When things get really real really fast

It’s strange to look at the calendar and find it’s March. January and February passed by in a blur, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I’m frustrated that I look up and realize it’s been over a month since I’ve written here — but at the same time, to be honest, I don’t know how I could have found both time and writing energy to do it. So I’ll apologize for going into hibernation, but sometimes, that’s life.

Part of why the last two months have been crazy has been work — I had my vertigo issues in December, which really impacted my productivity everywhere, and once they settled down and got out of the way, I had a project I needed to focus on. That involved what started out as some minor tweaking of some code of mine, and which turned into some significant improvements and rewrites — about 1200 lines of bash code, and about 50% of it is new in this release. And released it is; I installed it on the production server today and ran the final acceptance test, and it’s passed. So I can shift back from coding to writing again.

I used to code for a living; today, I don’t and generally don’t miss it, but this project is fun and interesting, but I’m finding that when my head is in “coding” mode, it’s hard to switch into “writing” mode. That’s part of the reason I haven’t written here — at the end of the day of offering expletives at the occasionally baroque syntax of a bash script (weird enough to make me consider writing this in Python instead, until I remind myself that’s swapping out the syntax issues that are annoying me today with other syntax weirdness that would annoy me forever) my brain is tired — and writing is work. So I’ve been spending my evenings relaxing more and writing less, and managing that work/life balance we all pretend to worry about but mostly don’t.

Without going into details about this tool, it’s something I took over for the company a couple of years ago that barely worked (and not well), and depended on, among other things, an open source project that had been abandoned for years and was decaying before our eyes. So I had to define a new toolchain and workflow and then create a tool that actually did it and worked reliably. This new round of updates was really about turning it into a true automated tool — my first release worked as long as I was babysitting it a bit — and add some functionality that allows me to offer it to other parts of the company as well. So if the first iteration was to give me a working tool, this new release is to give the company a working tool, one that doesn’t require a babysitter or gatekeeper. I’m really happy with the results so far.

Moving to Washington

Laurie and I have also been doing more planning about the idea of moving to Washington in 2021 — and in the last couple of weeks, that got very interesting very fast. Our move to Washington has to some degree been stalled by a delay in my selling the house I own in Southern California; the plan since my mom died was to sell it to the tenants (who have rented it for over 20 years) when they could buy it. We had a plan in place to do that last year, and the Covid hit and caused delays. We still felt we could make it happen and were thinking maybe April, but a couple of weeks ago they let me know they had pre-approval on their loan application. The time since has been a whirlwind, and we’re now in escrow and working with the escrow company to clear up those inevitable details on title — but unless something strange crops up, we expect to close towards the end of March. And… once we close on that house, we can get serious about finding and buying a house up North, and then figuring out how to get everything moved up there. when “everything” includes Myself and Laurie as well as two cats and a cockatoo… That’s complicated. But I think we have the start of a plan, and I’m really happy it doesn’t involve selling the house in Silicon Valley until after the move is complete (or mostly). We can be a bit patient here.

Finding that new house is itself a complicated beast — because, well, Covid. I need to figure out how to get up there, do some scouting, meet some real estate people and start identifying houses of interest. The kind of house we want hits the market on a regular basis — and stays on the market for < 20 days from my watching things. There are very few houses of interest that stay on the market long at all, so organizing how to be able to get up there to inspect and put down an offer in a timely way — and yeah, we have this pandemic — is something I’m still struggling with.

But the plans have suddenly changed from “sometime this year” to “we start house hunting in April”. My overall thought — I won’t use the word plan — is we can have the house bought and be moved into it by September if things work out, and have the silicon valley house sold by the end of the year. But it’s going to be an ongoing series of crazy getting from now to then.

Where are we going? Ground central is the area in and around Poulsbo, Washington, although I’m watching properties in the region; I’m finding a lot I like in Port Ludlow, for instance, and while I’ve also been watching Sequim, most of the houses are too “generic tract” on small lots and that isn’t interesting me (although some of the floorplans do). it might be a new house, I’d prefer something a bit older but seriously move-in ready. We’ll see how this plays out.

Meanwhile, in the garage….

Before we suddenly went from “this year” to “happening”, I started another project. Back in 2018 we started some remodel work on the current house, and we’ve successfully gotten three of five rooms with new carpet and about half the interior (and the exterior) of the house painted. Then my sister was diagnosed with lung cancer and ultimately passed away, and that sidetracked all of that work — which we didn’t get back to finishing before we got serious about moving. Now, we’re leaving it to the contractor who will come in and make the place move-in ready once we’re out. But to make it possible to do that work, we needed to shove some stuff into a storage locker at a local rental place, which I laughingly figured we’d need for about a year.

In December, I decided the best thing to do was shift that content out of the locker and into a PODs, so in mid-January one magically appeared in my driveway. Here we are a month later, the locker is empty and the rental cancelled, and I’m getting close to finishing filling it up with all of the stuff we don’t need to worry about until after this upcoming move. I have about two more rounds of schlepping boxes into the pods and organizing them before it’ll be full and can go live somewhere until I tell them to deliver it to the new house for unloading.

Did I mention these boxes are heavy? It includes Laurie’s hockey collection, which includes around 500 books, including 1 and a third copies of Trail of the Stanley Cup. It also includes her program book collection, which measured 27 running feed of paper, and much of her slide collection from her photographing at hockey games over the years in the film era. We’re basically filling it four boxes high of books and paper/heavy things, and then lighter stuff to the top. With the hockey stuff all in there, it’s time to move in the comics — she has about 40 long boxes in the garage.

I think I have two more rounds of hauling boxes and then it’ll be full. This weekend was more about making room to get to the comics in the garage and moving them, but I think it’ll go faster now. Assuming my back holds out…

I could leave this for the movers to do — but I need the room in the garage, and since I was emptying that rental locker in the first place, I figured I might as well shove it into storage in a way it wouldn’t need to be unloaded again until we’re done.

By the way, the new place needs room for a few bookshelves. well, lots of bookshelves….

Assuming nothing new and strange happens….

So, assuming nothing new and strange happens (hah), I should be posting here again more frequently. As the plans for the move firms up, we’ll pass along more info. If you know the area or live there, drop me a note with recommendations and I’ll collect them to share. I should probably talk a bit about why Poulsbo, but I’ll do that in some later piece here….

So if December ended weirdly with the few weeks of vertigo attacks, 2021 started out crazy in a good way. and I expect that crazy to continue for most of the year as we finally make this move and settle into our new reality. I’m starting to feel I know how to make the move happen, but I still see a lot of chaos to be wrangled along the way…

But I’m really looking forward to it. Here’s hoping it happens this year.