Before departing to Southern California, my dad joined me for a few days in San Francisco and Napa.

Our first day in together in San Francisco revolved mostly around wandering the Embarcadero area and the piers, followed by dinner at Chez Maman, which I had been to once five years earlier.

On the second day, we want to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. In addition to the “Passport to the Universe” planetarium show narrated by Tom Hanks, the museum had a rainforest dome and aquarium.

After we finished at the museum, we went for an excellent dinner at the Slanted Door, a Vietnamese restaurant on the pier recommended by my cousin. The food was all delicious, and they served some of the biggest scallops that I’ve ever seen.

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To end the night, we got a great view of a nearly full moon above the Bay Bridge. If I look uncomfortable in this pictures, it is because I am very cold. San Francisco appears to change weather by hour and by block. Dress in layers.

The first part of my trip, in some parts planned and some parts unplanned, has been reconnecting with friends. For me, seeing friends while traveling is nothing unusual. Most of my solo travel revolves around spending time with friends. It will actually be the later part of the trip when I am roaming the Pacific Coast Highway alone that will be novel for me.

Here, though, the amount of close friends I have seen is remarkable. To start, I visited my friends in Oakland (celebrating one of their birthdays in Tahoe) along with a high-school friend turned co-worker. After the ski weekend in the cozy cabin, my high school friend and I wandered San Francisco and caught up with another former co-worker.

To my surprise, I learned that my high school robotics team’s mentor has been living in San Francisco for the last decade. One of my closest high school friends and robotics team co-captain happens to be staying in the Bay Area this month. And a high school friend who was the team captain the two years preceding me also lives in the Bay Area. We all met up for pizza, perhaps for the first time since 2007 when we would do that nearly every week at times.

Before I take off to spend some time with family and then on my own, it was great to reconnect with so many friends.

Historically, I will spend solo city trips walking until my feet bleed. Usually, I am not wearing the right shoes. In this case, I thankfully do not have bleeding feet. They are just very sore and blistered. I have learned that Allbirds are extremely comfortable, but they are not made for walking nine miles in a day. Lesson learned.

The nine mile walk, however, was terrific. I started out downtown San Francisco, in the SOMA neighborhood and walked east until I reached the Golden Gate Park. It was a beautiful day, low 70’s and sunny, and I wished I had something other than jeans. As I moved further west towards the coast, the weather shifted to 60 and foggy. I was cold even with my sweater. From the warmth to the cool, I visited the Conservatory of Flowers, California Academy of Sciences (though I opted not to go in because I didn’t have the 3-4 hours of time recommended by Yelp), the Japanese Tea Garden (which had a strange $9 entrance fee, but was generally worth it), Strawberry Hill (a small island in the middle of the park), and the quieter area west of State Route 1 which bisects the park.

Getting back to dinner, I took the N trolley, which took me through the quant Sunset District and by the Duboce dog park. Of course, I elected to get off one stop early and visit the dog park before going to dinner.

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One thing to note, which I don’t have any photos of, is the massive inequality on full display in downtown San Francisco. It is less a stretch than I want it to be to say that most people I saw downtown were either homeless or millionaires. There were two completely different worlds, living right on top of one another not even seeing each other. I have seen this environment in the past, but not in a developed country.

Earlier this week, I finished Rutger Bregman’s book in which he outlines and advocates for a universal basic income. He argues that the poor are poor because they don’t have money—that they lack capital to move out of poverty. Citing many studies, he shows that giving the poor (in some cases the homeless) money with no strings attached actually reduces public spending and shrinks the government—in this case policing costs, sanitation costs, and court costs. That San Francisco, a progressive city in a progressive state, has failed so horribly at solving homeless and inequality is disheartening. San Francisco has always been a city of change. Perhaps it will soon take the lead in helping the homeless find homes and reducing inequality.

Of note, once I walked a few blocks outside of the downtown area, I no longer saw this inequality. Though it was overwhelming downtown, it does not permeate the entire city.

It’s been just a few days since I dropped off Aayla with my friends. Five and a half weeks will be the longest we’ve been apart since I was off at college. Thankfully, I get Aayla updates while I am on the road. She appears to be very happy.

For my friend’s birthday, we celebrated with three different pies from Gregory’s Gourmet Desserts. It’s known as the best underground bakery in Oakland because it is literally underground. If you need good pie in the east bay, go to Gregory’s.

The pies were massive and massively delicious. One pie, the Uptown Baby, was a custom order: an apple pecan pancake baked on top of an apple pie. We barely made a dent in these pies during dinner, so they were incorporated into breakfast the next day before we checked out of our Airbnb.

Skiing Tahoe is different from any other skiing I have done before. Or perhaps I just haven’t skied in so long that I forgot how much fun it is. With 6-8 feet of snow accumulated on the ground, there are no green patches and no ice. The temperature was also around 55ºF, so there was really no need for a jacket.

Apart from falling off the chair lift before my first run of the day, I’d say I did pretty well. We started off with some scenic greens and ended on some narrow and windy blues.

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We’ve made it to Lake Tahoe, a small group of us to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Never in my life have I seen so much snow as on the drive up here, despite the temperature being in the mid-fifties. Snow piled up as high as six feet.

We arrived at a rustic cabin, with more TVs and ethernet cable than I would ever expect to see. Below, a fire in the fire place, a cheese and charcuterie board, wine, and two fuzzy blankets on a soft couch. At last I feel so cozy, grinning ear to ear in the warmth.

Over the past few days, I keep being asked: “Are you excited?”

My response has generally been: “I will be when I get on the plane.”

In part, it’s reflects what I’ve experienced in the past, in that I usually don’t get excited for any trip until a few hours before I depart. But in part, it is an aspirational response. I am hedging, saying “not yet”, delaying giving a more authentic answer. In truth, I am apprehensively nervous. I am not stressed. I am not anxious. I am just less excited than I thought that I would be. And that’s OK.

I haven’t been away from home for this long since I went to Switzerland as a summer research student in college. Back then I didn’t have an apartment, a car, a job, a cat, a comfy bed—nothing that I was putting on pause. At the start of this trip, the feeling of the things left behind outweighs the things yet to come because the things yet to come have not yet arrived.

Knowing myself, I won’t be excited until I start doing what I set out to do. So now it is time to go snowshoeing in Tahoe. A good first step.

I am Known as the Snail Guy

Often when I meet a new formling, the usual greeting is “oh, you’re the snail guy!”

My reputation precedes me.

Yes, I am known as the snail guy because I have 3D printed thousands of tiny plastic snails. Many times I have hidden them around the office. My desk is also littered in snail paraphernalia, 3D printed and otherwise.

After realizing that I am, indeed, the snail guy, I am asked, “so what’s up with all the snails?”

The story, it turns out, is not that exciting. At least that is my opinion of it. Others have told me that I am wrong. So I will repeat it here and you can decide for yourself.

The Origin Story

Back in the long, long ago, shortly after we shipped the Form 1, I was working on developing material files to improve print success.

Allow me to break down that last sentence a bit. The Form 1 was formlabs’ first product. We launched it on Kickstarter, raising nearly $3M from backers. It was a revolutionary product at the time—the first desktop SLA 3D printer. It promised customers a significantly higher part quality than any other printer at a much lower price point with much better usability. For fabrication material, the printer uses liquid resins (acrylate-based photopolymers), curing (solidifying) it with a UV laser like one you would find in a Blu-ray player. A material file is used to tell the printer exactly how to solidify the material. The material file controls laser power, speed, wait time, motor motions, and a variety of other parameters. By tuning the material file, we can get the printer to produce better parts.

At this particular time, the printers were having trouble printing successfully across the entire build area. Parts printed near the edges were more successful than parts printed near the center. To run tests with varying material files, I wanted a part that is quick to print, is pretty small, and is not too difficult from a printing perspective. I would print many of these parts, in a 5 x 5 grid on the build platform. As it so happens, I had downloaded several animal 3D models the day before, and the snail fit the bill. Within a few days, I had several hundred little plastic snails. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, so they just collected on my desk. As I began to amass an army, the person at the desk next to mine put a 3D printed shore crab model at the edge to defend her desk from invading snails.

It Begins to Escalate

Soon people around the office began to think I had a problem. It was becoming a joke that I was an engineer here only so I could invent new ways to 3D print snails more efficiently. Why did I have all these snails? For a while I told people I was printing these snails as part of a large prank. After a co-worker smashed cake in my face at the Form 1 shipping celebration, featured on Netflix documentary Print the Legend, I was going to get my revenge by filling his bed with snails one night. That act of revenge never materialized, but it was a good enough story until I figured out what I was actually going to do with all the snails.

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The Great Snail-Bunny War of 2014

At some point in the summer of 2014, I noticed that a few bunnies appeared in the snail garden. A few days later, I began to find more bunnies hidden around my desk and around the office in general. I was unaware who was putting these bunnies everywhere, and no one else could provide me with any valuable intelligence.

At last I had found a use for my massive snail army: mounting a large scale war against the invading bunnies.

Since I didn’t know who was responsible for all the bunnies, I had to start by removing enemy combatants from the battlefield. At first, they were put in a jail, but they multiplied like bunnies and the jail couldn’t contain them all.

The war got brutal. There were heavily losses on the side of the bunnies and very few snails lives were lost due to extremely aggressive tactics. After a couple of weeks the war ended. The bunnies disappeared. It was a decisive victory for the snails.

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While I won the war, I may have lost a few friends in the process.

The Snail Enthusiast

After the Snail-Bunny War of 2014, my friends and co-workers began to become more comfortable with my snail obsession. For my birthday the next summer, a few of them made these delicious snail cinnamon rolls to share with the team.

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As the years passed, I become known more and more as the snail enthusiast. Friends send me pictures of snails they happen across in everyday life. Occasionally, some snail item will show up at my desk, usually without any indication of who put it there.

So there you have it. The story of how I became a snail enthusiast. Fun fact: I don’t actually know that much about snails.

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A major goal for my trip is to spend a lot of time doing nothing. I want to forget what it feels like to be always busy, always rushing to the next thing. With an empty calendar and being far from home, I will have a great chance to do just that.

Still in Boston, I got a brief taste this afternoon. For a couple of hours, I wandered the streets of Cambridge near Harvard Square in search of Prius’s with progressive bumper stickers. To answer your question, I run an instagram account called Progressive Prius. I first had the idea a few years ago when I saw a blue Prius with an Elizabeth Warren bumper sticker drive by a Whole Foods in Cambridge. The car right behind it was another blue Prius with an Elizabeth Warren bumper sticker.

This afternoon, I collected a wonderful FIVE progressive Prius pictures! And I had nothing pressing on my mind when doing it. At one point, I stopped by a liquor store whose owner Mike enjoys wine, socialism, and cats. When I told him about my account and what I was doing, he gave a hearty chuckle (and follow). He was skeptical that the owners of these cars are actually progressive. Whether they live up to the account name or whether their stickers and cars are a cover for PINOs (Progressives in Name Only), we will never know.

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