Entries Tagged 'What I've been doing' ↓

Stepping out for work! Boots a third the height of Beckett’s but I think I’ve seen her in this shirt!

Tried to get a picture of the full moon over the bridge a couple of nights ago but it hasn’t worked very well. For all the fog and haze that hangs around the hills and bay here usually, the night sky here is just stunning at the moment. The hills over in Berkeley and Oakland are extremely clear and sharp and all the lights are very sparkly and reflective on the water. It’s a joy to come home to.

I asked my new friend the Bay Bridge on Twitter (yes, a tweeting bridge) if there were New Year fireworks in the harbor – he replied that they were right overhead!

We decided to stay awake this year so invited Kara over for dinner and a show, and dressed up a bit.

We had pulled pork and I made lemon meringue pie from scratch – hot on the heels of the successful non-tanty pastry for Xmas fruit mince pies I thought I would try a full-sized pastry based pie. It was touch and go with the pastry being a little crumbly and I had to patch the sides once I got the pastry into the dish but other than my lemon filling being runny and my meringue not being anywhere as fluffy and high as Mother’s it worked out fine!

After being worried earlier in the day that the 2 towering apartment buildings out our window were going to block the fireworks we were very exited to see that we could actually see most of them! They were good and noisy and went on for 15 minutes with lots of whooping in the streets below. It was freezing out on the balcony taking photos. Traffic on the bridge slowed down and everyone on the fireworks side slowed to a crawl and the cop cars with their loud speakers that came along to shout at them to keep moving didn’t have much luck!

We opened some orange and green fortune cookies to start out the year.

Happy New Year everyone!

Spent so much time on the couch today trying to relax in true Boxing Day style that we were treated to the very rare sight of the bridge emerging from the fog – firstly because it doesn’t usually get foggy in this part of town and secondly because if it does we’re usually at work during the day and miss it clearing.

It took about an hour from thick pea soup all morning to clear.

After my New York girl time experiences I was all set to face similar issues when getting my eye lashes tinted here, however it seems it’s not such a rare occurrence and the first salon I saw in our neighbourhood does it. However they do it public style sitting up, just like New York – this time it was in a busy hair salon and really freaky.

It’s like taking some activity that’s totally private (oh I don’t know, perhaps stuff like cleaning your ears, pulling a wad of knickers from your butt, picking your nose, plucking/tweezing/waxing, bawling like a baby, picking your toenails) right out in to a public space. It took every ounce of will power (and I have a lot of that) and a whole lot of adrenaline (yuck clammy hands) to not open my eyes. Sounds simple right? Keep your eyes closed? I can’t even do that in a yoga class of 6 where I’ve been going for 3 years let alone in a busy salon, right by their waiting area, with my face pointing towards the people waiting and reflected in every mirror for people getting their hair cut to see! It’s not even that I wasn’t supposed to open my eyes, like yoga or eclipses or flashing epileptic rock band lights, it’s actually don’t open them in manner of Vampire Eric (my fav) going out into the sun light – searing burning pain the consequences of which would’ve been far more embarrassing than sitting there with eyes closed having a treatment that’s on their salon menu so everyone probably knew what was going on and was ignoring it anyway … well not that I could see!

The woman I had was very patient, she talked me through what she was doing, even though she knew I’d been doing this for quite a few years, and stayed nearby the whole time – I just bowed my head and squeezed each of my fingertips in turn in my lap and tried to visualise what each of my fingernails looked like (am not much of a visualizer either, way too practical, hence the choice of strange things to visualise) and it worked – after what felt like half an hour my eyelids stopped fluttering and I stopped sweating. I might not wear ridiculous high-heeled shoes or anything that causes blisters or stupid pinching clothes or scratchy zippers but in an act of vanity (and to stop all the comments about how tired I look) I’ll continue to put myself through this!

Emily came to stay for a week while on a conference. Keith arrived later in the week for a night. It was so great to see them. We don’t know Emily very well but Keith is a long-time friend so we offered for her to treat us like a hotel while she was in town for her conference. She arrived on the doorstep with a kilo of Supreme beans – we welcomed her with open arms!

When Keith arrived I showed him some good coffee – we hung out at Blue Bottle Mint for a while and got to watch the full siphon process a couple of times. Funny watching all the tourists in there. Emily organised a tour of Lucasfilm for us – The Mister was particularly excited to see posters and backing images for a lot of the films we’ve seen and to get up close to a stormtrooper and R2D2.

We had a great dinner at The Presido Social Club – a cool wooden-floored space in what could’ve been an old lawn bowling club with tables for 4 along the window. We had a bottle of champagne and I had macaroni cheese.

We dropped the off at the bus on Friday night to continue their trip through the States.

We’ve seen misty fog, sometimes low over the city, but this morning was the first creeping fog we’ve seen – woke to this amazing site!

Today we experienced an hour of American government department to get our Social Security numbers. After the brief visit a couple of weeks ago where there was barely any wait and a lovely lady who explained we were too early, that our immigration status hadn’t flowed through to their system yet, we arrived just after 9am this morning (Monday) hoping for the same. Not so.

• the line was outside the building to go into the foyer for security checking and they were only taking 2 people at a time through the bag scan and metal detector, several ahead of us didn’t seem to speak English so lots of short-tempered mad hand waving and strip-off motioning by the 2 guards to get them to put their stuff on the belt and walk around through the metal detector. One at a time.
• the security guards processing the bag scan and metal detector were worse than TSA – even I had to take my jacket and watch off, I felt completely naked. I wear more through airport screening. They turned away some people in front of us – not sure why but I could lip read “you can’t bring that in here” – perhaps they had guns in their bags. We had to open our laptops and turn them on until they booted. Heart missed a beat when Craig tried to explain his battery was flat. They scanned the laptops twice.
• the room we waited in last time probably had 50 people waiting in it, instead of the 20 that were there last time. We went to the monitor, checked in and grabbed our number, we knew the system. Now, to choose a seat – after a homeless man made the most disgusting gravelly wrenching liquid cough and (eeeeuw I feel nauseous typing this) spat up something brown on the floor then went into the bathroom to carry on coughing for a couple of minutes (magnified by all that porcelain) our seat choice was clear – way the hell over the other side of the waiting room.
• our number was 15 away from the next one being called, and stamped on our receipt, it said “expected wait time 90 minutes”. OMG, I looked around the waiting room, 90 minutes of coughing, elderly Chinese couples who kept dozing off and missing their number being called, several homeless people (educated guess based on their carts and sleeping mats), 4 wheel chairs, several middle-aged men in army fatigues/camoflage-themed sweats with authority attitudes muttering under their breath “what gives you the right to treat me like that” (obviously had a run in with the security guard), a couple from Russia who I could see were filling out the application form all wrong and had to look up in their passports whether they should tick box ‘male’ or ‘female’, was ahead of us – it was going to be a long morning. Pulled out our cell phones. No coverage.
• finally, after half an hour our number was called. We handed the clerk all our papers through the glass window – passports, application forms, marriage certificates, work permit – everything we had. He said hello, nodded and tapped a couple of keys on his keyboard. Then for the next TEN minutes we sat in silence while he scrolled up and down, tapped a key here and there, and stared at his screen. I was desperately trying to see the reflection in his glasses of what was on screen – I was convinced he was reading a newspaper, checking out his horoscope, sports scores or something. While we waited, I listened to everyone else’s business … no-one seemed to be there to get a social security number …
  • someone was in a custody battle over their son and the mother seemed to be taking the child out of the States, he had a court order and was denying receiving something else from the court so was trying to win a he-said-she-said argument with the clerk
  • a guy had been hepatitis free for 12 years but had some problem with his disability/medical payments and was locked in a he-said-she-said argument about which agency was responsible with the clerk
  • a young guy hadn’t paid his taxes and they’d seized his car and his momma had sent him down there
  • an elderly Chinese woman was explaining loudly to a clerk that she had a bank account, had received a hundred dollars into it but the clerk wanted proof of it, but the woman was adamant she couldn’t have proof because she’d spent the money; the clerk explained that a bank statement would show the money going into the account, but the woman said she couldn’t show the money because she’d spent it … and on and on …
  • eventually one of the guys who’d earlier been turned away at security screening came into the waiting room – what did he do? Stash his gun in a bush on 7th street?
• after 25 minutes and finally some typing action, our clerk printed out a couple of receipts for us and after earlier only saying ‘Hello’ we said ‘yes’ when he asked us to confirm our names and addresses were correct – none of the long discussions going on at all the other windows. He said our new social security numbers would be with us in about 2 weeks. We rushed out of there.

I felt so dirty – the creaking of the metal seats, in the waiting room and in front of the clerk windows (all bolted down by the way), the coughing and the smell will haunt me for a while. I was wondering out loud about all the people we knew who live here who’ve had to go through that but The Mister pointed out that if you’re born here you get your number then so perhaps I’ve experienced something special that most Americans don’t get to experience. I want to live and work here – this is part of it, part of becoming a little bit more American. God I hope we don’t have to renew these numbers like we have to for everything else official we’ve got – we didn’t hang around to ask!

With our first visitors due to arrive this weekend we set about assembling the sofa bed – which arrived in a very thin box from Ikea and was to miraculously transform into a sofa which transforms into a bed!

Ikea is an expert at DIY – everything comes flat-packed or shrink-wrapped and you’re to assemble it yourself – and because of that you don’t need your own tools. Bonus! We don’t have a mixing bowl, frying pan or iron, let alone a screw driver. Ikea assembly also requires you to interpret pictures – box-sofa-bed transformations certainly needed consultation with the instruction manual but it contained no words, only pictures. Before we set out I held up the instructions for The Mister to see and pointed pointedly at the first picture and translated for him – “don’t be a hero and huff and puff and shove things around and do the whole thing yourself and jam your finger and get shitty, get a helper and together you’ll smile and get it done.”

Yes, I agreed to be the helper and not the instructor so he could retain his man card Off we went following the pictures. No parts left over and everything went how it should including some fairly complex bracket and spring thingies that are the transformation mechanism for sofa to bed to couch. And we were smiling proudly by the end of it!

Get all the pieces ready …

Bed bit done – flash too – it’s a slat bed … complete with complex bracket screw thing expertly attached with tiny allen key and spanner!

A couch …

A bed …

While we were playing house we also arranged some other bits and pieces we’d collected while out. Two very cool orange baskets I’m using as fruit baskets from Crate and Barrel – love that store, so much orange stuff!

The Mister reckons the apartment has definitely got an orange glow to it now.

We also discovered The Container Store – oh my god – floors of nothing but mostly plastic storage stuff – coat hangers, office supplies, laundry baskets, wardrobe shelving, all sorts of hanging/sliding/under bed storage for small pokey places, rubbish bins … you get the idea. One thing I wanted was something to keep all the bottles of stuff in that we use in the shower – being a shower over a bath, shampoo and face stuff was beginning to pile up around the edges of the bath and it’s SO annoying when you’re trying to clean around it. The shower head offered no ability to hang a basket type thing over it so we looked at the suck-on canister things. I was a bit dubious though, with heavy bottles of shampoo I thought whatever we got would slide down the wall. But enter the ’super sucker’ – big suction cups and a kind of clipping mechanism so it uses it’s own weight to maintain suck – it’s brilliant! And very sturdy.

Hi everyone,

Hope you’re all well. We are. We arrive safely in San Francisco almost a week ago – last Saturday morning. As you can imagine, moving ourselves to another country has kept us fairly busy this week, and we didn’t take time off work, probably should have, so in between starting a new life here we’ve also been working in the gaps. A few late nights as we get used to the time difference between here and New Zealand.

The flight over was fine, neither of us got much sleep – the flight wasn’t turbulent really, perhaps just anticipation of us and our 7 bags arriving to live here. Having said that, I wasn’t too sad getting on the plane, I think because we’ve had a couple of trips over here the last 6 months, it kind of felt like another work trip. I didn’t burst into tears when the plane took off and must admit felt a little pang of excitement when we landed here. We had a few hurried goodbyes in person and on the phone at Wellington and Auckland airports which was nice.

We’d arranged to meet the broker who helped us find our apartment here on Saturday morning to get the keys so that we could move into the apartment right away – no use getting Xero to pay for a hotel if the apartment was ready. It was just a great as we remembered it – walking in and seeing the majestic Bay Bridge out the window really is fantastic.

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