Cancer and Evolution?

Strolling back from my morning coffee run, I noticed a pigeon with a giant cancerous growth underneath its left wing. I didn’t know pigeons suffer from tumors, although it surely makes sense.

I was feeling pity for the poor little fella, but suddenly my thoughts turned in a different direction: what if the tumor growth had actually been something that helps the pigeon survive? What if the distinguishing features of a pigeon were actually determined not by slow mutation and selection, but by a mechanism that allows for sudden appearance of a new feature without slow motion?

Uploaded Pictures

Here they are! After a lot of waiting (mostly due to the fact I was too lazy to move the pictures from my laptop to the web server – it’s 260MB of them, after all!!!), here the {moszoomalbum:2005-07-02} with the pictures of the trip to Hawai’i.

A few changes to the usual format: this time I refrained from putting all pictures from one day in the same folder, and just highlighted the places we went to. In the end, the Big Island is a big rock with outstanding features, and you really don’t spend all day taking pictures.

Back from Hawai'i

After a horrific nine hour non-stop flight (four of them spent on the ground waiting for a “battery charger”), I finally made it back in one piece from Hawai’i. A week of travel is about all I can handle right now, especially since the house didn’t close yet and I have a trillion things to do.

Takeaways from this trip? Not sure. I knew the island pretty well before I visited, so a lot of the sights were repeats. Since I had K. with me, I had new eyes to look at everything, and I could rediscover a lot of the marvels I had seen before. Pololu valley, for instance, is still magnificent. Puna road (Kapoho-Kalapana road) is still the most beatiful stretch of highway I will ever see.

Gone to Hawai'i

Will see you when I come back in a week! Let’s hope the site doesn’t go down while I am gone.

Loan Woes

I got the Commitment Letter from the bank, but it came with enough conditions and clauses that I might as well start from scratch. Turns out I don’t have enough open credit lines, which means the bank doesn’t know whether I will be repaying them on time. So, instead of a nice credit card report, they are asking me to provide a ton of documentation from other places where I have to pay regularly.

Flying to L.A.

Short trip out to L.A. to visit a conference. It’s funny to fly out to L.A. for work, being used as I am to the city as a vacation destination.

My first time was in 1998, shortly before I moved to the States for good. It was the last weekend of my stay in San Diego, and I had decided I needed to at least see Los Angeles before flying back and returning who knows when.

No Fog in Fog City

It looked at first as if this might become a challenging day. The low clouds were hanging around dangerous, and it was hot from the get-go. The typical mixture that yields that dreaded fog that hovers over the City all day, putting us sun-loving Californians in a stupor.

You probably couldn’t live here without the cooling influence of the Pacific. It is amazing how cold it is on the ocean side, and how hot it can get just ten miles East of here. Between our two poles, the City wavers undecided, with the Richmond siding with the cold, the Mission with the hot weather most of the time.

Step by Step

That’s how the whole house thing is slowly working out. There is always something new to learn, something new to do.

Today I found out that appraisal fees are twice as high in Hawai’i as they are in the Bay Area. My loan officer explained it was an appraiser market on the islands, and that I was very welcome to look for my own appraiser. We turned the conversation around quickly, and I really like her.

Hawai'i, I am coming

So, a lot happened lately…

1. My DSL router suddenly died, which explains why you have been unable to connect to this site for a while. I had to go in and re-route the whole shabang, ending up with the wireless router under the staircase and the phone cable draped across the floor just to make my life miserable.

2. I got my green card!!! Yes, two months after hearing that I was going to get it, there it is, in all its glory. A miracle, I would say. But one that prompted me to put copies of all my documents online, in a password protected zoom gallery. By the way: the green card is neither green nor (as they said it would be) pink. It’s simply white, with a metal box on the back.

Hanging out at the beach

A confession from a weird European: when I ride my bike for a longer distance, I will stop at a nude hangout and rest while my clothes are drying out. I did it at Baker Beach in the City today, and obviously it was not only my personal idea.

The currents are strong, and the waves still hit the beach halfway to the rocks. That means there was no real estate to be had, and I had to sit in the midst of testosterone laden muscle men. It felt a little uncomfy, naked as I was, still with the comments of one of my friends in my ears.