Settled in Silicon Valley

deer tick (ixodes scapularis)

It’s been several months since I’ve posted to this blog. In that time, Sara, Alex and I picked our stuff up and moved from Texas to California. This is the second time my wife and I have moved half way across the country in the past 10 years (first time around it was from Ohio to Texas for Sara’s job with the University of Texas at San Antonio). This time, I took a job with Apple, Inc. in Cupertino.

This past weekend, we finally unpacked the plethora of boxes that filled our apartment. I have to say, I was a bit shocked by how much rent averages around here. In Texas, an apartment of the same square footage goes for less than half of what we’re paying here. Then again, so do most of the salaries.

To take a break from the marathon unpacking session my wife and I were attempting this past Saturday, I decided to take the family into the Santa Cruz mountains for a picnic and a small hike. (Alex calls mountains ‘mounts’ which is almost as cute as him calling buttons ‘bunts’ as in, “Daddy, I want to wear a bunt shirt today!”.  Three year olds are hands down the funniest and most frustrating people on the planet.) The hike was awesome! Shortly thereafter, however, I had a run in with my first California bug bite.

I was taking more boxes to the trash when I felt a strange sensation on the side of my ribcage under my right arm. I went inside and looked in the mirror and found a deer tick!  Luckily, I’ve been bitten by ticks in the past and knew not to grab it and pull it out quickly.  Doing so will generally leave a piece of mandible in your skin.  Ticks can carry nasty bacterium like the spirochete that causes Lyme disease and it’s probably best not to leave infected bug parts inside of you.  Instead, grab the little bugger with tweezers as close to the jaw as possible and gently pull it out.

Once Sara got the tick out of my side, I put it in a baggie and took it to a crusty old doctor who said “Yup, that’s a deer tick.  Here’s some Doxycycline.”  Antibiotics FTW!

So that’s my first bug experience in California.  I’m looking forward to more of the computer kind rather than kind with legs.  Since this is an Illumos blog, I will mention that I finally unpacked my Illumos build machine and promptly compiled the latest repo update.  This time with GCC!  The result?  Hard reset during kernel loading, probably a driver.

Mounts and bunts in one photo!