So I got over my cold from earlier this week enough to make it into work yesterday, and I felt pretty good.  I got up this morning feeling kinda cruddy but bravely decided to make it into the office.  I drove into Walnut Creek to catch BART (I'm trying out going to different stops to optimize my commute a bit), and was about to catch the train, and just felt terrible. I ended up coming straight home.  So I spent almost 2 hours round trip on the road, burned gas, ended up back where I started, but am much more comfortable here (didn't want to be caught with a flu 2 hours from home on public transit).

 It's kind of been a lost week in some regards, I worked in the office on Monday and Thursday,  from home Tuesday and today, and took Wednesday off completely to try to get better (didn't do a terrible lot of good).

Anyway, on another note, see the attached picture (caught on my way home last night). 

Normal life starts up again today!  So far so good, though the morning car defrost was unpleasant (I've got to make a hole in the garage again tonight for my car).  Still I caught a 7:08 train out of North Concord, which means I'll be in the office around 8, which is one of my new year's resolutions.

 I've got a whole lot of work over the next two weeks (I am pushing out a feature at work that is exposing major bugs in existing code and just won't die), but I'm excited to dive back in and get cracking on my TODO list.

 We had a great week and a half at home; I had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time with Stef and the kids, catch up on stuff to do around the house, and from time to time just drop responsibilities and relax.  I'm sore from playing too much Wii Sports though :)

 Anyway, good morning, everyone!

 

Wed was a really foggy morning here in Oakley... but apparently not in Antioch or Pittsburg, but also in Concord. Here's a photo journal of my trip in to BART :)

 Also, for some reason this theme is acting a bit wonky and putting the attachments at the top in reverse order.  So what you see right now is Concord, Pittsburg, and Oakley :)  I'll see about fixing the theme soon.

This is one of the many reasons I ride BART instead of driving in to work... yikes!

Highway 4 continues to be a source of frustration for many people ;)

Ever since the government and IKEA engineered 4/29 (the tanker explosion on the MacArthur interchange), freeway traffic has gone from terrible to obscene.  It's starting to take me almost an hour to get to BART these days, and I spend more time sitting stil on the freeway that moving along.  Yuck.  A couple of nights ago on the way home, I got a driveby of an accident scene -- looks like this car spun across 3 lanes of the freeway, but fortunately, no other cars looked like they got touched.

Today a Fremont train had some problems and things fell behind schedule -- Fremont trains from the Peninsula were running 30 minutes behind, so they had all the Fremont people hop on our Pittsburg/Bay Point train. The train
was crammed to capacity, with no moving room. Then, we arrived at Embarcadero and they crammed another 20 or so people in each door. It was crazy; you can't move, you can't breathe, and you have sweaty people all over each other. Yuck.

Attached photo shows things after they cleared up a bunch :)

I got out from behind this truck as soon as posssible... I'd hate to be in an accident with this guy. I'm not exactly sure what would be left of me if his load spilled :D

I was walking to BART from my office this week and was almost run down by a group of about 50 joggers cruising down Post street toward Montgomery. I managed to get out of the way without taking any serious damage :)

In other news, Playing video games improves eyesight, and Paper Mario 2 looks most awesome (video).

I woke up this morning to find that Mount Doom* had snow on it :)

 

* Yeah, yeah I know, Mount Diablo. Inside joke :)