Personal

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(Gran) Dad arrived this morning at 7am. He followed the scent of fresh espresso right to our door.

For the past week I’ve been working on getting our new place ready. Simply put, it was a little paint and new flooring. Complexly (?) put, it was hundreds of square feet of paint and hundreds of square feet of laminate flooring and baseboard. Throw in some infant care, snow shoveling and mad dash driving up and down the hill for supplies and you’ve got a good picture of the last week. The place looks great. It’s the best looking domicile I’ve ever resided in. And it’s a trailer. I’ll post pictures later when my hands stop aching. Thanks mom for the help with the paint. Thanks PK for the help with the floor. Thanks Brian for letting me borrow your tools. Thanks Elisa for keeping me (and Corin) fed. Thanks to whoever reads my delirious ramblings.
Goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow.

If you guessed “Things that make Chester tired,” then you are correct. I would have also accepted “Inevitable consequences of living at Hume.”

Work
I’m tackling the development of the new website at work, and it’s off to a slow start. As a rule, it’s always best to have a clear “plan of attack”, but it’s always easiest to just dive in. mumble mumble mixed metaphors. I’ve just finished up (knock on wood) a freelance gig for Lambesis. It was three banner ads for Tacori. They’ll run on knot.com in a week or two. For the past two evenings I’ve had a vivid reminder of the pace and atmosphere I used to live and breath. One on hand it’s nice to have such strong momentum behind a project, but on the other hand that same momentum can often negate any plan of attack. See previous comment. I also recently made some changes on a project I help La Mer with back in 2006: Cole Muscle Cars and Nicole Lyons Racing. Check her out. I thought I was daring for driving Corin around in the zuk when he was only two weeks old, but she was in a drag race at age two. In addition, I’ve been continuing (albeit insufficiently) to provide tech support for the charter school up here. I can handle trouble shooting and fixing computer issues, but dealing with vendors and purchase orders is a pain. I’m behind on setting up some of the computers for the lower grade levels, but I should be able to tackle that next week. Also, I’ve been doing some consulting for the Shelby Kennedy Foundation. So far it’s just been getting a Virtual Private Server setup with Agathon. SMTP auth has been aggravating, but I think I’ll be happy I went with them. They also host and support the hume site. I believe Mike Atkinson referred Nate to them a few years ago. If so, that referral just keeps on giving. Other miscellaneous web work includes Karley Mase and Kaffee Meister.

Infants
Corin is doing well considering that he was circumcised a few days ago and is still quite congested. He’s showing a keen interest in funk, disco and the out-of-doors. He has slept over four hours straight several times now, so that’s exciting. In case you hadn’t put two and two together, working, moonlighting and living with an infant can be an exhausting combination. We also had Laurel and Noah out to visit last weekend, which was a blast. Laurel got a little sick, and I was pretty beat the whole time, but we still managed to watch hours upon hours of law and order as well as do some light hiking and off-roading. Noah and I helped pull out a few vehicles that got stuck back on ten-mile. At one point, my sammy was tethered to a jeep which was tethered to a 8000lbs truck. It took a few tugs, but we got it out. Noah and I also hiked up to the “water source”. I was stoked because after 3/4 of the way there I didn’t see any more footprints or signs of human passage. It was well after twilight when we got there, but it was still a beautiful scene. The last thing Noah and Laurel did while they were here with us was to wait in the waiting room while Corin was circumcised. They then flew to San Diego and waited at a hospital for their Niece to be born. Talk about an exciting 24 hours. Although it did give Noah plenty of time to play with his newly purchased Nikon D70 which we sold to them.

Snow
There’s been lots of it. We got another 5-6 inches today and we’re expecting more this weekend. I finally dug the toyota pickup out from the mountain of snow it was buried under, but then the battery was dead and now it’s getting buried again. My back is tensing up just thinking about it. As much as I complain about having to shovel snow, it is a nice way to burn off some of that “office energy” that builds up all day when you’re on the computer.

Mold
We found mold behind our bed and in the closet. This was right before Laurel and Noah arrived. We ended up having to empty the entire room (for those who don’t know, the entire room is half of our house) into the living room so that we could clean it up, which meant we couldn’t really hang out around the house. Being winter and all we couldn’t hang around outside for very long either. Luckily our neighbor was out of town and was kind enough to let us use her place. It’s an identical trailer to ours, so we felt right at home.

Trailers
We’re moving! The “new” trailer is about 150 yards away, so it qualifies as a new neighborhood. We’re pretty excited. We’re going down the hill tomorrow to pick out paint colors, and potentially look at some wood flooring. We’re not just excited about the house (even though it’s almost twice the size of our current abode, we’re also excited about our new neighbors, the Ferreira’s. They also just had a baby boy named Jaron, so we’ll be able to sit around and laugh at our kids together which will be fun. Also, the National Forest boundary marker is about 40 feet behind our house. I think that’s great.

I’m outta steam. It’s 3am and Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” just came on my iTunes. Dunno the relevancy except that it talks about dreaming and things being over… like me dreaming and this post being over.

Where ever you work I’m sure you have a way to take a short social break. For some it’s the ol’ fashioned water cooler. For others it’s the snack machine or kitchen break room. For me, it used to be either a three block walk to a little coffee shop for a few shots of espresso or 15 minutes of killing my co-workers in a game of Halo. Currently, whenever someone in the my office needs a quick break (mostly because of governmental ergonomic laws) we get to walk the 35 yards or so to the Hume G-Store (general store) where we refill our well worn coffee mugs. It’s not fresh espresso, but it’s still coffee. Since I’ve been at Hume almost a year now, I’ve experienced that same 35 yards in all sorts of conditions. I’ve had to maneuver through crowds of sugar-infused high schoolers, wade through melting slush, dawdle in the cool fall rain, meander in the fragrant spring air, slide on solid sheets of ice, and linger in the midst of 100 foot tall pines. It always ends the same though. Sitting back at my desk (standing now days–darn ergonomics) sipping at my cup of coffee. It’s not always fresh and it’s sometimes burned, but it’s always a nice pick me up.

Oh yeah, my father-in-law is now officially the kaffee meister.

Update: A Machine That Tastes Espresso, But Prefers Only the Good Stuff