It is 6:15 AM on Monday April 4th, 2023. It is the Monday after Easter and I’m realizing that many companies and schools have the day off. It is even listed in my calendar in official holidays as “Easter Monday.” My company had Friday off and it seems many others did not as I still received plenty of e-mails and even a call.
The weekend was nice and full of activity. On Saturday our karate dojo did a demonstration at the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival like we do every year. For me, I only had to do the nunchakus which were new as those weapons had been illegal in California until late last year. I got to break the ice last year which is the main event so this year other students got the opportunity to showcase their breaking skills. Senpai Maiko and Seya broke boards, Senpai Kenichi and Jun did the baseball bats and Shihan the ice. My boys did great showing off kata and my oldest did very well with “seenchin” as it is a blackbelt kata. We recently received our blackbelts so he had to learn it in just a few days.
I always enjoy the Cherry Blossom Festival as JAL is a major sponsor and seeing their participation makes me reminisce about my time working there 15 years ago. It is hard to believe how much time has passed since then. I remember dressing up in my suite, walking out of my San Francisco apartment and down a few blocks to the Nikko Hotel where our office was located and JAL used to own. Everyday was spent either in the office or in my car driving around to see customers. I remember thinking how great it would be to work from home. Now in 2023, I do work from home everyday which is thanks to not having a dedicated office as well as COVID. Working from home is great but loses a bit of luster when you’re spent doing it with very little opportunity to go out as most of my customers still work virtually.
As for life at the moment I’m under a bit of stress. The first item is that the wind and rain storms blew off plenty of shingles from my roof. It is 23 years old and given its age I’ve had to patch various places for the past five years. Well, given how many shingles blew off these past storms it is due for a replacement. This is a huge expense itself but we’ve also been meaning to add solar. Checking into it I learned that the current electric company incentives expire on the 15th and are greatly reduced under the new program.
Therefore, I had to really hurry and make a decision to get into the current program called NEM 2.0. It is not guaranteed that I’ll make it in as the installers must file paperwork and most of them cut that paperwork established a deadline that ended a month ago. I’m working with an energy broker that assures me we still have a great chance of getting in. They were the only ones who even offered to try but I had to make a decision last Thursday and put down the deposit. They assured me my deposit is refundable if I didn’t get in but I did have to sign an agreement with many, many pages which I didn’t have time to read as we were literally speaking at 10:00 PM that night, the last possible moment to try to get into this old program. In any case, a big fingers crossed we get into NEM 2.0 and we’ll go from there.
Work as usual is full of updates, new programs and thus many activities to keep everyone busy with customers. It is so busy and full of change that many of my colleagues are grumbling a bit in trying to keep up with it all.
Well, this morning is a foggy one so although it is getting lighter outside, there is no sun. As I mentioned above I just learned that today is a holiday for many and that includes my family but unfortunately not for me.
