In this whole parenting thing that I have yet to write about meaningfully, I've been given the great privilege of a whole sixteen weeks of paid parental leave. By normal people standards, this is a bonkers amount. By Bay Area tech job standards, it's somewhere around average (at some point, Netflix was giving out a whole year). I'm now six weeks into that, not including a week of PTO I tacked on right before the wee baby was born. So, it's been seven weeks since I did anything that can be considered paid work.

Initially, it was a weird feeling. I'd had a habit of keeping on top of work Slack on my phone, trying to keep the amount of unreads for the morning down (also, to make it look like I work harder than I actually do :D). That got signed out of in the hospital, so that was a reflex I had to break. The idea of there being no point in looking forward to the weekend because every day was a weekend was also strange. I tried to keep track of days so the weekend felt somewhat special, but that has since dissolved as a notion and I barely know what's up with the calendar anymore.

The contents of a day itself is just keeping on top of house chores and keeping my two loves alive (recovering mommies require work just as much as a baby does; perhaps I'll write about that in a three part series eventually). If I'm holding the baby, he's either being actively fed or I'm just watching bullshit on YouTube or dumping even more hours into Tears of the Kingdom while he sleeps. If I'm not holding the baby, I'm probably catching up on baby related chores, like cleaning bottles, or making sure the formula pitcher is full, or something something the diaper pail. An entertaining habit has come out of people visiting, wherein I will hand off the baby to said visitor and then, instead of socializing, I will immediately begin tending to the dishwasher...

What was I talking about?

Oh, not having work. It'll be interesting to see where this shakes out in another ten weeks when I "return to work" (read: mostly work from home). But, on that note, I did sort of return to work today. I'd logged into my work laptop to get on Slack so I could round up the usual suspects for a work provided meal enjoyed down at the local beer garden. All of this was under the guise of meeting the baby, of course. It was an interesting scenario, because I remember the few times I'd go to my dad's office as a kid was to parade around whatever sibling was new at the time. Now it was my turn. Also strange was roaming the halls of the office with a stroller and a fussy baby, reminding myself that a fussy baby in the office is weird and distracting... for the five other people that were there. Still, it was a good time catching up with coworkers, and the lovely beers and cafe food was delightful. While it may sound like the wee baby was not cooperating, all he wanted was a bottle and a clean diaper. He literally slept the rest of the time like a good visitor. Makes me wonder what other kinds of things he might be a good trooper for.

Making videos for an electronics YouTube channel?

With the arrival of our wee baby, so too has arrived a big increase in our TV watching. When you're at home all day with a baby who prefers human contact all the time, there's only so many forms of entertainment to turn to. Since we're modern cord-cut millenials, all our video watchings get streamed over the internet. And with this uptick in watching, that's meant we've come very close to hitting our monthly bandwidth caps. But, I've been finding little ways to curb that in an epic battle against the number of bits coming in and out.

To get an idea of where all the bandwidth was being pissed away, I turned to the daily reports that my eero router provides. It breaks down bandwidth usage grouped by device type (computers, streaming devices, phones, etc) and then further by device. This tells me exactly where I should be looking for reductions. By far the biggest bandwidth suck was on the main TV, so that's where a lot of my effort has been focused.

Step one was to stop watching so much streamed video. However, you've still gotta watch video. I've got a pretty good library of shows and movies, so I did a deep dive into disc ripping, and started repopulating my Plex library with stuff off the shelf. Honestly, this has been on my bucket list for a while, so that was really just a win-win (disc ripping has made a lot of strides in the last several years). Though, it does confine me to things I've already purchased. That really put a damper on my desire to watch Star Trek: Lower Decks... until I just bought the Blu-rays off of eBay and ripped it into the library. Probably more expensive than overage fees, but now they're mine and I got the best quality possible (a statement I will negate in the next paragraph).

Another genius idea I had was to simply dial down the resolution of the Apple TV. Streaming apps will only stream whatever resolution makes snse for your TV, so if the Apple TV is reduced to a 1080p signal, that's what it'll get. This has resulted in bigger bandwidth savings than streaming from the Plex server and, honestly, I can't really tell the degredation in quality from how far away the couch is from the TV.

Finally, scouring the list of devices using data when the device itself wasn't being used, I simply started turning things off. The TV computer is used rarely. OFF. The crib monitor isn't being used while we're not using the crib. OFF.

Over the last couple of weeks, it's been a marked reduction in bandwidth usage. Going by the week's end report, ~20% reduction week-over-week for two weeks straight. That's progress! To the reader, this is nothing super interesting, but it's been an interesting back-burner brain teaser. Of course, there's one thing that could once again throw off the balance of bandwidth usage...

Uploading videos to an electronics YouTube channel...

There are certain dates I try to remember. Birthdays, holidays, and important relationshp dates. Today, Facebook served me up one of its "this day in history" posts, which was full of photos of Kayla and I being cute couples forever ago. I didn't understand what was up with that until she later texted me while I was at the store "happy day we met four years ago". Doh! I don't think I've covered the "how we met" story anywhere outside of our wedding, in which the tale was woven by a certain Rev. Tim. So, I shall regale that here.

One of my favorite questions to yield from people is "where did you two meet", to which we both reply (sometimes in unison) "the internet". That's true, but more specifically OkCupid. I don't remember how Kayla was served to me as a match, but I do know how I introduced myself. As a response to a picture of her in front of the Dublin zoo, my first words to her were "is that dublin, california or dublin, dublin"? Why she answered, I'll never know, but that kicked off a long chain of messages that went on for weeks. It probably wouldn't have gone on for weeks except for the fact that I was days away from a long vacation to Oklahoma and Michigan to visit friends and family. That made me nervous: the longer the delay between first contact and actually meeting, the higher the chance of that meeting never happening. But we kept chatting good chats and I eventually returned home, where we arranged a date. (For a while, we joked that this was actually date two due to the amount of talking we'd done while I was away).

Said date happened at a now defunct Italian restaurant in downtown San Mateo. In retrospect, I'm not sure why I chose that restaurant beyond it being mildly fancy... except, it was more fancy than I had remembered. We had lukewarm conversation over a very expensive meal, and then went to my apartment to watch Coco (if not Coco, it was some other Disney movie). I spent the entire time on the couch being nervous as hell, but not making any moves even though it seemed like moves were expected. Those didn't come until the walk back to her car where I made a motion to hold her hand, a motion which was accepted. And, we held hands all the way to the parking garage where she'd parked. It wasn't a long walk, but I felt a little more at ease holding her hand, having done something instead of anticipating the need to do something.

The walk to the parking garage wasn't long, so we hung out next to her car for a few minutes lightly chatting, awkwardly putting off a ?"good bye". It was there in the B street garage that we kissed for the first time... or I tried to eat her face off for lack of technique. On a scale from 1-10, I think we both rate that kiss a three. Still, that kiss wasn't enough to keep a healthy amount of dates flowing over the next couople weeks, culminating in the road trip to Disneyland where we made the whole thing official.

Hard to believe that was four years ago; seems like yesterday but also forever ago. I can't imagine that either of those kids would've thought that in scant few years, they'd be married with a newborn. Lord knows where we'll be four years from now. Probably have another kid.

Maybe a successful electronics YouTube channel...

If you'd asked me four or five years ago what I thought of my culinary skills, I'd have responded with one of the few praises of myself. If you were to ask me today about my cooking skills four or five years ago, I'd respond by saying that I was a goddamn simpleton at best. I could follow a recipe, but I wasn't making the best food I could make. It wasn't until the pandemic and a lot of food experimentation (and a lot of tips picked up from Hello Fresh) to come to this realization, but I'd say the food Kayla and I make now is of a much, much higer quality. I may not have her natural ability to come up with the perfect mix of spices, but I get by pretty okay these days. In the spirit of late night brevity, here are a few tips we picked up over the course of the last few years.

Salt - My parents (and generations before that) grew up in a world that demonized salt because of health research at the time. As such, I grew up eating a lot of underseasoned food. Shcokingly, salt is very important. And I'm not talking about table salt, which is an abomination that nobody should use. No, I'm talking about ensuring that food is adequately salted while cooking it with a quality kosher salt (I prefer Morton; it has the best flakey properties). Properly salting is the difference between a bland meal and a fantabulous meal. Just be sure to taste as you go. Tasting is important.

Garlic powder - This one Kayla and I discovered for ourselves, but when you season with salt and pepper, add some garlic powder as well. This adds a delightful little bump of flavor to pretty much anything.

Avocado oil rocks - Most would tell you the best neutral oil is extra virgin olive oil. My problem with olive oil is its low smoke point. Kayla tipped me off to avocado oil, which you can use as a drop in replacement. It doesn't impart any flavor but has a high smoke point. Any time a recipe asks for oil, regardless of the application, we reach for avocado.

Roasted veggies - Growing up, the veggies we had were basically reheated straight from a can or frozen and "seasoned" with butter. Let me tell you about a magical way to prepare fresh veggies that's easy and also delicious: roasting. Take your pick of vegetable (pretty much any vegetable), reduce said vegetable into smaller pieces, throw on a baking sheet with salt, pepper, garlic power, and then toss all that together with neutral oil. Roast in a 425F oven for ~15min or when the tops of the veggies start to char, and you're having a good time. Preparing vegetables this way has basically unlocked that entire genre of food to me.

Embrace kitchen gadgets - I was a big fan of Alton Brown growing up, and one of his platitudes was to stay away from the uni-tasker. I'm here to tell you that some uni-taskers are so good at what they do, they deserve to stand alone. The two off the top of my head are the air fryer and the pressure cooker. That bit above about the vegetables? Do that same thing in the air fryer and those vegetables will be just as awesome in less time without pre-heating the whole oven. It also makes the best frozen tater tots. The pressure cooker is like a slow cooker on steroids: all the simplicity in a tiny fraction of the time. I've been making the old family roast recipe straight in the instant pot and we're eating delightfully tender meat in about an hour, not ten. Oh, I'll also toss in a good word for the toaster oven. I actually probably use that more than any other kitchen device.

There are a few of the ways our kitchen ways (or my own preconcieved notions) have change over the last few years, much to the improvement of all the food we make.

I like being outside. This is probably rooted in the amount of time I spent outside as a kid. Whether it be trying to set the backyard on fire or heading down the street to the playground of the nearby elemnentary school, my youth saw a lot of time in the outdoors. A great way to be outside for extended periods is to walk. My life has had various periods of time spent walking. When the family car broke down, we spent a lot of time walking to and from various places in the course of daily life. The store, church, the library. When I went to college, I walked to and from school every day since I didn't have a car. My first job, I spent a lot of time wandering downtown. This was only increased when the TV station gave all the employees and encouraged everybody to average 10,000 steps per day for some amount of time. There was even a counter on the sidebar of this blog for a while. This began my era of very long walks; 3-6 miles was pretty common. And when I moved to California... I kind of fell off that.

Now, when I was out and about, I still didn't mind putting in miles walking where other transportation would be annoying. Namely, doing anything up in San Francisco. Driving up there is not my favorite thing, so I'd opt for taking the train and walking wherever I needed to go. But, the every day long walks disappeared until I joined SurveyMonkey and my lunches were no longer spent with the usual lunch crew. I started walking around the block, then started walking around the mall, and just kept extending the range. As this continued, I needed footware that was actually suitable for walking. Wanting to make sure I got something that would best support my feet for long walks, I did some research and it turned out the best shoe for walking was a runnig shoe.

Took two whole paragraphs to get to the title's topic.

Armed with a pair of running shoes and a newly found zeal for working out thanks to encouragement from friends and coworkers (and also meaningful weight loss), one day I decided "hey... maybe I should try running?". By this point, I was living next to downtown San Mateo and was walking three to four miles every evening, on top of whatever I would do at lunch which itself had evolved beyond just walking. So, trying running was just another type of exercise to keep things mixed up. Also, devbus had been running for a while, so there as an added social aspect. All those sentences to say, one day instead of my walk, I attempted a run instead.

It sucked.

But, it was a start. I don't recall running being what I considered my "primary" form of exercise, that was probably more in the HIIT/weights area. But, looking back, I was definitely trying hard to get better at it. My early attempts were in the fall of 2018, and by 2019 I had signed up for and completed my first 10k, a lovely run through Bend which I had encouraged devbus to join for. The regular running was kept up and improvements were made, more races were run, but I don't think I actively enjoyed the sport yet. At least, not consciously.

That mentality held for a while, up until I signed up for the Star Wars half marathon in Disney World with devbus. I heralded that this race would be the end of my running career... that race was scheduled for April 2020. Don't have to tell you what happened there, but without anything to train towards, I fell off the running bandwagon for a while. During the WFH phase of the pandemic, I picked the long walks at lunch back up, only occasionally running.

Not really sure when it happened, but somewhere in there I realized that I was actually getting enjoyment from runs. I didn't balk at putting on the shoes as much, didn't curse every second of active intervals. It was enjoyable being outside, listening to a podcast, and having that good feeling of accomplishment I had when the run was done.

While there were no active races being held, I did a number of virtual ones just to dangle a little carrot in front of my face. That continued all the way to the Disney Princess virtual half marathon that I ran in February this year. This time, however, I never planned on stopping. I've continued to run (or maybe jog; my times aren't anything spectacular) and will continue to run. Not only for the in-person Disneyland half marathon devbus and I managed to snag spots for next January, but because it feels good.

And I need every drop of dopamine I can get.