Mike Ball

As I said in the last post, we’ve just acquired a house in Southern Oregon. At the moment we have a contractor doing some repairs before we move in. We’re planning on moving sometime during the first couple of weeks in June.

We set out to buy a house in Ashland, which is a small university town famous for its Shakespeare Festival. We’ve visited it often, and last summer we decided to retire there. We looked at quite a few houses in Ashland, which is built along the side of a mountain, but all of the nice houses had lots of stairs, which our bodies don’t like much anymore. Also, They all seemed to be really close together compared to what we’ve become used to. We expanded our search, and found a house on two acres in rolling hills that seem to fit well. It’s also only 5 miles from downtown Ashland, and the trip is a fast one.

I think we are going to like it there. The house has great views, but of a different kind than we found in Ashland. The area is a mix of farming, mostly pear orchards, and residents on bits carved out of farms.

We’re finally settled down in a house (not an apartment) and have the rest of our stuff out of storage. I haven’t written anything because I just didn’t feel like it. I haven’t even been reading much, including other blogs. We’ve gotten stuff unpacked, and have even gone on a couple of day trips when the weather was nice. I feel like writing again
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I’d say that things were getting back to normal, but everything is different, so it’s really getting to a new normal. Oh, did I mention that while I was gone to Washington, they moved my office? I have a nice window, looking out at the parking lot and the freeway. It’s actually not bad. The parking lot has trees that are starting to turn, and there are squirrels bouncing around there, too. The soundproofing is good, so I don’t hear the freeway. It’s actually kind of soothing watching the traffic going by. It’s sort of like watching water flow by, but a bit lacking in the aesthetics.

Slowly we’re starting to have more time, and may soon be able to have a social life again. How nice it will be to go out to dinner for good food and pleasant conversation, rather than quick sustenance before getting back to work.

I realize that I haven’t been keeping up my end of this blogging deal, but I have an excuse. This moving stuff is distracting, especially when combined with a new job where I’m trying to learn what’s going on. I’m supposed to initiate a new area using an established framework, so I have to learn the framework. Talk about drinking from a firehose!

Anyway, I keep running around trying to get stuff set up in this apartment, while running back on weekends to sort stuff. It’s kept me busy.

Last night was the first time I did a workout at the apartment complex, and though the CV room was fine (it’s hard to screw up a bicycle) the weigh room had real problems. For example, there was no machine that let you do curls! They didn’t even have free weights. I’ll have to do something about that, either get some weights or find another place.

I went out looking for a Club One, which is the club that MS Pays for. I had an old address for it, and got thoroughly lost in the process. After I sorted that out, I found a Target where I bought a floor lamp so I had light in my bedroom. The store was being remodeled, and it looked like a hurricane had been through it. What I noticed was that people took it with good humor, and there was even a sense of camaraderie from the shared adversity. It was a lot different from the way I remember Palo Alto. People were friendly!

I think we’ll like it here better than in Palo Alto. It sort of makes it worth the trouble.

My brother Charlie and his wife Donna came out to visit us in San Diego last week. It started out well, with the usual trips around the coast and mountains. We were trying to get a glimpse of the recent burn, but never did. Then, while Charlie and Donna took in Balboa Park and the zoo, I went and got the small moving truck I’d rented, and got ready to move some bare necessities up to the apartment. The trip was pleasant. We went through the mojave desert, over the Tehachapis, and then up the San Joaquin valley. Charlie saw stuff he’d never seen before, and all was good. We unloaded the truck, and I decided that an old man shouldn’t move stuff himself, even with the aid of his not quite so old brother, but we did get it unpacked and things are ready for me to move up next week. Thanks, Charlie.

Then we decided to go visit San Francisco, and the fun started. We were parked near fisherman’s wharf, and when we got back to the car after doing the tourist routine, the car was open, and somebody had stolen Donna’s purse and my briefcase. Donna and Charlie lost both their passports, both of their phones, all id, and the usual sort of purse stuff. I lost my brand new laptop, my Microsoft badge, my ipod, and some junk. We went to the police station to report it, which took a while, but was evidently enough to let Donna talk her way through airport checkin. I toted up what I had lost and it came out to about $20 more than my insurance deductible.

Important lesson: Your trunk is not secure. According to the police there is a device available that will unlock essentially any remote-control car locks with no skill required.

Talk about heat waves! We had lots of all time highs around here. In La Mesa, where we live, it was 113 today. Oh yeah, we’re having a monsoon, too, so the humidity was 58% instead our our usual 15-20% when we get hot.

Naturally, this put all time record stress on the power supplies, too, and transformers were cooking off all around the county. Ours hit about 11:45, with a couple of bounces as it went down, and came back up about 1:15. Unfortunately, not everything came back. One of our main breakers (we have two, one per sub-panel) was hot enough to burn fingers, and crumbled into pieces when I tried to reset it. Off to Home Depot, get a replacement, install it. Oops, that one works, but the other main breaker refuses to reset. Off to Home Depot, get a replacement, install it. Oops, that one works, but one of the air conditioners refuses to run. After poking around with a meter, I discover the blown fuse. Well, it takes two tries to find a replacement because there’s been a run on those fuses today. Finally, Oh joy unbounded, the AC is working again.

While I was out, I heard a report from one of the linemen who had been fixing electrical problems. “We start on the poles, but then things are blown all the way down to people’s houses, and even inside them. It takes a long time to get it all sorted out.” Maybe we should apply for a position as “poster child”.

Anyway, it all seems to be back together, and I’m convinced that the UPS (Uninteruptable Power Supply) that I got for the computer was a wonderful investment.

Time to take a nice, cool, shower.

It’s all signed and sealed, and I’ve called most of my colleagues whom I wanted to inform personally.

I just accepted an offer from MicroSoft to work for them in the Bay Area. They are starting a new operation there with a focus on multi-threading compilers and tools, and it seems like it’s just made to order for me. I’m not mad at Sun or anything, but they don’t really seem to want what I want to do.

I’ll be moving up to the Bay Area over the next few months. It’s liable to take a while, though, because reducing our load to what we can put in a smaller house is sort of like a going out of business sale for Macy’s. It can’t really be done quickly.

I expect to maintain two households for a while until we get it all finished.

I’m excited by the prospects and ready to go. Until then, I have to do a lot of writing for Sun to get the stuff in my head onto paper for the next person who has to pick it up.

I read this article in the paper today when the title caught my eye.

We’ve been watching a fair number of “Midsomer Murders” on DVD from Netflix recently, and we really enjoy them. We sort of space them out, because too much at once is definitely cloying, but they are worth checking out.

This is a rare case where we like the show better than the books. We read a few of the books, and though the plots are basically the same, the characters are treated much more harshly. The books have a rather bitter edge, and one of the main characters (Troy) is rendered as self-centered and obnoxious. In the movies he’s quite likable, if somewhat unaware. Some may prefer the more cynical treatment of the books, but both Flo and I prefer the shows.

The last couple of weeks have been mostly quiet and boring. The most interesting thing was Andy’s return from a trip to England with his choir. He had some nice pictures and some good stories, but those are his to tell, not mine. I spent a week flat on my back with some kind of GI virus. The house where we were playing D&D had a sick baby. That was Friday night. By Sunday three of us were down with the virus. The other two had already had it. I managed to call in to a meeting on Tuesday, and heard “Oh yeah, that one took me about 5 days to get over.” It seemed to be what’s going around. Only its ubiquity made it slightly amusing.

At work, we are in the process of writing a proposal for a very large Government contract. We don’t have long to do it, so there’s lots of pressure. Oh, did I mention that the process is boring? I did? Oh well, it is.

Somehow, in all of this, I haven’t had all that much of an urge to write. I do have a couple of topics saved up, but I’ll use them a bit later. For now, I think I’ll go to bed….

You don’t get to see this very often, so I thought I’d share the current view from our deck. Those are the Cuyamaca and Laguna mountains with record snowfall. I’m sure glad that we got home in time to miss it.