Last winter in Pittsburgh

It's been almost six months since I last wrote here, and I'm properly ashamed of myself. Let's start fixing that. The last few months were extremely busy for me, and the coming ones are expected to be even denser. To begin with, as most of you already know, we will be returning to Israel this summer. Anat has accepted a tenure-track position with Haifa University, and we're about to wrap up the wonderful period of life we've been spending in Pittsburgh.

As I previously wrote, I have mixed feelings about our decision to leave the US, but at this point in time it's a done deal. We were fortunate to remotely rent an apartment in Haifa in advance (Ramat-Begin neighborhood, not far from the university); Noga, Hadas and Maayan are already registered to school and day care, and I've started looking into employment options, Google Haifa being the natural first candidate. We plan on leaving Pittsburgh mid-June, and before that we have several planned trips (pleasure and business), grandparents' visits, and lots and lots of errands to run, inevitable when moving one's life across the ocean.

We leave here mid-June, but will first be heading west, to spend some 3 months traveling, hiking and camping in the western parts of the US. Our current plan is to start from the many national parks in Utah, Arizona & Colorado (Zion, Bryce, Arches and Grand-Canyon to name a few); then drive up north to Wyoming (Yellowstone, Grand Teton); cut westbound through Idaho to Oregon and spend a big chunk of time there (e.g. Crater Lake); drive southward to California (Yosemite, Kings Canyon, but skipping southern California) and conclude in the San Francisco bay area, where we have dear friends and family. The only finalized detail at this point is our flight back to Israel from San-Francisco on September 4th. Transition points in life are certainly the best opportunity to take such long vacations, and judging by our 2 months in New Zealand "on the way" to the US, we're gonna have the time of our life! I'm so very excited!! I look forward to spending time with Anat and the girls around beautiful lakes, on trails in the forest, on mountain tops and around camp-fires in the evenings.

Future plans aside, there is still a lot going on in the present tense. The main contributor to my hectic schedule is my relatively new job. Google is a unique employer, and a notable aspect is the unusual professional level of its employees. I am surrounded by many people who are simply better software engineers than I am, in every reasonable measure. This was a new and not at all pleasant experience for me. Don't get me wrong – it's not that I was the best in every workplace to date. Far from it. But it'd be fair to say I was used to feeling that I belonged to the upper half of the professionals around me. In Google, I need to do my very best and still see many that are plainly better. There are also some technical reasons in the Google environment that make such differences more visible, but I'll skip the details.

You might be saying that it's terrific, being among people from whom I can learn so much. In theory, I strongly agree. But as many smart people said - in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not... That is, getting used to such a new environment was, and still is, a challenge for me. The fact that I am very slow when starting in new workplaces only made things worse. All in all, I believe this is a very important experience, at a deeper level, and I try to remind myself of that when things are down. I can certainly say that things have significantly improved over the last 3 months, but this is not to say that everything is rosy. I should clarify, that despite the above I still think Google is superior as an employer for me comparing to almost any other alternative. Talking about Google's advantages, I can mention the company-funded ski trip in Vermont next week. Tough life...

Enough with work, back to the really important stuff. Though my workload was increased, I'm very careful not to reach a point where I don't get to spend enough time with the girls. This is, and probably will always be, the ultimate highest priority. It feels like Maayan grew up amazingly fast and all of a sudden we have 3 girls running around. No longer 2 girls and a baby. Even in objective measures, her development was astonishingly quick – she started walking before turning 10 months and is acting regularly as if she was much older than her meager one year. I guess the catching up with older siblings isn't a myth. She's unbelievably cute, fairly stubborn and possesses an exceptional talent of wreaking havoc. Her favorite activity is invading cabinets and dressers and quickly removing their content and transforming it into one big pile. It's hard to express in words how joyful she is – with her natural happiness, her meaningful facial expressions, her outstanding ability to understand what's being said to her (and ignore it outright if it happens to be a request to cease mess-creating activities). Her rolling laughter when I tickle her between her toes at bath time would leave anyone with a big smile.

Equally satisfying is seeing Noga and Hadas treating her with the sort of kindness reserved to siblings. Although Maayan tends to protest every time a parent is hugging or cuddling one of her sisters, pushing them aside as forcefully as she can, both Noga and Hadas are amazing sisters to her. It's not unusual to see Noga feeding her from a bottle, or Hadas playing hide-and-seek with her, laughter and screams of joy filling the house. In general, Noga and Hadas are as marvelous as ever (only bigger and more mature all the time). We're lucky that they are still young enough to accept hugs, kisses and cuddling willingly, while already old enough for very interesting discussions and conversations. I'll spare the details, as I'm already beyond reasonable length for this post.

I'll just add that there are plenty of new photos (and soon some videos as well) on our web site - http://picasaweb.google.com/AnatGiora

Hope all is well with all of you,
Maayan, Hadas, Noga, Anat & Giora