03.31.19

PLAYING CATCH UP

Wow, nearly a year has flown by since my last post.
In that time, an incredible amount of things have happened, the first being that I became a father 6 weeks ago

We named him Ansel, partially after the photographer, and partially because my family demanded we call him Hans (which can still work as a nickname). For being less than 2 months old, he’s incredibly active and surprisingly mellow at times. It’s whole new heap of responsibilities, but I figure I’ll at least have an assistant in the future for all my projects!

We also ended up moving from San Jose to Fremont back in October. Long story short, our landlord moved up to Portland, and his family decided to cash in their chips with the dual property in downtown. The house next door to ours was where his father grew up, and I think the property had been in his family since at least the early 1940’s. Our new house is much nicer: newer with a lot more space. The San Jose house was a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom built in 1919; the new place is 3 stories tall and only 2 years old.
When you’re exposed to something often enough, you become desensitized to it over time. I revisited our old place back in December, and it suddenly dawned on me just how rough of a neighborhood we were living in. After living in that area for 5 of the last 6 years (we spent 2014 in Germany), I had totally failed to realize just how run down that whole stretch of road really is. There are plenty of things that I’ll miss though; having a backyard, washing my car in the driveway, walking into town, and meeting up for Dog Group every evening. Even though our area was bad, the neighborhood 2 blocks up was gorgeous.

As for everything else, it’s been a mix of work and fun. My consulting work picked up in May and kept going strong until I landed a position at an augmented reality research and development firm. With a more stable work schedule, I’ve been able to focus on my projects, namely the Range Rover as well as restoring a couple of old rifles and a typewriter that came into my possession recently.