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