Chicken-cherry sausages from Rosamunde’s bought cold and cooked for breakfast

Kite surfers at the 75th birthday of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Hi followers! This has been my first week living in San Francisco and working at my summer internship (Instructables).

I thought I’d repost my blog from the Instructables forums to give you an idea of my summer job:

Today is my third day as an intern at the downtown SF Instructables office. I thought I’d recount Day 1 as a day-in-the-life!

It starts off with: “Don’t come in before 10am” from Eric, and a mention from Noah (my more direct boss): “We recommend that folks bring their computers, a contractor trash bag, a good pair of running shoes, a banana and hard hat on their first day - that way, they are prepared for whatever challenges may await them at Instructables.”

So I walked out to the office, found the robot-painted door wedged between the liquor store and the Mexican restaurant, and walked up the stairs.

It’s one big room- open tables everywhere covered in stuff of all sorts: duct tape, paper towels, electronics, crocheted Pac-Man, a giant styrofoam face, an electric toaster. Everyone is at their workstations- one folding a 3D paper alphabet, another fiddling with a breadboard. The devs coding on one side of the room while walking on treadmills at the computer and DJ’ing the room.

Anyway, I walked in and looked around, and was greeted with a tentative “Hello?” from someone at a desk*. I clarified that it was my first day of work, and that cleared things up. Bilal, the artist-in-residence, gave me a shoulder tap, and I was welcomed by Eric and Noah.

*Apparently random strangers occasionally wander up the stairs. We now have a laser cut “days since a random stranger walked up the stairs” counter for the office.

Noah showed me around, introducing me to the editors’ corner, the marketing team, showing me the rooms along the back wall: “Office, sewing/electronics lab, office, store room, office, prize room, woodshop/laser cut room, 3D printer. Probably ask someone before you use the 3D printer. Test kitchen, game corner.”

And that was it. Back at his place in the editor’s corner, he nodded. A brief pause, and then I asked, “Is there anything in particular I’m supposed to do?”
Noah laughed. “Good question! Since you’re just here for the summer, you’ll be doing a lot of making stuff. You can use any of the supplies, or if you need to buy anything, let me know.”

There are a few other things I get to do, too. I can feature Instructables, and am encouraged to do outreach to people who aren’t on Instructables but ought to be. But right now, most people in the office are working hard on entries for the Make it Real contest.

So I got to work. You can check out my page for the fun things I’ve begun to make here at the office.

A few other key points of the first day experience:
-2pm check-in: everyone in the office meets around the lunch table to say what they’ve been doing that day.
-Membership at TechShop- lots of fun toys for making things!
-Picking up things from the MakerFaire
-Getting project cards

Since then, I’ve gotten some fabric and done some sewing for a project I haven’t posted yet and worked with CNC paper cutting, 3D printing, taught myself Google SketchUp and Silhouette, and have begun to list all the things I’d like to work on this summer

All right, that’s enough writing. Time to make!

The picture is me in a new infinity dress I made at work. You can see what I’m up to most days by checking out my Instructables account (http://www.instructables.com/member/SelkeyMoonbeam/), because most of my job is making projects and then writing them up.

I walk to work half an hour every day from the glorified loft I currently share with Jon and Geoff. Aaron and Jialiya will be joining us soon, so we’ll see how crowded it gets. So far, it’s nice- Kat and Ais and Casey are coming over today, and we have a living/dining/balcony area big enough to entertain.

The city is all right. Living downtown isn’t homey the way woods would be, but it is very convenient. I get to walk a lot, and though I get approached by homeless people every time I walk alone, they usually just offer compliments or ask for money.

Spring Break!

Oh, this was supposed to post about a week ago. Now it’s messing up my post order. I hope you’re happy, spotty Internet.

Here is a picture of a dead fish.
We have been enjoying Costa Rica, even though it makes me uncomfortable how easy it is to be a tourist here. More comfortable in that the roads are really bad, but less comfortable in that everybody speaks perfect English. Maybe you think I’m weird for that, but I think this country is weird for rolling over to tourism so completely.
But anyway, we’ve done some fun things. Probably my favorite thing about this trip/location is the abundance of wildlife- animals I didn’t think people normally got to see, casually available even to the not-so-observant.
Like the coatis snuffling by the roadside, unafraid of our car. Or the manta ray that was swirling towards Eileen’s ankles as she emerged from the water (we swam to a real jewel of an island on Christmas day). And the sussurus of myriad hermit crabs scuffling and scratching down a river of dried leaves. Today we went on a night hike, and our excitable guide pointed out numerous sleeping and recently awakened creatures, my favorite of which was the baby two-toed sloth unselfconsciously gorging itself on nearby leaves under the beams of our flashlights.
Apparently not animal related but rather fungal, I’ve also observed/experienced/discovered ringworm, which is definitely going in my collection of cool foreign things and favorite afflictions.
Tomorrow, back to the beach. It will probably be peaceful and hot, sandy and beautiful, surrounded by helpful people speaking English to me. Oh well, you can’t have everything, I suppose.

1/3/2012
Those were the two weeks our family spent together in 2011. Dana returns to New Mexico tomorrow, the rest of us home to Seattle- a week of the four of us, though Ryan will be with his long-lost girlfriend the whole time, Rick catching up on work, and me.. I don’t know, but I’ll be busy, and gone again in a week.
But that’s normal, I suppose, for us, now. And it’s all right. Even individually, I think the members of our family could be hard to take for too long. As a unit, we’re used to each other- sideways looks and conversation a competition In witticisms. It’s fun, actually. Tough on outsiders, perhaps, but a game worth playing and a test too. But we’ll be fine back in the normal course of things, apart again. Maybe we’ll find a week sometime this summer to hang out.
The wind blows fiercely around our hostel in Alajuela. It’s a surprise, because the days are hot here, but it moves the building, our room the tallest point of the edifice.
I think we’ll just miss the heat on our walk to the airport tomorrow morning. Walking early down the road with all our luggage- shades of Chile, certainly, but also reminiscent of a walk between the Gatwick and Heathrow airports seven years ago, or the couple of miles we carried everything down the beach in Panama in 2006.
Huh. Up until just this moment, I thought my obsession with journeys á pié was original.
But I guess traces of family always show up in surprising little ways.
Anyway, I’m going home.

Always good to be back with the family.

Spelunking today. One of the coolest things I’ve ever done- a long cave with a river running all along the bottom. Bats clustered on the ceiling and would stretch and even fly if you shone your light on them for too long.
Our guide was excellent. He spoke great English, but gave our tour in Spanish and let me translate, allowing him to make little side jokes like “the crickets feed on guano and dead bats, the tarantulas eat crickets, the vampire bats feed on the blood of foreign tourists who don’t speak Spanish.” or after leading us through a feet-first tiny tunnel and up a rock wall, deadpanning perfectly that the next section was straight up a sheer rock face. Made the crevice down to the left much less daunting in comparison.
We were given rubber boots, waterproof flashlights, and hard hats, and used them all. The boots were the least useful, as the river filled them almost immediately. But it got us into the spirit of things, and after walking through several underground waterfalls, playing with scorpion spiders, and climbing ancient brain coral, we got to go on the special extension of the tour “because we are brave”.
If we weren’t wet already, this was the time to be soaked. The little tunnel behind the waterfall was only big enough to crawl through if it were dry, but as a river ran through it, we were swimming through the twisting back ways of the cave. The water was the perfect temperature, as the air in the caves was quite warm. And for a last hurrah, we took an alternate exit out of the cave, climbing up a rambling waterfall into the jungle in the light.
If anything the rest of this trip has to offer comes close to this, I will be impressed. But then again, I don’t need impressive, necessarily; tomorrow, we drive to the beach.

Costa Rica: a day in the life
We woke up in our cabin in the jungle to a balmy, cloudy warmth that stayed all day. Breakfast was interrupted with a monkey sighting, and the morning passed long and lazy.
Around midday, we piled into the car and drove down to La Fortuna to seek a bakery. Success was unimpressive, but the bread was adequate, so we trundles on beneath the low clouds and down the bumpy road to Cerro Chato. We had to go through a private hotel to access the trail, but leaving the car in their parking lot, we began our volcano hike- a nearby volcano from which to view Volcán Poas.
Though we didn’t hold out much hope for the view, we hiked upwards regardless, stepping over roots, around hanging vines, and over lines of leafcutter ants. It wasn’t long before we were in the clouds, and the mud increased as we climbed. But it was messy, slippery good fun.
When we reached the top of our trail, there was a lookout, clearly intended as the point from which to see Poas. What we saw: the end of a trail, misty whiteness. Probably a steep drop off.
But that was okay; there were two more trails, to the right and left. After little exploration, the left was deemed unsafe, and the right followed, eventually leading us to our true prize: the trail down to the lake in the volcano crater. We went swimming.
On a clear day, there would no doubt have been a marvelous view here as well. But I was well satisfied with the clouds- the thick mist over the green water lent a quietly surreal air to the scene. Dana and I swam out towards the center until the trees began to disappear into the whiteness. I have no idea how far across the crater was; we never saw it.
Stepping back out of the water was as into a sauna,
pleasantly. And then we made our slippery way back down the volcano, across a suspension bridge, by a waterfall.
We had hoped to drive to a free hot springs we’d seen on the map, but we couldn’t find it. So we went home to our cabin; it was dinnertime anyway.