To all my friends in the Perl community: Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!
Here's wishing you and yours a very happy holiday season. This is our second Christmas in Palo Alto. Our second year in California was a little less confusing than the first. Still some wonderful things -- the farmer's markets, the street festivals, of which there seemed to be one within five to ten miles each weekend day through the summer. It's also been a great place for concerts -- U2, and Sting, as well as really good local stuff. Some 100+ degree days, so N. Cal is not weather heaven, and some rains in the winter that were as heavy as monsoons in Asia, only the pervasively wetness that soaked through clothes was cold rather than hot.
I'm having a ball at Yahoo!, and Shymala has been very lucky in having the historical novelist, Beverly Swerling, decide to involve herself in the novel Shymala's been working on for the past several years. Beverly has been the perfect mentor, and a very good friend.
Shymala has had some medical problems recently that have got us both motivated to take care of some things that got postponed during all the busyness since we've been out here, so that will be part of our new year, along with getting ourselves back into a gym again.
Real estate around here, though slowing, is still ridiculous, so we are again figuring out where we might live when we grow up. Having done a cross-country relocation at an age when we should have had more sense, we want the next move to be final, but there's the difficulty that there are a lot of wonderful places out there, and who can guess what life will be like a couple of years down the road in any particular place?
We saw a lot of wonderful things over the past year - the SF skyline from Sausalito, surfers at Santa Cruz, some very happy ducks (and some very barbecued ones!), the San Jose Rose Garden, and sea otters in the ocean at Monterey. We've finally done some of he tourist stuff in SF - driving down Lombard Street (the crookedest street in San Francisco), checking out the sea lions at Pier 39, and driving across the Golden Gate, just to do it. Still haven't ridden a cable car, though. And we've had a chance to catch up with some very old friends, which was lovely.
Hope things have been good for everyone!
best wishes
Shymala & Joe
