Summer 2024 in a Nutshell

So…this summer has been a bit different than recent years. Having a job really gets in the way of travel.

As you may recall, I quit teaching in the fall of 2023 and just started working at UCSC in March. With only a few months under my belt, I didn’t really have a lot of vacation time saved up. But, with my job taking up way less brain space (I really don’t worry about it outside of work hours much at all…so different from teaching!) I found that my weekends were much more open. And my boss is a super-nice guy and will let me schedule remote work days when it will allow me to travel a bit more. So, while I didn’t really have much time off, we did manage to have some fun this summer anyway.

One new/old thing is that I’ve gotten back to working on games. I’m deep in the back-and forth with the artists on the upcoming expansion for Space Station Phoenix, but I also have started work on some new games, including spending time painting tiny wooden pieces for a game that is currently called Plum Gum Fairyland…

And while I’ve been spending a lot of hours at work, one of the benefits of working at UCSC is…being at UCSC. If you haven’t visited, it’s like someone dumped a college campus in the middle of a national forest. Except that the college campus isn’t all in one place, it’s spread over several miles of a steep hillside covered in redwoods with some occasional grassy fields that offer stunning views out over Monterey Bay.

Two or three days each week, I get out for a 30-40 minute mini-hike at lunch. Sometimes I just walk the paved paths and streets, often I use the clearly established dirt paths, and sometimes I just wander my way through the ravines around campus. There’s great stuff back in the woods there, and some weird shit that students have built over the decades…

The campus is home to a variety of wildlife. There are wild turkeys everywhere, squirrels, a ton of deer (including cute little fawns!), and I’ve now seen at least two snakes (not rattlers, thankfully).

Some of the wildlife even creeps indoors. Evidently, there are redwood tarantulas that have been known to sneak into my office. Thankfully, I’ve never encountered them, but we did have a cute little skink who slithered around under the cubicle walls for a couple of days this summer. We eventually caught him trying to sneak into my boss’s office.

Other than that, the job is fine. I like helping students out. I enjoy most of my colleagues. And my boss and grand-boss (as Jess calls him) are both super nice. We even had a nice Reg Office outing to go lawn bowling, something I’d never tried before.

When I was teaching, most weekends were spent working. Not the whole weekend, and not every weekend, but a significant portion. Now, once I leave the office, I’ve got nothing that needs to be done. Jessica and I took this as an opportunity to go on some nice long hikes up on the peninsula, often followed by a drive down the other side of the hill to the greater San Jose area for more interesting food than we can find in Santa Cruz, a visit to an Asian grocery store, and sometimes a stop at a game cafe.

We also got some good visits in with friends. We spent July 4th weekend in Los Angeles with John and Annie Rose. Besides one day of remote work, we went hiking and kayaking, wandered the canals and watched some kick-ass young girls skateboarding in Venice, had a lovely evening walk on Manhattan Beach, and harassed the beautiful, but unapproachable Kona.

This was also our first time experiencing L.A.’s 4th of July fireworks. We’d been told it was pretty epic, with everyone and their cousin setting off fireworks all over the place. Frankly, I didn’t expect it to quite live up to the hype…but it did. There were multiple people on John and AR’s block setting off fireworks, including from a house right across the street, but a few blocks away in multiple different directions, there were entire fireworks shows (some as good as legal, public ones I’ve seen) going on. It sounded a bit like there was a civil war battle going on a short ways away, but there was also just a constant rumble in the air that almost made the whole city feel like it was shaking. (Which kinda makes sense given LA and earthquakes.) The fireworks lasted pretty much from dusk until…sometime. I don’t know when, really. I went to bed to that continuing rumble and occasional loud pops.

Here’s a small sample of what we saw… https://youtu.be/eFaFEdy85YA (that’s the link because I’m having trouble adding the video to this post! Something changed on WordPress and I’m getting frustrated trying to fix it!)

In August we went on a hyper-local camping trip with Josh, Pella, and their kids Erez Noam, and Amaryah. We’ve known Josh since college. He grew up in the East Bay, but for much of the 10 years we’ve lived in Santa Cruz, he’s been living in other parts of the country. He just recently moved back and lives in San Leandro, so when we planned a camping trip with him, we chose…San Leandro. Like 5 miles as the crow flies from their house. It was a little silly. But also a nice spot above Lake Chabot and a very fun weekend of playing games, hiking, making banana boats, and catching up with old friends.

The big trip of the summer was when Jessica had to go to Montreal for the American Sociological Association meetings, and then we planned to zip around New England to see friends and family. In order to go with her, I arranged to work-from-elsewhere (not really “work from home”) for a few days. Again, nice to have a flexible boss.

We stayed in the little Chinatown section of Montreal and managed to get totally soaked on our first day there.

The next day, while Jessica was busy being smart, I took a long walk across town and back. I hiked to the top of Mont Royal and enjoyed exploring the trails and seeing the various sites up there.

Down the other side of the hill, I went to St. Joseph’s Oratory, a really gorgeous new church. I loved how it had a classic structure, but mixed that with clean modern architectural forms and artistic elements. The doors and gates were especially cool.

And as I wandered the city through the afternoon. I came across a game store that seemed to have some good stuff…

The next day, we met up with Jessica’s colleague/friend, Edward, who showed us around his neighborhood, including a visit to his favorite bagel place.

I also went on a walking tour of Old Montreal, but it was frankly one of the dullest walking tours I’ve been on. There wasn’t the deep knowledge of some of the tours we did in London, no one had a drug-induced fainting spell like in Amsterdam, and frankly I just didn’t learn much. My two favorite things I saw on that tour were (1) this crazy apartment complex…

…and (2) these two statues of a French woman and an English man with their poodle and pug sticking their nose up at one another, representing the various pretensions and tensions between the groups that settled here. Speaking of the word “settled,” that was my biggest complaint about the tour: the guide barely even mentioned the fact that there were people here before Europeans arrived. Even a little acknowledgement might have been nice.

Our last night in town, we went to an awesome Haitian restaurant and caught up with our old friend, Aaron (another sociologist) who we hadn’t seen in years. Yay!

Jessica’s parents, Mark and Sue, then picked us up and took us down to Vermont to visit her aunt and uncle, Nancy and Mike. I was introduced to the maple creemee (delicious!) and Mike tried to sell us on taking the surprisingly-comfortable-but-soooooo-not-our-style Connecticut State House-decorated chair left behind by Jessica’s grandmother. The four of them enjoyed some serious hiking (Nancy just climbed Mt. Shasta!) while I worked from home…just Nancy and Mike’s home, not mine.

Mark and Sue then took us over to Maine where we met up with our friend, Sarah, and enjoyed an enormous amount of lobster. (Yes, Sue ordered six. She knew Mark wanted a large one, so asked for one large one and five more…because there were five of us…forgetting that the large one should have covered one of us. Don’t worry. We finished them all.)

Besides doing some work from home (again, someone else’s home…actually, a hotel, really), we took some nice walks on both sandy beach and rocky coast before Sarah drove us down to stay with her at her new place (!) in Boston.

After working from yet another home (Sarah’s this time), the three of us spent a day down in Newport, Rhode Island, where we encountered the Great Elephant Migration (an art installation and fundraiser to protect Indian biodiversity).

We then toured the Vanderbilt mansion, the Breakers. It was completely overdone and ridiculous, but still an interesting look at a particular era. A few of my favorite bits: the fountain (with sitting area) under the grand staircase, the mosaic ceiling in the billiards room, the room with platinum-based paints (shiny!), and the kitchen built to feed a small army.

Before our flight back home from Boston, we went with Sarah to the Museum of Natural History at Harvard and saw an amazing exhibit of glass flowers made by a pair of Czech glass artists for the science classes at Harvard to use in the late 19th century. Until you looked very closely at them, you’d think there were real plants that had been preserved. The exactness of the details (veins, wilting, etc.) was just incredible. And there weren’t just a few. There were hundreds. It was amazing. Highly recommended if you’re ever in the Boston area. (Thanks for telling us to go, Mom!)

Our summer ended with one more visit from an old college friend, Marjorie. They came down from Oregon on their annual Northern California hiking trip and came to visit us in Santa Cruz for the first time. It was just a day or so they were here, but we took some nice walks, and watched an enormous feeding frenzy as all the birds and sea lions from miles around gathered to feast on the anchovies swarming the Santa Cruz coast.

I have to admit, the first few words of that last paragraph was a lie. That wasn’t really the end of the summer. Just the end of August. By that time, I’m used to being back at school for a few weeks already. But, Jessica doesn’t start teaching until the end of September, so there was a second chunk of summer to look forward to. More on that soon…