Earthquakes, Dragonboats, and Rednecks

After seeing Mom and April off to the airport, I had a chance to meet my friend Caroline and her family for dinner in San Francisco. They were in the area to celebrate her parents’ anniversary. It was nice to see a friendly face from Houston, and it gave me an excuse to drive down Lombard St. again.

Supposedly we get several small earthquakes in the Bay Area each week. I finally felt my first California quake ~2 AM one night (the last time I played seismograph was my freshman year of high school in Tennessee). The rumble here was just a baby (~2.4), but it still rattled some dishes and felt like a train was going by. I guess I’ve been officially indoctrinated into the area now.

To further immerse myself into the local culture, I volunteered for a charity event on the water. Shell sponsored a dragonboat team to race against other companies in the area to raise money for cancer research. I’d never heard of a dragonboat before, but I soon found that it’s like a long canoe (think Last of the Mohicans) that holds 20 paddlers and a lazy person in the back who tells you what to do. I thought our team did well given our lack of paddling experience, but I was a little disappointed when the weenies from Intel kicked our butts. At least we didn’t get booed out of the event for the $4.50 per gallon gasoline here.

I finally broke down and bought a townhome. It’s about a mile from my office; so I walk or bike to work when I don’t hit snooze too many times. I moved in mid-June and then was out of town the first five weekends I owned the place. Needless to say, unpacking has been a prolonged affair.

I celebrated my first weekend as a California homeowner by trying to help out Nevada’s economy too. Phil met me over in Vegas, and we spent a few minutes in the casinos between meals. We ate one of the meals with my favorite professional gambler, Mr. Long Nguyen. I think one of us left town with more money than we brought, but it wasn’t the person returning to earthquake country.

I spent the next weekend on a rafting trip with some coworkers. Before this trip, I wasn’t aware of California’s redneck population, but evidently they all like the river, and they all own guns—water guns in this case. I was paired up in a raft with one of our summer interns, and neither of us was an expert at steering. We ended up spinning in circles through the rapids, and we managed to get hung up on rocks quite a bit. This made us sitting ducks for the water gun marksmen, who weren’t ashamed to blast defenseless people trying to recover their beached rafts. Darn rednecks...