Every once in a while, I like to reconnect with an old friend: New York City. Although I have been recently swamped with a new job that miserly counts off vacation days, I nevertheless booked an early-April weekend away to Brooklyn to see whether I can balance travel and work. …
In 2005, I moved from The Netherlands back to live with my parents outside of Boston. I took a job, my first chemistry job, at Cambridge-based E-Ink. To get to work, I needed to buy a car. I tested some Honda’s and Toyota’s to pick instead a snazzy, 1-year old …
Coworker Ransom mentioned he occasionally stops in the morning at Tartine Bakery to eat a breakfast pastry before getting on the company shuttle to work. I live so close to this famous patisserie that I should also buy occasionally a croissant, but I don’t have enough time in the morning. …
Finishing his spring break from lecturing of college history classes, Ruben hops Amtrak Friday afternoon to head to San Francisco for a weekend of nothing planned. I can’t find in the weekly paper any good listings for parties or events. We’ll have to wing it, a welcome change from my …
If I talk only about work or LED projects, that is because that is all I do these days. Eventually, my life will reclaim balance, but for now I enjoy the focused mania upon my projects home and away. Work recently announced a mentor program to link more junior employees …
It’s seven in the morning and I’m hurtling through the air in a steel can back towards San Francisco via Phoenix. I’ve been up since 3:30 in the morning (feels like 2:30 with last night’s daylight savings clock change) with little sleep, as Ray wanted to explore Albuquerque bars on …
Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits, may March be a good month. Tomorrow is my two month anniversary at work. I’m exhilarated, exhausted, cautious, proud, despondent, and overjoyed. Work has been so much of my life January and February that work has taken over my whole life. Still, I resolved at the start …
Thursday night after work, I hustled to Rainbow Grocery to buy olive oil, harissa, and other weirdness. It’s been months since I last shopped at this indie, vegetarian grocer. Walking down 14th Street, it hit me, the remembrance of when I first shopped at Rainbow, when everything felt so fresh, …
Ruben moved long ago back to California before I did. As I was resettling in San Francisco from Boston around 2008, he had already moved to Sacramento to start teaching history, mostly American, at Sacramento State and Sacramento City College. For ten years, every few months, I’ve been driving, busing, …
Saturday night after a weekend of skiing, I find myself in an alpine cabin by Lake Tahoe with five feet a snow falling outside. Twenty coworkers cook a vegan Thai curry (my boss is a vegan) while a bunch downstairs shout drinking games over a pingpong table. I’m upstairs with …