Old is New Again

I started this blog ages ago, originally it was on Livejournal because that’s where my friends were. I moved it here in 2013 when I became frustrated with their format, and then semi retired it when I decided to start my motorcycle focused blog.

Well I’m going to be posting here more often. With the latest addition to the family not being a motorcycle I needed a place to write about it. It’s silly to start another blog since this one will do nicely.

Stay tuned for my ramblings on life… specifically Fatherhood.

Beautiful Girl

Let’s start this with the admission of the fact that I’ve had a bit of wine tonight.

I’ve just come back to settling you little dragon. You’re so big that when you move around you sometimes bonk your head on the side of your crib.

You woke up and luckily I was able to settle you down with out either of us waking your amazing mom.

So I lie here in bed watching you on the tiny baby monitor screen. Thinking of how precious you are. So beautiful, so tiny.

You’re growing so fast. I try hold you as much as I can. Sooner than I’ll like you’ll be too big and too mature to want anything to do with Dad hugs.

Hopefully we’ll come full circle and you’ll tear up as much as I am as you read this.

I’ll take that hug now.

Baby Dragon’s First Night Alone

It was a rough week. Little Dragon wasn’t sleeping like she used to. Every day she woke up early, and on Thursday she woke up at 3:30 ready to take on the world where Mom and Dad were still trying to recover from a rough Wednesday.

We had spent a good part of the previous weekend getting her crib ready

in the Dragon Den, and were planning on beginning the transition soon. However, we weren’t planning on it until the weekend and are still waiting for blackout shades. Four nights of too early wake ups moved the timetable up a day.

Thursday evening I moved the baby monitor, white noise generator, and taped plastic bags over the windows.

Everything was ready except for Little Dragon and her parents.

I’ll save you the details of our agony as the few minutes we let her cry seemed like an eternity, until we decided to soothe her and got her to fall asleep.

Then a few hours later we went to bed, with the empty cradle there. Such a painful reminder of how quickly she’s growing up. How every night of her life she’s slept in the same room as us.

Those who know us as a couple might be surprised at the fact that my lovely wife was the emotional one and I was the one telling her it would be fine. Not that I wasn’t upset, however I was holding it together until she started crying as she held the baby monitor staring at it looking for the slightest movement. My wife doesn’t cry often, and of course I’ve spent a good portion of my life is spent trying to make sure she has no reason to. (while simultaneously often being the cause) This rate showing of emotion really cemented in my heart how momentous this was, and that while she’ll always be our little girl she won’t always be little and not always close by.

Which means when picking her up from the crib this morning she got extra snuggles from dad.

Feeling a bit lost

Some days are just long. She was so hard to get to sleep. She just took what was a normal day and sucked the energy right out of me. So tired.

I find myself thinking “what have we gotten ourselves into?”

Not for the last time I’m sure.

Baby Girl

You just wouldn’t go to sleep tonight. Eight hours you were awake, at a time when four hours awake is an eternity. As always Dad had the magic touch, finally getting you to pass out over his shoulder. Not that you wanted to sleep, you wanted to stay awake forever with the grown ups. So much fussing.

I’m not going to lie, Mom and Dad were on the edge of losing it. We haven’t slept for more than a few hours at a time for over a month. It’s hard.

However, as I held you close to me, I couldn’t help think that I know I’ll miss this. These few precious months that you’re little, and can be tucked up to me and so easily held with one arm. I dance to the music with you, swaying to the beat hoping you’ll sleep. Imagining that someday I’ll be dancing with you as a toddler, then someday as a woman and I’ll tear up, because I’ll remember this. Dancing with you when you were just a little thing.

 Good night little one. 

Garbage at the Masonic

Wife and I went to see Garbage at the Masonic yesterday. Fantastic show, we had a great time.

Setlist

1. Subhuman
2. I Think I’m Paranoid
3. Stupid Girl
4. Automatic Systematic Habit
5. Blood for Poppies
6. Milk
7. Sex Is Not the Enemy
8. Blackout
9. Magnetized
10. Special
11. #1 Crush
12. Even Though Our Love Is Doomed
13. Why Do You Love Me
14. Night Drive Loneliness
15. Bleed Like Me
16. Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)
17. Vow
18. Only Happy When It Rains
19. Push It

Encore:

1. Sometimes
2. Empty
3. Beloved Freak
4. Androgyny

San Bruno Historic notes

 

1. The San Bruno Creek is not named after the town, it is named after St. Bruno of Cologne, Germany. The town, in fact, is actually named after the creek!

2. The town’s original name was Clarks’s Station, and served as an important stop on Butterfield Overland Mail route for stagecoaches.

3. The stagecoach route was served by Thorp’s Place, an inn built in 1849. It was demolished 100 years later and replaced by a supermarket. However, the supermarket is no longer there, either. This historic site is now the Walgreens at El Camino Real and Crystal Springs.

4. Today’s Caltrain began as part of the Southern Pacific railroad system. In the 1960s, San Francisco and San Jose were linked by a stop in San Bruno.

5. The historic 1906 San Francisco Earthquake actually helped start growth in San Bruno, as people relocated here and schools were built to accommodate the increasing population.

6. Route 82 was California’s first state highway, and paving began in 1812, right in San Bruno.

7. After Charles Lindbergh’s historic Transatlantic flight, he visited San Bruno on his national tour. (Technically the nearby San Francisco International Airport.) His famous plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, got stuck in the mud.

8. The first ever successful landing on an aircraft carrier took place here when Eugene Ely took off from Tanforan and landed on the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay in 1911.

9. Despite all this history, San Bruno didn’t actually incorporate until 1914, largely thanks to a campaign by a local newspaper. The initial population was less than 1,500 people.

10. San Bruno was tied up in one of the sadly overlooked aspects of American history, the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II. The Tanforan Assembly Center was established here and served as a temporary detention site.

11. San Bruno students did not go to high school here until 1950. Prior to that, they attended high school in San Mateo and Burlingame.

12. The famous race horse Seabiscuit, who became the subject of books and movies, raced at Tanforan Racetrack, an historic site that closed in 1964. The Shops at Tanforan are now on the same location.

13. San Bruno’s biggest employer is Youtube, which employs close to 500 people. Walmart’s Global eCommerce subsidiary, which handles all their online sales, is second with 400 people from San Bruno employed there.

What I do when not Riding

The Kitchen: Tear it out and start over

It did not take long for us to start planing what we were going to do with the house. The offer was just barely accepted before we were talking about the things we needed to change or fix and the things we wanted to change.

One of the biggest things we wanted to do was open up the kitchen, this is a very popular thing to do and I really like it. One of the reasons I wanted a larger house was so that I could entertain, and one does not do that easily when trapped in a kitchen. We suspected (correctly) that one of the the two walls that we wanted to take out was load bearing so we came up with some ideas on how to deal with this. Luckily I have a father who is a Civil Engineer and an Uncle in construction so we were able to come up a good solution that we were happy with.

We visited the house a couple of times while in escrow planning the kitchen lay out. We quickly realized that we would need to move the sink, since it was in the corner with a wall we wanted to remove.

While some might balk at removing what looks like perfectly good cabinets and counters, be assured that you can’t see all the cracks in the tile from here.

Here are a couple of pictures of the kitchen in the original form. Really nice… if you like being locked into a closed space and made to cook dinner.

It was a long journey from that to this:

It has changed a bit.

We started here, on this wall. Not sure why, but you have to start somewhere. We began taking things apart. In hindsight deconstruction goes much faster than the putting it back together.

Step one carefully take out the shelves. We re used them next to the new sink.

Remove Cabinets and Counters.

Remove wall, and admire your handiwork.

Then take this wall… and make it look like…

This.

(The other side) Looking out of the kitchen into the living room.

It was here that we had to use the professionals. Putting the beam in was made to look easy by the wife’s Uncle. Easily worth twice what it cost. He got it done in one (longish) day. Including reinforcing under the house to handle the way the load of the wall shifted. It’s nice to have a father who can make you feel good that the engineering was right. (He actually did the math.)

It’s nice to have people who know what they are doing.

Looking pretty awesome.

Later that night once we cleaned up a bit, looks really good. Still so much work to do.

The only picture I have of myself. We took out the built-in cabinet and the ironing board in the wall behind me, I’ll share what we did with that space in another post.

The Lovely Wife is working hard here. Putting the wall back together.

Look we have walls (mostly) it got late and needed to have the electrical finished up before it was closed up.

We also started work on the arches for the corners of the doorway.

We did arches here too, mainly to hide the vent pipe in the upper right corner.

 

Once we got all the electrical done and drywall up we could start installing the cabinets and appliances. It was around this time that we moved in. We had the bathroom done (which we were working on concurrently) and were hoping to get things done faster by living in the house instead of an hour away.

Getting this set of cabinets were relatively easy. and the kitchen was somewhat usable.

We got the diswasher and stove hooked up ASAP with no sink in the kitchen there was no way I was doing dishes in the garage.

The hardest part of getting the Cabinets in was putting the pantry in. It needed to be cut down and assembled in place since it was exactly 8 foot by 2 by 2 leaving no room for the slight inconsistencies in a 75 year old house.

I’m glad I only had to put one of these in. Though I was impressed with how well the wife and I managed it, just ourselves.

We then put the rest of the cabinets in to finish the island. With proper reinforcement for the bar overhang. We then had to wait a while for the counter tops to be made and installed.

 

 

They were finally put in just 2 days before our house warming party. We still did not have a kitchen floor for that party, but it was great to have a fully functioning kitchen!

There are still things that need to be done. Little things, moulding, and other small details are still unfinished but even I don’t see them. Every day I come home and smile at how amazing my house is.

 

My House in Pictures: Living Room, Kitchen, Dining Room

So many hours and Days, but I think it was worth it. If you want to see what it looked like before you can see the house in these posts: Kitchen, Bathroom, Living room and Dining room.

Sadly I don’t have a picture that we’re not working on filling the filing.

Seeing how the table fits with both leaves in. Works great!