The Mandelbear's Musings

Things got done. Sorting the mail, enough to find the tax forms. Putting CDs on shelves. A sleep study (rescheduled from the 23rd). Making a budget spreadsheet. Finding out where the money has gone. Getting stomped by the elephant in the living room. Slacking. A lot of good reading research (c.f. [Lehrer53]). That kind of thing.

See userpic.

For some reason I don't seem to be nearly as panicked as my financial situation warrants - I have been retired for nearly 8 months, and I've been in deep denial over just how much money I've burned through during that time.

N starts a new job on Monday. That will help, but not enough. I could easily cover the shortfall by getting a job -- there are remote options out there and a lot of them look attractive. The problem is that they're all full-time, and given what else needs doing in the household I really don't want to work full time. (And that's assuming I could get one, which at my age isn't a given anymore.)

Not a happy bear at this point. And I'm going to owe a lot on my taxes, too, because I didn't set up enough withholding on my retirement income. Because denial and depression.

( Notes & links, as usual )

It's been an exhausting week; moderately productive at work. But a bit more physical work than I've done in a while, plus anxiety and depression, which are tiring on their own. Naomi occasionally tells me to "act my age", usually when I've pushed my body to do something that was easy when I was about thirty years younger. Or fifty. So, yeah. That.

There's a great line in James Keelaghan's song "Small Rebellion" -- "... the job that was your life becomes the job that slowly beats you." That, too.

It doesn't help that my confidence in my ability as a programmer was completely shattered about a year and a half ago, with a series of projects that I completely failed at. OK, maybe just partially failed at -- the first was, fortunately, cancelled, and the second (which would have been trivial if I'd known what I know now) was eventually finished by someone else. The one I'm on now is following a similar pattern. I never learned to estimate, and part of that is the fact that I keep finding pieces that got left out of the design. It's possible that not all of that is my fault -- other people had plenty of input. But it feels like my fault, and because I've been the most senior engineer on all of these projects, one can easily argue that the disasters are at least my responsibility.

In all those cases a contributing problem was procrastination -- that, at least, is undenyably my fault. I've gotten really good at not doing stuff. More generally, not even thinking about stuff that I'd rather not be doing. And here I am, nearly seventy years old, planning to retire in less than a year, with a household that needs to be downsized drastically so that we can move out of the house we love but won't be able to keep. I hate it. I hate myself for the decades of bad decisions that made it necessary.

The next year is going to be rough. The next decade is going to be rough. I'll probably make it through, but I'm not going to like it.

( Notes & links, as usual )

So... last week was both relaxing and stressful. It was my first full week after my contract ended, and included our second weekend in the new house. Saturday, in fact, we had our first event, a tea party catered by Friday Afternoon Tea.

I had several interviews, and one in-person interview. That was pretty good; my job search was really starting to heat up. I spent quite a lot of money on and around the house, some of it rather inadvisedly. We did save rather a lot by switching from a curved stairlift from Ameriglide (which we found out doesn't actually get permits or use licensed installers in Washington) to a pair of straight ones from Acorn. Saved $4k.

The house has a secret passage! Well, ok, it's a laundry chute. But it was a secret from me, anyway.

I'm going to cut this short (if you really want details, you'll find them in the notes) to get to the last two days, which were kind of harrowing.

Well. This was my first week at work in six months. It'll take a while for me to get the hang of it, and for the stress to go away. It's demanding, and promises to stay demanding, and I'd gotten very used over the last 6 months to having lots of free time.

The whole week was mostly paperwork and setup. It's my first encounter with development using Windows, Eclipse, and Maven. Plus Rally. Confluence is familiar, at least, and along with the two other new guys I've made a few edits to the "new developer setup" page. So... yeah. Steep learning curve. I hope to be writing code next week. I'd better be.

I like commuting by bus. This is a good thing, because as a contractor I don't get free parking. I don't get a lot of things. Like paid vacations. Orycon is going to be a weekend blitz this year. Fortunately it's only a 3-hour drive; we'll be able to drive down after work on Friday and come back Sunday night.

My stupid body seems to have decided it wants at least 7 hours of sleep every night. Do Not Have The Time! I especially miss having an extra hour or two to myself in the morning. One hour (if I get up at 7 and leave at 8) is barely enough for the usual round of drugs, nose-watering, tooth-brushing, and a quick breakfast. A shower is pushing it. Well, maybe I'll get into a stable schedule eventually.

Apropos of tooth-brushing, we went to Costco and I found a two-pack of Sonicare teethbrush (that's the plural of toothbrush, isn't it?). They'd been strongly recommended by my new hygienist. We did end up spending quite a lot more there than I'd intended.

I also spent more than I'd intended at the Container Store, getting tracks and standards for the living room. I finally decided not to try anything fancy. I have one, 4' shelf up, for the guinea pig cage. It's a huge improvement. I also got a pair of stacking bamboo shelves to go between the chairs - the stack is low enough that it fits under the overhang of the arms, and I've clipped a pair of drink holders onto the end. Big win.

Today I may have time to buy wood for the bookshelves.

Colleen had wanted to check out Bellevue Square, which is next door to Lincoln Square (where the Container Store is), so we did that. Ghastly. It's laid out so that you have to do a lot of backtracking if you're on a scooter, plus it's noisy and crowded. We didn't even bother with the first floor -- there was a long line for the elevators. If it wasn't for having the only Container Store in the state I wouldn't go back there at all.

I did some cooking -- Polish sausage with beans, carnitas soft tacos, ... The really huge thing this week was that Colleen cooked dinner on Friday! That's wonderful progress -- it's been a really long time since she was able to do that. The fact that our kitchen is almost an ideal layout for scoot-through cooking helps. She only needed help a couple of times; getting a hot pot of pasta between the stove and sink for draining is still well beyond what she's capable of. So far.

Some links. Watch out for the first one -- it's going to be very triggery for some people. Harrowing and heartbreaking, but you need to see Amamda Todd's video if you can handle it.

Feeling good, and even optimistic, is something of a new concept for this old bear. I am having a little trouble wrapping my fuzzy head around it. Does that make sense?

There is still the nagging worry that, now that I've turned in the last of my paperwork, $K or $D will reject me at the last minute. I don't really believe it'll happen, but we're not talking rationality here.

The dresser arrived Saturday. It's lovely, and large, and went a long way toward organizing the bedroom. Now it's my side of the bed that's still a mess. That'll be harder, because there's noplace to put a dresser there.

Having given up on the foolish notion of putting a desk next to the bed on my side, I went over to Naomi's and gound the pieces for my old computer desk. The one I made a couple of years before Chaos was born, and put into storage when we remodeled the Starport the first time. It's now on the short wall of the living room next to the sliding door onto the balcony. I'm gong to put an Elfa track over it this morning, and have already moved the printers and strung Cat-5 over to the phone jack in the kitchen.

Putting the rolling file under the desk where it belongs naturally adds a fair amount of space -- it is now possible to walk to the gray recliner when people are sitting in both facing chairs. Which is good, because the corner by the desk is still pretty crowded.

Now I just have to move the computers: nova and the inside router (starport) to the desk, and the outside router (polaris) to the kitchen. Unfortunately, there's no phone jack in the area that is pretty clearly meant to be the entertainment corner. Not so odd, really; the apartment building predates DSL. I might be able to summon up the energy to do it this morning -- it has to be a morning when the two women are asleep so that nobody wants to use the net connection.

Oh, and I used my SAD light Monday, for the first time since the move. Maybe it'll help. I'm also trying to shift my schedule back to waking up at 6:30 instead of 7:30 or 8; I need at least an hour in the morning to get out the door in reasonable working condition. Preferably two, but that will take longer, I suspect.

Links, as usual, in the notes. Check out "It’s Opus, it rocks and now it’s an audio codec standard!" and The Wordsmith's Forge - Unsold Poetry from the October 2-3, 2012 Poetry Fishbowl. I put money on two poems from this: "The Cybernetic Sorcerers" (co-sponsor because of net-lag) and "Promises to Keep" (which combines global warming and sea monsters).

Yesterday I had a dentist appointment at 11am, to get my teeth deep-cleaned. As I was pulling in to the parking lot I got a phone call from $K (the contract agency) saying I'd gotten the contract at $D.

In spite of the fact that I think I'd probably prefer a full-time job at $T, which is a smaller company with a really cool product that I actually want to use, the timing for that just isn't likely to work out -- I haven't even had a phone interview yet (I expect one this afternoon, but still...) So my mood has been distinctly mixed -- it was something like depression last night. (I'll get to that later.)

The teeth-cleaning went very well -- the hygienist was surprised that I was able to handle it with just a topical anesthetic. Yeah, there were a couple of twinges, but I often get worse from my arthritis just getting out of bed in the morning, and much worse after sitting with my legs crossed for half an hour.

Which brings us to the evening, when I was feeling depressed, and made a joke about something I thought was unrelated that N. misinterpreted as sounding suicidal. And then couldn't get back in touch with me.

Apparently several of my followup IM messages simply got dropped on the floor between here and there. And she couldn't raise me by phone or text, apparently because I was reading a book in the Kindle app! The text, in fact, finally arrived a minute or so after I exited the app. WTF?????!!! Anyone ever encounter that one?

OK, getting back to the down mood. I don't know how much of that is due to uncertainty over $D vs. $T, how much is due to simple relief, and how much is due to the fact that I've gotten used to being "retired". Have I mentioned alexithymia lately? It means that, very often, I don't know what I'm feeling. It's a problem.

A few links in the notes, though nothing exceedingly noteworthy.

I finally made the call to my benefits people that I should have made two months ago, to find out what the options and prices were going to be to keep my medical and dental COBRA coverage going. I was not expecting the total to be more than the mortgage on the old house! $2100. I am *so* *screwed*

And I actually have a gap in coverage, between the end of this month (when Ricoh stops paying for it) and the time I pay my first bill. At which point they cover me retroactively. I went ahead and got my crown started before I knew the details, but that'll be ok.

I still have a month, I *think*, to sign up for a Medicare Advantage plan. Anyone have recommendations re: GroupHealth vs. Blue Cross/Blue Shield? If I can get into that now, I can drop my COBRA coverage and just go with Colleen and the YD.

On the job front, $A3 looked at my resume and said "other candidates are more qualified". So much for that. $A also rejected me -- that was actually a relief. On the other hand, my interview at $D was the easiest so far -- I think I have a good chance at that.

And on the gripping hand, the CTO at $T wants to talk to me on Wednesday. Looking at the company and what they do, I *really* *really* want it. And I think I'm a good fit. And it's a cool product -- I signed up for a month's free trial, and at $40/year may very well keep it. Unlimited file sharing from your own computers, with nothing stored in the cloud.

Only problem is the overlap with $D, which I expect to hear about next week. They'll probably want me to start on the 15th. Tight.

I went to my interviews by bus again. I *love* being this close to the bus line and downtown.

Links in the notes, as usual.

Bad week. No biscuit.

I went in to my interview on Tuesday with $COMPANY feeling very optimistic. I was wrong. Thursday I found out that they didn't want me. CRASH.

Now, of course, I can see all the ways I screwed myself over. Going back years, to not being more involved in open source projects and not keeping my skills up-to-date. And back six months to the layoff, not keeping office hours and browsing the web instead of working through the skill-building list I set up right at the beginning. And back one month to the interviews at $COMPANY, not starting in right away playing with their software. Sure, I spent a lot of time reading the documentation, but I didn't have anything to show for it.

That was stupid.

I get my last severance check at the end of next week. Damned if I know what happens to my COBRA health coverage -- they were paying for it up until now. I'm going to have to spend all next week scrambling.

Um... in other news, I've been doing a fair amount of walking, finally. Including a nice ramble around the Convention Center and Freeway Park, after my interview.

Lots of good links, including the awesome xkcd: Click and Drag (zoomable view and more in the notes) and some great open-source stuff by way of Linux Weekly News, which I'm finally catching up on.

Another week gone by. Do people prefer the weekly dumps, or daily dribbles? Inquiring minds and all that.

Worrying news on the job front -- $COMPANY, which last I heard was about to hire me as soon as they got through some back-office stuff, has re-organized. There's a new hiring manager, and apparently he has some concerns. AARGH! I have a new set of interviews on Tuesday. If this falls through I'm unlikely to get anything before my severance pay runs out.

In retrospect it's a good thing I couldn't get a Friday slot -- I apparently came down with a 24-hour virus of some sort. With luck I'm over it now, but I was pretty miserable yesterday afternoon and evening. Went to bed 10:30ish and slept for 11 hours.

In other news, I've done a little music with Naomi, and fixed a mysterious problem I'd been having with my mail reader.

I have been realizing more and more how much we'd been relying on Colleen's support network back in San Jose: Liz (and Marty and Alison before her), Safeway.com, ... Housekeeping, shopping, and driving Colleen places are nearly a full-time job. I'll be happy when the YD gets her license.

Speaking of the YD, she's an official AVON Representative now.

I want a Nexus 7 and a pair of Want. Also want Equator D5 Studio Monitors. Grump. When I get a job, damnit...

Since the Hugos were announced, I've been reading Digger by Ursula Vernon, the winner for best graphic story. Go read it -- it's amazing.

Lots of links, as one would expect for a week's worth.

Well, it's less than a week since my last update; must be getting a little better. I've made slow but steady progress on unpacking and setup -- there are shelves up over the bed now (still room for one more, but I can't find the necessary brackets -- they must still be in a box somewhere). Probably one I didn't pack, which will make it harder to find. But progress.

I had several phone interviews, and a full day of interviews at $COMPANY on Wednesday. That one looks like a great fit for me, and I'm told they agree, but until I have an offer in hand I'm still officially looking.

Many thanks to egoldberg.

I took the bus to my interview -- major win. Yesterday, when the YD wanted a ride to the convention center to meet somebody who was there for PAX, I pointed her at the bus. It's under half an hour on the 522, which compares favorably to my commute by car from San Jose to Menlo Park. One thing I'm still getting used to is how much smaller Greater Seattle is than the SF Bay Area -- it's 50 miles from San Jose to San Francisco. I like being this close to downtown.

I also took a couple of nearly-three-mile walks. Go me! Now let's see whether I can do that more often.

Not surprisingly the links down in the raw notes are full of political crap and job-search hints.

Good grief, indeed! It looks like this post is going to try to cover an eventful two-and-a-half weeks; there's no way I can do it justice.

tl;dr: Our Stuff arrived two weeks ago, I flew down and got the Honda and more Stuff, and we're gradually getting unpacked and settled in. I still don't have a job, or even any interviews scheduled, so I've decided to offer dinner at the Herb Farm to anyone who finds me one.

And now a few highlights.

The movers arrived on Wednesday, having had another stop along the way because our 17,000+ pounds of stuff only filled about 2/3 of their big-rig. Props to Billy, who managed to get the rig parked next to our entrance, which the apartment office staff had assured me was next to impossible. Billy and Pam were the husband-and-wife team of drivers; I can't praise them, United Van Lines, Chipman Relocation, and the loading and unloading teams too highly. A very smooth, painless, hassle-free operation.

... that left us with an apartment full of boxes, of course. We still have more Stuff than space, even after paring down a lot and storing almost half of it in N's garage. Well, we knew the job was impossible when we took it.

Speaking of jobs: I got my rejection from EnergySavvy, so I now have nothing on the schedule because the move totally ate my brain. I have until the end of September before my severance pay runs out.

I do not like it, Sam-I-Am.

Two weeks ago (Monday the 30th), something finally clicked in my head, and the apartment felt like home. I was in the kitchen; I knew where everything was, it was small and comfortable and convenient, and I felt like I belonged here. It's still scary, but only because of the job problem, not the move. I like it here.

I discovered something else about myself: I like giving stuff away to people who will give it a good home. More than like it -- it's *wonderful*. I'd been talking with Nathan, the guy who owns the painting service that did such a good job on the interior. I'd been referred to him because he's in a Christian group with Liz. Anyway, the conversation turned to music, and the instruments we play, and he asked about the beat-up old mandolin in the "what the heck do I do with this?" pile by the garage door. And then the balalaika, which I'd bought on a whim in high school and never learned to play.

I ended up giving them to him. I felt both relief in simplifying them out of my life, and joy -- mudita, actually -- in seeing how happy the gift made him. A very middle-sized-bear thing, I think. And I realized that this was one of the things that was making the move an enjoyable experience.

I also realized how much I enjoy traveling by myself.

One reason I haven't been posting has been the difficulty of connecting to the fileserver from outside the firewall; I think I've finally fixed most of that, but also copied my emacs-based posting client onto the netbook. We'll see how that works in a few minutes...

Loads of links in the notes, of course.

Oh, good grief! An entire week... maybe I should just give up and post weekly. It's been a long month since last Saturday.

The big news was the bad news from Google: they don't want me. All my "cautious optimism" collapsed in a heap Thursday evening, leaving me to wonder how in hell I'm going to pay for the move, the house improvements, and Colleen's ferociously expensive meds. Two months of overlap between work and severance pay would have covered it.

I'm probably screwed. I have one set of interviews scheduled for Friday, but I've been letting the move (and the web :P) take most of my attention. I decided Thursday night that the move had better take all of it for now -- the movers come Wednesday.

*sigh*

I am getting the packing done, at least. A little belatedly; and I'm probably going to panic tomorrow night. The office still has seven boxes and a handful of flats to sort through, and the tools in the garage and bedroom need to be boxed. Gleep! We'll manage, though, because we have to.

"You do what you have to" is familiar, at least -- it was my mantra all through the year Dad was dying and I was flying back and forth to Florida to see him as often as I could. And again, the six months Colleen was in and out of hospitals and nursing homes and I burned through my sick time, most of my vacation time, and about 150% of my cope visiting and taking care of her.

I had help then, and I do now. Liz, Og, and Devon are awesome! And Colleen keeps assuring me "we'll make it." I hope so.

Lots of links. Many of them, unfortunately, are also bad news. Can't be helped.

When we left our intrepid, if somewhat reluctant, adventurer he was in the process of moving in to his new apartment in Lake Forest Park. (When the rest of the family arrived on Tuesday it somewhat inevitably acquired the name North Starport; the only other serious contender was Starport North, but that doesn't have the built-in pun that justifies the new URL.)

Tuesday the 3rd was busy. I had an interview at Facebook (that resulted in a rejection, and a severely dented passenger-side front door thanks to a concrete post in the parking garage) in the morning, came back to Shoreline for some badly-needed rehearsal time, then down to Seatac to pick up Colleen and the YD at the airport.

That's when I found out that Colleen was en route to the ER, having gashed her leg on a closing fire-door coming out of the jetway. GLEEP! (And someone dinged the front bumper of my car in the Lowes parking lot.) By the time we finally got everybody back to the apartment and got settled in, I was pretty thoroughly frazzled.

Internet turned on sometime Tuesday as well; it was supposed to have been the previous Thursday, but I'd given them the street number of the office rather than of the building. Oops. But at least I could be frazzled with a live net connection.

I'd brought up quite a lot of stuff in the van, but there were still some omissions. Like, a phone cable and a computer power cord. Minor -- I made do quite well with the netbook, though stuff like posting on DW went by the wayside. Oh, and pillows. I borrowed a set from the Wolfling, who stayed with us in the apartment Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Tuesday evening we had dinner with Chaos and her new BF, Rabbit (James).

Wednesday we made our expedition to Central Market. Thursday we had dinner with Naomi and her kids, then made our way to the Seatac Doubletree for Westercon.

Saturday was my concert. Formal setlist and recordings later, one hopes; for now, the set was The Fox, As You See, Wheelin, The River, Riverheart, Boom Gone To Bust, Kitchen Heroes, and Inherit the Earth. The first half was something of a minor trainwreck, but I felt good about the second half.

A few good conversations at the con; nothing very deep, but people are glad to see us moving up to the area.

Monday was a full day of interviews at Google's Seattle office. I really hope I get that one.

Yesterday noonish we set out for finally set out for home. Old home? The apartment -- and the PNW -- is already starting to feel a lot like home. There's nothing like a couple of drives through the desert to make one long for a place where it's cool and moist a lot of the time.

Sunday morning, just hours before my flight left for Seattle, our router finally became unusable. It had been deteriorating for quite a while; I have no idea what the problem was. It would be good for a while after a reboot, then the lags would get steadily worse. By Sunday the "while" was down to about five minutes. I spent the rest of the day struggling to recover.

By the time I had to leave I had gotten our Linux-based WAP more-or-less configured, but it turned out that I had neglected to test ssh-ing in from the WAN side. So I spent the entire week without access to the files on the inside of the firewall. Including my email archives and password database.

Fortunately, I was able to set up email forwarding from savitzky.net to my gmail account, so I didn't miss much. Next time, though, things will be different. I'll write about that at some length later, for the geeks in my audience.

The flight was paid for by one of the two companies I had interviews with, Zillow. They'd booked through the aptly-named cheapflights.com (and ended up paying more than they would have through Southwest); my flights out were on Delta, and back on Alaska. Bletch.

I arrived in Shoreline well after midnight, and flopped into bed.

Monday morning I went with Naomi to get my first look at the new apartment, and pick up keys. Spent the rest of the week slightly croggled by the idea; there's nothing that makes it quite as real as a set of keys and a tape measure (which I wielded on Wednesday).

Monday afternoon was my interview at Zillow -- several coding tests and a lot of data structure and algorithm questions. I think I did ok. Gorgeous view from the 31st floor, a block from the waterfront. Great atmosphere -- it would be a fun place to work.

Tuesday afternoon was Intentional Software. Tougher questions for the most part, no idea how I did on that one. Very opulent and quiet offices, which I guess is what you can expect with Microsoft billionaires bankrolling it. Brilliant people; on average an older crowd than Zillow.

We'll see.

Wednesday I ran errands with Naomi, and we had lunch in Columbia City at a diner called Geraldine's Corner. Yummy chili with a side of excellent hashbrowns. After that she showed me the huge Goodwill in that area. I'll be back.

Thursday morning I had brunch with Chaos at another diner -- Shari's in Lynnwood. Which left me with just exactly enough time to drive down to Seatac and return my rental car. The trip back was, mercifully, nonstop, so I was able to get home in time for dinner. And to finish fixing the network setup, which only took about an hour once I had access from the inside.

All in all, a good trip.

Quite a few links in the notes, such as one accumulates over the course of five days without an update. The New Map of the Solar System has all thirteen planets (counting the five dwarfs).

Our last party at the Starport is over -- it was a good one. Lots of people came out of the woodwork to wish us well. Some tears. I sang a little.

I mailed in a copy of my pension paperwork. Again.

I packed, for this week's trip to Seattle. Since one of the companies I'm interviewing at bought the tickets, I'm flying on airlines that charge for checked baggage -- heck with that! I'm taking Chami and my old, huge REI backpack/suitcase. It holds almost as much as the suitcase.

I'll be arriving late tonight, and leaving Thursday afternoon. I have interviews Monday and Tuesday afternoons; Wednesday is still open. Hint.

Some interesting links, mostly from people at the party.

Yesterday Colleen, the YD and I went to the local Greek Festival and dropped a sizeable wad of cash on yummy Greek food, while listening to Greek music. No formal walk, but I was on my feet for about an hour.

I also packed up a lot of the science books and most of my "to be read" stack. Triaging books is hard.

Lots of links. Including How Downsizing Gave Us More, which would be apropos except that it's entirely a "we did it" article, not a "here's how." It mentions the 1-year rule, but I'm not sure how well that applies to some of our stuff. For example, the 2x2 space frame from our old apartment, that let us put up shelves without driving screws into the walls. It's been 36 years, but that's going to be useful again.

It's going to be a bit of a wild ride here on the River. I seem to have been drifting for a long time. (I know, I've always viewed my journey downriver as a walk along the bank, but I can damned well mix my own metaphor if I want to.)

And I know that most of what I've written about under this tag has been relationships, friendship, and the care and feeding of geeks. But every once in a while, you have to change direction. And it's happening now.

Grand Central Starport is full of boxes now -- we're moving in less than two months. (How much less is, at present, a matter for some speculation.) I'm also changing jobs. What job I'm changing to is, at present, also a matter for speculation.

I believe I've mentioned alexithymia. I have it -- a difficulty detecting and identifying emotions and other mental states. I believe what's going on now is a mixture of anxiety and stress, mostly. And although I'm getting better at identifying and dealing with anxiety, stress is another matter.

Guess I'm going to learn.

I'm not sure exactly what went into the decision to move from the Bay Area to the Seattle area; economics (cost of living's 25% less) was only part of it. And certainly the fact that I have family and close friends there was a factor. But I don't think that's all of it. Both Colleen and I were ready for a change. Big change. As I said, we'd been drifting. 36 years in the same house, 19 years in the same job... one gets stale, somehow. Complacent.

And, yes, I've always taken the hobbit's view of adventures -- "Nasty, uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner." It takes a certain amount of concentration to look at that big bend in the river coming up and look forward to finding out what's around it.

The house is full of boxes; we're moving from 1850 square feet of house and 1600 of garage, to a two-bedroom apartment (and some storage in Naomi's garage). The bookshelves have been ravaged. There's an apartment waiting for us in Lake Forest Park, empty of everything but major appliances and potentiality. Potential energy, soon to become kinetic energy.

Is that white water up ahead?

I spent a lot of time yesterday (and today) ripping CDs so that they can be packed. The ones that aren't in FreeDB, and a few of the ones that, for some reason, my Linux box refuses to read, got sent over to the Mac mini; it worked on a lot of them. I'll have to write a script to translate the filenames to match the conventions I'm using on Linux, but that's easy.

We had an electrician come in to look at our fan/lights -- the fans work fine, but the lights don't. Turns out it's not the remote controls, it's the stupid ballasts. I looked at one -- the insulation on the wiring harness is brittle. Should be easy to replace, in that case.

A little random hacking in the makefile templates, prompted by the fact that the Makefiles in theStarport.org are hopelessly out of date.

Some good links in the notes, several of them music-related.

I seem to have spent basically the entire day working on coding problems from Tableau (C) and Zillow (Java). Fun. But I didn't get out much at all.

Way too much to do more than summarize briefly -- I spent most of the last week in the Seattle area, mostly hanging out with Naomi (and, briefly, Chaos), apartment-hunting, and interviewing. (The latter was mostly by phone, but there was one fairly grueling coding test at PopCap. I may or may not have squeaked through that, but it made for a fascinating learning experience.)

The phone interviews mostly went well, I think. A few stupidities on algorithm questions; I got extra points for having at least heard of topological sorting, even if I didn't get the algorithm right.

The apartment search fairly quickly narrowed down to three complexes, fairly close to Naomi's house, that had 3-bedroom apartments available. As it turned out, we ended up in a large 2-BR; the 3's were either too small for us, or not accessible by scooter. But we have a place.

Friday I had lunch with Chaos at AFK Tavern, a gamer joint. Fun.

Saturday, N. went to an all-day workshop at a massage therapy school she's checking out, and took me along. Great fun -- not enough for me to consider a career change, but enough that I'll strongly consider taking a couple of classes for the fun of it. In my copious spare time.

The only major screw-up, and it was major, was forgetting my meds. Fortunately, the only one I expected to have real trouble with was the SSRI; I picked up some 5000 IU vitamin D (my usual dose is 2000) and St. John's Wort. Worked, apparently.

The big disappointment was that it was overcast on Sunday, so we missed the eclipse. We did see the light change -- it was pretty noticable.

Plenty of links in the notes.

Oops! Here, out of sequence, is the to.done for Thursday. Most of it was an LHH webinar on interviewing essentials -- hopefully I'll have a chance to apply that when I'm up in Seattle next week.

I had a burst of pain in my left arm, probably from twisting it and pinching a nerve -- I'd had my elbow resting on the buffet next to my chair in the living room; it's a little too high for real comfort.

Some links, mostly political. One to Wikipedia on Martin Luther King, Jr -- I found it startling and scary that younger people don't remember the time when many -- perhaps most -- churches were liberal. It seems to be pretty rare now. Of course, I also remember when "liberal" wasn't considered particularly far left.

Finally posted my itinerary/tentative schedule for the next couple of months. And, as usual, didn't do all that much else. Well, there were some things accomplished. Including the phone interview with EDD, which I'd been worried about. It looks as though my pension won't affect my unimployment insurance, because Ricoh stopped paying into it in 2010.

I'm continuing to putter, and got a fair amount of book triage done in the office. Most were immediately snapped up by folks in the Wednesday crowd, which of course was the whole idea. The old turntable, too -- now that we've gotten rid of all our vinyl, we really don't need it. End of an era.

I called PODS and got a quote: about $3200 for a 16' pod. The move will be complicated by the fact that we want some of the stuff to go into N's garage; I'm thinking of PODS or some other container company for that. We'll see. Unfortunately moving.com doesn't seem to have any way to compare prices; I'll have to call them all separately. The salesdroid at PODS was rather pushy.

Link of the day, after a nod toward Richard Lugar's statement, is Rachel Held Evans | How to win a culture war and lose a generation. The money quote:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)

Now, I'm part of that 91%; as an atheist and a Democrat I don't see a major shift away from religion as a bad thing. But if you do -- if you're one of the many progressive Christians I know are reading this -- you might want to do something about it.

When I was in college, the churches were hotbeds of radicalism, solidly on the left. They fed the poor, opposed the war in Vietnam, ... Where in Hell are they now?

Hmm. I hadn't thought it was a particularly productive couple of days, but looking back on them I've done a fair amount. Even a walk.

I've finally started to get some traction on the job search, including talking to a couple of recruiters and my coach at LHH, and filling in some of the background. Actually, the most encouraging thing was looking at salary ranges and cost of living for Seattle. The latter is about 24% lower than San Jose, and my pension (which starts in June) accounts for another 12% or so. Social security, next March, will be another 12%. So not even counting downsizing and tighter budgeting, I'll be able to maintain my current profligate lifestyle on a comparatively modest income.

The really scary thing is still health care. Especially if we can't get Colleen on Medicare early. My cousin Caroline, who has a degree in social work, has offered to help with that, but it's still scary.

Spent quite a while fielding calls from moving companies, after requesting quotes via moving.com. Told them all to call back in June after we've done more triage.

I keep waffling about whether this is a good move, but right now I'm feeling pretty optimistic. Monday was a bit down. Uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner.

Lots of links in the notes.

Progress? A lot of puttering, and two job applications. N. persuaded me to set a minimum goal of 2/week. And I re-pinged Google. Apparently I've let a couple of emails get stale on my stack, so I've gone back and replied to some of them.

Thursday's webinar on career objectives was useful -- that's one of my highest priorities, since just about anything in the IT field is going to be a career change from "software research". The other high priority is figuring out what my budget is going to be, since I'm highly unlikely to be making anywhere near the same amount after the move. I need to know what my bottom line is.

The house is looking much "better", thanks to the efforts of minions good friends Devon, Liz, and Ogg. Huge amounts of stuff have been recycled, friendcycled, donated, sold to used bookstores, or put on the discard pile. What's left is probably still too much for an apartment, but it'll go into storage until we get into a house a year or so down the road.

Some of that stuff hasn't been touched in over two decades. Three, in a few cases. Gleep!

We're running across some fascinating old stuff, though. One of the most interesting was an old self-assessment I did toward the end of my previous job. Not all of it is relevant anymore, but it's interesting.

AT&T pushed an update to my phone, but it still wasn't Ice Cream Sandwich. :( I installed Eclipse, thinking that I probably ought to get familiar with it, and do some Android development. We'll see how far I get with that, but my Java is pretty rusty and could use some work.

Naomi and I had time yesterday to work a little bit on our upcoming Westercon concert set. We discovered that I can, in fact, come up with harmonies. Not in real-time, but once I have the chords down I can pretty easily improvise a harmony line that fits them, and Naomi has a good enough memory for melodies that together we can make it work. Cool!

I'm still not walking nearly enough, though I did do a 1.4mi loop around the neighborhood yesterday morning.

Several links. Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? Probably. And I and many of my friends in filking show up in Eye On The Bay: Those Other Conventions Pt. 2

Yet another piece of the Rose Garden puzzle dropped into place this afternoon: I now know how I Never Promised You a Rose Garden made a journey into the unknown go from frightening to familiar.

It made it into a Quest. A fantasy journey.

I know this story. I love it, in all the hundreds of variations that I've read. Sure, the scenery is unfamiliar. You expect that in a fantasy. Sure, it's going to be tough going and scary at times. You expect that in a quest.

I may not have ever been on this journey before, but now I know what story I'm in.