Weigh ins #25-29, Honeymoons, Newcastle United and the FBI and Plex Success!

Time to take a quick dive through our accumulation of rubbish in the last few months from January until now!





Weigh in #25 was 15oz






Weigh in #26 was 18oz





Weigh in #27 was 11.5oz





Weigh in #28 was 22oz





Weigh in #29 was 12oz.

With these five weigh ins we're standing at a grand total of 562.5oz or 35lbs and 2.5oz after 48 weeks so well inside our target. The next earth day is only 4 weeks away so the experiment is coming to an end, but not the practice of buying wisely, recycling, and composting, so our amount of waste going to land fill will be kept as low as we can.

This next year I think I'm going to try and cut out all of my junk mail. I've tried mailing back those business reply envelopes, but that is just petty!

I've signed up with Catalog Choice to see if I can get rid of those blasted "redplum" coupon things the postman delivers once a week. I'll let you know how successful I have been.

On a similar note to opt out of all those annoying pre-screening credit offers you can call 1--888-5-OPT-OUT (1-888-567-8688) or visit OPTOUT

That should remove your name for 5 years. I think you can remove it permanently as well if you chose. Remember the next time you legitimately apply for credit it will put your name back on their mailing list so you'll have to re-register to opt out.


Talking of credit, you may or may not know that I walked away from my condo in what's called a "strategic default". In lay mans terms I stopped paying my $400,000 mortgage on a place that was then worth $170,000, and let the bank carry the can.

I heard many horror stories of what would happen to my credit, so I got my credit scores just before I stopped paying my mortgage in April 2009, and then I recently did the same thing in January 2011, some 6 months after the foreclosure.

So here are my pre and post-foreclosure scores

April 2009 :

Transunion = 737
Experian = 734
Equifax = 756

January 2011

Transunion = 721 (a drop of 16 points!)
Experian = 684 (a drop of 50 points)
Equifax = 716 (a drop of 40 points)

So not the whole doom and gloom the financial sector predicted, but then again they were trying to pray on my fear!

There is one slight catch however. They'd started adding grades to the scores so as well as my score I am graded C by Transunion, a lowly D by Experian and a C by Equifax.

So would I rather still have my good scores and grades or $380,000 of debt? I'll let you figure that one out!

Just after I got my new credit scores Ananda and I headed out on our Honeymoon; a few days in Tahiti and then almost 4 weeks in New Zealand. Here's a few pictures just to wet your appetites for when we get round to some serious editing!



This is the swim up horizon pool bar at our resort in Tahiti. The weather was superb for the three days we were there and snorkeling in the lagoon was so fun...... until I spotted a massive moray eel on the last day! Only drawback about Tahiti is it is very, very expensive for food! We got a sweet deal on the resort though, only $120 for three nights!

Next up was New Zealand and an amazing time in my most favourite place in the world!



This is Ananda kayaking in the beautiful Able Tasman National park. Truly beautiful in itself but throw in a pod of dolphins swimming around us, sting rays and beautiful song birds and you begin to get a better idea!




Most of you might recognise Mt Ngauruhoe as Mt Doom in LOTR. We had a great one day trek up amongst the volcanoes. If New Zealand is my most favourite country in the world then the Tongariro National Park, a double World Heritage Site is my favourite place, ANYWHERE. It truly is a magnificent and sacred place to be.



When I moved to New Zealand back in 2000 it was the best thing I had ever done in my life. I was so lucky to land on my two feet sharing a house with some amazing room-mates. Here's two of them, Nick and Verena, who in the intervening time have got married and grew another room-mate of their own, Oliver! It was great to catch up with them, all too briefly though.



This is the Whangapoua crew from a wonderful weekend at the Arcus's beach house, which doesn't really do the place full justice. Award winning beach compound might be a better description. It was a great opportunity to catch up my dear friends and to see their kids and to see how they have all grown up too in the case of Leon and Gracie. An unforgettable weekend of sun, sea, fun, food and friends. Thanks guys!


Well coming home after that was a big strain on me, as I so long to go and live there again.

My first day back at work didn't help this mood too much since my computer at work had been confiscated by the FBI! Welcome home Graeme!

To cut a long story short I had downloaded a bundle of programs called Tor that allowed me to log into the BBC website as if I had a British IP address and was therefore able to listen to football commentary of the mighty Newcastle United!

Unbeknownst to me, that also opened up my computer, gloriously labeled as "Property of the US Government", to be an anonymous server for anyone that wanted to use it. All that the two Counter Intelligence FBI agents would say when they interviewed me a week later was that "a bad actor" had been using my computer as a "node".

Since birth it's been a pretty rough ride being a Newcastle United fan. We're basically the equivalent of the Boston Red Sox in terms of not having won the Premier league since 1927 or something, (famously throwing away a 15 point lead in 1992 I think to finish 2nd!!!), but surely adding the FBI into the mix is not something any ordinary football loving fan should have to deal with!

Still, the FBI had not broken my resolve to be a Newcastle United fan, Fat Mike Ashley on the other hand.........

I've yet to break it to my wonderful in-laws that I'll have to become a San Diego Chargers fan since that's their home town, and no doubt I will bring the Newcastle United curse with me to their team. Sorry Jeff!

So after about 6 weeks I finally got my two computers back, and yes my honeymoon photos were on them, so I can someday soon get them out there for you to look at!

Finally good news and some pictures Bruce wanted to see! Thanks to good fortune and luck, our former company has been bought out for almost $1 billion dollars. Some might say that may be a bit on the cheap side since the drug, once approved will be a multi-billion dollar seller, but hey I'm not complaining about the wonderful abundance that's been presented to us!

When I started at Plexxikon, I instituted the traditional British Friday lunch time trip to the pup in Berkeley called Jupiters, which some of my American colleagues took to with, quite literally, flying colours!

Despite the odd reprimand over some post-pub lab safety issues, they were some of my happiest moments there, and indeed it was during one of these visits that I first got the inclination that my now wife had a bit of a crush on me!

So what better place to celebrate our collective good fortunes than at Jupiters!

Here's some pictures and the odd commentary!















In honour of Bruce, I gave my vegetarian habits a rest for the evening and had the world famous "Cassiopeia BBQ chicken pizza"




John and Graeme discussing if they can buy out the Oakland A's, or maybe just build a new all seater stadium for them, so about 200 seats then.









The gangs all here!





The Jihad reunited for the first time since that fateful June day..... Bugger I'll probably have the FBI back on my case now....





And as usual the last to leave were .....



Thanks for reading and see you next time!!

Weigh ins #22 -#24, Birthdays and the Garden

In short order, Weigh in #22







was 18oz.....

#23 .....





was 32.5oz probablt due to some of William's nappies (diapers).

Weigh in #24 ....






was 16.5oz. That gives us a total of 484oz which is 30lbs and 4oz. Not bad for 38 weeks, so we're running at about 12oz of rubbish a week.

I recently turned 40 and Ananda took me to Farallon in the city for dinner. Very nice indeed.



I finally got some pictures up onto Facebook at the 4th time of asking! Even then I had to do them a few at a time. Not really sure how FB is meant to be worth 25 billion dollars!

Finally, Ananda asked if she could cut my hair and I said "no". So, she took it out on the apricot tree....



Glad I said no now, look what she did to the poor thing!!!

Weigh in #21 - Faith in Humanity and Crazy Americans

Hello, final weigh in of the year since we're off to Blighty later this afternoon, weather permitting.





A massive 9oz for the last week. So a total of 417oz which is the equivalent of 26lbs and 1oz.

Obviously the blog will be on a bit of a hiatus whilst we're in the UK. Will try our best to reduce, reuse and recycle whilst we're home. Although it is so cold we'll probably have to burn everything to keep warm.

Finally got round to printing out some wedding pictures, and then I stupidly sent them over to my old house! I dashed over their at about 10pm one evening. Since it's been foreclosed on I didn't want the packages left lying out in the rain.

To my surprise the place is actually occupied now, so someone must have bought it. I was very shocked. Despite lights being on in the house I could not raise anyone, despite knocking and ringing many, many times.

In the end I left a note and posted it through the door, my faith in getting the pictures back at an all time low. However, my faith in humanity was restored as by the time I drove back home the lady had called me and we arranged to pick them up the next evening. Hurrah!

Sometimes I don't understand America and American politics. Everyone is up in arms about the ballooning national deficit, but no-one has the balls to do anything about it. That's because of the endless rounds of elections they have here. It seems to me you get voted to office and then spend the next four years raising money to try and get voted in again, so you obviously don't have more than a 2-3 year plan.

Take this week for example. They voted to extend the Bush era tax cuts for another two years. So that's one avenue of revenue they just closed off. As part of that same bill they extend un-employment benefit which I agree with, but it doesn't take a genius to see that that is going to put them more in the red.

Did they discuss how they would pay for this extra benefits? No. Maybe if they had increased taxes they might have had some money to help pay for the benefits.

So who's going to pay for this then? Well I found out part of the answer the next day at work. Uncle Sam just imposed another two years pay freeze for federal employees, including yours truly.

Maybe I should become an investment banker, and that way no matter how royally I fuck up and fuck over the country I'll still get a massive bonus, and hey if I get the sack a massive golden handshake. (Gay, sorry for the F words.)

Can't wait to see the next round of Wikileaks cables - rumoured to contain stuff about Bank of America!

Of course, not allowed to read them at work since we've been warned not to use Federal computers to view them.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Weigh in #17-20, McDonalds revisited.

Hi everyone.

Well the last month has flown by. Been very, very busy and maybe a little stressed at work. Working from 7am to 1am tends to have that effect on me. Still the beam-line is up and running AND on time this year so feel very happy about that. The madness should be over for another year!

Okay, in quick order then......

First on is 7.5oz




Second one is 9oz






Third one is 10oz






Fourth one is 22.5oz.





That brings our grand total to 408oz which is 25.5lbs in 31 weeks. Pretty damned good I say!

We've recently received new recycling bins from San Mateo County and from Jan 3rd we can start to add food scraps to the green yard waste bins. That's excellent news, but most of our food waste is still going to be going into the compost bin and the worms lunch menu!

Talking of compost, yesterday I dug around in out compost tumbler to find the new biodegradable chip packet, you know the loud ones that claim to be biodegradable. Well we popped that noisy bugger into the drum on the 2nd October and two months later still looks like we just bought it off the shelf. Very little degrading.

Was not able to find the biodegradable wine cups we used at the wedding. Not that I looked that hard as it started to rain......



You may remember in my last blog that I was going to do the "why does a burger not go mouldy experiment" but I've been beaten to it. My good friend Bruce found a link to someone who carried out a pretty good set of experiments. They experiments and the conclusions can be read here. I won't spoil the ending by telling you what he found... no pun intended!

We had out last harvest from our tomato plants at the end of November....



it was a very strange summer indeed.

Summer is over, especially so for my poor family back in the UK, struggling through a couple feet of snow. Not to be out done we built our own snowman.... by built I mean bought one from Home Depot and then assembled it at home. "Frosty" as we named him (original huh?) is now proudly stood out on our front lawn.

Catching Up - Weigh Ins #13-16, Apple Harvest, Weddings and McDonalds!

Been over a month since I last updated the blog. Been a bit busy since then with a wonderful wedding, wonderful family and wonderful weather all to contend with and keeping me away from the computer. Since the weather today has conspired to postpone my 7th graders football game (soccer) I have some time to catch up.

October 21st was the 26 week anniversary of our 100lb challenge. Although I've not been blogging I have been weighing and recording what we have thrown out so here goes......

Weigh in #13 - 16oz





Weigh in #14 - 24oz





Weigh in #15 - 26oz





Weigh in #16 - 23oz






So our grand total for 27 weeks is now at 359oz or 22lb and 7oz.
At this stage we should have been at 54lb so we are running at 50%!!! I personally think this is awesome!

Okay, onto more exciting things news from the garden.

Late September, early October our Washington Navel orange tree started to bloom, and grow like crazy!





I think these two tiny little buds might be oranges forming! Exciting times ahead I hope. The tree is only maybe two years old so we're not expecting a bumper harvest from it.

About the same time the apples on the tree, well the ones left by the bloody squirrels, were ready for harvesting.



Although our landlord said it was a Fuji apple tree they look and taste more like Gala apples. Anyone care to comment?




With Ananda's and Gay help we harvested all of the apples from the tree. The two smaller boxes are the apples that had not been attacked by the codling apple moth, about 9lbs worth, and the apples in the bigger box are ones that had worm holes in them.

Not wanting to waste the latter ones I peeled them, cored them, got rid of the wormy bits and then made a delicious apple pie.... and yes I even made the pastry from scratch!





Since it was a rainy night I made some Bird's custard and introduced Gay to the delights of apple pie and custard! Yummy! She said that when she was growing up they served cheese with their apple pie. Turns out to be a tradition from Yorkshire in England. Who'd have thunk it?

The apples that we saved for eating are so juicy and delicious. Very happy with how they turned out. Next year I will be more vigilant in dealing with the codling apple moth - I have a recipe for making a home made pheromone trap, and I read somewhere that by irrigating the tree from above, so the fruit and leaves get wet, cuts the moth down by about 50%.

The summer this year in the Bay area was very weird and most of the crops I had in my garden at home seemed to be not producing anything, and then everything took off like nuts. Last weekend I picked over 4lb of cherry tomatoes from my 8ft tall cherry tomato plant, and that's on top of about 4lbs I picked a few weeks earlier. And that's only about 1/3 of them. A lot of them are going rotten because I can't pick them fast enough and cold nights have set in. Friends at work have been getting lots of them.

So this picture below is some of the results from my garden at home and at work......



The pumpkins are from the garden at work, there were three of them but one has already been turned in to a Thai red curry. Too tasty to carve. The egg plant is from work too. We need to find a way to grow more egg plant as they are delicious but not very abundant.

The big tomatoes are a mixture of "mortgage lifter" and "German Strawberry" varieties. The brown thing on top of the cherry tomatoes is a "chocolate beauty" bell pepper. These things taste amazing, but again this summer was so poor it's the only one I got. :-(

Peppers definitely need heat. Missing from the picture are the hot peppers. Nice red hot ones from work and serrano and jalpeno ones from home. I think I see some salsa being made today.


So all of this food is organic and pesticide free which brings up neatly to McDonalds. In a recent discussion with some of my friends on Facebook I offered to repeat the experiment performed by the Manhattan Artist Sally Davies. You can read about it here.

My good friend Bruce suggested that the experiment had not been done properly, which is true since they did not use any control experiment. So I suggested to Bruce that I would repeat the experiment with a happy meal or whatever it was, versus a 100% grass fed burger and organic sprouted whole wheat bread and I might even be persuaded to make some chips (fries) as well. Then we'd just leave them out on my kitchen table and see what happens to them. So, since this involves a bit of preparation on my behalf, I'm only willing to do it if enough people say they want to see it, so leave comments for me if you want to see it. Some comments encouraging Ananda to allow me to do this would be useful too. Maybe that should read encouraging Ananda to not eat the 100% grass fed burger!

Okay, finally a couple pictures from my parents and sisters recent trip to California. It was so amazingly wonderful to have them all at our wedding, it really helped make a perfect day more perfect. The first picture is the front of their vacation rental and the second one is proof that Mam and Dad did truly make it to San Francisco. Much Love to them all!





Final pictures are myself and my beautiful wife at the terminal in San Francisco, taken at the point where we shared our first kiss.



From there to here......




:-)