Deliveries, Desks and... Tulips

Welcome, freezing reader, as across much of the world we see a late Winter cold snap taking hold. There's no such thing here in Northern California, with this exciting display on the verge across the road from us:

It's been another lovely week here, and we have the Spring flowers to prove it.

Anyway, this week has been another one punctuated by delivery excitement, which let's face it, is about all the excitement we're going to get until highly effective vaccines are circulated to most of the population (and it seems increasingly unlikely that that will happen here in the US before Autumn). I'd ordered a large item which came with - ahem - some assembly required, shipped with FedEx as four separate packages.

So three of those packages arrived over the course of two days, but the fourth eluded us. The FedEx tracking website said scary things like "Delivery Date: Pending" and "Delivery Exception: barcode illegible". I began to wonder whether I'd ever have more than a kit of parts. But lo and behold, the package arrived.

That's great then, you say. It's just Philip moaning about delivery services as usual, you might say. This blog's going downhill, you might quite rightly say. But hang on reader, there's a twist: this package really wasn't in the best of condition when it arrived. Here's what it looked like:

It's a bit the worse for wear, isn't it?

Fortunately, the contents appeared to be in fine condition, but for the avoidance of ambiguity, let me just say this: FedEx, one of the best couriers in the US, is worse than the worst courier that exists in the UK. This is one of those things that you really can't imagine the UK is a world leader in, but the reliability and speed of deliveries in the UK is something that simply cannot be matched here. It's bizarre.

So what was in this mighty set of boxes, you ask? A desk, dear reader. But not any old desk. A desk that can do this:

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/b4ccc2_60b74d3175b743f8babd205d71a50e3c/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

As I've discovered over the last year, sitting in the same chair for 9 or 10 hours a day isn't tremendously good for you, so a desk that allows me to sit and also to stand is overall much better. This baby is the top sit/stand desk as recommended by the New York Times, and it's thoroughly American, which means it's made of enough metal that I'm pretty sure our house now distorts the Earth's magnetic field. By American standards, it seems pretty well engineered (which means it's ugly, but heavy enough to take some abuse). It made my previous Ikea desk seem somewhat flimsy, but also somewhat easy to assemble: by the time I got to step 21 I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever get it done.

In other news, we lived through our second Super Bowl, and our second impeachment trial, although I have it on good authority that the latter isn't supposed to be an annual event. It also happens to be Chinese New Year, which brings back memories of going to the New Year parade in San Francisco last year. Obviously that's not an option this year, but our very kind Chinese neighbour gave us a present of some lanterns which now decorate our front porch:

We're coming up on a few anniversaries: next week it's a year since I last got on a plane, and in a month's time, home in Palo Alto will be the desk location I've spent more time in than any other in the 7 years I've been working at Google. I don't miss the planes, and I don't miss the desk moves either if I'm honest.

Anyway, I'm deep into the Marie Kondo book that Helen bought me for Christmas, so rather than stories of deliveries you can expect tales of extreme tidying coming to this blog soon. Until then, dear reader, second to the right, and straight on till morning.