What’s New?

This page has gathered a little dust since I’ve last been here.  It’s been an extremely busy, but also different kind of summer so far.

I started a new job seven weeks ago, as I mentioned I would back in May.  That transition has been more challenging than I perhaps expected it to be.  Suddenly, instead of hiding among a more talented team, or playing a minor supporting role in a large company within another large company, I’ve now moved into a key role in a pretty small, lean organization.  In other words, there’s no safety net, there’s nowhere to hide, and people will be depending on me.

No pressure.  Of course, I’m there for a reason — I bring a specific skill set that was somewhat lacking previously.  Still, acclimating to a new environment, albeit one that is supportive, energetic, and friendly, is nevertheless a stress-inducing endeavor.  The last few weeks have been a challenge as I’d begun to find my role within the fluid, “chaotic” organization.

The good news is, I’m finally starting to feel like I’ve got my feet under me.  Meeting and getting to know the whole team, especially those who would benefit from my expertise, has easily been the most helpful thing both for my confidence and my sanity.  I am (probably) the proverbial “dumbest person in the room,” so I anticipate my continued professional growth will be meteoric and swift.  All I need to do is make an effort.

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Now, my main reason for breaking my (slight) drought on here, though, is that I really want to jot down for posterity several events that occurred during and after my transition.  With a week off between jobs, I did some things that I’d been wanting/dreading to do for a long, long time.

Firstly, the moment my cashed-out time off arrived in my direct deposit, I paid off my student loans.  All of them.  Done.  Back in 2012, when I initially started paying them, I assembled a detailed projection spreadsheet, wherein I could adjust payments and see how it affected the next 10+ years of my financial life.  Tweaking it often consumed my mind, since I had nothing else to do back then.  The financial burden was more significant on my measly entry-level salary, and I wanted it gone as soon as possible, even though I could only afford to maybe improve the payoff date from 2021 to 2020.

Here’s the thing: it didn’t really matter.  I paid off my loans over two years early.  I saved, maybe, a couple thousand dollars in interest.  That’s not insignificant, sure, but over a decade that includes three job changes (read: major raises), it just gets absorbed.  But the biggest reason I say this is, once I pulled the trigger and the balance finally, finally read “Paid in full,” I didn’t feel anything.  Nothing changed.  In fact, my credit score went down because I shaved several years off my average account age.  Inside, I felt no satisfaction or sense of accomplishment.  It was, just, over.

I am, however, very fortunate to have been able to afford my monthly payments since I graduated and I understand many folks have a far heavier burden than I did, so this sentiment doesn’t apply to everyone.  That said, if given the choice to pay my loans faster or build my savings with what I know now, I would choose the latter every time.  Patience may cost interest down the line, but having any savings at all in the present is paramount.

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Secondly, I bought new clothes.  Like, clothes that fit.  Yeah, weirdly I didn’t know how to really dress myself for most of my life.

The reason I bring this up, though, is the side-effect of buying new clothes: getting rid of old clothes.  I’ve always been way too sentimental, keeping things around beyond their utility.  Well, something changed that week — I went fully Marie Kondo on my closets, ripping out old clothes, clothes that didn’t fit, clothes I didn’t want, clothes I’d been hanging on to for sentimental reasons, and threw them into piles with abandon.

It took me mere minutes to thin it all out, discarding most of the clothes I still had from my college days and before, as well as some less aged items that I never really used.  Many had awesome memories attached to them, so I thanked them for their service before I let them go.  Three massive trash bags were loaded up in my car and taken, without hesitation, to Goodwill.  Like paying my student loans, it was a shocking non-event — I pulled them out of my trunk, plopped them in the bins, and walked away.  That was it.  So many sartorial memories, gone.  For a moment I felt some twinges of regret, but those have since passed.  I didn’t need these things, so I got rid of them.  End of story.  My life felt lighter and more organized — more ready to face the challenge my new job would bring.  I’m hoping this experience will teach me to be less sentimental, should that impulse to jettison be difficult to find again.

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Finally, I’ve been biking.  A lot.  When I bought my (first!) bicycle back in 2016, I rode quite often, albeit I was “unemployed” for a few months.  The next couple working years naturally relegated my riding to weekends, where I’d usually need to psych myself up to get out and make an effort.  On beautiful days, it’s easier.  In the cold of winter, or the claustrophobic fog of summer, it’s not so much.  Last year I started riding to my girlfriend’s place across town for the weekends, but in total that would be a workout of less than 10 miles per week, at best.  When the rains came, it stopped entirely.  And 2019 had been very rainy, so my riding had been less than consistent.

Flash forward to June: on my first day of work, I noticed a little nook in the office where someone had put their bike.  Oh, happy day, that was all I wanted to see!  I could, and would, ride to work.  And so I did, three days later.

It was hard.  San Francisco is not topographically cooperative, though culturally, I would say the opposite.  The route from my house to the office is mostly downhill, largely on shared roadways with minimal morning road traffic, and in part on dedicated bikeways.  Nevertheless, I often work up a sweat because I don’t know how to not make an effort, especially when the roads are clear and the lights are green.

The ride home was hell.  Uphill the whole way, into the wind.  I was sweating bullets and freezing at the same time.  My legs ached.  By the time I hit my 14th mile of the day, I was ready to give up, and that’s not even that much distance, really.  But I knew if I kept this up, I’d get in better shape real fast.  I spent some time optimizing my routes, through trial and error as well as tools to evaluate paths and hills — in the end there’s no avoiding the climbs, so I might as well not waste energy going higher than needed.

Now it’s the end of July.  I’ve ridden to work and back 12 times out of 32 working days, or just under twice a week on average.   In other words, since starting, I’ve put 177 miles through my legs instead of paying to ride a cramped and unreliable streetcar.  That’s 16% of all of the miles my bike has traveled so far.  The best part is I have extrinsic motivation: my commute is much shorter time-wise when riding, and it’s free, save for the infrequent cost of bicycle maintenance.  The more difficult ride home is mitigated by the fact that, well, it’s my ride home — I can reach just as fast as I want to.  The increased fitness is a bonus, as is the benefit to the environment.

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So, in a nutshell, since I’ve left my last job, things have changed, mainly for the better.  It’s been a severe adjustment period, both in a good and bad way, but I have confidence I’ll be much better off down the road.  That is, assuming I don’t pour all of my new salary into cycling accessories — at this point, it’s a real danger. 🙂

The Elephant Does Not Fly (or, हिंदी सीखना)

As a prelude to (perhaps finally) writing about my pair of not-so-recent experiences in India, I want to share a relatively new development in my life.

I’ve started learning Hindi.

For real.

In July, after years of anticipation, Duolingo launched their Hindi Beta, and being the ravenous amateur linguist that I am, I blew through the initial beta tree in a couple weeks.  Granted, I was only skimming through to understand the extent of the course’s coverage, but since then I’ve slowly, dutifully restarted, practicing my fundamentals until solid.

Hindi isn’t exactly a new endeavor for me though.  My relationship to the language goes back several years; in a way, it’s been longer if you consider the five words of Bengali I learned in college, but they’re long gone and that’s a story better fallen into myth.  At my previous company, my North Indian coworkers would often speak Hindi, which actually isn’t all that unusual in the Bay Area.  What actually piqued my interest in the first place was seeing its script.

Devanagari is gorgeous.  It’s curvy, yet angular.  It’s bound together through its characteristic horizontal line, presenting a picture of order and unity.  Of course, when I first took a closer look at the script, I was utterly befuddled.  It’s on its face more alien than any foreign character sets I’d come across and studied, be them alphabets barely different than English such as the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, or the dueling syllabaries of Japan, Hiragana and Katakana.

However, Devanagari and its constructs, as I’d come to learn, are far more straightforward and logical than they appear to an uneducated observer.  But more on that later.

At the time, I had no reference for associating sounds with graphs, and the effort required to pick up yet another alphabet (in addition to the extra four mentioned above jammed in my brain) didn’t feel like it would be of much benefit.  Most Indians, especially those in the States, speak English, so it didn’t affect our communication at all.

This all changed when I met a girl.  She opened the world to me.  Her fluent trilinguality inspired me.  Already fairly advanced in German, as well as having dabbled in Russian, I was finally open to the idea of learning another new language, especially one so exotic.  Of course, things didn’t quite go the way I’d dreamed — over a few years, I’d picked up only a few phrases and words.  I still couldn’t even begin to read; I wrote Hindi through Google Translate.  Sometimes I’d stumble recalling my phrases, and say something entirely different by accident.  As much as I’d ask her to speak Hindi with me, her indulgence never really lasted — my practicing never took off.

I went to India twice.  As I mentioned, many people speak English, so that was my default method of communication.  If the situation called for a local tongue, I had a guide to help.  Also, the majority of my Indian travels ended up being in the south, where they not only prefer not to speak Hindi, but each state seems to actively resist its use in favor of their native tongues.  (Kannada in Karnataka and Tamil in Tamil Nadu were the other major languages that I personally encountered with some ubiquity.  Various other languages such as Telugu and Urdu were also seen written in certain places just about everywhere I went.)

Flash forward to this year: I guess to impress my North Indian girlfriend, I actually decided to learn Devanagari script, mostly so I could text with it.  Now here’s where the awesomeness of Hindi finally broke through to me: it, like Japanese, is actually just another syllabary… sort of.  It’s an abugida, which is basically a syllabic alphabet where vowel sounds are modifiers appended to a root consonant.  Let me show off my expansive knowledge for a second:

In Japanese Hiragana, you would write ひらがな (hiragana), which broken into characters goes simply like this:

• ひ (hi)
• ら (ra)
• が (ga)
• な (na)

Similarly, Japanese Katakana (カタカナ, katakana) is the same way.

• カ (ka)
• タ (ta)
• カ (ka)
• ナ (na)

Very straightforward.  It’s just a matter of remembering each of the individual shapes.  I crammed these on my flight when I visited Japan a couple years ago — after only a couple hours, I’d gotten 92 characters into memory.

Hindi is just bit more complicated.  In Hindi, the basic word हिंदी (hindī) is formed like this:

• ह (ha) + ि (i) + ं (n) =  हिं (hin)
• द (da) + ी (ī) = दी (dī)

Devanagari has roughly 33 base consonants and 14 standalone vowel characters.  As noted above, the vowel sounds also have diacritic forms that are appended to the root consonant.  (i.e., I used ि and ी above with the consonants, but those two sounds have their own standalone letters too: इ and ई, respectively)

Often Hindi uses a special trick to combine two consonants into one, called a conjunct.  For example, an alternate spelling of “Hindi” is हिन्दी, which constructs the second syllable like this:

• न (na) + द (da) + ी (ī) = न्दी (ndī)

There is a conjunct for every combination of consonants for a total of 1296 additional characters.  Most of them are simply formed by (generally and simplistically speaking) adding half of the leading consonant’s glyph in front of the full glyph of the second, like above.  However, there are a bunch that are irregular, and some of those get pretty weird.  I think it’s so cool.

Now, there are certainly troubles we English speakers will encounter in Hindi.  Learning the written language is certainly a stumbling block, as few if any of the characters have a clear visual analog in English, and the intricacy and density of the written word requires extensive practice to understand at a glance.  My memorization of these has been far more difficult than it was for Japanese.  Several diacritics look very similar to others, so often I will use the wrong vowel sound.  Some accent marks appear as single dots or slightly extended line curls, so you really need to look closely if you want to get it right.

There are also a handful of sounds that simply don’t exist in English, including some of the thirteen plus vowel sounds.  Additionally, aspirated and retroflex consonants pose a particular problem for an untrained mouth and tongue.  Put a few of them in sequence and you can go ahead and give up any possibility of a correct pronunciation.

But it’s still fun.

At this point in my real learning, which has been nearly every day since the launch of the Duolingo Hindi beta in July, I can recognize and translate a handful of words without truly knowing how to pronounce them.  My reading is extremely slow.  Grammatically, it’s not super complicated (yet), but I still trip over the few rules I’ve been taught.  However, I am actually able to produce perfectly grammatical sentences and phrases, to the delight of many Hindi-speaker in my midst.  They’re always so basic and/or childish, it’s kind of funny.  One day I’ll hit some level of competency, but for now, I’ll keep repeating phrases like चूहे छोटे होते हैं and हाथी नहीं उड़ते. 🙂

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I should also mention that I absolutely have not stopped learning German.  On Duolingo, I have gilded my complete German tree with a maximum (at the moment) of 608 fancy Crowns.  My streak exceeds 1850 days and I have no intention of stopping any time soon.

Avant Gardener

Ever since 2008, I’ve had a houseplant or two in my dwelling.  By 2015, that number had grown to twelve, mainly hardy hanging philodendrons, spiky dracaena, and resilient aglaonema.  It’s not often that I lose one of them; these plants are pretty hard to kill.  A few have come and gone, usually lasting a few years without trouble.  Based on that unwarranted confidence, I fancied myself as having a bit of a green thumb.

Earlier this year, I was inspired by a couple things — firstly, that lovely patchwork flower garden on top of the multi-colored greenhouse bunker in The Witness, still my favorite puzzle set of the game; secondly, the flowers around Walnut Creek, where my current workplace is located; and thirdly, the very title of this post, which I’ll get to — to create and plant my very own flower garden in my backyard.

In San Francisco, it’s a blessing to even have a backyard, and my house had its renovated last year.  Since even before then, I’ve cared for the grounds insofar as I’ve been the one to voluntarily pull all of the weeds out of the beds surrounding the patios.  This past summer, and tired of looking at nothing but concrete and wood chips out my windows, I decided to add some color.

Naturally, watering hardy indoor plants regularly is a little bit different than growing flowers in a bed of mystery soil.  I didn’t know anything about it, really; I kinda just winged it.  Couldn’t be that hard, right?

I went ahead and dug up the dirt in two rectangular spaces with my trowel and garden fork.  We have a shovel too… not sure why I didn’t just use it.  A couple inches of worked dirt should be enough to plant in, I thought.  It only took a few hours in the afternoon summer sun to get it ready for planting.

The next morning I would head down to one of my new favorite spots in the city, Sloat Garden Center — right next to the ocean by the zoo — and snag a couple dozen 4″ perennials of varying colors as well as fertilizer and soil.  The soil in my yard is somewhat sandy, thanks to the dunes that used to cover my neighborhood, so I ordered soil specifically to enrich it.  Luckily, I happened into the store on the very weekend where they were having their annual flower sale.  I didn’t know about it beforehand, honest.

I very scientifically measured appropriate intervals for planting my perennials, dug little holes, and put them in, eventually covering the whole planting area with soil and mixing in the fertilizer.  After a light water, I was done for the day.  I have to say, it looked pretty nice!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BVf-14dB6nY/

I gave them a shower ever other day or so, as needed.  My lovely little flowers.  They grow up so fast:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWngvQkhV24/

In this fledgling garden was a great variety of color, shape, and size.  A cluster of magenta, red, white and orange geraniums flanked by deep blue and purple verbena and yellow, red, and pink calibrachoa.  Others included white lantana, apricot sprite agastache, and a few grassy pink things — I don’t know the names of the latter because they’ve since been replaced.

During the later summer, I went home for Labor Day weekend.  It was, unfortunately, the hottest week of the summer in California — temperatures in the city exceeded 85 degrees for days on end, which is a rarity.  In my absence and without water for four days of extreme temperatures, I lost a great deal of growth on my garden, with some flowers wilting enough to require amputation, while a couple just outright died.

To make matters worse, there was an invader in my garden.  I didn’t full understand the scope of my troubles until I saw it with my own eyes.

A gopher!  This little underground terror had been burrowing his way around my garden for weeks, casually nomming down my more appetizing plants — the verbena and calibrachoa —  as well as stunting the growth of the rest of the garden with its tunnels and root damage.  I had been puzzled as to why my left-side bed was under-performing the right; here was a sure indication.

Now, I should have known better.  There are gopher scars in the vacant planting bed at the rear edge of my yard, as well as all across the neighborhood.  I can’t help but notice them now whenever I’m out and they’re everywhere.  Indeed, the folks at the garden center confirmed they’re somewhat of an epidemic in the city, especially out on the sandy western side.

So with that in mind, I purchased and liberally deployed rodent repellent in the garden.  The above pictured bed was subsequently completely unaffected by the little menace following this endeavor.  The verbena he was most recently eating has fully recovered, as have the calibrachoa which were chewed up only on the fringes, with the cores left intact.  But, he scurried his way underneath the patio and began to severely terrorize my other bed.  The repellent had failed, despite continued use, and every week, another one of my tasty flowers was crippled.  I knew exactly where he was coming from, yet I had nothing at my disposal to solve the problem.

Finally, last week I’d had enough.  After losing two flowers completely and having *four* more crippled in just days, I decided to take a full measure.  No, I didn’t kill it.  That’s, ironically, only a half measure.  I plotted out and engineered a solution: I was going to enclose the beds of my garden in steel mesh to ensure that they were completely impassible to burrowing animals.

I bought corrosion-resistant galvanized steel meshing, planters for emergency evacuation, and wooden stakes to attach the mesh to.  I spent nearly a whole week working on it, starting by digging out my most vulnerable flowers a few at a time each evening after work.

Of course, that only seemed to embolden the little guy by giving him a direct path through now-thinned soil to get at other at-risk flowers.  I lost one completely, and am rehabilitating two others that were severely wounded.  What a terror!

When the weekend finally arrived, I stripped the garden down six full inches of dirt, roughly four inches below the base of the patio on all sides.  It was harder work than I was expecting.  By day’s end, I had two giant piles of dirt, but a snugly secured steel mesh in each bed, fastened in place with staples and friction.

That’s four cubic feet of dirt, plus whatever air filled in the gaps of the newly unpacked earth.  The mesh is jammed in there as best as I could get.  The only gaps are hopefully not large enough for vermin, but I can’t be sure.  The good news is any potential access points are easy to mend without needing to dig up the whole garden again.

The next day I woke up sore, but managed to fill in all of the dirt, along with new enriching soil, layers of repellent, and fertilizer before the morning was through.  I replanted all of the flowers in the new beds, re-arranging them in a more appropriate configuration given their individual growth patterns and colors.

In a few weeks hopefully the dirt will settle and I can finish the landscaping off nicely.  By then, I also hope the damaged flowers will have somewhat recovered.  For now, my reborn garden looks a little unfinished.

Five months into this project, I feel like I’ve learned a ton about how to build a garden and care for it.  San Francisco’s climate is welcoming, so I have yet to experience the challenges of other areas, but at least it’s a start.  When I inevitably move out of this house (hopefully not for awhile), I’ll have practical knowledge to build on for my next garden adventure.  It’s been unexpectedly expensive to do this, but it pays off in the vibrance and life it gives my yard.  I appreciate my view far more than I did before.

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t follow up on the title of this post.  “Avant Gardener” is a song by Courtney Barnett, one of my latest favorite artists.  I have to admit the lyrics of this song are also partly responsible for my dive into yard work; the way she puts it, it sounds wonderful, at least at first.  Coincidentally, I went to see her in concert in Oakland just last week during the majority of my garden troubles, and as I suspected it would, the show closed with this very song.  Incredible.