Mike Ball

Yreka (Why-ree-ka) is a small town about 25 miles South of the Oregon border. The name is said to come from the local native language and means “great white mountain”. The picture shows why.

We really don’t know much about the town, though we expect to learn more, but just driving by makes it look interesting. As you approach from the south, you encounter a barn advertising the State of Jefferson. Then you come to a statue of a cow (Moo-donna) in the middle of the field. It turns out that it was created by a local artist, Ralph Starritt. We drove by his shop and looked for a moment, but didn’t have time to explore properly.

As you leave town, you encounter a dragon to the right of the road. There’s no easy way to stop and look closely, but it’s an impressive bit of work. I wish we knew who made this one.

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.

Who would have thought that retirement would be so busy? I somehow thought that I’d have lots of time and would be looking for new projects. The trouble is; I’ve been saving up things to do and things to read, and there just always seems to be more to do. Reading in particular is taking a lot of time. With the “ripening” cataracts, reading had gotten downright painful. Now one eye is fixed, and the other isn’t really so bad, so I can read again. I’m picking up all of the books that I didn’t finish and working my way through them. And that doesn’t mention the stack of journals and papers sitting by my desk.

But back to Ashland. One thing we are doing is looking for a place to enjoy our retirement, and Silicon Valley is not it. The Valley is a great place for work, partly because it’s full of smart, active, people. Note that “full of people”. Though there’s a lot going on here, getting to where it’s happening is almost always a long and difficult journey. I don’t want to travel to Berkeley to see a play! So we’ve decided that Ashland is a good compromise, having enough smart, active people to be interesting, but not enough to cause problems. This last week we took a trip there to look for a house and check out the winter weather.
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The Fourth turns out to be a big deal in Ashland. If we had known just how big a deal, we’d have skipped the play for that day and just enjoyed the Fourth.

It started with a parade that lasted for about an hour and a half, then everyone moved to the park for booths and the standard Oregon eat-a-thon. That night there were two band concerts and fireworks.

If you are wondering why this took so long to get posted, it’s simple, if sad. I got a new computer with Vista, and working with web photos is a lot harder with it. The system I had set up to work with XP just didn’t work, and it took quite a while to figure out just what would work. Everything about Vista seems a littler clunkier (is that a word?) I mean, Windows XP always seems sort of clunky to me, with everything taking more effort than it should. Vista just seems to be more so. I’ve learned how to turn the worst of it off by now, but things still take a lot longer than they should.

I haven’t put together the picture show yet, but I thought I’d talk a bit more about Ashland and the Shakespeare Festival.

Ashland is a relatively small town, in a lovely setting, with a drama festival that runs most of the year. It also has a college and is sort of an art center. In fact, it’s a lot like Sarasota in many ways. It’s only about 5 hours from the Bay Area, so it’s not difficult to visit, and this visit was pretty much on the spur of the moment.
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The Supercomputing convention was in Tampa this year, so Flo and I took the opportunity to visit Family and the Roseate. The convention was huge, but exceedingly unexciting, while downtown Tampa was as unappealing as ever. I knocked off a bit early one afternoon to drive out to the Gulf. [read more…]

Microsoft sent me and some other software architects (that’s a job title) to a resort in the Napa Valley. I’ll discuss the meeting in my professional blog, but I’ll talk abut the trip here. The Napa valley is in the heart of the California wine country, and the wineries compete with each other in poshness and pretension as well as the quality of their wines. The resort where we met was pseudo-Victorian, though most of it was of fairly recent construction. It wasn’t a winery. The site included a croquet court, complete with a dress code (tan pants, white shirt). It was supposed to be a “team building activity” though it was never made clear how a cutthroat game like croquet will build team spirit. It’s more a war of all against all. I declined to participate.

We did have a trip to a real winery, complete with original art and dinner in the cave where they age the wine. See the pictures for more on that.

Overall, it was OK, and I did get to meet a lot of interesting people. I think they were trying too hard to entertain us, and would have done better just to let us talk.

Here’s one of the items I had saved up. This one is from my trip to Seattle a couple of months ago. This troll hides under one of the local bridges, not too far from Ivar’s Salmon House, another local institution. I forgot my camera that trip, by the way. The photo is courtesy of Carol Eidt.

Well, I’m back on line in the Bay Area. I just got cable internet access installed in my apartment. It will probably take me a little while to get caught up on the various details. For example, I don’t have a printer, and I’m still in the process of setting up remote access to MicroSoft. I supposedly have the hardware, but knowing how to use it is something else.

I have a neat picture from my Seattle trip, but the software to put it on the blog isn’t set up yet.

Daily life is a work in progress.

Today I flew up to Redmond to meet with my peers at MicroSoft. The boarding pass, when I printed it out, said to be sure to arrive two hours early. Sooo… At great expense in terms of sleep, I got to the airport at 4:30 for my 6:30 flight. So did a lot of other people, all of whom were waiting for the check-in counter to open at 5:00. Once they finally opened, checking in and getting through the inspection took all of 15 minutes. Nobody was carrying on much, so the inspection was very fast.

There may be some times when getting to the airport two hours early is a good idea, but the first flight in the morning is certainly not it.

Once we got in the air, the flight was smooth and fast. I had a window seat, and got to admire the Cascade mountains on the way up. Seattle was warm and lovely. I’m sorry that I forgot my camera in the rush of outfitting my replacement briefcase.