Moving on, Changes and Keeping My Eyes on the Prize

I can’t believe it’s almost August.  2009 has flown by.  I admit my updates to this blog have been lackluster.  I’m right now on a trans-con flight to spend a week in Rhode Island with a few co-workers.  Half of us will be working from Newport, RI, and the other half will be taking a legitimate vacation.  Truth be told, I’ll be pulling in just as many hours while working in Rhode Island than if I were in the office.  That said, I am looking forward to spending some time with my frineds/co-workers and being in New England over the summer – warm nights? Yes, please.

In the past two months, work has taken an interesting twist.  My manager left Ning after accepting a job with her former boss for a new company.  In just a week, our small team transitioned quick and became smaller – 2 strong.  Needless to say, Jenny and myself have been working around the clock to hold down the Policies & Abuse fort.  I’m thankful to Jenny and our Advocacy umbrella co-workers for helping us out, and for our amazing legal team – they’ve been working hard to help us out as well.

While I wouldn’t consider Ning a “start-up” anymore (we just got a new $750 million valuation!), there’s a lot of work to go around.  In turn, we’re given a lot of responsibility… very quickly.  I’m definitely kept on my toes – and that’s really exciting, challenging and refreshing.  Multitasking, focus and staying organized have become all-too-important and a must to take on each day.

At the same time work had ramped up, I had already made the decision to move out of my house in San Francisco.  After living with four other people for about 18 months, I felt it was time to try living by myself.  I decided that the least stressful way to make this transition, and so as not to rush myself to find the “perfect” place, was to move back to my parent’s house in the East Bay.  This way, I’d have the flexibility on move-in dates and could afford to be picky.  I was definitely apprehensive about moving back, and I wondered how it would affect my day-to-day and social life.  Surprisingly, the move back has been a smooth one.  My commute is a bit longer in the morning and evening, yet is completely manageable.  I pick up car-poolers so that I can go in the express lane and avoid paying the bridge toll into San Francisco.  It’s about a 40 minute drive door-to-door and once in the City, I park and take Caltrain down to work, about a 30 minute train ride.  Keep in mind that while living in the City, I had to give myself 30 minutes to get from the Inner Richmond to Caltrain.  My commute is not much longer now.  In the evenings, I take Caltrain back up to San Francisco and make an effort to meet up with friends for dinner and drinks during the week.  After, the drive home takes about 15 minutes from San Francisco, and then it’s rinse-and-repeat. 

Surprisingly, I feel like I've also been meeting and getting to know so many new and great people since I moved out of the city -- funny how things work, no?  My intents are to move into an apartment walkable or extremely close to main transit lines and Caltrain.  The whole apartment search has definitely been a long process, though I feel fortunate that I’m not on a time-crunch to find a place.  It’s also been amazing to be saving so much more money by not paying rent.

I recently returned from a last-minute trip to Peru with my college roommate John Steigerwald.  While the trip was an already reasonable one because of the state of the economy, having no rent completely sweetened the deal.  We winged the trip and booked it less than 2 weeks before we jetsetted – John flew from Boston and myself from San Francisco.  It was an awesome reunion/trip.  We flew into Lima, where we spent a full day and then flew onward to Cusco, a high-altitude city that serves as a major transit point to get to Machu Picchu.  I had absolutely no expectations or knew what to expect when we decided to go to Peru – it was my first trip to South America.  From Cusco we did a full day-trip to go to Machu Picchu (while hiking the Inca train sounded amazing, those treks need to be booked months in advanced).  We took a 4-hour train ride to get to Machu Picchu and spent an afternoon on-site.  It was truly awe-inspiring.  All I could think was “How did they get these boulders here?”  The ruins are quite literally hidden high on a mountain, hardly visible from any party toward the bottom of the mountain.  After Machu Picchu, we went onward to Lake Titicaca.  At an even higher altitude from Cusco, I found myself constantly tired and with malaise for most of the trip—you don’t really how much high altitude affects you when you’re trying to keep active and see as much as possible.  Lake Titicaca was equally as awesome – and we had the chance to go to two island – Taquile and a string of floating artificial reed islands called Uros.  Definitely a completely different way of life.  On our last night, I succumbed to a bad case of food poisoning.  Of course, at the height of the swine flu, I had epic fears I’d appear sick while traveling and would have to be quarantined or something along those lines.  Thankfully, I was able to pull myself together and got the cross-border flights back to the U.S. Note to any wise traveler, don’t eat a pizza with fresh tomatoes or anchovies in foreign countries… no matter how good it looks.

Check out my albums:

Land of Llamas 1 

Land of Llamas 2

Land of Llamas 3

Speaking of travels to South America, Simon Bresler also just got back from what looks to be a whirlwind trip south of the Equator.  Check it out! http://www.meditatewithasmile.com.

On that note, I’m going to try and get a few hours of sleep on this flight.  I'm looking forward to some East Coast summering.

Take care and I hope that everyone is doing well out there :)

Jason