Living in Belmont

Forbes Magazine recently came out with its list of Top 25 American Cities to Live Well, and Belmont, California (where we live) was number 11.

We've lived here six years, and we like it very much. We love our neighborhood, and its proximity to hiking trails. The schools are very good. It's close to San Francisco. It has a great new library.

The main drawback is the weather.. it's often 20 degrees cooler here than next-door San Carlos! It can get quite windy. Chris doesn't mind it, but I'd prefer it a little warmer. We do have heat waves.. it was 94 degrees here yesterday.. but it seems like its either slightly on the cool side, in the 50s or 60s, or REALLY hot. I'd like more 70-80 degree days!

Also I wish there was a real downtown. There are shops and restaurants, but no real main street.

But I have to agree it's a great place to live!

What's different about England?

Every time I visit the UK, I see little things that are subtly different than the US. There are the obvious things, of course, like different vocabulary, driving on the other side of the road, having a Queen, etc. This last trip I decided to write down some of the things I noticed. I've listed them here.

Let me preface it by saying I really love the UK, and that these are just my own experiences, from the 4 months or so I've spent there. Your mileage may vary.

• Separate hot and cold taps. This really drives me crazy... you either burn your hands or freeze them. The idea is that you're supposed to put the plug in and fill the sink with the right mix of water, but that seems like a lot of bother.
  
• "Half-eleven". Just one of those phrases that I have to stop and think about when I hear it (I would say "eleven-thirty").
• "dinner" == Sunday lunch. I still get mixed up about the usage of lunch, dinner, and tea. Sometimes tea means afternoon snacks, sometimes it means a light dinner, sometimes it means a regular dinner. Sometimes lunch is lunch and sometimes it's dinner.
• No napkins. Or at least, very few napkins. Chris is adept at eating without needing a napkin. Me, not so much. I didn't realize I was a messy eater until I had to make due without a napkin. Restaurants have napkins, but often have paper napkins instead of cloth even at slightly nicer places.
• Putting the laundry out to dry outside. This is good environmentally, and not everyone has space for a dryer, but I see lots of people who do have dryers still using the line. In a country that rains a lot. I remember being in Scotland at a B&B and the owner had just put the wash out to dry, when it started hailing, so he brought it all back in. Then it was sunny again, so it went out again.
• No shower door/curtain. Another skill Chris has that I lack: taking a shower in a tub with no curtain. After my 5th visit to his parents', I am finally able to take my shower without getting the floor soaking wet. Showers often have hand-held sprayers that are on brackets on the wall; I must admit I really like my water-wasting more powerful American shower heads.
  
• Small rooms, keep the doors closed! I'm used to houses with more open-plan styles, where you often can't even "close" a room because there's no door. A lot of the UK houses I've been too have smaller rooms, and I see people opening and shutting the doors as they go in and out. Makes sense from a heating perspective. It's just something different.
• Soap with a "badge". Chris's parents have this soap called Imperial Leather that has a little "badge" in the middle, that's leftover when the soap is all gone. Never seen that before!

Anyway, those are just some of the little things that struck me. I would love to hear from Brits about the little things they've noticed in the US.

Song Flashbacks

This morning on the radio I heard Sting's Love is the Seventh Wave and was instantly transported back in time to 1988, driving down Ygnacio Valley Road in Chris W's (POPnet handle: Number Six) yellow AMC Hornet, en route to a party.

I love song flashbacks. When I hear Groove is in the Heart by Deee-Lite, I'm back in my dorm room freshman year at UCSD, dancing with my roommate Amanda. Push It by Salt-N-Pepa puts me back at a high school dance, doing the Running Man. When I hear The Flag by the Barenaked Ladies, I'm driving in my car from Indiana to Kentucky on my first solo road trip.

When I hear Help Me Rhonda by the Beach Boys I picture my Dad dancing in our living room, clapping his hands and singing, and everything seems right with the world. Early Morning Rain reminds me of Jon...it was on a mix tape from him and I listened to it over and over in my Honda station wagon in high school.

Some songs have multiple memories. The Summer of '69 by Bryan Adams brings to mind hanging out at Jason's house in high school, singing along in his living room, as well as early days of dating Chris, jumping on the bed in his studio apartment and air guitaring.

Some songs are sad, reminding me of breakups, or my lonely first summer in Indiana. Some songs make me tearful but for good reasons: the lyric "And when I take your hand, I watch my heart set sail," from Mark Cohn's True Companion fills me with love for Chris.

And there are songs that I just can't help dancing to, like It Takes Two to Make a Thing Go Right by Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock. Lisa and I heard that in the mall the other day and just started grooving at the Gap.

I love how music brings back such powerful memories. Got any song flashbacks? Share them in the comments!

Love Me Tender

Last night was the Yahoo! holiday party. The theme this year was Las Vegas, and I have to say it was my favorite so far (of the four we've been to). The first year we went, I was feeling terrible from the bug I'd picked up on our trip to the Caribbean. The second year was good. Last year I was 5 months pregnant and spent most of it sitting down. This year I was footloose and fancy free!

My parents babysat and we had a great time dancing, eating, playing Dance Dance Revolution, and renewing our vows with Elvis. Yes, they had a Vegas-style wedding stage, and Elvis performed the ceremonies. They even had wigs/glasses to dress up. The only thing lacking was gingerbread men (available at the previous parties).

Here In My Car

Chris and I have been discussing buying a new car for years. I'd been driving a 1996 Nissan 200SX SE-R, and he's been driving a 2001 Audi S4.

I loved my Nissan. It was my first new car, and I bought it back in Indiana when I was going to graduate school. I took my first solo road trip in it (down to Kentucky to visit Mammoth Caves), and drove it from Indiana to Virginia, and Indiana to California. It was just right for me: small, zippy, and comfortable to drive. The only thing it lacked was a color: I wanted green, but settled for black. I vowed the next time I bought a car I wouldn't settle.

I briefly considered buying a Nissan 350Z as its replacement, and even took one for a test drive, but I knew I wouldn't end up buying it. Too impractical.

When the baby arrived, I started driving the Audi, because it's a 4-door so it's easier to get the car seat in and out. However, it's still too small to fit two adults in the back in addition to the carseat. So we decided we'd replace the Nissan with a more family-friendly car.

We didn't want an SUV or a minivan, and quickly settled on a wagon. But then we stalled. There are wagons out there, but nothing met all our criteria: good gas mileage, reasonably sized back seat and cargo space, a little bit sporty, 4WD, and, my most important one: it had to come in red!

We dithered for months, went to the car show, test drove a couple of cars, and finally decided on a Toyota Matrix. But finding the Matrix with the options I wanted (red, 5-speed manual, vehicle stability control, all-weather package) was impossible. I tried CarsDirect.com, spoke to various dealers, but they all said that combination wasn't available. One dealer kept calling/emailing me and would say, "Cathy.... are you SURE you want red? I mean... it's RED. Really red."

Finally I called an auto broker and she found the car I wanted in Sacramento. Two guys drove it down on Saturday morning, and when we opened the door they looked at us doubtfully and said, "It's red." I GET IT. Then when I said I wanted to take it for a drive around the block, one of them said, "Well, it's a 5-speed.." Um, yeah, I DID buy the car... do you think I can't drive it? Then he insisted I was the co-signer when in fact my name was listed first. Ok, I'm a 36-year old woman; why is it I can't possibly want a red car with a manual transmission??

Anyway, we drove the car this weekend and I like it a lot. It doesn't have all the luxuries of the Audi--I really miss the automatic temperature control, where you can just set the temperature you want--but it's been nice to drive so far. And, we can fit two adults in the back along with the car seat!

Now I just have to sell the Nissan. I'm going to miss that car.

Duh

Stupid things I have done recently that I choose to blame on sleep deprivation:

• Stuffed the water bill into a drawer and forgot all about it
• Went to the grocery store but forgot my shopping list
• Went back to the store to get what I forgot, and bought sour cream instead of cottage cheese
• Forgot to pay the credit card bill, then argued with the customer service rep that of COURSE I had paid it, it must have been a bank error. Uh.. no.
• Set fire to parchment paper on the stove
• Drove down the block with the emergency brake on
• Sent someone a birthday card an entire month early

I'm sure there's more, but I am too sleep-deprived to remember.

Ho Ho Ho

I find this a little ironic: it's a bag of coal from Crate and Barrel (really licorice pieces), for Christmas stockings. And it's kosher.

Bad Survey

As someone who used to conduct surveys, I am sympathetic when I get calls asking me to participate in one. Plus, I actually like taking surveys.

Tonight I got another call from the Nielsen people, asking me to take a television survey. First the guy says, "May I speak to Cathy.. F.... female?" I said, "Cathy F?" and he says "Oh.. no.. Cathy, the F is for female."

Ok, that's me! Then we get stuck on the first question: do I subscribe to cable TV? Well, I asked for a clarification, since cable TV sometimes means literally cable TV (e.g. instead of satellite), and sometimes it means non-broadcast channels.

He repeated the question. I said, Does it include satellite TV? We subscribe to satellite. He repeated the question. Finally, I'm like, I don't know, let's move on.

The next question? "Do you subscribe to a satellite TV service?"

Sigh.

He then proceeds to list every sport known to man, including 10 types of car racing I've never heard of, and wants to know how much I like watching them on TV, on a scale of 1 to 5. Since I don't watch sports on TV, I answered 1 to everything, though I really wanted a negative rating scale for things like hunting and fishing, which would be even worse than watching, say, football.

About 12 minutes into the survey, he suddenly says, "I am having computer problems. I will have to call you back." I ask him how much more there is of the survey and he says "I don't know.. my computer is having problems."

I think their survey technique could use some improvement.

Book Review: Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do

I just finished the book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. It was excellent!

He takes a look at the psychology of driving, and has lots of data and studies to look at. One of the most fascinating parts to me was about the "less is more" theory, e.g. it's safer to have FEWER traffic signals, signs, high sidewalk curbs, etc, because those things allow a driver (as well as pedestrians and bicyclists) to feel safe when we shouldn't. He quotes recently-deceased Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who pioneered this theory. You can read more about Monderman on Vanderbilt's blog, or watch this video.

Two paragraphs really stood out for me. The first is about people's inability to understand the odds of dangerous things happening, and how it makes us try to add security to the wrong places. He articulates something very well that I've long thought (emphasis mine):

Grimly tally the number of people who have been killed by terrorism in the United States since the State Department began keeping records in the 1960s, and you'll get a total loss of less than 5,000--roughly the same number, it has been pointed out, as those who have been struck by lightening. But each year, with some fluctuation, the number of people killed in car crashes in the United States tops 40,000. More people are killed on the roads each month than were killed in the September 11 attacks. In the wake of those attacks, polls found that many citizens thought it was acceptable to curtail civil liberties to help counter the threat of terrorism . . . Those same citizens, meanwhile, in polls and in personal behavior, have routinely resisted traffic measures designed to reduce the annual death toll (e.g. lowering speed limits, introducing more red-light cameras, stiffer blood alcohol limits, stricter cell phone laws.) . . . It might be precisely because of all the vigilance that no further deaths due to terrorism have occured in the United States since 9/11 . . . This raises the question of why we do not mount a similarly concerted effort to improve the "security" of the nation's roads; instead in the wake of 9/11, newspapers have been filled with stories of traffic police being taken off the roads and assigned to counterterrorism.

And I liked this paragraph too (again, emphasis mine):

On the road, we make our judgments about what's risky and what's safe using our own imperfect human calculus. We think large trucks are dangerous, but we drive unsafely around them. We think roundabouts are more dangerous than intersections, although they're more safe. We think the sidewalk is a safer place to ride a bike, even though it's not. . . We do not let children walk to school even though driving presents a greater hazard . . . We buy SUVs because we think they're safer and then drive them in more dangerous ways. We drive at a minuscule following distance to the car ahead, exceeding out ability to avoid a crash, with a blind faith that the driver ahead will never have a reason to suddenly stop. We have gotten to the point where cars are safer than ever, yet traffic fatalities cling to stubbornly high levels. We know all this, and act as if we don't.

Anyway, the whole thing is a great read and I highly recommend it.

A Poll

Just curious about my readership. (I have the same poll on my other blog too.. please only vote once!)

Which do you read: 1) I only read Blogosaurus. 2) I only read Baby Blogosaurus. 3) I read both blogs. View Results Make your own poll