Ann vs. Jason

By Jason

Halloween is kind of a big deal at Google. Almost everyone dresses up, with geek points awarded for elaborate costumes, internet in-jokes, and shameless puns. This was a particularly important Halloween, being Athena’s first. So we faced a challenge: to come up with clever costumes for the three of us without doing anything offensive enough to get me fired.

Given all the work I’ve been doing lately to warn people about internet scams, we decided to be a whole scam family:

Ann is the deposed Nigerian prince looking for a trustworthy American friend with a bank account number, Athena is Falcon the Balloon Boy, and I am the make-money-at-home Google money tree.

Here’s a better picture of Athena’s costume:

We ended up ditching the cardboard box portion of the costume while at Google, since she spent most of the time either eating it or trying to take it off. It turns out that all you really need to do is tie a silver ufo-style balloon to a little kid and just about everybody recognizes the balloon boy. She was a big hit. Athena loved the crowds and all the attention – she ran around in the grass, balloon trailing, as everyone doted on her.

I’m posting this photo only to note that you can see Larry wandering by in an airplane costume in the background. Athena’s first celebrity sighting.

Here’s a photo of some of my coworkers on the search quality team, with Shane, Nelson, Wysz, myself, Rowyn, Sandy, Alissa, Koklynn, in the back row and Reid, Sophia, Tom and Rahul in front. Both Nelson and Reid were dressed as Max from Where the Wild Things Are. The giant banana in Nelson’s arms is actually his dog, Henry. Wysz is dressed as a chef in one of our cafes, though he had a hard time coming up with a costume this year.

Here’s a photo of our vocational-gender-stereotype-busting support engineering team, including Merry (as a 1-up mushroom), Rowyn, Sandy and myself.

Halloween was fun. We didn’t do any trick-or-treating with Athena, our apartment building wasn’t doing it and we don’t really know anyone in the neighborhood to show her off to. Next year I’m sure we will – because by next year, she’ll have a child’s all-consuming desire to acquire candy.

As always, I’ve got more photos in Flickr.

Some other happenings we’ve missed in our blogging tardiness:

1. Rachel, one of my high-school era friends, came to the Bay Area for work and spent a couple days hanging out with us and playing with Athena.

2. Athena is walking incredibly long distances. She can now easily handle several blocks at a time – the only reason we have to hold her hand to to keep her from running into traffic. Here’s proof, taken on Castro Street in Mountain View:

3. We hung out with Ahan and Julie, who are moving to Oregon and having a baby soon. Here’s a pic of Athena helping to take apart Julie’s lego building:

4. Andy flew in for a Google Summer of Code mentor conference and we got to hang out a bit. He regaled us with tales of what happens when you collect a bunch of super nerdy computer scientists together. Let’s just say that if anyone ever starts a conversation with, “did I ever tell you about the programming language I invented…” you should run.

This photo didn’t turn out very well but I’m including it as proof that Andy was near a baby and neither burst into flame:

It’s hard to believe Andy and Michelle’s wedding was over a year ago, or that Athena is almost a year old. We’ll have more posts coming soon… I think Ann wants to write a bit about what we’re doing to get Athena to eat better, all the talking she’s doing, and we have a Thanksgiving trip coming up soon as well.

By Jason

If this post is a bit disjointed, it’s because the past week or so has been a bit busy and we’ve bounced around from one thing to another like a pinball, inside a pinball machine, inside another giant pinball machine.

Last weekend was to be our big trip to Yosemite. We were planning on camping out with some of my coworkers and then doing some mild hiking around the valley while most of them attempted to scale Half Dome. This was going to be Athena’s first camping trip, so Ann spent the week preparing and packing and I spent the week convincing Ann that it wasn’t a crazy idea and that Curry Village is actually quite nice.

This was all planned out when we learned that Todd would be in San Francisco the same weekend. We worked out a plan to drive up to Sonoma on Thursday to meet up with him, then leave for Yosemite Friday right after work.

Then some of the corporate communications people at work told me some news outlets might be interested in doing a story on all the scams using Google’s name and logo… and by the way, Good Morning America will be here on Friday :)

Then Yosemite caught fire.

So on Thursday, we did go up to Sonoma to see Todd and meet Liz. Todd was actually having a bad reaction to some sunburn so we didn’t go on on wine tours, but Athena was her normal charming self and we had a nice visit.

I had to go in to work early that morning for practice interviews and give the correspondent some background over the phone during lunch, but that was okay.

On Friday I did the interview – it was about a half hour of taping but in the end they only used a few seconds. You can see the clip and read the news story and read more about the experience on my blog.

Later that day we found out that wild fires near Yosemite had closed the road to the west entrance and filled the valley with smoke. We had to cancel the trip, but Reid pulled together a last-minute day trip to Angel Island, just north east of San Francisco in the bay.

We carried Athena around with the baby carrier and stowed about a thousand pounds of baby stuff in another backpack. It pays to be prepared, though – Ann had bought a new thermos for the camping trip and it kept us supplied with hot water for milk all day, no problem.

We split off from the main group to avoid the steep trail and walked over to the Angel Island Immigration Station, where many Asian American immigrants were detained. It was a nice walk, though uncharacteristically hot.

The walls of the building have poetry carved in Chinese:

Athena absolutely loved taking the ferry to and from the island. Judging from her reaction, it was the greatest thing she had ever experienced in her 9 months on this earth.

Our fellow hikers included Mike, Beah, Dan, Nelson, Merry, Charlene, Reid, Kolina, Naoko from the Tokyo office, and Andrew from Seoul.

Few people know this but Nelson and Mike are professional catalog models:

The ferry back from Angel Island is amazingly inconvenient. We had to go to Tiburon, then Fishermans Wharf, and then finally back to the Ferry Building where we started our trip.

And here’s one last photo, Athena has learned how to drive:

Ann and I are somewhat exhausted.

By Jason

I just realized we haven’t updated the blog in a few weeks. Work has been very busy. I’ll cover some of the things we’ve been up to lately, including visits to a number of local parks.

GoogleServe 2009

This past week we had our annual community service project at work, GoogleServe. This year my team signed up together to remove invasive plants from the dunes at Half Moon Bay. We were going after mustard and ice plant. I was surprised to find out that ice plants aren’t native to California – I took a bunch of pictures of them when we visited Santa Cruz. They are great at stabilizing dunes but choke out native plants that local wildlife depend on.

I didn’t take any pictures, but Reid did, and you can enjoy this quick video from my friend and fellow internet-blogger Wysz.

Apparently very few Googlers (or Californians, for that matter) have ever used a hoe before. I tried to explain: in the Midwest, we have these things called yards, and with yards you can often find gardens. Given real estate prices here (even in a down market), I guess we’ll have to find a volunteer organization or community garden or something to better introduce Athena to the outdoors.

GoogleServe, by the way, is an amazing program that more companies should consider copying. Kudos to Seth for his help organizing.

Castle Rock State Park

Last weekend we took Athena on a hike in Castle Rock State Park. We’ve been on walks before, but we’re starting to work our way up to what I would call an official hike.

Athena loves hiking so far but going up and down hills is probably the only activity that’s still hard for Ann. She’s been working out and is probably in better shape than me by now but the changes in grade make walking a challenge for her.

You can see the Castle Rock formation in the photos below. Given all the mountains and cliffs around California I was a little surprised at how small Castle Rock is – it reminded me of the rocks at in Chippewa Gorge at Brecksville Metropark. Fun for climbing.

I have more photos at Flickr.

Lake Chabot with Ahan and Julie

A few weekends ago we spent the weekend at Ahan and Julie’s place, including a nice walk at Chabot Regional Park in the East Bay.

It’s a long story why we spent the whole weekend with them – we haven’t written about it much, but Athena had cold symptoms for about 5 weeks straight, since just after our visit to Cleveland. We’ve had water leaking in the ceiling and mold problems at this apartment so we spent the weekend with them to see if it would make a difference. I headed back home for one of the days to do a thorough cleaning, even washing the walls of her room.

In any event, she’s fine now. Back to the pictures:

Athena loves the grass. We couldn’t keep her on the blanket for long before she rolled over into the grass to start pulling it up.

We’ll try to do another update soon, with picture and video of Athena in her current favorite toy, the Johnny Jump-Up.

By Jason

One of the strangest things about coming to work for Google has been the fact that I can’t really tell people what I do at work.  That includes friends and family.  The work my team does is visible, in a way, to thousands of people every day but if we’re doing a good job they don’t even know it.

So when friends and family (i.e. you all reading this here blog) ask me about my job I end up saying a lot of vague, general stuff.  I feel bad, like I’m being evasive.  The best description I could come up with for Grandma was that I was the “Janitor of the Internet.”

So today, I’m happy to say I can actually share something with you all:  I wrote a post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.  There you can read about the sorts of things that I think about all day.

A few other quick updates:

• Ann and I had our third anniversary on Wednesday.  We walked over to the Garden Fresh Vegetarian Restaurant for dinner.  Our trip to Monterey and Carmel counts as our big anniversary celebration.

• We currently have 560 votes in our baby name poll.  Some of the more interesting write-ins include Zora, Neeti, Ea, and Saskia for girls and Pelayo, Kaden, Nintendo, and Agitation for boys.

• I changed the way comments are set up so it’s easier for you to comment on the blog.  Just type away. If you read our updates via email just click on the headline at the top to go to the site and comment.  We have to approve everything before it will appear, and I have some automatic anti-spam stuff in place too (see my Google blog post).

By Jason

I probably shouldn’t post this – my brother is already convinced that all we do at Google is eat all day.  On Thursday my team had an offsite at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which is a pretty cool old-timey amusement park.  We made a stop there a few months ago with Ryan and Jessi but everything was closed at the time.

In a sense it was bad timing, since I have been very busy at work lately and could have used the hours to do something productive…  on the other hand, it was probably good timing to get a break and have some fun with co-workers.

Here’s a video of our ride on the Giant Dipper, an old wooden roller coaster:

Link to video. Special thanks to Reid for recording and posting it.

We promise to write more about the baby shower soon. In the mean time, I’ve been uploading old papers and notes on my professional blog, so feel free to poke around the archives and see what I was thinking about as long as ten years ago. I’m considering putting up some interesting old emails here as well, like from my first days at college or the trip with Todd and Martin to Argentina.

By Jason

We are ridiculously behind in posting what’s going on in our lives in NorCal (this is what the kids call it).  We have been fairly busy, though, what with all the gestation going on.

Last month my parents came for a visit and we gave them our comprehensive tour of the Bay Area.  They flew in around noon and Ann brought them directly from the airport to Google for lunch.  I gave them the grand tour (which, despite all the practice, I have yet to master) and we ate at the No Name Cafe.  Within 10 minutes my Mom managed to get the all cooks singing Canta y no Llores.  It was one of those great moments that is both endearing and a little embarrassing.  Dad was impressed by all the different languages spoken and how people seemed so social and engaged in discussion.  It really isn’t like any other workplace.

The next stop on the tour for which I have pictures available was San Francisco – hopefully we’ll post an addendum later to fill in narrative gaps like this.  We parked near the financial district so that we could take the cable cars up California Street and then down to the Hyde Street Pier and Fisherman’s Wharf.   I think my dad could have ridden the cable cars up and down the hills all day.  Mom kept wondering whose idea it was to build a city up and down so many steep hills in the first place.  I think it was a conspiracy between cable car union and the post card industry.

To get an idea how steep the ride is, here’s Mom and Ann with Hyde Street in the background:

As always, you can click on the photos to see larger versions.  Next is a picture that should be pretty familiar to anyone who’s traveled with my Dad – reading all the informational signs:

Next we took a cruise around the bay, out to the Golden Gate and around Alcatraz Island.  Here’s a photo on the boat with the bridge in the background.

This picture is a little more newsworthy but also a bit sad.  Can you tell that the tug boat is pulling something?  That would be a dead whale, which had drifted under a pier and was stuck for a few days.  We just happened to be heading back as they towed it out to sea.  I wasn’t the only one taking pictures, it looked like the city’s entire fleet of news helicopters were circling above.

Next we wandered around Fisherman’s Wharf for a bit, taking a look at the Lefty’s leftorium, which is just like Ned Flander’s store in the Simpsons, and the other shops and galleries.  We walked down to the end of Pier 39, which you can see here:

Our next adventure was to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, which we also visited with Ryan and Jessi.  Next door is the Roaring Camp Railroad.  We couldn’t take the ride because this part of the year they do group events like weddings, but we got to watch as one of the old steam locomotives headed out.

Dad got to talk a bit with the engineer.  One thing you might notice in the picture is that the train doesn’t have the usual pistons and connecting rods on the sides of the driving wheels.  Think of the arm motions you would make if you were pretending to be a train in a game of charades.  Since these trains had to go up steep grades they actually had three big pistons up front with a central drive shaft down the middle.

Here we’re watching the train leaving the station.  Ann is eating old-fashioned horehound candy which does wonders for nausea.

The big attraction of the park is the giant redwood trees.  You can get an idea how big they are from the picture below.  We had a chance to crawl inside one tree that was completely hollow inside, maybe 15-20 feet up.

One thing I don’t have a picture of is a giant banana slug.  I have been hoping to encounter one every time we’ve taken a trip to the redwoods with no luck.  As we headed back down the trail we heard a bunch of commotion ahead of us.  On the ground was a (relatively) small, very stunned banana slug.  Apparently some kids had run ahead for their parents and found it on the tree.  They dared each other to kiss it, at which point on of the little girls freaked out and knocked the poor thing off.

Our next day was spent in sunny San Jose, where we visited the Winchester Mystery House.  There’s no real mystery, but it is a great story – Sarah Winchester, wife of the creator of the Winchester rifle, was left a widow with a ridiculous sum of money.  She worried that she would be haunted by the ghosts of all those killed by her husband’s rifles.  Supposedly a psychic told her she must never stop construction on her house (ghosts don’t like loud hammering), so she didn’t.  The end result is a sprawling complex with no central plan and lots of expensive details:

Here’s a picture from one of the upper floors but this doesn’t really give you a good idea of how big the place is.  It’s a lot of fun, though the tours are a bit pricey and our tour guide was less than knowledgeable.

It used to be on a big estate but now it’s right in the middle of San Jose, you can see office buildings behind us.

Mom liked the place because Mrs. Winchester had lots of mini-steps built in the staircases.  It was like the house was designed for her.

As always, there are more photos of the trip here.

Up next:  shirt trips to Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve.