A few months ago, I stopped setting my alarm. Around that time, Stephanie started waking up earlier to get to work earlier. So now my “alarm” is a kiss on the cheek just before she heads out at 8.

I get out of bed a few minutes later, usually after she’s left. I shower, brush my teeth, shave every other day. Sometimes I turn on a CD. I get dressed, grab a granola bar, fruit if there’s any, lunch or leftovers if there’s any, and then I fill up my water bottle and strap it to my backpack. I put on my riding jacket, backpack, and shoes. I grab my helmet with the gloves inside and head outside to my scooter.

While the scooter is warming up, I put on my helmet and gloves, and then head off down Pine. I turn left on Franklin because the lights are green all the way to Lombard. Once I get through the Lombard lights, there are no more stops all the way to work. The whole trip takes just under 20 minutes. Lately I’ve been getting in around 9 which for me is early. Sometimes I’m the first in (from tech).

I take off all my gear, and head to the bathroom to wash out my mug and fill the electric kettle with water (we’ve got a great view but no kitchen). This is another new “habit” I started around the beginning of the year: morning tea. I was finding it hard to focus on work in the morning, so now I make myself a cup of black tea when I get in. Occasionally the afternoons will call for a small bottle of Tejava iced tea.

So I put on my headphones and turn on Indie Pop Rocks, sip my cup of tea, and eat my granola bar while checking email and blogs and thinking about what I want to do that day. Work happens until around noon when one or more of us emerges from our headphone-induced concentration and cries out “Lunch?” Which most days is a walk to Venice Gourmet Deli, or sometimes Golden Gate Market, or on rare occasions Hamburgers. Good lunch options in Sausalito are surprisingly few and far between. But the walk is nice.

I usually work until after 5, depending on how into things I am, but I try to leave at least before 5:50 so I can make it through the toll plaza by 6, which allows me to skip the $4 toll as a “high-occupancy” commuter. I ride home down Lombard, Van Ness, and Bush, looping around to Pine, and making sure to park on the side of the street that isn’t scheduled for street cleaning the next morning (otherwise a $40 ticket). Sometimes Stephanie and I leave work together, which is funny because she gets to work before me, other times she’s already home.

I like to have a little snack when I get home, usually some nuts or crackers or cheese, and then catch up with Stephanie. A few weeks ago we found that talking about work right after work (given that we work at the same place) sort of created a weird feedback loop that amplified things rather than diffusing them. So we put a moratorium on post-work brain dumps to give ourselves a break. If one of us is feeling inspired, dinner might be a big production, if not, we’ll put together something simple or just do a little grazing.

Most nights I find some some small projects to work on, usually on my laptop, occasionally work related, rarely a grand personal project. Usually just photos or blogging or email. Or chores. Or researching some weekend adventure. Meanwhile Stephanie might be doing the same or at a dance class, but lately she’s really been into her Nintendo DS. She heads to bed around 10, and I usually stay up doing things until midnight. I brush my teeth, wash my face, and slip into bed.

Saturday night we invited some friends over for a pizza party. Not unlike the ravioli party, we provided the dough, cheese, and sauce, and asked everyone to bring a topping…

…And everyone brought something different. We had pepperoni, pancetta, fancy mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, zucchini, sun-dried tomato pesto, chili peppers, fancy cheeses, artichoke hearts, spinach, caramelized onions, and pears. Stephanie even had some anchovies on hand.

Though we had the capacity to produce 15 pizzas, it turns out it only took 4 to feed the ten of us. So we didn’t manage to incorporate every possible topping (sorry, no anchovies), but we tried. Here was the menu for the night:

1. Pepperoni
2. Fancy mushrooms and pancetta with fresh tomatoes and garlic
3. Caramelized onions with pears and blue cheese
4. Garlicky spinach with artichoke hearts

I was thinking pizzas would be easier than assembling raviolis (and they are), but after doing some research I realized that proper use of a pizza stone required preheating it for an hour at 500°F—which, thanks to our lovely gas oven, meant the kitchen felt like a furnace all night. Didn’t stop folks from braving the heat to lend a hand.

I made a day-of decision to make my own pizza dough (rather than using the pre-made bags from Trader Joe’s). This was a risky proposition, as it was something I’d never done before (involving yeast), but I was happy I did. There’s just something transcendent about biting into homemade bread. It didn’t just feel like we were eating Pizza, it felt like we were eating something we made, soup to nuts. Which feels pretty good.

Here’s the recipe I used, which makes enough dough for two New York-style 14″ pizza crusts.

1. Dissolve 1 tsp sugar with 2/3 cup of 110°F water
2. Stir in 1 packet of yeast, let sit for 5-10 minutes
3. In a large bowl combine 3 1/2 cups of bread flour with 1 1/2 tsp of salt
4. Combine the activated yeast with an additional 2/3 cup of water with the flour
5. Knead for 5 minutes
6. Put in a bowl, cover (with cloth or saran wrap), let rise a warm place for 45 minutes

So we cooked, we ate, we drank, we talked, we drank, we laughed, we drank! Oh yeah, there was wine too. And Dawn brought homemade lemon scones! It was a time. Here are some pictures:

Two completely unrelated people in the “friends” folder of my feedreader said that they were unexpectedly moved by Barack Obama’s speech on race in America: A More Perfect Union and The Speech (I haven’t seen/read it yet, but I think it may be important enough that I do)

When I worked at O’Reilly Media, the Online Publishing Group (OPG) had this external-facing blog they called “From the Belly of the Beasts”, a reference to O’Reilly’s famous animal-branded technical books. The blog lived at blogs.oreillynet.com/beasts/.

It was started in October 2004 by Terrie Miller, the group’s manager. I arrived in May 2005, hired partly to assist with O’Reilly’s blog and feed projects. I loved that our group had a blog of its own, so I started posting to it within days of my arrival.

In order to justify blogging at work (to myself), I treated it as a knowledge sharing tool. I’d usually post useful things I found online and then pass the URL around to my co-workers. Frequently I’d refer back to an old post to jog my memory (or someone else’s). It was also a place to be a little silly, to lighten the mood. I posted there frequently until I left O’Reilly in June 2006. After my last post only two more posts appeared, one by Mark and one by Terrie, and from that point on the blog has lain dormant. Update: Terrie left O’Reilly in March 2008.

I’ve always been a little surprised, and of course happy that those old posts still exist out there on the web. They come from a special time in my life, my first year in California, my first job outside of the university. I definitely felt I was leaving behind something dear when I left O’Reilly. I expected the blog to just cease to exist one day, presumably after someone unplugged some dusty server in the corner that happened to be blogs.oreillynet.com.

Anyway yesterday I heard from Mark that the Beasts blog is indeed getting “unplugged”, and he wanted to know whether I wanted to save anything beforehand. Yikes, yes! So I’m going to recreate each of the posts I wrote there on Justinsomnia, categorize them in such a way that they can be pulled out together, and postdate them appropriately. I’m actually really excited about this, to me it’s like getting back a piece of myself for my archives.

I remember thinking the the trailer was ok—but that this wasn’t the type of movie I’d be able to watch with Stephanie. And then the reviews started pouring in, and then the Oscar nominations. I think it was this sentence that finally caught my attention:

No Country may be a masterpiece, but it’s a cold-blooded one, perhaps too much a splatter fest and a museum piece for Oscar voters.

Over the long weekend Stephanie wanted to do some shopping, so I took the opportunity to take myself out to a movie. I’ve been really curious about There Will Be Blood (a movie I might could get Stephanie to come along for), but the timing wasn’t right, so I decided on No Country.

I have to say, it’s not a bad movie. It’s crazy well-made. If you haven’t seen it and want to, you definitely should. I just didn’t like it. And I want to tell you why. This may well be the only negative review of “No Country for Old Men” that exists. Anywhere.

This is the point where you should stop reading if you want to see the movie.

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