I'm officially seeking collaborators for SF Native Guide (aka estripwest v2, haha). Seriously, I miss Alamedalink, and blogging platforms have come such a long way, even I can build a site now (almost). So I'm giving it a shot over my sabbatical. What do you think? It's about time I got back to the master plan.

Wow, it's been so long! Since I didn't get you a gift, here's an update.

For starters, my tenant gave notice and moved out last November. This was great news, but bad timing. It would have been crazy not to take advantage of the vacancy to pull out the wall-to-wall carpeting and refinish the floors, replace the kitchen cabinets, and tile the bathroom floor.

Only bad part is, I'm still deep in debt from my own renovation, and I already had plans to go "home" for Christmas before I knew about this. So naturally when the IKEA kitchen cabinet order turned out to lack certain key items the day before I flew east, it was hard to take care of everything before I left. But not taking care of it would have been worse, since the longer I'm paying for that unit without any income from it, the harder it is to pay off my old and new debts.

Anyway, I'm so sick of all this renovating now. It's like a second job, that apparently I'm not so good at. The scariest part was yesterday, when my contractor managed to leave two stove burners on (long story) while the floor guys were sanding and putting on the final coat of highly flammable finish. What are the odds? You can see my footprints on the floor finish since I had to get to the oven (9 hours later) to turn off the burners before the building exploded or we all passed out from the fumes.

Anyway! The good news is, now I'm planning to use the unit as a furnished vacation rental. So if anybody wants to visit me, they'll have their own, furnished apartment to stay in! This better be worth it . . .

Happy Birthday Paul! (And Happy Birthday to my brother Erik too!)

My friend Steve sent me a DVD with highlights from his past Halloween parties. I figured I'd do my part toward making 25,000 journals by posting it here. You might recognize some of these shots from (e:Twisted,36393) Ghost of Halloween Past post.



Have a great Halloween, everyone!

I will FINALLY get to verify a bit of Google-lure first-hand. Namely, heated toilet seats at Googleplex world headquarters. You can bet your bottom-dollar my tushy will be the judge!

I really didn't do anything to deserve this honor, other than register as a platinum (whatever that means) attendee to the Search Engine Strategies conference. Mostly I'm having major flashbacks to the last time I was in San Jose to drop (e:Paul) off at his conference. Not much has changed since then, I'm sorry to say.

I wish (e:Paul) and (e:Iriesara) could join me this time!

If a picture is worth 1000 words, and a blog is approximately 1638 words, then this entry = 9.7 blogs.

I have approximately 3 dozen spots for cats. But suddenly Oscar believes the only place for him is exactly wherever Filippe is.










I finally pulled out my sewing machine. The cats really like to be helpful with creative projects.





Rare photos of all three cats together:



Oscar in a box and on a pup:




ps -- Looks like the rent arrived...