Blog of Bermanism

Last Friday was a really big day for me for a number of reasons, one of which was that my Ph.D arrived in the mail. I was due to head to Bear Valley ski resort for the weekend and I was going to leave directly from work and just head over the Bay Bridge instead of going all the way home, which was 20 miles out of the way. However, when Rachel called me and told me that the Ph.D. had arrived, I had to go home to see it before I left. She thought I was nuts and that I should just look at it when I got back from skiing the next day, but I couldn’t let it go. I had worked for six years for that piece of paper and it represented a major milestone in my life. I had to see it.

So, I went home after picking up my friend Greg so that I could see it for myself. I got inside and Rachel handed it to me. It was such an amazing experience to finally see it for real. I actually graduated and I’m actually Dr. Berman now, and I’m an almost productive member of the research community. Anyway, shortly afterward, Greg and I left and had a wonderful time skiing (that story is for another post, but see the pics here). Rachel was nice enough to take a picture of my Ph.D. and send it around to my friends and family so that they could see it. I believe it to be appropriate to post it here as well. So, here’s the thing!

Thanks to everyone who helped me get to where I am. You all know who you are and you all enrich my life in ways you’re probably not aware of. Ok, I need to get back to work now. Cheers!

I had a rather unfortunate experience on Thursday morning. I went to crew practice all ready to get a great workout as usual with the Marin Rowing Association. When I arrived that morning, there were a very large number of my team members that had shown up. This is usually a great situation because we get to take out a large number of boats and have a nicely competitive practice. Our coach, Jim Andersen, figured out that we could take out three eights with the number of guys that had shown up, but that two people would have to sit out, and we were one coxswain short. Well, I decided that it would be really nice of me to volunteer to cox for the morning, mainly because I wasn’t going to be able to make it to our most important race of the year, the San Diego Crew Classic in April due to my brother’s wedding. Plus, I had had a decent amount of coxing experience at the Austin Rowing Club. Well, I had only coxed at Marin once before, and that time I was being carefully watched by our coach who directed me out of the estuary (we call it the creek) on which our boat house is located and out into the ferry channel in the San Francisco bay. As a coxswain, once you’re out in the bay, coxing isn’t very challenging because you just have to keep the boat moving along the channel markers, which are lit by flashing green or red lights on the top. Plus, we usually don’t go much further out into the bay than San Quentin prison, and you can see that very clearly most of the time from anywhere in the channel. Anyway, in order to get out to the channel from where our boat house is located, you have to navigate through a relatively complicated series of pylons that support three bridges for Hwy 101. When you first look at the pathway through these bridges, it really doesn’t make much sense. It just looks like a littering of cement pylons that have no obvious pathway through them.

Well, that particular morning, I started the boat through the bridges to get out of the creek. It was really dark out because the moon has already set this time of year. I thought I was heading through the correct span, but I asked the guys in the boat anyhow, and they said it looked good. There is a black sailboat that is always parked at the exit point through the bridges that we use as a landmark to get through, and I could see it on the other side, so I thought I was going the correct way. Well, once we were through the first bridge, I realized that we weren’t in the right place and that we were heading straight for a large cement column. I tried to start turning the boat away from it, but the currents from the tide were preventing me from turning fast enough. So I told everyone to stop rowing, and the check their oars down to stop the boat. Then, I asked only starboards to check their oars so that we would turn faster. Not all of them listened and we didn’t turn enough. The port oars started to hit the cement column, but the bow three port oarsmen were able to pull their oars out of the way before any damage was done. Unfortunately, Emil, the stroke seat for the boat, couldn’t pull his oar in enough. His blade hit the column with full force and sent the oar handle careening straight for Emil at fairly high speed. Emil managed to duck out the of way fast enough to not get injured by the oar, but we all heard the dreaded cracking and creaking of an oar blade breaking in half. In addition, I saw the gunnel of the boat flex under the pressure of the blade, but it looked OK from where I was sitting.

Needless to say, I was embarrassed and upset that I had steered us into a giant cement column. I backed the boat out of there and headed back to the dock to get Emil a new oar, since the one he had was destroyed. We got back just fine and Jim walked up to inspect the boat. He said that his fear when that kind of accident happens is that the support ribbing on the inside of the boat cracks, and sure enough, the rib next to Emil was cracked clean through. When Jim uttered the words, “This boat is done,” I thought I was going to pass out. The boat we were rowing was a $30,000 boat and there really wasn’t time for us to get another boat. So, Jim sent us in and the crew was assigned to erging for the day. I was so upset with myself. I had killed a boat, broken an oar, and ruined a perfectly good practice for a really great group of rowers. Luckily, they were all really good sports about it and told me that everyone does it sometime. The cliche, “Shit Happens,” came up quite a few times. Anyway, after sulking in the boat bay for a little while, I decided that I needed to join the team on the ergs to get out some aggression. So, we rowed a fairly hard series of pieces, just as we would have out on the water, except that I actually got to work out instead of steering the boat.

When practice was over, I waited patiently for my flogging by Jim. I told him that I wasn’t comfortable with the whole crew paying for the damage because it was entirely my fault. He was surprisingly gracious (because I knew he was really pissed) and said that the way the crew works is that the everyone in boat is responsible for it, and the whole group will split the cost of the repair to the boat. He said that people could have told me I was in the wrong place, they could have listened to my instructions that ultimately would have saved us from crashing into the column, etc. He said that things like this happen all the time, it is part of being on a crew team and that, while it sucks when it happens, it isn’t a big deal. The boat will be fixed, and everyone will move on. Well, it didn’t make me feel much better. I tend to really beat myself up about things like this. I was not happy and I needed to unwind a little. So, Rachel and I went to get some breakfast. I hung out for a while and calmed down, then we went home and I went to work. I suppose that these things happen, but I couldn’t help thinking that no good deed goes unpunished. I thought I was being helpful by offering to steer the boat, but I ended up making things much worse than they needed to be. I thank my team for being so gracious about it, but I probably won’t be coxing for a long time after this one.

Life is full of beginnings and endings. We seem to measure everything in our lives by when they start and end, and lately I’ve been a little disturbed by this pretense. Everyone always asks how long I’ve lived in San Francisco, I say 8 weeks, a time frame marked by a beginning. Intriguingly, very few people ask if my impression of the city has changed throughout the time that I’ve been here, and even fewer ask how I feel about living here now. We, as people, mark everything by time, by quantity, and by beginnings and endings. We either want something to begin or end, we almost never savor the moment that we are living in. We are almost always working toward some final goal, never enjoying the process of accomplishing that goal. In the immortal words of Neal Peart of Rush, “The point of the journey is not to arrive” (lyrics from Rush’s “Prime Mover”, Hold Your Fire, 1987).

One of the reasons I bring all of this up is that I’ve recently been faced with several beginnings and endings in multiple facets of my life. The most obvious ending was my graduation from UT graduate school with my Ph.D. in Molecular Biology. That graduation carried with it a subsequent beginning of my postdoctoral career. Additionally, my time in Austin, Texas came to an abrupt halt and my time in the San Francisco area started all too quickly. As I reflected on my graduate career, I realized that my intentions and goals were often entirely driven by my desire to graduate. I wanted to reach the end of graduate school. While most sane people on the planet would say that the point of any school is to graduate with a degree, I would say that in making graduation your only goal, you miss much of the point of the journey. A close friend writes, “[I am] too busy going forwards to look back,” which is a situation that I often find myself in as well. I believe that much of what is important in life occurs in the moments in between the beginning and ending of something. If you are always focused on the final goal, sometimes the point of reaching that goal is entirely lost and then the journey has been without as deep of a meaning.

I’ve recently found myself trying to live more in this moment than in the moments of some imaginary future concocted by my brain out of the current probable possibilities for the outcomes of my current path. In fact, my New Year’s Resolution is to live more in this moment and to savor the current experience, but at the same time not to ignore how I began traveling this path, nor what my goals are once I reach the end of the path. This is not an easy thing to accomplish. People have a hard time with things that are in the middle, things that are unfinished, things that are incomplete, things that are neither starting, nor ending. We have difficulty fully comprehending the nature of infinity due to its lack of a beginning and an end. Without boundaries by which to compare the sum total of experiences in our lives to each other, the experiences appear meaningless and we have a hard time measuring our self worth. This is, sadly, an inescapable facet of the human psyche. That is why, while I’ve decided to live more in this moment, that I will also be cognizant of the beginning and ending of my journey. I think that this is the best way to live your life, and the best way to enjoy it as it happens.

This discussion of metaphysics is also bounded by some common events that are occurring in the lives of people close to me. Several of my closest friends have recently experienced the end of their marriages, and several others of my closest friends are about to begin their marriages. My friends that have ended theirs are all a little lost at sea. They feel like failures, they feel alone, they feel like they have not lived up to the potential they had as a husband or wife, and worst of all, they feel like they are not worth as much single as they were married and that they did something terribly wrong in their marriage, either at the beginning or the end to have this unfortunate result. I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately and other friends of mine that are potentially on the same path and I’m brought back to the current discussion of beginnings and endings. I feel that my friends, through no fault of their own, forgot to live in the moment with their spouses, either before the marriage ever started, or while the marriage was in progress. I really believe that if two people try to live in the moment, the possibility arises to sense changes that are occurring in the other person, and because those changes have been recognized, it is then possible to compensate for those changes most of the time; the couple can grow and change together, thus preserving the marriage. In my friend’s relationships, I’ve noticed that they were all very, very busy people. Marriage was more of a thing to get done and out of the way for them to be able to move on in their lives. Their focus was often more on their careers than on living their lives, which is extremely common. Once people are married, they often take the relationship for granted. They believe that no matter what, the marriage will prevail simply because they love each other and that little to no effort is required to keep the marriage alive. So, they focus on being successful. Then, once they are successful, they will have children. Then, once the children are grown up and out of the house, they will retire, and then they can enjoy each other, 20 – 40 years later. Sadly, relationships require a lot of work, effort, input and communication on the part of both people involved, always. There is no denying this fact. Marriages especially must be nurtured and problems must be worked through immediately. But to recognize that problems are occurring, people need to focus on what is happening now, otherwise the lack of attention to the relationship results in the two people in the marriage growing apart. They start developing separate lives and they stop growing and changing together. This is what happened to my friends. They simply grew apart from each other. Each person changed and grew independently of the other, which resulted in an incompatibility that could not be resolved. I’m not saying my friends did anything wrong or that they could have done anything differently to save their marriages. There were a lot of other circumstances surrounding their separations that are important to understand before passing judgment. But, I do believe that more marriages would be more successful if people stopped chronically focusing on the future, and lived in the moment a little more and enjoyed their partner a little more.

I could ramble on about this for a long time, obviously. I could draw parallels to this phenomenon in religion, science, philosophy, history, the workplace and to the life cycle, but I’ll stop here before this post reaches dissertation length. I urge you to slow down, to experience the now, to enjoy what the world is and has to offer. Don’t lose sight of the future and always maintain your goals. It is fine to plan your life to be three steps ahead of where you are now. Just don’t forget to enjoy what is happening now. Even the most unpleasant experiences can be rewarding and can have a bright side. As much as something may be painful, explore it, live in it, learn from it. You’ll be better for it later on and whatever trauma the experience may inflict, will ultimately make you stronger. Obviously, the same is true for pleasant experiences. Savor them, remember them, explore every moment of them so that you can more fully enjoy that experience. Don’t go to work to simply make money and to get to the weekend. So many people are so put off by the fact that it is Monday, and so excited that it is Friday, that they missed the entire week and spent much of their work week in misery. Enjoy the moment. Be proud of your accomplishments everyday and strive to learn from your failures. In this way, not only will your job become much more rewarding, but every facet of your life will gain significant meaning.

On that note, this is Dr. Berman signing off of Metaphysics Tonight. Remember to feed the universe.

Well, it is still raining here in San Francisco. The majority of northern California has been declared a disaster area by our illustrious governator and the rainfall totals have reached 200% of normal in the San Francisco area for this time of year. Cities are flooding, people are dying, and we haven’t seen the sun in about three weeks.

So, what do normal people do when it is raining non-stop, when people have lost all of their possessions, and when a new river has formed in between your toilet and your big screen TV? Drink beer, of course!

My new lab went out for some beers tonight to a place called The Cliff House. This restaurant/bar is located right on the ocean, up on a cliff (hence the name), in the most northwestern corner of the San Francisco peninsula. In fact, it is very close to the VA hospital that I work in. We went there tonight to give a send-off to one of the postdocs in our lab who’s last day was today, and it was actually a really nice place. By nice, I mean upscale. They had a bar made of Zinc, aptly called the “Zinc Bar”, they had a full menu of drastically overpriced food, and they kept the beer flowing as long as we could drink it. Adding to their credibility, they had Fat Tire on tap, which is one of my favorite beers. Anyway, this place was really nice, and if it weren’t storming like there was no tomorrow, I could imagine being able to look out of the bar’s many windows into the ocean (on a sunny and clear day (unlike today) The Cliff House is apparently well known for its sunset views). Anyway, since we had our whole lab there tonight, we got a table in the “Bistro” which allowed us the pleasure of Fat Tire Ale from our friends in Fort Collins, Colorado along with a healthy helping of calamari. Sadly, I cannot tell you if the calamari was good or not because I seem to have come down with a fairly nasty cold that has subsequently dispensed with my sense of smell, and thus my sense of taste (see my previous post for details).

Anyway, this lab outing was my first real social experience with the lab. I tend to be less social at work than I normally would be and I like to get out with the people I work with to get to know them on a personal level. Knowing someone always helps you work with them better, in my opinion. This outing also gave me a chance to get to know Dr. Swanson a little better. This was the first time that I was able to talk with him in a social environment, not about a work-related topic. I think we’ll get along well.

Anyway, we bid adiou to Olivier (the leaving postdoc), wish him luck in his visa application (so he doesn’t have to go back to France), and we hope that he finds success in whatever he does. I also want to thank him for allowing me to take over his lab bench, desk, and computer for the duration of my employment in this laboratory. Finally, I highly recommend the Cliff House to anyone who is looking for a romantic spot for dinner. The newly remodeled restaurant looks very upscale, and the views are spectacular, even during a storm, at night. I know this post is a little on the random side, but hey, I’m trying to write something every day now, so you’ll get a little of everything from me.

Oh, and I’m going to start sending rain from our area to the south so that they can stop having brush fires from the extensive drought that is going on there. Apparently, the San Andreas fault works as a sinkhole for all of the moisture in the United States as well as being one of the most active earthquake-causing faultlines in the US. We love it!

This past weekend, Rachel and I ventured up to Lake Tahoe for New Year’s weekend with my cousin Devin and her husband Adam. We went to stay at a cabin near Tahoe City, CA that belongs to Adam’s best-friend’s family. It was to be a nice, relaxing weekend of skiing, talking around a fire, and celebrating the arrival of the New Year with family and friends. Little did we know that this trip would turn out to be quite an adventure.

We left Sausalito at around 6pm on Friday, December 30th and headed up through Sacramento towards North Lake Tahoe. It was raining the whole way up there. The radar showed that the entirety of Northern California was under a giant green, rain-drenched blob of storms that were only getting worse. As we headed into the Sierra Nevada mountains up Donner Pass, the rain only intensified. We were hoping it would turn to snow at the higher elevations since snow is easier to drive in than rain, and we were planning on doing some skiing that weekend and new snow would be much better to ski on than new rain. Sadly, the rain persisted all the way into Truckee and finally into Tahoe City. It was a difficult drive for Adam (who drove the entire way) since the rain was coming down so hard that his windshield wipers could barely keep up and the visibility was extremely low. However, after about 4.5 hours for a 196 mile trip, we made it to the cabin. We couldn’t see anything because it was so dark and rainy, but Adam insisted the the cabin was right on Lake Tahoe. We were excited to see the view in the morning. But, we were tired from a full work day and then driving so we got into the cabin, turned on the heater, moved our stuff in and lit a fire. The original plan was to go skiing the next day at the world famous Squaw Valley ski resort, which hosted the VIII Winter Olympic Games in 1960. I was really excited to ski there since I had heard about that ski area since I was a little kid and I’ve been an avid skier my entire life. However, since it was obviously raining at all elevations, including at the 8600ft summit of Squaw, we decided against skiing the next day since the conditions would be pretty bad. Soon afterward, we went to bed.

We awoke the next morning to more rain and visibility near 1/2 mile, but we could clearly see that the cabin was literally about 50 feet from the shores of North Lake Tahoe (view out the back window on a clearer day). We couldn’t see much beyond the shores due to the intense rain and clouds, but we could imagine that on a clear day, you could look all the way across the lake to South Lake Tahoe, 22 miles away. So, we lit a fire and started waking up and deciding what to do that day. The plan was to go get some breakfast at Adam’s favorite breakfast place in Tahoe City, called Rosie’s, then to head up to Squaw and take the tram up to the High Camp for some dinner and great views. So, we started getting cleaned up. Rachel, Adam, and I took showers and got dressed. Devin decided that she would take a shower after breakfast so that she could have hot water and a nice long shower. Just before leaving, we turned on the news to see the extent of the storm that was rocking the Lake Tahoe valley. The news station from Reno, NV was reporting that Reno was flooding from the Truckee river overflowing its banks. We also learned that mudslides on I-80, eight miles east of Truckee, CA had closed the interstate. Then, an event occurred that would change the nature of our entire weekend. The power went out. At first, none of us was very surprised by this and we expected it would be back on in the next six hours or so. However, Adam went to try to wash his hands and something very surprising happened, no water came out of the faucet! It turns out that the cabin gets fresh water directly from the lake and the pump and filtration system are electric, so because the power was out, we had no running water! Well, we still thought that the power would go back on soon, so we decided to head to breakfast anyhow. As we made our way to Rosie’s, the rain began to turn to snow, a pleasant change since we were still planning on skiing New Year’s Day. But, as we got into Tahoe City, we noticed that nothing there had power either. None of the restaurants we passed were open and the city appeared to be completely closed down. We got the feeling this may be worse than we originally expected.

We arrived to a jam packed Rosie’s Cafe. There were literally hundreds of people in the restaurant, most of them waiting for tables. Apparently, Rosie’s was the only restaurant in Tahoe City with a generator, so they could have a functioning kitchen and heater, but no lights, no credit cards, no computer ordering system, which all caused the wait staff to be thrown into chaos with their normal, machine-like routine smashed to bits since they had to resort to paper ordering. We decided to wait out breakfast there and weren’t seated for about an hour. Once we were seated, it took an additional 45 minutes to get our food, but we were so hungry that we were happy to have it. Since the power was down and they couldn’t take credit cards, we pooled our cash together to get our poor waiter paid so that we could move on.

During our time at Rosie’s we learned that the power outage was more of a problem than we anticipated and the snow storm had gotten much, much worse. Having planned on going to Squaw, I looked up Squaw’s website on my phone to find that they were expecting nearly three feet of snow over night and that the bad weather and high winds had forced them to close for the day! Also, the mudslides had closed the road to Squaw which would make it impossible to get there in the first place. So, we decided to go to the grocery to get enough food for dinner and enough supplies to last the weekend without power, just in case.

The supermarket was insane, and was itself on generator power so it had limited functionality and low lighting. Checkout lines at every register extended all the way down the isles behind them. People were freaking out, and I could swear that the city was on the virge of looting. We got all of our supplies and through some great teamwork and Adam’s great idea to get in line before we even started shopping, we were in and out in about an hour. Some people were reporting that they had been there for nearly three hours! We got ourselves checked out and headed back to the cabin to relax until the power came back on. When we arrived we built a new fire, talked and played cards. It was actually really nice and we all enjoyed it a lot.

By 5:30pm, there was still no power. I managed to get a hold of the emergency line at Sierra Pacific Power to get an estimate of when the power would be restored. They said that the high winds and mudslides had caused widespread power outages throughout the area, but that power would be restored by 6:30pm. Knowing that power companies always lie about when they’ll have power restored, we began trying to figure out what we were going to do for our New Year’s celebration. Without power and running water, it was going to be difficult to cook a meal (though we did get charcoal in case we needed to light the indoor grill that the cabin had).

So, we ended up meeting a few of Devin’s friends and their gang of Berkeley scholars and going to the Granlibakken Resort for a New Year’s Eve feast and bash. The main reason we were going there was that it was one of the few hotels that was running on generator power, so the ballroom was fully operational. Also, it was $40/person to join in the festivities, and the alternative was watching the fire, again. So we met up with Devin’s friends and went to the resort. The dinner was a buffet style meal complete with prime rib, stuffed portobello mushrooms, and some weird prawn dish that was pretty good. The meal was finished off by a caramel mousse covered in hardened chocolate. It was really good. Then, the buffet was cleared and the DJ started playing dancing music. We knew we were in trouble when he said that he had three hours of “family oriented” music for us. The nice New Year’s Eve party suddenly turned from elegant to feeling like a cheesy Bar Mitzvah party. It turned out really fun, though. Once the DJ had played every line dance known to man (and woman), we started dancing with about 20 minutes to go until midnight. And then, the countdown began. At midnight, about 20 balloons dropped from the ceiling at each corner of the dance floor just in time for everyone to step on them and pop them. Lame as that was, it was 2006 and this crazy busy year that went by way too fast had come to an end. After the party, we headed back to the still-without-power cabin with another couple from the evening who’s hotel had closed and had kick out all of its guests. So, we offered them a cold and running-waterless bed as compensation so that they wouldn’t have to sleep in the car or drive back to San Francisco at 1:30am on a snowy night.

That night was very interesting. We started by making smores in the fire, and they were really yummy, but we were so full from the dinner and dessert that we just couldn’t do them justice. So, we went to bed. I’m guessing that the ambient temperature in the cabin was 35 degrees F. You could see your breath. Now, image crawling into a bed that is about that same temperature. It was freakin’ cold!! It took about 10 minutes for Rach and I to warm up the bed enough to stop shivering. I wore my ski hat to bed since I’m really bad at sleeping with my head under the covers. It was a cold night, but we got sleep and woke up the next morning hoping that the power had come back on, but it hadn’t. Poor Devin hadn’t showered in two days and the rest of us smelled like smoke from the fire. Adam and I got up and made a fire and then started talking about what we were going to do since the present situation wasn’t quite ideal. I called the power company and they said that the power wouldn’t be on until midnight! At that point, Adam and I still wanted to go skiing, but we also wanted a warm cabin and a nice shower to come back to. Since that couldn’t happen, Devin said we should just head back to San Francisco and call the weekend a wash. So, we all started getting our stuff together and got ready to leave. We didn’t really clean up the cabin because without electricity or running water, it would have been nearly impossible to do so. So, Adam and I hiked down the hill to the lake and filled up a 13 gallon trashcan with lake water and used that to manually flush the toilets that hadn’t been flushed in two days. Then, we locked up, said we be back in a month to get some real skiing in and to clean up the cabin, and headed back toward I-80.

Unfortunately, a major snow storm had started during the time that we were packing up the cabin. This made the driving very slow from Tahoe City to Truckee due to slick roads and cautious people. We got to Truckee, filled our gas tank and got onto I-80 west trying to get up the pass. CalTrans had invoked a chain control check point four miles west of Truckee, in which every vehicle needed to be checked for the necessity of chains over Donner Pass. Since Adam’s car was all-wheel drive, we didn’t need them. But, we still had to get through the line. It took us almost two hours to go four miles. Once we got to the check point, we got through and were home free. The trip back to San Francisco took a little over seven hours, and we were happy to be home.

Unfortunately, the storms that were ravaging Lake Tahoe had come from the Bay Area. We came home to an apartment that had been without power for at least 12 hours, but had it restored. There was obviously a large power surge with that outage because the heat lamp for my iguana’s cage had burned out, and it was fairly new. Also, the heater in the apartment wasn’t working and Adam and I tried for about an hour to get the pilot light to stay lit when the thermostat was tripped, but it just wouldn’t work. We thought that the surge caused the ignitor get the frozen in a safety mode and it wouldn’t let the heater engage. But, a guy just came to fix it and the pilot thermocouple had burned out. Who knew? In addition to having to spend another night without heat (granted it wasn’t anywhere near as cold as the previous night), we had a slow leak coming through our ceiling in the living room. The apartment owner looked at that today also and it looks like it was caused by clogged gutters in the deck above our apartment. Sadly, it means a lot of construction is necessary to fix it, including re-roofing the deck upstairs and replacing that section of ceiling in our apartment. Good times!

So, it was definitely an interesting weekend, and not one that we planned on having at all. We didn’t get to go skiing at all, which was a major bummer for me, and we were dirty and cold for much of the weekend. But, despite all of that, we had a really good time. It was so nice to just sit and talk with Devin and Adam, we really enjoyed their company and it was good to get to know Devin better and to get closer with Adam, her new husband. The New Year’s party was really fun too, and I would do it all again. I’m looking forward to heading up there again sometime soon for a skiing extravaganza.

So, that about wraps up our New Year’s celebration. I’m looking forward to a bright and prosperous new year in a new city and with a new job that looks to be really exciting. I look forward to more good times with my cousin and my wife, and I look forward to having old friends come visit this great city that we live in. My best to all, and Happy New Year! May all of you find yourself in a place of comfort and happiness throughout the next year, and don’t forget to have fun along the way!