May 27 2006
Six months in San Francisco
I can hardly believe it. It feels like just last week I was standing on the dock behind the Four Season’s hotel saying my goodbyes to my rowing team at the Austin Rowing Club after my final row with them. It was a very sad day. I had lived in Austin for 11 years, and the rowing club had been one of those stabilizing forces in my stressful life as a graduate student. As I stood there gazing at the water, the whole team came down to the dock to say their goodbyes. I almost cried, and it was hard not to. At that moment, it became real to me, I was leaving my home and my friends and family and moving to the most foreign place possible within the United States, San Francisco. I knew I would miss my lab mates, all of whom became my very close friends, my rowing friends, my fellow computer geek friends, my other friends that I had made throughout the years, my family members living in Austin, and especially, Austin itself.
Austin is a wonderful city. In my opinion, it is one of the greatest cities in Texas. It is fun, beautiful, energetic, relatively liberal (the only blue spot in all of Texas during the last presidential election), and it is nestled on the edge of the Texas hill country, which gives it a unique feeling from the rest of Texas, since most Texas cities are flat and sprawling. Most people who visit Austin are surprised by its uniqueness. I know I was. Being a native born Coloradoan, I grew up hearing how obnoxious Texans were, mainly because of the select few who wore belt buckles, wranglers and 10 gallon hats yelling, “Yee haw!” down the ski slopes around the peak skiing seasons. I experienced these folk first hand, but it turned out that most Texans aren’t like that at all and that Texas isn’t at all like the movies make it out to be; barren farmland with tumbleweeds and uneducated farmers and ranchers with their own culture so foreign to most people in the US. It turned out that most of the people in Austin are just like you and me and that Austin is a more progressive city than Denver ever was. It only lacks my beloved snow covered mountains. As wonderful as Austin was, I think our friends and family made it the experience that it was, very positive. Rachel and I passed into adulthood there and developed into the professionals we are today, and neither of us will ever forget that. Alas, we had to move and we had to move on to the next adventure in our lives, we were moving to San Francisco.
I won’t lie, as sad as it was to leave Austin, I was really excited by the prospect of moving to San Francisco. It is an awesome city and my early impression of it after visiting a few times was that it was fun, different, diverse, and beautiful. I’ve never heard anyone say that they hated San Francisco. I was also really excited about starting my postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF, one of the best research institutions in the world. I had a lot to look forward to, but we had to get there first.
Sadly, our move was a horrible experience. We were originally going to rent a giant U-Haul with a trailer and put Rachel’s car on it, while Rachel drove my car. While that caravan seemed a daunting task over 2000 miles, in hindsight, it would have been much better in a great many ways. We hired a company called Nationwide to move us. We had heard of them and thought that they were a reputable company with their own fleet. Sadly, they were not. They were a middleman. They hired external companies to provide the moving for them. Well, for us, they chose K and X Express to do our moving. Never heard of them? Me neither. But, we had no choice in the matter. This crackpot group was 3 days late to pick up our things and they came on the last possible night (before we were flying out to San Francisco) and they showed up at 9pm! Apparently, they had had four of their 10 trucks break down that week and they were overbooked to begin with. Well, it took until 3am for them to finish loading the truck, which then promptly took off. Sadly, they never got the truck weighed (since the total cost of the move is calculated by weight), so we don’t know if we got a good deal or if we were totally ripped off. Anyway, the agreement was that they would show up in Sausalito (where we live) four days from when they picked up our stuff. It took them an additional five days to get there. The truck that had our stuff in it broke down in eastern California and they had no other trucks to bring to the broken down truck to transfer the load so that they could make it on time. Well, we called Nationwide to help resolve the issue. But, no one at Nationwide answers the phones on the weekends, which is right when most of the moving takes place. Convenient huh? Anyway, after getting avoided by the manager of the company (he was screening our calls because we were getting pissed and he didn’t want to deal with us, how’s that for customer service) and then finally getting a hold of him and getting yelled at by him during my first lunch with my new boss in San Francisco, they finally got the truck to Sausalito, which if you look at any description of the city, is nestled into a very steep mountainside with narrow and winding roads that a giant 18-wheeler can’t get up! So, they called me and told me to go rent and pay for a UHaul so that they could transfer the load!! I freaked out. I told them that they hadn’t done their job since day one, and that it was their job to make sure they can get a truck to where they are going. Otherwise, they should make and pay for alternate plans. Anyway, I was pissed and totally lost it with them. They finally got our stuff off-loaded onto a UHaul that they paid for and got our stuff back to us. Now, I had every intention of paying these guys as long as they got all of our stuff into our house in a reasonable fashion. But, the owner of the company wanted all of the money up front in cash before they would even unload it. I freaked. I totally didn’t trust these guys and I wasn’t about to give them $2000 in cash if they were going to break all of our stuff while moving it in. Anyway, we reached an agreement amid a screaming match that I would pay half up front and the rest at the end. They moved our stuff in. The movers were great (the boss was the jerk). They got everything in and done with by 10:00pm. The problem was that our solid wood dining room table was snapped in half, Rachel’s dresser tops were shattered, we had broken glass in boxes, we were missing five boxes with important things in them, and they had broken a lamp in two. This was about $2000 of damage. Well, they noted the damage and took off. In the weeks and months to come, we filed for insurance payment, and received only $350 for our broken things. It is a long story, but we are considering suing the crap out of them for negligence and for not following our contract. But, we are also really tired of this crap and aren’t sure we want to spend the time and energy and money to not let them get away with robbing us blind. The bottom line is, we would have avoided a lot of pain and hardship and saved about $5000 if we had stuck with our original plan and we would have been in control of our belongings the whole time. I’m sure other companies are better, but this one was awful. Never use Nationwide to move, you will regret it!
Well, despite all this madness, it was hard to be too upset because Sausalito is simply one of the most beautiful places in the entire world. It looks like a scene from Greece, houses built into a lush mountainside leading down to the bay and an extensive marina and shopping area. It was wonderful and we were enjoying exploring our new home. Once we got all of our things, we relaxed a little, even though we were really pissed off at the company, at least we had most of our stuff and most of it was in one piece. We got moved in and set up and we both started working.
We joined a local rowing club called the Marin Rowing Association. Actually, seeking out a rowing club was one of our first priorities for moving here since our last club was such a strong foundation. This club is located in Greenbrae, CA, which is near San Rafael in Marin County, about a 10-minute drive from our house. The club is huge and has some really amazing equipment. We joined up, and not surprisingly, it was about 10 times more expensive to join than our last club, but it seemed worth it. It has been. Rachel is on the Masters Women’s team and I’m on the Masters Men’s team. We’re rowing with some of the big dogs here for sure. There’s a guy on my team who won the bronze medal in the 1968 Olympics!! There are a number of those on my team. They are all seriously hard core and we train really, really hard. We train to win. Our coach, Jim, has also become a good friend of mine. His coaching style reminds me a lot of our last coach at ARC, George. I loved George’s coaching and I love Jim’s coaching. The intensity here is way higher than it was in Texas, so I’m getting in much better shape and I’m getting to be a much better rower. It is really fun. I’ve lost 15 lbs. since living here, just rowing and slightly watching what I eat. It has been a slow advancement because while I’m losing fat, I’m building muscle. But, I’m not so much interested in my weight as I am my fat percentage, and it is definitely going down. I’ve lost 3 inches in my waist and it is still going down.
Rachel is doing equally well. She loves the intensity of her team as well. She is still doing home health care, but doesn’t like the system as much as her old job in Austin. It isn’t as challenging to her, so she’s decided to focus on rowing and competing this year. She’s doing really well and I’m really proud of her. We each practice about six days/week. It is a great way to relieve stress and, it turns out, is a great source of new friends. We’ve really put together a great network of friends here now. It took six months, but now we never seem to be without things to do, which is great. It can be a little tiring sometimes with my work and rowing schedule, but we figure we’d better have fun now, because once a baby comes along, it will be much more difficult to go out all of the time, especially together. The baby thing is a ways off, so don’t get too excited, but we are thinking about these things. 
My job is great. I honestly couldn’t have created a more ideal position for me to be in following graduate school. The research I’m doing is mainly focused on Alzheimer’s disease and neurodegeneration, but there is a splash of Parkinson’s disease in there as well. My projects are really interesting and I’m starting to really get a grasp on everything. Switching fields entirely from alcohol research to neurodegeneration was a stretch. It is taking time to catch up on the literature, but I’m getting there. I’m starting to understand this system a lot better and I’ll, hopefully, be able to come up with some good ideas about where to take my research soon. I’ll write much more about the projects in the future, I’m sure.
My boss is great also. He is very organized and really knows how to direct research so that everyone is as productive as they can be. He is a bit of a hardass, but that is a good thing because it keeps us all motivated and working hard. It is a really nice environment to be in because I’m learning from one of the best. The environment can be a little stressful at times, but it is mostly just good, productive work. I think that I’m adapting to the new environment pretty well and I’m excited about where my future will take me in this lab.
So, overall, my first six months in San Francisco has been a really positive experience. I love it here. I like it even more than Austin. This place has everything from any kind of food you could ever want (and as authentic as it gets), to lots and lots of great places to go out to like bars and clubs. San Francisco has a great many attractions that tourists come to see all the time, but it also has a lot of beauty and culture, both inside and out. I’m never bored here, there is so much to see and do that I’m actually a little overwhelmed with the possibilities presented to me. My new found friends are really helping me feel adapted and settled and I know that we’re all going to have a great time for years to come.
Well, this post is getting on around 2400 words, so I think I’ll sign off now. There have been a lot of unique experiences that I’ve had here that I haven’t gone into in this post, but, either I’ll touch on those experiences in future, shorter posts, or I’ll just skip them and my friends can ask me about them later. So, with that, I bid you adieu. Check back regularly (again), and you’ll hopefully find that I’m posting much more.
