(1985) just after the beginnings of our legos obsession.

Ever since I was about 5 years old, I have loved legos. My best friend, Nir, and I, used to play with legos just about everyday, for hours. I would come to his house everyday, and we’d pull out his enormous box (I didn’t have much legos) and have at it. In fact, we became friends in kindergarten because of a mutual obsession for legos.

I think legos were really good for both of us. Not just in the social sense of giving us something to do together. But it also helped our imaginations, as well as our technical skills. We are both engineers these days, and I attribute much of that to legos.

Recently, Tobia and I stopped inside a lego store. After I got passed all the envy of “we didn’t have this when I was growing up”, I came across a classic collection of lego people. It totally took me down “memory lane” and I felt nostalgic.

I can actually remember playing with every piece before 1993 extremely well.

Once or twice a week I take my lacrosse stick, gloves and balls and head out to the tennis courts near my house to practice.

The tennis players despise me and don’t appreciate my presence there. They’ve used excuses from “please leave we’re having a tournament” to “you’re making too much noise” to get me to leave.

All the while, I am completely out of their way, often leave instantly when they want my court, and always make sure to throw their balls back to them when they’re anywhere near me.

I think two factors bother them. The first is that I’m not actually playing tennis, but lacrosse. The other is that it’s just me- a single person- taking up a whole court. That’s why I’m all too happy to share the court with them. I’m perfectly happy shooting along the red colored sidelines, well out of their way.

Two nights ago, I was playing in one of the courts, when a guy coyly came up to me and wondered if he could hop on the court as well. Naturally I said I’d be happy to share the court with him.

He pulled out a cricket bat, some wickets and some balls and thanked me like I owned the joint and was magnanimous for sharing with him. He was practicing bowling along the other sideline of the court, using its length while I used its width.

Shortly thereafter, a friend of his joined, and they were practicing together. About 5 minutes later, a mother and 4 children looked into our court, full of desire to play tennis on our court. They wouldn’t dare ask if they could hop on, but I could see it in their demeanor.

I turned to the two cricket players and said that I didn’t see why these 5 folks couldn’t just join and use the tennis courts while we stayed on the perimeter. The guy said sure, and we waved the people over to our court. Ecstatically, the kids hopped on and played around right beside us. It was a full house (we were later joined by one of the kids’ father, making us 9 people) but it was also so lively, inclusive and social.

Sure, I didn’t have as much room to run around and shoot, but that really wasn’t the point. The point was that the sun was going to set, we would all have to leave for home pretty soon, and there was no reason we couldn’t all just get along and enjoy this limited resource while there was still light. Besides, it wasn’t like there was no room to play; it is a total misconception that we need all that room to play.

The situation reminded me very much of my childhood, when I used to play soccer with dozens of people in a small playground area in Israel. Within short running distance there were basketball players right next to us, as there was only 1 hoop, and of course the hide-and-seekers and tag players were also sharing our court with us. We never thought twice about the court belonging to anyone of us, it seemed only natural that the resources were scarce and we all wanted to do our own thing and would have to accept being so close to each other.

This whole episode made me wonder why we’ve become so possessive, exclusive, and snooty about public resources for which we feel so entitled. We have to have the resources we want, when we want them, we don’t want to share them, and we feel so isolated so much of the time. And why make all these unnecessary rules about who can use the courts when we’re all harmlessly having fun and doing no damage to anything?

The solution has always seemed obvious to me – let’s share the limited resources and let everyone feel included and have fun while we still can.

2008 started with our apartment complex management unreasonably wanting to raise our rent by 20 percent. Frustrated by all the problems we had with our apartment, and the sudden surprise of the upcoming hike, I convinced Tobia that we needed to buy a house. She wasn’t as willing to come along, but ultimately agreed.

We spent the first few weeks of 2008 looking for a house and settled on a fixer upper in Santa Clara. We were disrupted by two great events during this process that enriched my life. The first was finally getting permission to see the private Point Conception Lighthouse in mid-late January. I have blogged at length about this great trip. The second happened in early February, just before moving into our house. The NY Giants unexpectedly beat the NE Pats in the most amazing sports championship I’ve ever seen (close 2nd is the Diamondbacks game 7 win over the Yankees in the 2001 World Series).

We moved into our new house in March. Our contractor promised to finish our house remodelling by the time we were to leave for our upcoming trip to Greece and Turkey. That gave him two months. Needless to say, this didn’t happen. In fact, running out of options, and giving the contractor more space to work with, we moved in with my parents for a couple weeks before the trip.

In early May we left for Greece and had a wonderful 2 week organized tour there. We toured the beautiful country, and saw/did many different, exciting things. The tour group consisted of great people and we had a very memorable trip. We followed this up with two weeks in Turkey. It was much more of the same- great sights, some hot air ballooning, good food and nice tour group members.

Early June came around and the trips came to an end. It was time to come back home. Unfortunately home was still not completed. It wasn’t until early July that the house was sufficiently well along that we were able to move in for good.

Once in the house, I immediately started my square foot gardening project. It was already early summer, and I wanted to take advantage of the weather to grow my crops. It turned out to be a very successful summer and I will plan on tripling the size of my garden in ‘09. We also took some time to rennovate the front and backyards, as well as purchasing furniture and just settling in.

Late in the summer I joined a new lacrosse league, started by a professional indoor lacrosse player. I’m still involved in it and it is going extremely well. For years I’ve wanted to play in a league but have struggled to find one. It has been an awesome experience to finally play against other people instead of just shooting a ball against the wall.

Around fall time, I started getting bored with my job, feeling it wasn’t going anywhere. The company was also struggling fairly badly. I started a lengthy job search project. After many interviews with different companies, I settled on a new job close to home a couple months later. I have since been at the company for 3 weeks now.

One of my favorite times of year- Thanksgiving time- did not disappoint. Beast came to town for almost a week, and we were able to hang quite a bit, as I was (at least mentally, if not actually) between jobs. A bunch of other friends out of town and those I hadn’t had much of a chance to see this year were able to show up and hang out as well.

Christmas vacation was short but excellent. I pushed my old body to the limit, playing hockey, more hockey, lacrosse and even more lacrosse. It has become a tradition with certain friends to get together and compete til we drop.

Tobia and I will be celebrating new year’s eve in SF with a handful of friends. Looking forward to our tapas style dinner, and to being out late.

In the new year, I plan on seeing some Oregon lighthouses. I hope the lacrosse league generates more players and more competition. Also want to get back into hockey more seriously. I will be hitting the 30 mark at the end of January. Don’t expect that to be a big thing personally, but it’ll be an interesting measuring point. Most of all, I look forward to getting one step closer to Mendocino.