Our California years

Walt and I lived in California for 15+ years, from 1987 until 2003, after spending five years (1982-87) living and working in Washington DC. We had met in Paris in 1981. We ended up moving to California because Walt wanted to go to Berkeley and complete his university degrees. And that's what he did. I tagged along — I never enjoyed living in DC, though my work was really interesting. W. and I lived in San Francisco for most of the time we spent in California, with a three-year interlude in Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley) in the mid-1990s. I worked for Apple during those years. Walt worked for Santa Clara County as a transit planner, in San Jose.

    

During our more than 11+ years in San Francisco, we never lived more than a few kilometers from the coast. We'd walk the dog we had rescued in 1992, Collette, on Ocean Beach or on China Beach as often as we could. I enjoyed the beach because I grew up on the beaches of North Carolina — 4,000 kilimeters away on the East Coast. Lighthouses like the one at Pigeon Point on the San Mateo coast (photo below) reminded me of lighthouses in NC. I loved the smell of salt air and the sound of waves crashing on the shore. I was nearly 40 years old when W and I escaped from DC and fled to SF. I had already spent five years in France, mostly in Paris, in the 1970s and early 1980s. I had also spent five years as a grad student at the U. of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

    
Berkeley was on the other side of San Francisco Bay, at the other end of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. During Walt's early Berkeley years, I was working in downtown SF as managing editor of a computer magazine (UNIX Review). Walt ended up with three degrees from Berkeley — in architecture, city planning, and transportation engineering. I ended up working for several different software companies in Silicon Valley, with a lot of very talented people, between 1989 and 2002. I liked the people more than I liked the work. Walt ended up with a management job with the public transit agency of the city of San Francisco.

    

There were things I loved about SF and California, but the chilly, foggy SF summers, the earthquakes, the long commutes, and the Bay Area traffic jams were not among them. We lived on Potrero Hill for a while — that's it in the photo on the left above. Then in 1992, we both found ourselves with well-paid, interesting jobs in Silicon Valley, so we left SF to go live in Sunnyvale. That was a different world. After three years The Valley, we realized that we hadn't moved to California to live in the suburbs. We wanted to go back to the place San Franciscans call The City. So we bought a house in a neighborhood called Glen Park, which was similar to Potrero Hill in feel and flavor, and wound up living there for eight years before coming to live in Saint-Aignan. We've been here in France for nearly 19 years already.