Diane and I went on another volksmarch this morning, this time the Striders’ Almaden Lake walk. We were the first participants this year, slightly to my surprise. We walked around the lake and all the way down to Pfeiffer Park, for a total of 8km.

The rest of the day was devoted to mundane activities. Possibly the most interesting activity was learning how to use PyCharm with pyenv (tl;dr: tell PyCharm to use the pyenv shim as the Python interpreter) – need I say more?

We started the morning (and the year) doing the Los Gatos Year Round walk with the South Bay Striders. We took a slightly extended route, going as far as Vasona Lake Dam before turning around and having lunch at the Los Gatos Cafe.

This afternoon, I booked our tickets for our spring trip to Japan. I didn’t want to pay Actual Money for the tickets and I didn’t have enough United points to book the trip, so I had to dip into our stash of Chase Ultimate Rewards points. I thought I was going to have to use the Chase travel portal to book my flights, which would have made them worth 1.5 cents each, but it turned out to be better to exchange the Chase points for United points and book directly with United; that way, the points were worth about 2.1 cents each. The Points Guy values Chase points at 2.05 cents and United points at 1.45 cents, so I think I came out ahead!

Happy New Year!