Vacation musings

Dec 30, 2007

As I sit here in my parents’ house on the last night before I fly back to New York, gazing into the thick fog that’s settled over the neighborhood, I feel compelled to take stock of my life. The last week has been a really great time, and it’s going to be tough to leave, though I know I have to. Knowing how hard it is on my mom doesn’t help either.

Overall, I feel like my life in New York is pretty good. Looking at it from the outside, it certainly looks awesome: I live in a great place, I work at one of the most desired places to work, and so forth. But for the most part, I feel unfulfilled, and I can’t quantify exactly why. Part of it is that work isn’t that interesting to me; I work on interesting projects, but the complete disconnect from the customer dampens my enthusiasm dramatically. I don’t feel like that’s it, though. Hopefully I can find what I need to change to feel better.

In other news, there are some exciting developments on this side of the country.

My parents have a new cat, and she’s absolutely adorable. Her name is Gina, and she’s quite small, roughly 2/3 the size of what I think of as a normal cat. She’s got plenty of spunk, though, as she’ll happily climb up onto my (six foot high) bed or chase a wine bottle cork around the house.

There’s a new Catholic cathedral going up in Oakland right on Lake Merritt, and it’s pretty impressive. It looks to be about eight stories tall, judging by the neighboring buildings, and is faced with glass panels in a elegant curve shape with a angled indent. Andrew Sherman has been keeping a log of its construction with a large helping of pictures.

Speaking of Lake Merritt, they’re finally doing planning and construction for the southern end improvements, most notably: redesigning 12th Street and Lakeshore, adding more park space, and removing the horrible tunnels that go under the expressway. The design looks really good, though there are concerns about the number of trees being removed (both there and elsewhere), and I’m not convinced that the new restaurant that’s being put where the boathouse used to be will be worth anything. There’ve previously been restaurants on the Lake and all of them have gone out of business. I wouldn’t mind living in a high-rise apartment overlooking the lake someday, though.

Also, SCO was delisted in the last couple days, though not as a result of low share price (which it was already under advisement from NASDAQ about), but due to filing for bankruptcy.