| October 19, 2005 | 'There are places so dirty that we have to wear gloves.' |
If my packing made Bocce nervous, the movers made her go completely ballistic.  She was outraged and barked non-stop for the first 2 hours they were working in the house. I kept her locked in the upstairs bathroom, which unfortunately has a glass door so she was watching and giving her "This-is-an-outrage!"-bark as they removed all the contents from the house. I think she thought they were robbing us. Eventually, all the ferocious barking took its toll on a dog who is acclimated to a life of incessant langor, and she surrendered and curled up on my bathmat in an exhausted heap. I didn't let her out until the movers were finished. It was best that she didn't witness the fast and furious dismantling of the household by three people we had never seen before. I wanted to shield her from the upheaval. As the shelves and furniture were removed an embarrassing abundance of dust was revealed on the hardwood floors. Dust bunnies, dust kittens, dust tigers, dust dragons -- we had a whole dust menagerie. "I'm sorry! I'm never at home to do housework," I said to one of the movers. "Is this place totally disgusting?" "No!!" he said, becoming animated. "This place is not bad at all. There are places that are so dirty that we have to wear gloves." He made a sickened face. "Ewwww! Really?! That's gross!" I said, feeling terrible for him, but suddenly feeling much better about my own dust menagerie. I swept and vaccuumed after they removed most of the big pieces, and hours later after they left with all of my stuff in a giant truck on its way to Los Angeles, I let Bocce out of the bathroom where she had been locked away. She sniffed around at the empty house, nails clicking on the hardwood floors as she slunk around looking for a nonexistent cushy surface to curl up on. When she realized that Big Plum (the purple velveteen couch) and my bed were both gone, she looked perplexed by the empty house. I scrubbed clean the kitchen and upstairs bathroom, and began to pack my car full to the roof. When the Beetle convertible was almost packed to the roof with the remaining boxes, I realized that the cactus plants were left up on the ledge in the upstairs bathroom. I didn't want to leave them behind, so after the car was packed full, I lodged them in the front seat between Bocce and me in the car. I left San Francisco at 7:50 p.m., driving East over the Bay Bridge with a very nervous thin-skinned dog perched precariously atop a shaky stack of clothing aside of an extremely prickly plant. She looked at me dubiously as we began the long drive south. Labels: beetle, bocce, dog, moving, packing posted by Jess Barron @ 7:55 AM 
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| October 18, 2005 | Doggie 'Dark City' |
Moving to a new apartment is stressful, even with professional movers who are supposed to pack everything up for you.  For instance, there are things you may not want your professional movers to pack up and handle. Perhaps you might want to pack the contents of your lingerie drawer yourself. Then, there are those hundreds of loose CDs lying around the bedroom because you've been ripping them to your PC and transferring them to your iPod. And if you share your place with housemates (as I do) you might have stuff that's mixed together that you need to separate out -- such as all the plates and silverware and DVDs of Twin Peaks, Seinfeld, and the Simpsons and games for the Playstation.So, I spent all my "free time" (read: the 6-8 hours each day when a normal person might sleep) for the past three days trying to go through the house -- locating things and boxing some of it up myself. When objects are being moved around and put into containers in the middle of the night, Bocce -- the small nervous Italian Greyhound creature -- knows that I'm packing. She's seen it many times before. We've lived in 7 different places in her 8 years -- Providence, RI (with Damien); Somerville, MA (with Ellen); Cambridge, MA (with Ellen); Los Angeles (with Jeff and Hillary); and 2 different Dogpatch live/work lofts (with Gareth) and the current dilapidated Mission Victorian (with Owen, Ric, and Sye). Additionally, I've gone on hundreds of trips all over the country and Bocce has gone on most of those as well. She's been on cross country flights at least 30 times. She's also been to exotic locations like St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. So, whenever she sees me packing late at night, she thinks she's either going to the kennel or she's getting on a plane. And though she doesn't really mind either of these things, the uncertainty seems to make her nervous. She may be wondering if she's going to be left behind. Three days of packing has taken its toll on her. Furniture and books have been moved to unfamiliar places and Bocce is dubious about the piles of boxes creating a new wall in the living room. She hides under the covers on my bed, nervously shivering. And I imagine that big moves like this are like some version of a doggie nightmare, akin to the movie "Dark City," where every night while the human population of the city is drugged into a deep sleep -- the alien overlords reconfigure all the buildings and city layout and change around entire households of people, importing new friends and family members from the existing pool of people. Yeah, moving is totally like "doggie 'Dark City.'" Her whole idea of reality will be 100% changed in less than 24 hours. Has anyone moved with pets? Any horror stories? Also, did you see 'Dark City?' What did you think? The images and ideas in that movie stay with me, particularly the idea about escaping to Shell Beach. Labels: bocce, darkcity, dog, moving, packing, sanfrancisco posted by Jess Barron @ 8:47 AM
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| October 11, 2005 | Why Am I Leaving San Francisco for Santa Monica? |
 I'm excited to announce that next week I'm relocating to Yahoo!'s new Santa Monica office. I'll continue to fulfill my current role as Senior Editor for the U.S. broadband portals (SBC, BellSouth, Verizon, and Plus), but I'll be working among the Full Coverage and Yahoo! News teams who have recently moved down south to be part of the new Yahoo! Media Group. "Why the hell are you leaving San Francisco?" at least hundreds of people have asked, yelled, emailed, and pinged me. It sounds like some people think I have a lotta explainin' to do -- so here are the main reasons why I'm so glad to be making this move: 1. It's a great opportunity to work among colleagues in the Yahoo! Media Group where most of the new original content on the Yahoo! Network (including Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone ) is being created. I've worked in online web content creation for the past ten years (can you believe that -- ten years?! That's making me start to feel a bit old.), so now that Yahoo! is making a big commitment to creating original content it makes sense for me to be located where it's all happening. 2a. I love San Francisco, but to be honest I don't see as much of it as I'd like to. For the past five years(!) I've made the arduous commute from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley -- I worked for two years at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View and for the last three years at Yahoo!'s campus in Sunnyvale. I spend ten hours per week driving on the 101 freeway, and that's 10 hours too many at this point. Sure, I still do cool things up in SF, like produce a weekly pirate radio show with Allyson and go to my friend Derek's Walk-In Movies and occasionally to see bands -- but the truth is, I'm in Sunnyvale in the midst of Silicon Valley waaaay more hours per week than I'm up in SF. And since I never want to live down in the suburban sprawl of "The Valley," I'm looking at many more years of commuting ahead of me if I decided to continue living in San Francisco and working a decent tech job. Pretty much all the best tech companies: Apple, Google, Yahoo!, and eBay are each headquartered somewhere down on the Peninsula, an hour's drive from San Francisco. I love it when Bay Area people comment about all the traffic in Los Angeles. My commute in Northern California is far worse than any Southern California commute I've ever had. 2b. In Los Angeles, I can live near the Yahoo! office and still live in a great area with cafes, bars, and shops that I'll enjoy. My friend Laura and I just signed a lease on an amazing house right across the street from the beach in Venice . It's only 4 miles from the office, and it has trees in the living room growing down into the ground! (Have you ever heard of such a thing?!) And I just might *gasp* ride my bike to work along the Venice to Santa Monica beachfront bike path. 3. I've lived in San Francisco for exactly 5 years. I arrived in SF in October 2000 just as closing time was setting in over the drunken magic of the dotcom days -- the music was turned off and the dim lights were turned up and everyone had to go home alone to their cold, lonely beds.) My instincts are saying that five years is long enough to stay in one city at this point in my life. I've experienced two neighborhoods in two different housing experiments: I spent 3 years living in a loft in Lower Potrero/Dogpatch and 2 years living with some guy friends in a dilapidated Mission District Victorian. I've met tons of amazing people and been to great parties and seen some incredible things. I'll certainly miss my incredible SF friends (August, Owen, Bethany, Allyson , Bryan, Andy, Jen, Deneb, Derek, Leanne, John, Shannon, Daniel, Mici, and everyone else I'm not naming) and I'll definitely be back to visit, but it's time for a change. 4. I actually like Los Angeles. Here's what I wrote about it in my blog back in November 2001. (Four years ago!) I hope that I'll still like LA now that I'm five years older. We'll hafta see. I'll be sure to blog about it as always. 5. My dog and I are fans of warm weather. Bocce, my tiny fruit bat of a dog -- though velvety -- is practically hairless (and fat-less!). San Francisco weather -- though temperate when compared to Boston -- is still not warm enough for this little dog to go running on the beach. I also enjoy wearing flip-flops every day and walking barefoot in the sand. Do you love or hate Los Angeles? How about San Francisco? Do you have any tips for me? Well-wishes or anything to add? Labels: commute, la, moving, sanfrancisco, santamonica, sf, work, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 5:40 PM
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