August 9 , 2003

The big news has been selling my house. I spent June and the first week of July fixing it up for sale, and it went on the market July 11. See our sales flyer here. The good news is that it sold a few days ago, for $685,000. Whew! I was starting to worry because it wasn't selling. Besides just general worry, I've had my neighbor's daughter, Carmen, coming over every morning and cleaning up after me and the kids and staging the house, and she's leaving to go off to college on Tuesday! Just in the nick of time. Now I'm frantically looking for a house. Mom is in a frenzy. We hope to find something in the next few weeks. If we don't, we'll be looking into rental housing, but we're optimistic. We have tough requirements, though: enough space for me and Val and the kids, enough land for Mom to build an in-law unit, not to far from SF for Val's commute, have to stay here on the Peninsula for my commute and for kid exchange with Kathie. It all adds up to only a small number of houses in our price range with what we want, but I'm optimistic we'll find it.

I went down to SoCal just for the day yesterday to visit Grandma Frances. I went down to help her take care of some banking and other business. She get around mostly in a wheelchair, but her mind is still quite sharp. We should all be that wll at 96 years old!!

We're getting very close to closing the deal for Mike and Andrea to buy the house I own on Sunnyside here in South San Francisco. They're excited to be owning their first home, and I'm excited to be getting my money out, and to be able to give them a good deal on it.

Other real estate deals: I sold the condo in San Luis Obispo, and also two other pieces of land in which I was a partner in Riverside County. One closed (only got a little bit of $$), the other closes soon. I feel like a real estate mogul these days, with all of the escrow papers I've been signing! I guess I'm lucky to have had these business dealings, though.

Val and I visited her stepsister Debra and her husband Joe and daughter Margot on 8/3. Debra is finishing up her Fendenkreis training in Marin County, so they were here for the summer. They go back to New York next week.

Last Friday, August 1, Val and I took the day off work to take the kids to the Steinhart Aquarium and the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Check out the pictures. They're moving to a temporary location at the end of the year for a 4-year renovation project, so we wanted to see it before it changed. We had a great time! (Well, Haley only had one or two tantrums, so that counts as a good day.)

Val and I went on a late anniversary trip (since I was at Christopher's graduation on our actual anniversary, June 14) to Fort Bragg, along the coast about 4 hours north of San Francisco. We had a wonderfully relaxing weekend. We left on Friday July 25 and returned on Monday the 28th.

July was a month of medical issues. First I badly strained a muscle in the bottom of my foot while working on the house. Because of where it is, and the anything but being completely off my feet keeps reinjuring it, the podiatrist said it might take a couple of months to heal. I'm still hurting and it's now 5 weeks later. ARGH. Then I broke a tooth and had to have a cap replaced. Then Haley came down with a nasty chest infection, and of course I got it and Val got it. Needless to say, it's been a difficult month.

Had some fun times with Glynis and Susan. Today we went to the San Mateo County Fair with the girls. We also visited them for a party on July 10th, and I went to a Giants game with them and Judy and Donna on the 8th.

Work has been busy, as usual. We're closing down on our Application Server and Collaboration Suite releases, and looking towards the next Database release. I primarily work on Enterprise Manager, which is the management tool for all of these products, so I'm busy for every product release. And since there are always new and changed user interfaces, I'm always very busy. But I love my work, so it's great.