Hello from Washington!

6FPS V3#8 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
August 9 (well,17), 2021

 

Chuq update August 17, 2021, the “sorry this issue is late” edition: I apologize for this issue being late, but… It’s not my fault, really. I had this scheduled to go out at planned, but MailChimp had other ideas, and something I did flagged their automated “bad content” filter, putting the issue and my account on hold.

What was it? I have no idea. I filed a request for review and feedback, and over a week later, they have yet to bother replying, which I can only take to believe their opinion is “if you’re a free account, please leave”.

I had been considering shifting 6FPS to work with the Squarespace email campaigns anyway, and their lack of any timely response made my decision to move both easy and necessary. So this is the first newsletter to go out via Squarespace to you.

I expect we’ll find broken things. I’ve fixed some aspects of the move, but the archives (for instance) still point to Mailchimp and I need to move those. If you find broken links or if a form doesn’t work, please let me know ASAP and I’ll sort it out for you. And this newsletter design will be refined before the next issue…

Sorry for the chaos. Fortunately, I had nothing more important to do than change email vendors in the last couple of weeks, since I’m not, oh, trying to move into a new house or anything…

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Hello from Washington!

Laurie, myself, the two cats and the cockatoo Tatiana have all successfully relocated to the new place and we've left Silicon Valley behind. I've been up here about two weeks, our furniture arrived about ten days ago, and we've been massively busy trying to organize and get the house put together.

We left a lot of stuff behind -- we had the haul-away people (College Hunks: highly recommended) to the old place three times, for 5/8, 5/8 and 3/4 of a truck, including a lot of our old and not terribly good bedroom and living room furniture. Since we got up here, we've had a bunch of new stuff delivered (thank you, Ashley Furniture), and we have a functional bedroom and parts of a functional great room, although I still have a number of pieces in boxes in the garage that need to be set up and moved into the house, but we're getting there. Laurie's been focussing on the kitchen, I've been dealing with work deadlines and setting up my office, and things are starting to feel functional.

But it's been a lot of work, a lot of hours, and a lot of end of the day too tired to think about writing. Today (as I write this, August 8, and this issue goes out tomorrow) is the first day I felt ready to slow down, take a day easy, and try to get some writing done. It was only the second time I left the property since I got here, both times to head to town and grab supplies.

Laurie is making one final trip to Silicon Valley this week to wrap up a few final things, and then that's likely the last time either of us will be down there indefinitely. After this week, it's building new paths forward here in Washington.

Meanwhile, down south, the contractor is busily working on the old house updating things (new bathrooms!) so we can put it on the market.

If you know someone who might be interested in buying a 1956 Eichler that's been maintained in close to it's original configuration, which happens to be in a great neighborhood about 4 miles from the Apple Spaceship, have them contact me and I'll forward them to my agent. We expect it on the market sometime this month and not on the market long.

The new place is coming together; the main floor has two bedrooms, with a really nice, large master and a smaller bedroom we're using as the place where Tatiana sleeps when it's bedtime, and for storage and books. Downstairs is a converted basement with a good sized common area and two decently sized rooms. One is my office, with good views outside and a door I can close when I'm having meetings, and Laurie is taking the dining area of the common area for her office. The rest of the common area is becoming a lounge area for us to sit in and have a TV, and the second bedroom is being turned into a quiet room with a recliner, a twin bed (for if/when we eventually have guests, or for naps), and the exercise bike, plus more books... So upstairs is the living space, downstairs is the working space, and I kind of like the mental separation.

There are a massive number of details to sort out here. For instance: I've talked to two landscaping firms and Monday I'll accept a quote from one, and will start getting the yard back under maintenance and cleaned up. Since the property is 4+ acres of mostly undeveloped woodlands (with a vernal pond), I'll be working with them on a plan to maintain and protect the woods and keep it healthy as well. Once we have the boxes a bit better wrangled, we'll be talking to housekeeping services to come in every couple of weeks to do the routine cleaning, since neither Laurie nor I want to spend weekends doing that any more).

Because the property is 4+ acres -- and my legs and knees aren't, I've put a deposit down on an ATV to use to move around the property and explore the woods -- a Kawasaki Brute 300. It will allow me to haul things and poke into corners of the land I would struggle to see by walking. Six months ago, if you had told me I'd be buying an ATV I'd have laughed, but it makes sense here.

And since there's a flight of stairs between living and work areas, and my legs many days are not stair compatible, I'm looking at putting a stair lift in. I reached out to one company to come in and give me a quote, and they were nice enough to send me a paper catalog instead that was useless. So I'm looking to find a different company to actually be interested in taking my money on that...

I haven't touched a camera not attached to my phone in weeks, although I have moved my bags into my office but not unpacked them yet. Soon... And I have found and set up my printers (an HP Deskjet for general work and my Canon Prograf 300 for photo printing) -- except the Canon didn't survive the move even though I literally hand carried it and drove it here myself rather than let the movers touch it. Sigh; I'm starting the process of working with Canon to figure out how to get it repaired. It is one of the few casualties of the move, though, and still under warranty.

But I'm starting to finally feel like I'm building up a new "normal" routine and new habits as I get comfortable in the space, and I'm looking forward to really making this a home that I function in day to day. This has been an opportunity to consider and rethink many habits, and build new, hopefully improved versions and rethinking how I do some things in my life.

Oh, and I am losing weight along the way; and I've hit 330, down about 10 pounds for the year, a weight I haven't been since about 1997, and I've been able to reduce my daily insulin a bit as I've made changes to the diet and pushed to get that under better control again... All of which is kinda awesome. That puts me at 85 pounds down from my all time high, well over half way to my long term goal of around 260 (BMI 40). Oh, and this new house's setup is encouraging more moving around and walking, which doesn't suck.

And I love being up here. It is so green, and while we have neighbors (I've met two, and they both seem really nice) there's a nice feeling of isolation -- while being less than 10 minutes from the city center at the same time.

So I'm really happy to have finally done this, although I miss some things -- and the people -- I've moved away from. But there are so many possibilities, and so much potential to explore.

What's New from Chuq?

  • I am hoping writing will return soon. It's been crazy time.

A Thought on

Trusting Good People

This essay's going to be short, but something I wanted to touch on quickly. When you read advice on things like hiring contractors, you're often told to talk to multiple bids and talk to at least three before making a choice. That's not bad advice but -- there are alternatives as well.

If you know the proper people, you can leverage them to find the right people through their network. Our move north is a great example. For instance:

  • A friend of mine sold his house in Silicon Valley and moved to Washington a couple of months before we did. He recommended his agent to me for my house; I talked to him (Brett Caviness at Compass Real Estate) and hired him to manage selling the place. He's handling all of the details including bringing on the contractor to update the house and staging it to sell, so all I have to do is approve the offer and sign papers.

  • Brett recommended an agent here to help me find our new house (Shari and Karl Royston at the Royston Team in Poulsbo), and I can't recommend them highly enough. They were amazing at understanding our needs and moving quickly to help us negotiate on this house once we identified it -- at one point we'd been told it had an offer coming, which for some reason never happened, and when we realized that, we jumped on it and I made an emergency trip north to inspect it in person and build out an offer with them -- which beat out another offer that came in as we were finalizing ours. So we were literally a day or so from missing out on this place, without their help.

  • Karl recommended Evergreen Loans and Amber Page and her team made the financing aspects of all of this amazingly painless. When it came time to sign the final paperwork, the notary that came by the house remarked he wished he could work with them all of the time because the paperwork was amazingly well organized.

  • Brett recommended I talk to Eric Galpine at Ace Relocation for the move, and said that was the group he always worked with when possible. Eric talked over the move, gave me a quote, and his team organized the move in a way that was incredibly painless and professional -- and I realize interstate moving is one of those industries where horror stories happen a lot. The driver team and the load in and unload teams on both ends were incredibly good, hard-working and professional, spending about 3 hours on both ends to get stuff in and back out of the truck. Literally the only things that have broken in the move are things they never touched, like my printer. I am thrilled the actual furniture relocation was so painless.

  • Karl has recommended to me a local locksmith who came and redid all the locks, the landscapers, and a few other contractors I haven't yet reached out to (like an electrician to come in and evaluate some updates I want to make, like replacing the greenish fluorescents in the garage/workshop with LED fixtures).

If you can find people you trust who have networks they trust, and you leverage those networks like this, you can get things done well with a lot less stress. The key is to get those right connections working with you. I am stunned, honestly, how easy this process has been overall, but it's because I was able to find the right people by leveraging the experience of others who knew which people to connect me to.

Photo Wednesday

Every Wednesday I'm posting an non-bird image from my collection and talking a bit about the image. And on Fridays, I'm posting a bird image as well. So twice a week I'm now starting to share my images again to the world at large with some bit of story about how and why the image came to be.

To see all of these images at full size and read the stories behind their creation, you can visit:

(new images will return next issue... simply no time to get this ready. My apologies)

For Your Consideration

Birds and Birding

Photography

Health and Fitness

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

See you soon!

And with that, I'll see you in 2021 with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq (chuqui@mac.com)

 

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui@mac.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

Know someone who might want to subscribe? Send them here. You'll also find the archives there if you want to look at previous issues