let the engines roar and floor it!  No speed is too fast on city streets and if you see any creatures that seem to be blocking your way, remember that those pedestrians are probably mythical anyway.   Don't let them get in the way of you making it past what is probably the slowest light in all of LA!

Yellow light

This light was especially created for people wanting to make a left turn.  In the city where traffic never stops, making a left turn is rather complicated.  Only one or two cars will get the privilege of turning left per full cycle of the lights.  The yellow light is the sign for the left turners to say their prayers, cross their fingers, call their loved ones one more time and attempt that daring maneuver of turning left while avoiding high speed drivers making it through the intersection at the last moment. To make it worse, the drivers in the cross street are revving their engines and getting their hands ready to honk hard if you dare to still be anywhere near the intersection once their lights turn green.  One - two - three, go now, or no -- stop, yes , go.  Oh I don't know.

Red light

The agreement is that this light means stop, we all know that.  But that is theory, you see, and how does it really work in practice?    What does stop really mean, and where should you stop?  Stopping is hard, especially if you were already driving fast.  Given that there is always ample time between this light turning red and the lights on the cross streets turning green, it is worth considering whether stopping at the next red light can be counted as an indirect way to obey this light, don't you think?   Furthermore, those drivers trying to make a left turn are sore losers and you have the right of way anyway, so if you drive fast enough it will be clear to them that they will have to wait until you have passed.    That makes it really quite safe and kind of legal, don't you think?

See you next time at an intersection in Los Angeles,
Dirk

More birthdays

Everything is starting to become a little more routine here, and that is very good.  For the first time in ages, we were able to get the girls in school on time, maybe even a little early today. It was very much enjoyed by all.

We spend two great weekends with activities around the area. The weekend before last, we were in San Diego, went to a birthday party, and saw tons of pumpkins in a Halloween Pumpkin patch that was lots of fun.  It was very hot for the time of the year again, the pumpkin patch was in the mountains between San Diego and Los Angeles and the highest temperature was around 37 Celcius (100 F) that day. That is very hot.  During most of last week, Santa Monica has also been unusually hot and relatively humid (for here at least).  Luckily things cooled down last weekend, when we ran lots of errands (boxes came in and out of storage, in the hope that one day we will fit it all into our house) and spend the Sunday at the Discovery Cube Orange County, a fantastic museum / activity place for kids.

It is funny how our feeling for distances has already been distorted:  The cube is about an hour's drive away, but we just got in the car and started driving on the endless LA freeways (this map gives you a great overview, scroll down slowly to enjoy to its fullest).

Oh a message from our sponsors:
Today's blog post is brought to you by the Birthday Boy.
Dirk: Did you know this is my first ever birthday in the US?  I was always in the US over the Summer or Winter holidays and when I was in the US for a full year in 2000, I happened to be in Montreal (Canada) for my birthday.  It was a rather uneventful day, "I went to work" basically summarizes it, but I had a fantastic weekend behind me so it still was a great day.

I did some more writing on Java Spring at work, learned more about data science and worked on my ping-pong skills, an essential part of working at Pivotal :-)  Oh and I got to unpack the fantastic ChromeCast (the 2014 model) at night, which really solves a bunch of the issues we had around media in the living room.

This is from the SF office, but ours looks quite similar

Size of a big USB drive

More news another day! 

Dirk & Lea

Some of the more remarkable things you see in Santa Monica

Quick update here with nothing about us, but a lot about what happens around us.  Los Angeles is a big town (larger than the country of the Netherlands, if you take the larger LA economic area, however vaguely defined that is) and it shows.

1. Food

So people ask me how the food is.  That really depends, there are terrible places and great places.  But just the other day I visited the great bookstore around the corner from my work (Hennessey & Ingals art and architecture bookstore) and found that LA has had a reputation for healthy and very Californian eating that goes much further back than you'd think:  In the early 1900 (I think 1910's if I remember well), LA was not only the place where the film industry started but also a very popular place for wealthy people who had contacted TB.  In those days, staying in a place with clean air was the best known cure and with its climate, LA was the place to go to (this is of course more than a little ironic as LA is not exactly known for its clear air these days, but we are so close to the coast with a Western wind almost every day that we can ignore this).
Of course these TB patients tried all kinds of diets in the way that current patients of you-name-it still think they can eat their way out of disease.  Apparently this got so out of hand that people complained that eating in LA was no fun at all, as alfalfa and avocado were placed on unsuspecting food items that didn't deserve that kind of treatment, including  burgers.  So 100 years ago, alfalfa and avocado were basically just where they are now, only now kale in all varieties and roasted brussels sprouts have joined their ranks.  Today I was served a Mexican salad from California Pizza Kitchen, which had guacemole, salsa, greens and ..  kale.  Plus ça change (French for, well, you look it up).

2. Vegetarian Food

So if the food is varied and sometimes a little crazy, how is to be vegetarian in the land of the burger?  Well it was the first one, and we didn't go because we were to busy, but look at this billboard:

So that is an opportunity to dress up, drink beer from steins and eat vegan food.  Still not sure how we managed to not go there, and it was in Santa Monica!

3. Weird People

I work in downtown Santa Monica, where all the tourists are (and boy, are there some tourists around here), plus a whole bunch of shoppers with money to spend, plus a good bunch of business people who fill up the office towers that make this into a little downtown.  All of that of course attracts, American style, homeless people and plain weird people.  

Lea's favorite is a bike messenger guy who has a cart with a very large American flag on it.  The messenger is very, very  suntanned and often wears nothing more than the tiniest swim speedo you can find, with the American flag printed on it.  When he actually delivers something, he first puts on some slightly larger boxer shorts, also with the American flag on them, so he looks decent.  Kind of. 

Well looking for a great picture of him, turns out there is even a youtube video that was taken of him in 2012 (from a bike helmet, so beware of some shaky imagery)

I swear his swim pants are two sizes smaller nowadays. 

My favorite weirdo of this week was on his phone in Third St today, talking slightly too loud as people do.  I was drinking a coffee to treat myself after a nice presentation and musing on the fact that several years ago, I was still disturbed by grown-up people seemingly talking to themselves in a public place.  I think the first one I ever saw was on a platform in London and I seriously worried that this person was going insane and would surely jump in front of the next train.  This was before I spotted the phone earbuds of course.  

Either way, as I was sipping my coffee today and couldn't help but notice that the man in front of me was talking an awful lot about politics and, even though he did pause every now, the other party was not saying that much.  Then I noticed his phone was really quite bulky and old.  Then I noticed his earbuds were not actually connected to his phone, but the end was just loosely hanging in the air.  

So we have gone full circle:  From normal people looking insane with earbuds, to insane people using earbuds to look normal.  Welcome to LA!

 

Birthday!

It has been another busy two weeks, but very happily busy with the 'business' of celebrating Delphine's birthday!  It is amazing to see how she has grown into such a real big girl!

The birthday was necessarily a bit different than previous years, given that we have just moved and she hasn't had the time yet to make really good friends here.  So we celebrated it in San Diego with her friends there one weekend, and then again here with some friends from school last weekend.  Great opportunity for us to practice our cake baking!  And it was fantastic for Delphine to see Simone again and to have her school friends over for the first time.

The parties went really well and everybody had a great time.  Delphine is over the moon about her presents (thank you all) and really liked it.  Both parties were a little less well attended than planned because some people had urgent other things to take care of and on a small party, that makes a big impact.  But luckily there were enough kids left to have a great time and it gave us time to really talk with some grown-ups, which was absolutely great.

On top of that, the girls went to Orange County Discovery Cube last Friday, which was an absolute blast.  The went with Lea's brother, mother and sister-in-law, which was great because Lea's brother will be away until March or so, so a great goodbye was in order.  After the little girls played for ours and discovered a lot, they also had a great dinner at the cheesecake factory.  Yum.

Molly (our cat) is really settling in and has started to explore the neighborhood some more.  She often goes out now and has so far always come back when we call for her.  One of the first nights she got stuck on the roof of our neighbor's garage, but she has since found out how to get down from there.

You will hear more from those neighbors in a little bit because he makes the biggest and scariest Halloween display of the whole town.  Apparently he spends about three days just to set it up, applying all his knowledge from propmaking for the movies.  I am really looking forward to it but he warned us it just may be too scary for the kids....

Lea is working away, staying only just ahead of the students each week.  It is very stressful and too bad that with our busy Summer first and Delphine's birthday now, she never got the time to really get ahead of the class. Luckily she has a plan for her two courses and she mainly needs to create new slides, but that still is a lot of work.  On top of that, she will have her first teaching observation by a member of her tenure committee this week, so more reasons to be nervous.  Of course, she will be fine but it is stressful.

Dirk is still on the beach:  The project he was on got delayed, then it was stuck because the scope was not clear enough and now they are waiting for hardware, software and approval from other departments of the client.  If the project goes through it would be great, from what he knows it combines the results of big data and analytics with a user friendly dashboard.  Right up his street.

our storage place - full

Finally, we have found a great baby sitter (the tall girl on some of the pictures), who has really helped us out in the last few weeks when Jenna had to come home from the nursery twice.  She will also look after the kids some this weekend so we can hopefully get rid of all the boxes that are still stacked around our bed.  There is still a lot to do, so not sure if we will complete it this weekend, but progress would already be fantastic.

A Monday afternoon visit to the beach

It's working

So here is my trying hard to keep to a more or less weekly post on this blog.  Today's topic is the first question many people ask us: How is work?

Lea has starting teaching in earnest 2 weeks ago.  It is going very well and she is really enjoying it.  The challenges of an American college do indeed exist (a few difficult students, doing lots of class-related administration) but it far outweighs all the nice things, mainly the mostly really motivated students who are eager to have a discussion in class (about almost everything, of course).  Her colleagues have been nothing but wonderful and SMC (Santa Monica College) is by and large a place that is full of friendly people who keep it running smoothly.  Lea even got a first week recovery present from one of her colleagues and several cards as well to welcome her.

It has been very hot here, and especially not just one occasional day but almost 10 days of afternoon temperatures in the 90 F (32 C).  Because the rooms in her ecological and green building do not have air conditioning, Lea moved a few classes to grassy area outside, where the students continued to work in groups and be quite productive.  That is dedication!

Meanwhile, Dirk has been going to the beach every day.  Yes, it does have palm trees but you can only see them through the window:  The beach is the area dedicated to employees who are new or are between projects, and his assignment has been to get to know people and read up on stuff.  So his head is more or less exploding with new knowledge (Ruby, Java Spring, Vim, ..) but luckily the real beach is only a block away and a refreshing walk during lunch time is helping a lot.  Not too many problems with the heat there, although the bike ride to work (about 3 miles, 15 minutes) is long enough to require a change of shirt on arrival.

The colleagues here are also very nice, mostly very young but super friendly.  Dirk's work is basically a big room full of geeks who, thanks to pair programming, have social skills. Hooray for that!

We are close enough to the beach that to have a house without air conditioning and for most of the year, that will be fine given the evening sea breeze.  However, during the heatwave the evening just brought in more moisture and hardly any cold.  The girls didn't sleep so well and this was wearing on them (and us) quite a bit.  Luckily things have cooled down now and everybody is catching up on sleep.

Meanwhile, the girls got a hair cut:

Delphine's birthday is in a few days!  This is of course fantastic, but it also makes her miss her Dutch friends very much.  We will have no fewer than two parties for her here:  One in San Diego with her old friends; and one here in Santa Monica with her almost-there new friends.  We have been so busy we haven't even had time to buy her any real presents yet, but we have some good ideas:  I am sure that this too will be fixed last minute .  :-)
 

Two minute summary of two months in Santa Monica

Hi and welcome to our new blog.  A Dutch translation is forthcoming.

Let's start to say that we are sorry that we haven't kept you up to date more.  Things have been superbusy and then we had some confusion last week whether or not Lea had posted something like this on Facebook or not.  Those of you who are following Dirk on Google (google.com/+dirkjanssen-dpj) may have seen of this info already.

We will from now on post longer things and lots of pictures here, or at least, we will try :-)  If something substantial has been posted, we will make announcements with links to our Facebook and Google+ sites, so you don't have to check on this blog.

Today is the block party in Oak St, where we live (an email update with our full address and phone number is being written as we speak).   It is Labor Day in the US, so everybody has Monday off and the street is blocked off so we can all meet and mingle.  The girls are really looking forward to making new friends and we are looking forward to getting to know our neighbors a little better.

We live in a nice, cozy 1920's style wooden bungalow house.  It is the back unit of what they call a 'duplex' here.  Nice wooden floors, lots of windows and bay windows, pretty front yard with grass and a patio outside where we eat every night.  It is very cute and we like it very much.  It is a fair bit smaller than our house in Breda, so we have tons of boxes in storage for now.  Luckily there are all these built-in cabinets and with Lea's skills at packing stuff in small spaces, we are slowly taking in more and more boxes.

Here is a picture from just before our container arrived, so no furniture yet but beautiful light:

The girls are going to school now:  Delphine has started in 3rd Grade of the Will Rogers Elementary (you can google who Will Rogers was, quite interesting) with Mr Witt as her teacher.  She is working hard on learning how to write in English, luckily she is having zero problems speaking it!  She is starting to make new friends but of course they never come as fast as you want them to.

Jenna is going to a day care/ preschool which is called Mount Olive Preschool, it is part of a small church very close to our house.  We wish we had more pictures from the inside, it is like a beehive with kids and rooms everywhere, very cute and wonderful.  Jenna likes it very much and she keeps calling it "my new Altijd Lente" (the name of her day care in Holland).  For some reason, Jenna has completely given up on speaking Dutch which is worrying us a fair bit, but we are hoping to coax her back into using it in the house.  She can still speak it fluently, she just avoids it.

We planned to speak only Dutch at home, but this is not working out so well because Lea's mother is staying with us for a good week right now.  Of course she doesn't speak Dutch, so the kids naturally switch to English.  It is great to have Betty here and it is fantastic for the kids.  The occasion, however,  is a sad one:  Lea's father passed away on Aug 18th.  He was 88 and doing relatively well until the last 2 weeks, when things went downhill very fast.  We are all still a little in shock; the funeral was only a good week ago and it still hasn't fully sank in with Betty, or with us.  The funeral and the reception were really nice, thanks a lot to all of you who were there or sent flowers, gifts, etc.

Lea is really enjoying her new job, she just finished the first week of teaching at Santa Monica College.  Due to all the family circumstances, the move and the relatively short notice at which Santa Monica hired her, she is a little behind, but catching up.  Lea really loves her work, the campus is beautiful and a 10 minute walk away, and the colleagues are outstanding.  She just has to get used to being called "professor Hald" :-)

Dirk will start working tomorrow as a software engineer at Pivotal Labs, a company that makes website and web services for businesses.  What is exciting about it is the way they work (they do pair programming) and the pace of things in general.  Their hiring process was also quite different:  After a one-hour first assessment, Dirk was simply asked to come work there for a day.  So at the end of that day, he had a very good idea what the new job is going to be like.  Unlike most other programming jobs, you end up talking all day as you work with another person on one computer (two keyboards and screens, so you don't have to push each other aside when you have a good idea).  This older and as always a bit over the top post by Tim Ferriss summarizes it nicely.

We just had a block party (straatfeest) today and it was really good, we met lots of friendly faces and the girls made new friends.  It made us think of the wonderful Postlaan in Breda, of course, and a party that was hard to match.  Jenna often asks about Britt and Sarah and the children from Altijd Lente that she wished were here.  It is great to be here, but sometimes sad that we had to leave so many people and things behind.  When that happens, we sit on the patio at night, look at the palm trees and decide to go to the beach again this weekend :-)

That's it for now, back to unpacking boxes!
Lea and Dirk