Back to the Beach

Since I’ve not been traveling as much, I’ve made a recent attempt to re-integrate myself into Southern California.

First a quick aside. Back in startup #2, I was fortunate enough to be able to have a home base in Las Vegas (where I grew up) and travel quite a bit up to the bay area. Eventually, I ‘moved’ there for about a year, living in Cupertino as set up by that startup.

Working 12-15 hour days 6 to 7 days a week though didn’t really leave much time for integrating myself into SV.

While the party at my particular angel funded startup was winding down, the whole party wasn’t over yet. I joined Sun Micro, which seemed like a good place for a 24 year old with some skills but no real successes to learn. This took me to SoCal. Long Beach at first, then El Segundo.

Oddly though, within 3-4 years, I was back traveling to the bay area.
I like to think this is because I found ways to add value that transcended SoCal, but it may just as much have been the regular reorganiations which were ongoing as Sun tried to adjust to the market.

During this whirlwind of time on tech but not time on life, I never really felt at home anywhere. I had people connections in all of these places, but I’d not really come to terms with living in SoCal since I really had anything but work.

I tried a few things, but the one that ultimately stuck was beach volleyball. There were a few things I’d grown to like in SoCal– like eating lunch outdoors almost all year round– that one simply could not do in Las Vegas, but they weren’t endearing enough to encourage me to call SoCal home.

A Wednesday night beach volleyball class and spending half the day Saturday on the beach worked. That’s the thing that made me think “eh, SoCal isn’t just a traffic jam bereft of culture.”

So here I am, nearly at year 7 in startup #3 and though the time spent is still intense, my particular day-to-day is done more from the home office.

The last couple months therefore have had me spending more time with Michelle and yet again trying a few different things to add more to the life side of the work/life balance.

Somewhat surprisingly, at least in the last few weeks, beach volleyball has once again stuck. My skills in the game are no better than they were back in 2007 or so, but as long as I don’t let that stress me out, it’s pretty hard to play volleyball on the beach for a half a day and not like SoCal.

Now I just need to keep it up so I’m not a mass of muscle aches over the rest of the week.