a blog by Ian Kennedy
We went up to Tahoe last weekend to catch some of the record snows that have fallen on the Sierras over the past few weeks. Our digital camera’s battery ran out of juice so I only have this shot of a tricked out Mustang that we saw on the road but Doug Yarrington posted more pictures here.
According to a story in The Guardian, The Economist reports that if you added up the value of all the frequent flier miles outstanding, they would add up to $700 billion, surpassing the value of any other floating currency in the world.
Who hasn’t thought that there should be a free market in Frequent Flier Points? Heck, why stop there, there should be an open market to trade my Safeway sandwich points (the cashier reminds me cheerily every time, “Mr. Kennedy, you’re only five sandwiches away from a free lunch!!”).
Now that stock market quotes have become more or less commoditized, Reuters could set their sites on this new market (they should before eBay, PayPal, or American Express lock up this market). Matching deals between the family that just relocated from New Jersey with too many Continental Airlines miles with someone with enough Hawaiian Air miles for the family trip to the Islands may not be as lucrative as feeding quotes for the Bank of Japan but the new economy is all about making up for thin margins with scale.
They’re already trading online gaming currencies – it’s only a matter of time before you can trade your Second Life dollars in for a meatspace trip to Disneyland.
Once this stuff becomes legal tender, I can’t wait to pay my first tax bill in Chuck-E-Cheese tokens!
For the last weekend of the year, we travelled two hours south to Monterey where we stayed for two nights to unwind a bit. We made no specific plans except to see the famous aquarium where the only captive white shark in the world continues to thrive in their big tank.
Things really clicked for us on this trip. We drove down without a lick of traffic and were greeted to a sun that parted the clouds that had been raining down on us for the past few days. Poking around for something to do that evening (it was New Year’s Eve after all) we found out that Monterey sponsors something called First Night in which the streets are blocked off to a host of roving bands, dancers, and other performers. For $15 you can drop into any number of events going on across town and in the space of a few hours we took the kids to see a world-class opera singer perform arias to us in California’s oldest playhouse, a local jazz band perform in a 1930’s era film house, an African drumming troupe, Greek line dancers, the local taiko dojo, flamenco dancing, belly-dancing, and a monkey with his organ-grinding master. We all picked up some elvish-looking hats with bells on them to keep things hopping. We stayed out as long as we could but the rain set in around 9 PM and after we took our showers and curled up in our bed we couldn’t keep our eyes open and ended up drifting off around 10:30.
New Year’s Day was perfect, the sun shone brightly and we awoke early and had a relaxed breakfast in our room and later somehow joined in member’s only early opening of the aquarium and were surrounded by lots of people that really knew their fish. The jellyfish exhibit was most impressive and ended up being the most represented in the photos I took of the weekend.
After lunch, just as it started to get crowded, we left the aquarium and, much to the delight of the kids, rented a four-wheeled cycle which we could power up and down the seaside path. They both enjoyed sitting up in a seat hitched up on the handlebars greeting everyone we passed. We later ended the day with a delicious seafood meal where Tyler & Julia had their first taste of lobster (Tyler was not impressed).
Today the rain started up again so we drove down 17-mile drive to Carmel and, after a brief look around, headed back home. A perfect weekend, especially for the discover that such beauty is only a short drive away.
Our kitchen/dinning room looks like one of those life-sized dioramas in the Smithsonian that should be titled something like “Rental Apartment in Alameda, circ. 1980.” Behind me on the wall someone thought it’d be funny to put up a Norman Rockwell print (signed litho by the way) of some Pilgrim in the stockade with the words “Ye Glutton” on a sign around his neck – not exactly the thing you want to see while eating dinner.
The stove has those electric coil things which never really works for cooking anything but Campbell’s soups because it takes forever to heat up. Also, the largest of the coils is busted so we only have three tiny ones to work with.
But the strangest thing in the kitchen are these two stuffed roosters up on the shelf. I know they want to put things up there to fill up the space and make it cozy but stuffed poultry? When you look at them up close, as in the shot below, you’ll see that the one on the right is particularly menacing. There’s really not a good seat at the dinning table – you either have to look at “Ye Glutton,” the menacing chicken, or out the window at this weird stone cherub/angel thing that’s placed right outside the window with the plastic ivy.
Living in a one bedroom, furnished apartment, with a pull out sofa bed for the kids, has taught us that small children are not unlike electrons in their observance of the immutable laws of the universe. The smaller the space you give them, the higher the energy. This is our living room at 8 pm. Not much of a place for peace and quiet!
Our cars arrive.
. . . and if feels like we’re still in the First Act! Another weekend of driving around looking at open houses and hoping that the right place will fall in our laps. We’ve narrowed down where we want to live to such a small area that we pretty much know each house on the market there. We drive the streets one last time just to see if there’s some FSBO that slipped past without us knowing. We’ve got three internet filters running as well as a buyer’s agent scanning the MLS every morning. It’s pretty sad.
Tyler knows what each realtor’s signs look like and shouts out when he sees one. Either Izumi or I will say, “no, that’s the one that reeks of cats” or, “that the one with the psycho neighbors” or, “that one had that weird fishpond thing in the backyard.” We know this market!
Because there was nothing new to look at, we ventured up into the Berkeley hills just so I could show Izumi what it was like up there. After winding up and down some narrow hilltop roads with Izumi and Tyler both saying that the cliffside roads were scaring the bejezus out of them, Julia threw up. I guess we’re not going to live in the hills!
This evening, all tired out and a bit punch drunk after being cooped up in the car all weekend, we went to a local Chinese restaurant for dinner. The food was good and the service great but when the kids starting dancing in their seats to a version of My Favorite Things played on traditional Chinese instruments (trust me, it sounded odd) we all bust out laughing. We so very much want a place to call home!
We left Pennington, our home of four years, in the early morning fog to catch our flight to California. The limo driver said that he’s been taking a lot of people out to the airport for their moves out of New Jersey. This echoed what our mover said in that they’ve been extremely busy because Sony just shut down their New Jersey campus and have moved a lot of people out West. It seem like those involved in the relocation business have a good sense of the economy and from talking with them, it seems like things are picking up. The tide rises and the boats start to drift around.
We’re now in a furnished apartment in Alameda, where we eventually want to live. More house-hunting this weekend but at least we’ve got a rental contract that we can take to the School District office so we can get Tyler enrolled in the local Kindergarten.
I’ll try and get the digital camera hooked up so I can post some pictures from our various goodbye parties. Lots of tears and I think it really hit Tyler pretty hard in ways that we will not fully appreciate until we see how things go at his new school. It’s always sad to leave friends behind.
Just got through packing up 350 boxes of stuff that’s all going on a trailer truck tomorrow. When we moved here four years ago we had 150 boxes on half a container, my how we’ve grown.