As I write this, there are dark clouds outside, with the low pitched rolls of thunder echoing off the hills. Boy, that brings back memories from living in northern Arizona. Every afternoon in the summer, it seemed like, the storm clouds would rise over the Mogollon Rim and form into thunderheads, and give a nice monsoon rain and lighting show. I miss that…

Work has been going well, and unlike what I’ve been hearing on the news about this economy being broken on the side of the road, my company has been super busy. My own team has about 11 different projects on our plate right now, and I know the two other teams have a bunch of their own as well. Sometimes it can be a struggle to stay on top of things. No, make that all the time. Add to that my inexperience with everything  in this job (I’ve been here for seven months though, wow! ), things can sometimes get overwhelming. I did gain an engineering assistant for a few months, (who happened to be old enough to be my father; that was interesting ), but then he was moved to the new wind energy division in the company, so I’m back to being the lone ranger team again. That will change next week when I gain a new engineer fresh from college, who happens to be a young woman (I think she’s older than me though). So we’ll see how that works out. Also Andrew will be working with me part time, since things are kind of slow in the construction world. That should be good; I’ll be able to tell him what needs to be done without saying anything! Overall, things have been really busy and sometimes stressful, but I’m enjoying what I do, and I think most everyone there likes me. It’s sort of cool when the more experienced engineers come to you for help with things.

I finally decided to get a newer car, after Peach started having heavy vibrations in the front suspension, and finding out it would cost about $1800 to fix everything that needed fixing. I bought a 2001 Honda Civic HX coupe, which has been very nice to drive. I’ve been averaging 38 mpg, and looks like it is going up.

Honda Civic

I was hoping to be able to keep Peach, and work on fixing her up, but my parents don’t seem too thrilled to have an extra car sitting around while it gets repaired. Add to that my lack of time to even try to repair it, it will have to go. I have found someone from the Tercel forum who is interested in it, so I’m glad someone else will be able to use it, even if it’s just for parts.

Among the productive things I have been doing with non working time is starting with a friend, a group of musicians to play for english country dancing. My sister holds a weekly ECD ‘class’, where we do 6 to 10 dances. It has been pretty fun. I’ve been helping with the calling for a while now, but several of us who attend are also musicians, so we have wanted to perform live music for a while now.  We played for one dance a couple weeks ago, and it went pretty well. We are going to play for 3 dances this week (we’re ambitious ). Right now, there are 5 of us, with piano, two violins, a flute/recorder, and guitar. I’m sure there will be more people who are interested in playing, and the thought is to have people sort of cycle through, because we all love dancing the dances as well. Of course having live music means you need sound equipment, so today I helped stimulate the local economy and bought another microphone and stand. It’s not the best out there, but it should be plenty decent. When I eventually get a better mixer, I’ll be able to use condensor mics, which can give a better sound (maybe I could use a preamp to give the phantom power…). I’m still relatively new to all the sound equipment, so there’s a bit of a learning curve. It can be an expensive hobby too.

The cherry trees are all blooming around here, and the days are getting longer. It’s nice.

Hmm, it’s been quite a while since I posted last. I suppose I should give an update on what has been happening in my life.

In December we received several snow storms, which left us with more than 2 feet of snow at times. That was quite amazing and fun. Peach, my 1985 Toyota Tercel 4wd wagon did wonderfully in it, with no problems whatsoever, despite the bad conditions the roads were in. But, as is to be expected on a 24 year old car, things have worn out and failed. I had to replace both the starter and the alternator within the space of a few weeks, but they were the original ones in the car, so I think it’s a pretty good deal. She is burning oil, and her gas milage of 25 mpg is a bit lower than the 34 I was getting a while ago. She probably could use an engine rebuild, but that will probably have to wait until I get another car for my daily commuter.

As for my job, it has been going well. I was recently ‘promoted’, kind of. I’m now in charge of my own engineering team, though it happens to just be a team of one right now. I’m supposed to get an engineering assistant soon though. I’m not a big fan of change, so these past few weeks have been a little tough, but it’s getting better. I’m working on my own project now, and of course am also responsible for them. This first one is replacing the controls at a site we did in 1998 with newer controls that we can monitor over the internet. That has been going mostly well, the hitch is that it is a 24 hour care facility for troubled teens, so the heating system can’t be down at all. So I’ve been staying late a lot at work, making sure things will work through the night. Overall it’s been good, but you know you still have stuff to do when the customer says ‘we never had any complaints with the old system, the only started when you guys put in this new system!’ :/ This upcoming week, I finish that project off on Monday, and start another retrofit on Tuesday. That one, I will have to be out on site to program, since the computer is on a dialup connection. It is in Vancouver, WA. So another fun week begins. O_0

With guitar, I am currently working on Bach’s Lute suite #4 ( BWV 1006a), the minuets 1 & 2 are the first parts I am tackling. Bach can be really fun to play, but it is quite difficult too. A lot of my practice is just figuring out how to finger the pieces, and go from one chord or hand position to the next. But I’m getting there.

Since I’m sure too many of you are wondering ( ), there is no news on the girl front from me. I’m just staying busy with other stuff, and figuring out where I’m heading. Dad says I should be thinking of what kind of things  I’m looking for in a girl, so I have been doing some of that. So many things, it’s hard to know how it will turn out. And in the mean time, just trying to make sure I don’t do anything stupid.

So yeah, that’s the update from me. TTFN! Ta ta for now!

Well, I finally recorded the piece, here it is both in audio and video:

http://www.filedropper.com/prelude1_1

(Click the ‘Download this file’ button; I need to get a better file hosting service…)

Well, I’ve played guitar off and on since I finished the recording, but haven’t really studied or practiced a new piece since then. So I figure I’d better start one. Right now I’m working on the Prelude from Lute Suite no. 4 by Silvius Leopold Weiss, which seems interesting. I doesn’t look particularly challenging, and it is only a page long, but the trick will be memorizing it, and making it melodic. I tried looking for a recording of it on iTunes, but I couldn’t find this specific one. I will record it once I’ve got it perfected.

This Sunday, I am playing the accompaniment for a duet between a tenor and alto at church. It’s called Do you believe in me?. It’s a nice piece.

I think the next guitar I’ll get will have a pickup built in, as that would make things a lot easier for performing at church and recording. I like the Yamaha Silent Guitar, it’s pretty cool.

Man, I love music.

As a lot of you already know, I finally have a job now. I’m working for a HVAC contractor, that does Air Conditioning installations for large buildings like hospitals and universities. It is pretty interesting so far, and I’m enjoying it. I help with the design and layout work of the control systems, and programming as well. It is located in the small town of Independence, Oregon, of about 9000 people.

So yeah, finally have a job. I’m glad to be a useful member of society now.

I thought I’d post how to join a gmail group chat using adium.

It usually starts with one of your friends inviting you to a group chat:

Click on the link, and it brings you to this page:

Click the button, but then stop the new window from loading completely. If you need to, go to the view menu, and click ‘Show Toolbar’ so you can see the URL. It should look like this:

Now, click in the url and move to the right until you see this:

You want to select what I have selected here, though the letters and numbers will be different. The important thing is you start selecting where it says ‘private-chat’, and stop selecting right before the ‘%’ sign. Copy this.

Now go back to Adium, and go to the File menu, and choose ‘Join Group Chat…’

In the window that opens, make sure you have your gmail account selected, and paste what you copied earlier into the box that says ‘Chat Room Name’, over what is in there already. Click ‘Join’, and you should be in the group chat! In the group chat, it show’s the other users names a little oddly, but hopefully this will be fixed in future versions of Adium.

As some of you know, I grew up living in a Navy family. Though on the tail end of my father’s career in the service, I did get to experience many of the things only military families can. One of those was moving. I’ve lived over 5 widely different places in the country, and have also traveled abroad some with my family. I always thought it was a great experience, being able to have lived so many different places, and having a little broader view of things was much better than some of my friends, who have lived in the same state, or even the same house their whole life.

Our last large move, was from Arizona to here in Oregon. We had lived in AZ the longest place we lived anywhere, 9 years. I was 16 when we left, and it was hard. I had good friends, I loved the area where we lived, and it was home. Once we got to Oregon, it took me a while to get used to the change, and for a long time I didn’t like it. I didn’t really like living in the middle of a farming community, I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t walk out my front door and go hike a mountain like I could in AZ, and I didn’t like the rainy winters. Now, 8 years later, I do like it here, and think the two places are about equal (very different though). I’ve met a lot of good friends here as well.

Which I guess brings me to now. I’m done with school, out looking for a job. Now that I have the opportunity to strike out on my own, to move, if I want, to the another part of the country, or even the world, will I? I guess it seemed easier when I wasn’t the one making the decision. We were just moving, and that was that. Some of our friends in Flagstaff said ‘you guys can’t move!’, and I was sort of thinking, ‘watch us!’. I don’t think I’m so brave, or flippant about it now. Friends are important. Moving to a place where you don’t know anyone is unnerving. Gosh, I’m not even sure if I’m brave enough to go travel the world! I have one friend who was raised both overseas and in the states, and thinks nothing of hopping on a plane to go to another country. Another regularly goes to India for extended periods to help in missions work there. A third just moved across the country for a job. But maybe all those are somewhat temporary. Maybe if they were looking at a longer term commitment, like I am, they wouldn’t do things the same. Several of the companies I’ve interviewed for, are looking for someone to stick around for the long haul. Someone who will be around for more than 5 years, or even 10. These are scary times, my friends.

I do expect to move some distance away from home, just because there are not really any engineering jobs in my town to speak of. And I am quite tired of the 50 mile commutes each day I’d make to college or to work over the summer. But how far will I move, just an hour away from home, or several days travel? This will be an interesting year, to be sure.

Hello all!

Been a while since I last posted… not a whole bunch to report, I think I’m close to having a job, but that’s another blog post when it’s certain.

The news I wanted to share is, my CD’s are ready! I don’t have them yet, but they are being shipped from the printer in CA today. Here are some details:

It has 13 tracks, mostly from the classical guitar genre, with a few celtic tunes.
Um… I don’t know what else to share, so here’s the part you all are wondering :

So, I’m giving these away for free, but I wouldn’t mind having donations for them either. It would be nice to have enough so I end up all even. It costs around $3 to make each cd, not including shipping. You can send donations to me via PayPal.

If you would like a CD, send me an email at 4wdtercel@gmail.com, with your address. I will only send out 1 cd per person/family right now, because I only ordered 100 CD’s, and I’m not sure how many people will want them. If there are a bunch more people that want one, I might do another run later on. If you’re in my vicinity in Oregon, I could also give it to you in person. With the HSA reunion coming up too, maybe I could send people theirs via my sister, I’m not sure though…

Hmm, I think that’s it! Email me if you want one!

I’ve long held the opinion that honesty is the best policy, no matter what. Even if it means being blunt and maybe offending someone.

Though, I wonder now, if one shouldn’t be so honest or blunt, when one is asked ‘what do you think of working here?’ or, ‘what would your dream job look like?’; if it means you might not get the job. I knew going in that it wasn’t the most exciting, cutting edge type of engineering out there, but the company is good, and the work is interesting, from what I’ve seen. The manager did say that he doesn’t want to hire someone that after a year on the job, decides it’s not what they want to do, and I can’t blame him for that. So, he got the blunt answer. Let the chips fall where they may, I guess…

 

Yay, I’m done with college! There was a ceremony for the Mechanical, Industrial, and  Manufacturing Engineering (M.I.M.E) Department Saturday evening, and the big commencement on Sunday, with the whole university.