Kevin Kelly: Why Technology Can’t Fulfill

At the beginning of this summer an Amish guy I met online rode his bicycle out to our home along the foggy Pacifica coast. Online, is of course, the last place you’d ever expect to meet an Amishman. But he contacted me via my blog, and then a few months later he appeared at our door hot, sweaty and out of breath from the long uphill climb to our house under the redwoods. Parked a few feet away was his ingenious Dohan foldup bike, which he rode from the train station. Like most Amish he did not fly, so he had stored his bike on the 3-day cross-country train ride from Pennsylvania. This was not his first trip to this neck of the woods. He had previously ridden his bike along the entire coast of California, and had in fact seen a lot of the world on train and boats.

Read more.

With labor heated sore

Then came the iolly Sommer, being dight
In a thin silken cassock coloured greene,
That was vnlyned all, to be more light:
And on his head a girlond well beseene
He wore, from which as he had chauffed been
The sweat did drop; and in his hand he bore
A boawe and shaftes, as he in forrest greene
Had hunted late the Libbard or the Bore,
And now would bathe his limbes, with labor heated sore.

- Spenser, The Mutabilitie Cantos, Canto VIII

The container tomatoes looked like they were coming down with something, so I broke down and bought some organic everythingcide which is supposed to work on mites, aphids, scales and various fungal maladies. I’ve only applied it twice, and it doesn’t look like the stuff is spreading, so maybe it’s working.  I went  ahead and hit the zucchini as well, since a few of the leaves were starting to mottle a little bit. The plants themselves are…gigantic. Like, 3 or 4 feet across and probably 2-3 feet high. I’m not sure I could bear seeing them croak after getting so large. There seem to be a few miniature zucchinis among the foliage, so I think we’re on the right track.

I spent Saturday evening at a cornhole tournament that our scout pack organized as a fundraiser. There’s a late-summer trip to the Huntsville space center planned, and the goal was to take some of the sting out of the price.  Through a series of events too long to relate here, I have a cotton candy machine in my garage. I schlepped it to the event, but didn’t end up moving much candy. This was actually OK, since I’d never actually used the thing before and needed the practice. I also discovered that the plug really needs to be replaced.  A thick layer of electrical tape is not a proper substitute for a ground prong. Zot!

Yesterday I had to run the thing out of candy sugar before I could clean it and put it away, so the kids played in the sprinkler and ate gobs of blue cotton candy.  I don’t think it gets a whole lot better than that for the under-10-set. Everyone turned in early and the oldest girl chased fireflies around the yard.  Quintessential summer.

Century training continues apace (har).  I have a little bit of travel this week that’s going to interrupt some of my daily riding schedule. Dumb work. They’ve got their nerve.

Anyway, our school year is tapering down to a sort of trickle. The older kids are winding things up in between scouting day camp, VBS and upcoming trips with grandparents (one is going with my parents out west to Colorado, the other with E’s parents to Kansas). Some time in August, we’ll haul up to Maryland to visit family there, which ought to be a good time.

I’m about halfway through Infinite Jest. Parts of it are hilarious. The whole of it is simply amazing, in terms of scope and complexity. I don’t know how he kept on top of all of it. I think by the end of it, I’ll want to unwind with something a little less complicated. Chaucer in Middle English, or something along those lines. Chaucer is blogging, by the way.

We recently wrapped up BSG 4.0 and are waiting for 4.5 to hit the Netflix queue so that we can find out how it all ends. On deck after that is Mad Men with a sprinkling of movies that came and went without us (Cinderella Man and The Happening are sitting upstairs even now).

Looking ahead: midsummer – the summer solstice -  is approaching, and this year coincides with Father’s Day. The sun will reach its northernmost arc before starting the southern retreat. About this same time, the Church celebrates the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

May, we hardly knew you

Are we really at the end of the month? It’s been a busy couple of weeks around here. Thus:

We hosted a Memorial Day cookout thing with a five other homeschooling families for a grand total of 27-some-odd kids ranging in age from 16 to 3 months. It didn’t rain too much, everyone filled up and we managed to avoid any injuries. I call that a win. It’s so very much fun to have everyone over – the children clump up into cohorts by age and are generally left to their own devices. The adults talk about adult stuff. Good times were had by all.

Our two missing chicks returned from their cruise and are slowly readjusting to normal life. It will be a difficult road, but we are made of stern stuff around here.

Our school year is still generally winding up, having taken a hit in late winter with the arrival of  S., aka “The Caboose”, aka “We Think Seven Is A Nice Lucky Number”, aka “It Would Be OK With Us If Someone Blew Out The Candle, Really“. In any event, the daily schedule is fairly light and there’s been wide latitude because of family drop-ins and other events. A little bit of kvetching, a little bit of math, lather, rinse, repeat.

Our garden is doing quite well. The container tomatoes are starting to set some blossoms, the zucchini is turning into kudzu and we found a tiny baby pepper. We’ll try to get some pumpkins in the ground here in the next week or two and hopefully harvest them in early autumn.

Last weekend we went to the renaissance festival, and I think we’re good to go for another couple of years before returning. The raptor show is always a good time, and the boys thoroughly enjoyed watching a real joust.  The babies played in the gravel. One craft booth offered the chance to Make Thine Own Candle, with “Monkey Fart” (banana, I presume) on offer in the way of fragrance choices. I ate half a hamburger. Very sixteenth century. I almost asked Queen Elizabeth if there was any news from Walsingham or were there any recent Jesuit intrigues at court, but was afraid I’d get a blank stare in return. Next time!

Speaking of the Renaissance, we started disc 1 of The Tudors and are not so impressed so far. It hasn’t really grabbed us like Rome (yet), but we’re willing to give it a few more episodes. Jonathan Rhys Meyers was an excellent Steerpike and anyone attached to anything related to Gormenghast gets some props from me.

Speaking of books, I’v succumbed to the popular tide of sentiment and am giving David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest a go. I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again some time ago and really enjoyed it. It’s an odd book so far (~150 pages in), but I can already see why the fans are legion. Not as difficult as Gravity’s Rainbow, thankfully.

Cycling continues. I skipped the morning ride because a) I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night and b), I may be coming down with E’s cold. This would be a profound bummer, since it seems to be taking her a while to kick it. In lieu of rest and fluids, I’m opting for flat out denial. I’d like to be in good shape to make a 30 mile trip this Saturday. Time will tell; I’ve built some flexibility into the training schedule for just such a contingency.

Lastly, I couldn’t resist linking to this absolutely awesome Spenser database [via].

A little more bike nerdiness. Ashrayaparavrtti.

Took the bike out for 25 miles this morning. This was formerly my long loop, but in the current training schedule I’ve set for myself, it turns out to be the shortest. I’ve set my sights on a century ride (100 miles) that’s sponsored by the local club in late August, so I have around 12 weeks to get ready for it. Most of the guidelines say that it’s very do-able to train for a century in 8 weeks, so 12 ought to allow for some flexibility. Weather permitting, I’ll be on the road 5 days a week building up base miles plus one ever-lengthening long ride on the weekends. Rest for one day, rinse, repeat. The goal is to be able to comfortably complete 65 about 2 weeks out of the targeted date. So we’re off.

Observations after this morning:

100 pounds of air in the tire is stiff. The frame is stiff. Without shocks, bumps are much bumpier. The new position is going to take some getting used to, but I was pleased to finish up without any numbness anywhere. The brakes are really, really g00d. Riding a lightweight bike is a helluva lot of fun.

Right then. Enough of that. Here’s an interesting word that I came across in the latest issue of First Things: ashrayaparavrtti. It’s Sanskrit, and the sense it conveys is “a sudden moment of life-changing insight” (think Saul on the road to Damascus, or Lewis on the back of the motorcycle). In the context of the article, the author uses the term to describe the moment at which many turn to veganism.

I’ve been turning the word ashrayaparavrtti over and over in my mind since reading it. Have I had any moments like this? I can think of one for certain, and it came very soon before we started attending a church regularly. I’ll have to ponder this one a little longer.

Speaking of cosmic things, I’ll leave you with this.

Conjunction junction

According to my Old Farmer’s Almanac, Saturn is in conjunction with the moon tonight. That means…well, I don’t quite know what it means. It hardly matters, in any case – the cloud cover here is quite impenetrable. The only conjunction I’ll see tonight is “ain’t”, as in, “we ain’t seen anything.”

We had our last den meeting of the year tonight, and spent a few minutes discussing plans for the coming year. General consensus: more knots, less inside work. As soon as I have a chance, I’ll pick up the book for next year and the other leader and I will start hammering out next year’s schedule.

The rain pretty much put the kibosh on any serious yardwork over the weekend, so I spent much of Sunday making a rain chain, which has now replaced one of the downspouts next to the front porch. Since it rained pretty much all weekend, we had a chance to see how well it worked, guiding the rainwater down the links to the ground below, in a sort of Zen symphony of sight and sound.

The result: not very well.

There was a whole lot of splattering near the top, which I think had something to do with removing the entirety of the downspout and simply hanging it in the vacant hole. I fixed this by reattaching a short piece of downspout to sort of focus the water on the chain, but then, naturally, the rain stopped. It looks a little neater and more finished-off. We’ll just have to see.

Here’s a picture of the final product. Clouds, but no rain.

The grass is getting long enough in which to lose things, so here’s hoping that the rain stays away for one more day so that I can cut it, and heave the trimmings into the compost bin.

Here’s the bin:

Those are pallets, attached together on three sides with baling wire. The front has a couple of hinges and, uh, a rock to hold the thing shut. This was one of E’s requirements – the heap must be contained. I freeformed the compost mound at our last house,  surrounding it only with enough chickenwire to sort of hold it together. But then, it was out of sight. Not so here. The bin also serves to keep the children out of it. Not that any of them would dare to go digging around in search of the gigantic worms. Heavens no.

I’ve been adding mushed up newspapers to make up for my deficit in browns to add to the heap. Even with the mostly-grass-and-greens pile, it’s still plenty warm in there.

Speaking of gardens and whatnot, the state of détente that existed between the local rabbit population is over. Half of the sunflower seedlings are gone and I think they’ve pillaged the eldest daughter’s cantelopes. My exhortations to chase the rabbits out of the yard was met with some resistance. After all, I had only just last week been warning the children to leave the rabbits alone. Also, they look cute hanging around, and here we are, scaring them into running all pell-mell. We’re nothing more than a big group of mean ol’ Mister McGregors!

Too true. I have no plans to trade in their skins for rabbit tabaccy, but neither am I interested in seeing them feast on our plants while there are acres of grass and other assorted weeds free for the taking elsewhere.

Salve, cuniculi.

Reading Moby Dick these days. So far so good. Learning lots about whaling.

That I might know

Now God grant I speak suitably and value these endowments at their worth: For he is the guide of Wisdom and the director of the wise. For both we and our words are in his hand, as well as all prudence and knowledge of crafts. For he gave me sound knowledge of existing things, that I might know the organization of the universe and the force of its elements, the beginning and the end and the midpoint of times, the changes in the sun’s course and the variations of the seasons. Cycles of years, positions of the stars, natures of animals, tempers of beasts, powers of the winds and thoughts of men, uses of plants and virtues of roots- such things as are hidden I learned and such as are plain; for Wisdom, the artificer of all, taught me.

- Book of Wisdom, 7:15-22

The rain seems to be breaking a little, so I may yet accomplish some yard tasks today: deadheading the tulips and maybe some weeding. The lawn will have to wait, which is a bummer because the grass is getting pretty tall.  The birds (goldfinches! cedar waxwings!) here are in full riot and the big ditch across the way is doubtlessly full of rainwater again, which means that the frogs will be back shortly.

The picture above is a colored version of the so-called Flammarion woodcut. It was believed to be medieval, but it is more likely to have been produced in the 19th century.  Fabrication or no, I like it a great deal. Et docere et rerum exquirere causas* – isn’t that what it’s all about?

Anyway – I’ve had a long and abiding interest in the seasonal cycles: changes of daylight, the movement of the sun, moon and stars, solstices, and equinoxes. In terms of history, it wasn’t all that long ago that these are the cycles that regulated daily life and I think we minimize these things to our own detriment. We are creatures of the earth – divine for sure, but no less connected to the rest of the creation. We head inside and bear down on the tasks at hand and lose sight of the changing shadows outside. Or the different kinds of light in the evening from one month to the next. The pre-Christian calendar recognized these cycles, prefiguring  – until claimed by baptism -  our own liturgical year. Consider: the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, which is celebrated on (or around) the summer solstice. The days begin shrinking, bit by bit, until the winter solstice. What does the Precursor tell his followers regarding the Christ? He must increase, I must decrease. The year descends into night until the Nativity of Our Lord. The summer sun for the rich and winter fire for the poor dispels the darkness from our world, guiding us towards the morning of the year,  the renewal of spring.

We were meant, I believe, to live a little closer to the ground and sky than we do today. Cultivate a greater awareness of sun, sky, root, leaf, soil and stone. Re-root. Go outside.

But don’t forget the Claritin.

* – “To teach and inquire into the nature of things,” motto of our alma mater, the University of Georgia

Then came hot JULY, boiling like to fire

Good heavens, but this place has some cobwebs in it.

For starters, we’re all still here. Just busy as all get out. I can hardly believe that it’s July already, but there is meat destined for the grill, beer in the fridge, and a bag of fireworks somewhere around here. As long as the weather holds, we should be in fine shape.

About the most exciting thing around here is the rabbit, pictured above. We have many rabbits in the area. There are also more hawks and other raptors here than anyplace else I’ve ever been, and I’m sure it’s no coincidence. We seem to lack the tree cover for squirrels and the ground cover for chipmunks and, frankly, that’s fine with me.

I’ve been engaged in a low-level cold war with squirrels for years now, starting with the one I found gnawing on our roof. When I shot him off the roof with the airgun, he fell to the deck, lay there for a moment, then took off and zig-zagged all over the place. I went into full-on Yosemite Sam mode, cocking and firing the air rifle to no avail until he disappeared into the weeds, never to be seen again. From that point on, he was the Dick to my Ahab. Moby Rat. From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee.

Anyway, no squirrels around here. Well, a few in another part of the neighborhood. They’re on their side, and I’m on mine. Détente, for now. I’ve been mulling over a proxy war via the local cats, but some things are better left undiscussed in the open.

But the rabbits are welcome. I have no garden as of yet, so I may rue the open-armed reception they’ve gotten in general, and to one in particular. The cottontail in the picture above took up residence, more or less, in our backyard a month or so ago. She can usually be found as pictured above – lounging under the trampoline. The kids don’t bother her and the dog can’t see her (as far as we can tell), so she’s become quite comfortable with us back there. Sometimes we can get as close as 5 or 6 feet away before she starts to hop a little. As hawks are not the only danger these “important prey animals” face, we have resisted the urge to name her. The Rabbit was sufficient, since we were not sure of her sex.

Well, until we found the nest anyway.

This is the nest. Sorry it’s sort of fuzzy, but I didn’t want to hang around too long. It’s a little hard to make out, but I counted at least three in there. Oddly enough, this nest was just out in the middle of the lawn in the back yard. We would have never seen it (which is probably the point), unless we hadn’t noticed her loping out to the middle of the yard and sitting there. One afternoon, about dusk, she was out there sitting over it when I noticed something with small ears moving under her chest, which is when I realized she was nursing them.

I went out the next day, pulled a little wad of pinestraw aside, and there they were, all piled up in a tiny hole. We brought the kids out, one at a time, to see them and declared that corner of the yard Off Limits, though I continued to peek every so often to make sure that nothing had eaten them, as I wanted time to get my explanation straight.

Happily, the Circle of Life talk was not needed – they seem to have bolted on their own. Everyone vanished for a few days, and then last night the mother returned and we saw at least one tiny one with her. We are presuming that the others were just hiding. That’s our story, anyway, and we’re sticking to it. The baby is small – probably only a little bigger than a baseball, and the yard we back up to his pretty shaggy and full of tall grass. Our guess is that the young are hiding back there in better cover during daylight hours.

In other news, we finished out the quarter at work and it was super-busy. You’d think that the beginning of a new quarter would be a little more relaxed, but no. The frenetic pace has carried over, which is probably a good thing. I have quite a bit of travel this month, including two back-to-back weeks in Seattle for orientation and product training. I’m looking forward to the training time, but not the time away from home. There will be another week of this in August followed by a one-day deal in New York and I’ll generally be caught up. Oh, and there’s a regional sales meeting next weekend in Ft. Lauderdale. This sounds great, but for all of the free time we’re likely to have (which is none), it might just as well be on Mars. Every hour we’re not at appointments and such is an hour we’re not driving revenue, you see.

And so the world turns.

In other news, our diocese has exercised its episcopal prerogative and shuffled all the priests around, as they do every few years. For us this meant the loss of a beloved little old priest from India who may be one of the holiest men I’ve ever met, though he would not like to hear me say it. He leaves us to become the pastor of a pair of churches elsewhere, and we wished him the very best of luck in his new assignment at a reception last weekend. But as a door closes, a window opens, and one of the men ordained this very year will be joining us in his first assignment, and we welcome him with love. Farewell and welcome, Fathers.

Let’s see…what else…

BookWatch: E is nearing the end of Mansfield Park and still can’t figure out how it’s going to end. I say you only need to read one Austen novel to know how it’s going to end, but I resist the urge to spoil it for her. For myself, I detoured back into Lovecraft for a little while but have started, in earnest, World Without End, Ken Follet’s sequel to Pillars of the Earth. It’s great stuff so far, as expected. We’re midway through season 2.5 of BG and are still having a great time with that bit of after-the-kids-are-in-bed indulgence. I think the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie is up there. We watched the third Spiderman installment last weekend and were a little underwhelmed. It was fun and all, but paled pretty badly next to the recent Hulk and Iron Man movies. As for the upcoming Dark Knight…well…let’s just say we’re pumped to see it. Enough said.

DorkWatch: The almanac says that we’ve entered into the Dog Days, traditionally defined as the period when the Dog Star, Sirius, appears in the morning sky along with the sun. During Roman times, it rose before the sun and was blamed for the hot weather. Thanks to precession, it’s been rising later ever since and now doesn’t show up until August. Hesiod:

When the thistle blooms and the chirping cicada
sits on trees and pours down shrill song,
from frenziedly quivering wings in the toilsome summer,
then goats are fatter than ever and wine is at its best;
women’s lust knows no bounds and men are all dried up,
because the dog star parches their heads and knees
and the heat sears their skin. Then, ah then,
I wish you a shady ledge and your choice wine,
bread baked in the dusk…

Ahem. Let’s move artfully along to Chambers’ Book of Days, which has this meditation on summertime dreams:

What dreams have we dreamed, and what visions have we seen, lying idly with half-shut eyes in some ‘ greenwood shaw,’ sheltering from July’s noonday sun, while we seemed to hear ‘ airy tongues that syllable men’s names,’ in the husky whispering of the leaves! Golden forms have seemed to spring up in the sun-lighted stems of the trees, whose high heads were buried among the lofty foliage, through which were seen openings to the sky. The deep-dyed pheasant, shooting over the underwood with streaming plumage, became a fair maiden in our eyes; and the skulking fox, noiselessly threading the brake, the grim enchanter from whom she was escaping. The twining ivy, with discoloured leaves, coiled round the stem in the far distance, became the fanged serpent, which we feared would untwine and crush her in its scaly folds. Scouts were sent out after her in the form of bees and butterflies, and seemed not to leave a flowery nook unvisited in which there was room enough for her to hide. Bird called to bird in sweet confusion, from leafy hollows, open glades, and wooded knolls, as if to tell that she had passed this way and that, until their songs became so mingled, we could not tell from which quarter the voices came. Then, as the sun burst out in all its brightness, the grim enchanter seemed to throw a golden net over the whole wood, the meshes of which were formed of the checkered lights that fell through leaf and branch, and, as we closed our eyes, we felt that she could not escape, so lay silent until the shadows around us deepened, and gray twilight stole noiselessly over the scene…

Now that’s what I’m talking about, though the shady ledge and choice wine sound pretty good, too. Have a happy and safe Fourth of July, everyone. I’ll try to write a little more often than once fortnightly.

One month in. Pie.

So here we are at the end of my first month on the new job. If the precipitous drop-off in posting hasn’t been enough of an indication, I’ve been busy. Real busy. Busier, in fact, than I’ve been in months and maybe even years. This is a good thing, because I haven’t had any serious challenges in quite some time.

I spent most of the day either on the phone, hammering out e-mail, or on my way to visit customers in my territory, which covers three states. Most of my appointments are here in town, but I’ve made several single-night trips to far-flung parts of our “patch” (as we call it), averaging about one per week. I have to be much smarter about managing my time, which means that the downtime during the day, during which I used to do the majority of my writing, is consumed instead with planning, writing or studying product documentation. For the overnights, I typically hit the road after dinner with the family, arrive late to the hotel and crash. I get up the next morning, do my appointments and hit the road for home in the early afternoon, usually returning 24 hours after I left. It’s not a bad deal.

Life in a sales organization is like nothing I’ve done before, so the sheer change from customer to vendor has been exhilarating. Strictly speaking, my focus is on engineering but…it’s presales engineering, make no mistake.

A few things have changed ’round here as a result of this new gig. First, I tend to work longer hours when I’m at home. This is expected, when your commute consists of shuffling from one room to another. It also means that it’s a little harder to unplug. So far, so good. At around 5, E discontinues asking the kids to stay quiet. Her little way of reminding me that it’s time to ‘come home’. I try to limit my Internet time after hours, so far to good effect. If I skim through my RSS feeds at all, it might be while I eat lunch

Second, working at a more frenetic pace during the week makes the transition to the weekend all the more abrupt (and glorious). Knocking out yardwork and errands on Saturday, then doing nothing on Sunday – both are considerably more savory than they used to be.

Finally, I thought the travel would be difficult to stomach, but one overnight a week isn’t bad at all, and 80% of our territory is within a 3-4 hour drive. The home-office time more than offsets it – even when I’m booked up with appointments around town, I’m usually home by the early afternoon. Transit times are sometimes used for conference calls, so the handsfree bluetooth thing in the car has been a godsend.

Movies we’ve seen: The Thin Man, The Devil Wears Prada and Borat. Yes, Borat. I laughed at most of it. Her, only parts. Must be a guy thing. Still working our way through season 2 of BSG. I’m still on my Shakespeare project, and am about halfway through Much Ado About Nothing. I’m still not clear on what all the fuss is about. Har, har.

We celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary in May, and are taking an adults-only trip down the Florida panhandle in a couple of weeks. The brood will be left with my parents, and all parties concerned are ecstatic. Us most of all, as I’m sure you can imagine. I promise you that it won’t be another 8 years before we sneak away.

Now I must away. It’s time to fire up the grill – we’re trying out a grilled sausage technique that was in this month’s Cook’s Illustrated. This blueberry pie came from the same issue. Look upon it and tremble.

Furniture, gymnastics and Battlestar Galactica

Spent the evening assembling office furniture. Most of it is done, but one of the pieces was busted in the box, so we set that whole unit aside while we wait for a replacement part. In the meanwhile, I’ve cleaned out my desk at work and have all of my books and whatnot sitting in the trunk of the car. Soon, but not soon enough, the chaos will be done and we can get back into a routine of sorts.

This past weekend had us at an invitational gymnastics meet for our oldest. She had a lot of fun and is looking forward to the next one, which will be some time in June. 

As for the rest of the brood, I’m happy to report 0 sick days and 0 injuries. I’m going to hang one of these in the family room, I think. I keep threatening to do so. 

Movies: Pan’s Labyrinth, which was…interesting, though a little depressing. Parts are very difficult to watch, this is definitely an adults-only fairy tale. Also, the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, which we watched over the course of 2 evenings. We enjoyed it and had some fun trying to pick out references to the original series, which we both watched as kids. I paused during one of the museum scenes to point out which toys I’d had. She remember quite a few of the characters I’d forgotten.

Bit of trivia from the IMDB: when the doctor is delivering the bad news, there are ships flying around outside the window. At the very end of the scene, Serenity can be seen landing on a nearby roof. Sure ’nuff, there it was! What a hoot. I think I made two Firefly comments during the rest of the series. Something along the lines of “this needs more Jayne” and “Mal just would have killed that guy and been done with it.” Dorkalicious!

New job

So, the thing that was cooking is this: I’m starting a new job in a couple of weeks. This represents somewhat of a career change for me, so I’m a little nervous but still very excited. I’ll be based out of a home office and traveling a little around the region as a “field service engineer”, which basically means that I accompany an account executive and answer technical questions about the products. I can do this with a minimum of hassle because we used quite a few of these products at my current-soon-to-be-former employer and know full well how great they are, albeit a little on the pricey side. In any case, it’s the first time I’ve ever worked in a sales-type of role.

Luckily, the AE I’m working with is pretty seasoned so I can concentrate on technical stuff for now. He’s a strong believer in minimizing the amount of overnight traveling, which is another bonus. Our location puts us within about a 4 hour drive of most of our territory, so we should be able to do day trips throughout the middle of the week, reserving Mondays and Fridays for office days.

I’m pretty stoked. A couple of former co-workers have already moved over to this company, so I’ll already know some of the folks on the team. I haven’t worked from home in several years now, but thoroughly enjoyed it when I did. We’re having to rejigger some of the rooms in order to clear enough room for an office, but everyone seems to be taking it in stride. The sleeping arrangements were going to change anyway, so they’re just changing a little ahead of schedule.

Anyway, it’s been brewing for a couple of weeks, but for obvious reasons I had to keep mum.
Having given notice at work, I can talk about it now with no small amount of relief.

Oh, and: W00T!