airline suckage redux

I've been hating on airlines more than usual recently.

Yesterday evening I paid over $1200 for a three-legged post-Christmas route between the Bay Area, Maui, and the Big Island. I'd been watching the fares since May (which was unfortunately before we decided to go for sure) and this particular route had never gone below $983. I finally pulled the trigger because they were down to three seats left on only non-stop flight between Kona and the Bay Area. Grr. (On the other hand, deals for early December are plentiful; I've seen ads for sub-$350 roundtrip flights. Darn high season.)

Then, I discovered this morning that because we'd booked our upcoming East Coast trip through continental.com (using Continental miles) on flights operated by United, we had no seat assignments. We would have gone seat-less ("you will get a [super-crappy] seat assignment at the gate") except that I pulled United Premier rank to get us Economy Plus seats. Whew.

Finally, I randomly checked our October DC itinerary online and discovered that it listed our status as "Schedule Change" instead of "Confirmed". It had a red warning that instructed me to call customer service to confirm. I spent over 20 minutes on the phone with the rep just to reconfirm that flight. WTF? Last month I got an email from Virgin America with a schedule change, which required about ten seconds and two button clicks to confirm.

service upgrade

We got a flyer from our garbage company a couple days ago. It announced that they're beginning compost pickup shortly, and will also be picking up recycling every week rather than every other week. This made my day. (Yes, my life is super-exciting.)

microclimates

This Saturday, I'll be going to a birthday party in Sunnyvale, another one in Danville, and then having dinner in San Francisco. I live in the mid-Peninsula area.

Here's the weather forecast for Saturday:
Danville - 94F/35C
Sunnyvale - 83F/28C
my house - 74F/23C
San Francisco - 65F/18C (low of 58F/14C)

That almost makes me want to stay home all day. I guess this is one of the reasons I live where I live.

very random act

On Saturday night, I went to the AMC Mercado with a bunch of friends, as part of a birthday celebration. It was the first time I'd been to the Mercado in probably 3 or 4 years, and as usual it was teeming with high school kids.

We were pretty early, so after we got our seats, I went to use the bathroom. As I was walking out of my stall to the sinks, a very agitated teenaged girl asked me for help. I'm usually wary of strangers asking me for stuff (or giving me stuff, for that matter) but she looked really young and upset, so I paused to let her explain.

It turned out that she had broken the zipper on her skirt, which was only about mid-thigh length and pretty tight to begin with, so she couldn't get it zipped up anymore. She asked me to hold her skirt together while she tried to zip it. It took us about five minutes of wrestling with the zipper (and she kept talking about how embarrassed she was the whole time), but we managed to get it. Afterwards, she gave me a teary hug and thanked me profusely.

I was kind of amused but also glad I had been able to help out. It would have sucked to be in her situation.

that's a first

It appears that I am going to (part of) a bachelor party tonight. I'm pretty sure I was only invited because D is going to be at a different bachelor party in New Orleans and they need even teams for Starcraft, but whatever, I'm not passing up a SC LAN party. If there are strippers, they better be dressed up as zerglings or something.

just fix it

For the past few weeks, there's been a little orange bubble on top of the "options" icon () in all of the Chrome windows on my work desktop. It was pretty small, so it was probably hovering just below my annoyance threshold, and I never bothered to figure it out. Also, I think in the back of my mind I thought that it must have to do with my Gmail chat status somehow, even though that makes no sense whatsoever.

Just now I clicked on it and got this message:
Old school is not cool. Google Chrome is woefully out of date because it hasn't crashed or restarted in weeks. Restart to apply update.

Pretty cute message and all, but I really hate restarting my browser, partially because I always have like three or four windows open with five tabs apiece, and partially because we have an OTP authentication scheme at work that requires me to dig up an OTP keyfob every time I start a new browser instance. Anyway, I grumbled about the convenience for a couple seconds but decided to restart anyway. I clicked on the icon, Chrome restarted itself, and magically opened up all my windows and tabs again. Awesome sauce (with no orange bubbles)!! Yes, I know that's how it's supposed to work, but I find I'm often amazed when software works properly.

super yummy day

For some reason, I had both Monday and Tuesday off this week. We came back from DC on Monday night anyway since D had to work, so I had all of Tuesday free. I decided to embark on a food tour of SF of all the places that I'd been wanting to try, but hadn't had time to go yet.

My friend and I left home around 9:30am, and went directly to Little Skillet, where we split chicken and waffles and an order of biscuits. Everyone else was eating their food on the street, but we were cold so we ate in the car. I thought the chicken and biscuits were quite good, but the waffles were so-so.

Next up was Dynamo Donuts, where we met up with another friend and ordered a maple glazed bacon apple donut and a bread pudding to share, plus coffee/espresso all around. Of course, I took a box of donuts to go: another maple glazed bacon apple, a lemon thyme, a spiced chocolate, and the last passionfruit milk chocolate available. Score!

I wanted to hit the farmer's market, so we headed back across town to the Ferry Building where I bought cherries and green beans but resisted some delicious brittle. Instead I went inside where I bought Cowgirl Creamery cheese (Red Hawk, Cave Aged Marisa, & Wasatch Mountain), more Acme bread, and Miette macarons. We also snacked on a "meat cone" at Boccalone Salumeria and I eyed some of the mushrooms at Far West Fungi but I finally decided they were just too expensive.

Soon afterwards, we met up with yet another friend, and after much debate, the four of us picked Hog Island Oyster Company over Out the Door for lunch. Together, we split a half dozen oysters, two salads, and two delicious gruyere and onion bread grilled cheese sandwiches.

I couldn't eat anything else after that, but couldn't leave the city without some ice cream anyway. We discussed the pros and cons of Humphry Slocombe and Bi-Rite but in the end I picked Mitchell's since I hadn't had it since high school and figured I should give it another chance. We took home a pint of "Tropical Four" (banana, guava, mango & pineapple).

After a few hours of errands and such, it was time to make dinner! My contribution was pasta with shallots, mushrooms, tomatoes, and pesto sauce, made from all of the fresh basil in the fridge that was just starting to spoil. We also made chicken piccata and had some of the bread and cheese. For dessert, we sampled the donuts (my favorites were the maple bacon and passionfruit chocolate) and I made a parfait of sorts from ice cream, milk, Grand Marnier, peaches, and blueberries.

Now that I think about it, it's probably a good thing that I hardly ever have random weekdays off of work.

step by step

I've been thinking for awhile that I should get into biking. I used to bike when I was a kid, but then since college, my only experiences with biking have been between buildings at work, on ultra-ghetto cruisers that use pedal brakes and have no gears.

This train of thought started probably a year ago. I asked my parents to drop off my old 18-speed bike from high school at my house, which they did a few weeks later. At that point I discovered my bike actually seemed to be in okay shape, with the exception of some very flat tires. Nevertheless, I thought I might want to get it checked out before riding it any real distance.

Unfortunately we left soon afterwards on our round-the-world trip, and after we got back it was winter and rainy and ski season, so it was March or April before I thought about biking again. We moved out of our house in late April due to our remodelling project, to go live with some friends down the street, and my bike got left behind in our garage.

Bike-to-Work Day was May 13th, and ideally I would have brought my bike in to get tuned that week, but I completely forgot. Then, a week ago, I got an invitation for a friend's birthday party for which the main event will be a bike ride on the Los Gatos Creek Trail. I figured I'd use that as my motivation to get my bike in shape, and responded yes.

This afternoon I stopped by our house to pick up my bike. I tried to put it in the trunk of my Subaru Impreza. Not even close. I folded down the passenger seat and tried to put it in the backseat of my car. I succeeded in scratching up the center console pretty badly with the pedals, but was unable to get the bike into the car.

I fiddled with the front tire for a few minutes and finally figured out how to take it off. Then, I again tried to put the rest of the bike in the trunk. Nope. In the end, I managed to just barely jam the front-tire-less bike into the backseat of my car, threw the front tire in the trunk, and drove back to our friends' house.

Since our friends bike quite a bit, I was able to use their pump to re-inflate the tires. I even biked in a couple of small circles in the garage, but have yet to try it outdoors. The bike *seems* okay, as far as I can tell...