Dr Moo in California

Well, I've now been living in California for about 8 months. When I first arrived here, I was provided with temporary accommodation by my company (Adobe). However, if I had decided to stay at the original place, the monthly rent would have been $2,700/month. This was beyond my capabilities (or would have blown virtually all my spending money each month), so instead I moved closer to my friends (Alicyn and Jamie) in Sunnyvale and took up a cheaper apartment. My friends and I had talked about combining our finances and moving to a nicer place together and now that Ali and I are dating, it seemed a sensible choice. Therefore, we started looking for a nice house to rent.

We have just (today) submitted an application for a house. We must of course now wait to see if we get the place, but it is a lovely house. A very nice open-plan two-storey building in a lovely neighborhood. It is right next to a park with a swimming pool and other facilities, so should be a very pleasant place to live. More importantly to me, it has air conditioning, which I will be very grateful for as summer approaches. Anyway, needless to say we have our fingers crossed that our application is accepted and are just looking forwards to moving in.

As has been mentioned a number of times, Alicyn and I play tennis quite a bit (2-3 times per week) for fitness. We decided to finally bite the bullet and start taking some lessons. Yesterday (Tuesday) was our first lesson. I thought it went pretty well to say we are both entirely self taught.

The first part of the lesson consisted of serve practice. The tutor had laid out two cones on the court and had us serve at them. I actually managed to hit mine once and came very close a number of times. We practiced serving to both halves of the court. Because there were three people there, two people practiced serving at a time, while the other practiced their return of serve. This worked very well of course. The second part of the lesson was praticing our volleying technique. This consisted mainly of bouncing a ball and hitting it to the other side of the court, practicing putting spin on it. The final part of the lesson was a bit of a competition. Two people stood at one end of the court and one person at the other end. The tutor hit the ball to the single person, who then had to start volleying it over the net. The goal was to score a number of points. The two people took it in turns to play, coming off when they lost a point. I won two of the rounds (one when I was the lone player and one as the team). It was good fun, but very tiring.

It also happened to be one of the nights we normally play tennis, so after our lesson, we then headed over to our normal courts and played for another hour. Overall, a very good evening of Tennis, but very very tiring. My muscles ached from playing for nearly 2 1/2 hours in total.