Today, Kathy came home from Target or the grocery store or Ye Olde Candy Shoppe with an amazing find: Ginger Altoids. Being the fine woman she is, she had thought of me immediately upon seeing this breathtaking item, and brought a tin back for my enjoyment.

Remarkably, they’re exactly like what you’d expect: Ginger Ale’s bigger, meaner brother. I can’t decide whether I love or hate them, but have been compulsively popping them all day.

Ginger Altoids. What a wonderful world. (Now, all they need is a curry flavor…)

Rather a lot going on right now, which leaves little time to write about it:

• Kathy’s brother Dan arrived from New York. He’s been planning for a while to come down and stay with us, but only just managed to pull up stakes and make the trip. We’re enjoying having him stay with us, and Liam and I are grateful for another man around the house!
• Last weekend, Chris came into town for the weekend and to visit down at UT Health Science Center. We celebrated Emily’s birthday and his presence on Saturday with one of our usual backyard bacchanals: lots of eating, swimming, piñata bashing, and visiting with wonderful people, most of whom we don’t get to spend as much time with as we’d like. Thanks to all of you who helped make that a wonderful time, and to Chris and Emily for giving us a reason to celebrate.
• My friend Mark McFail had his bachelor party this week. We went camping out at a stunning spot in the hill country owned by Travis Schrank’s family, a little bit south of Kerrville. We reveled in manly company, hill country views, spring-fed creeks, Dr. Pepper, Fredericksburg peaches, cherries, and strawberries, music, and a testosterone-fueled, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to shoot a pig for dinner. I slept out in a hammock under a thick, wooly blanket that was waterproof enough that I didn’t notice that it rained on me during the night.
• I started the new job at the University. It’s been a bit of adjustment to get used to the University culture again after being in corporate America for nearly a decade, but I’m enjoying it a great deal. The library in which my office is located is amazing, and it’s a great perk to be able to find nearly any book, map, journal, or government document I might be interested in just by popping upstairs.
• My old friend Greg was in town for business and stayed with us Wednesday night. It was a great treat to get to hang out with him for an evening, enjoy good conversation and brew, and to show him a bit of what I like about San Marcos.
• Kathy’s sister Karen and her husband Jeff (who’s an old college friend of mine) are coming in this afternoon with their kids to stay with us for a week. We’re greatly looking forward to the time with them, though anticipate that having five adults and seven children under our roof may get a bit lively at times! Unfortunately, I won’t be able to skip out on work during the time they’re here, but I’ll be racing home quickly afterwards to make the most of the time with them before they head off to Africa.

Though we’re not having the party proper until Saturday, today is Emily’s 12th birthday. Congratulations, kiddo! We love you immensely, couldn’t be more proud of you, and thank God that you’re a part of our family.

• The Job Title: Systems Programmer II
• What it actually is: The University is going to be pulling all of the various departmental web sites and tools that have sprung up over time under the umbrella of one centralized Content Management System (Vignette, in this case). I’ll be programming and porting apps to the new system, doing user support, and doing some sysadmin work. This will give me a chance to dig even deeper into Java and to see whether Vignette is worth the huge price premium over Conversant! Should be a fun and interesting project, and plays much better to my professional strengths and direction than did being on the Server team at EA.
• The Pay: While it’s one of the best-paying jobs I’ve seen posted on the University’s job beard, this position pays about 20% less than my old job at EA did. While this represents a fairly significant drop to our family’s income, it should still be enough for us all to live on, especially with Kathy’s mad garage-sale skillz. (Heck, with gas prices shooting up, the mere savings from not having to drive to Austin daily will make up a fair portion of that cut.)
• The Compensatory Factors: There are a number of things that make the pay cut worth it to us. The fact that the University is about seven blocks from our house means that I’ll be able to bike to work daily, enjoy lunch with family and friends in San Marcos, and not have to spend two hours a day in the car. The University provides good educational benefits, and good leave policies. (No 100 hour per week crunch here!) The creativity and diversity of Universities is something I’ve always found a treat to be around, and was what I missed most after leaving my job at UNT. And finally, the stability has some appeal after being through this last layoff at EA.
• When: I should be starting on Monday, or Wednesday if the paperwork gets delayed.

I want to thank all the people who prayed, prodded, supported, encouraged, enquired, and reconnoitered over the past couple of months. (A special thanks to the folks who encouraged me to go back and apply a second time after they’d closed the position without hiring anybody the first time around.) I’m immensely grateful for all of your support and help.

P.S. Everyone enjoyed the soup.

Just heard from the University, and they extended me an offer! I should be starting on Monday.

More details later on; I’ve got soup to cook for tonight.

Whew, it’s been a busy day for learning. Since the job offers aren’t yet coming in at a furious rate, I’m taking advantage of the time to cram more into my brain, especially in the area of enterprise Java programming, where I hope to nail down my next job. Today I installed Tomcat on my Powerbook (which lets me run Java Server Pages), installed ant (which automates a bunch of build chores), created a pretty basic JavaBean, created unit tests for that JavaBean, created an ant buildfile that compiles the code and runs the unit tests, caught and corrected an error in the JavaBean with the unit tests, and wrote a JSP to use the JavaBean in another context. The only significant speedbump was that I’m evidently an idiot, and can’t tell “CircleTest” from “TestCircle”.

While I’ve been reading lots of Java material for the past few weeks, and have worked through many of the included examples, there’s nothing like actually writing your own stuff from scratch to come to grips with a new set of material. (I must admit I love the frisson when things actually come together and work the way they’re supposed to.)

Many thanks to Kathy for running interference with the kids while I dug into brain-work.

We watched Tim Burton’s Big Fish this evening, a beautiful meditation on the stories we tell about ourselves and how we know each other through them. The specific theme of knowing one’s father is an extraordinarily meaningful one to me, both in my roles as parent and son. As the latter, I’m still amazed when I talk with my Dad about his life, and unearth aspects of him, of his history and personality, that I never would have suspected. (“You were considering being an artist professionally?” “You ran a coffee shop in Nashville where Bob Dylan played when he came through town?”) That relationship is phenomenally important to me, and has only become more so as time has gone on.

As a father, I’m trying desperately to make myself knowable to my kids — an effort which can be only partially successful at the moment, given youth’s limited comprehension of adulthood. Part of the reason for this site is to leave a bit of a legacy of our stories for them; stories of the times that we’ve all had together as a family, but beyond that, also stories of Kathy and I that will fill in some of our history and let them know where they’ve come from.

One story that Kathy and I have both told many times, but never committed to paper, is that of how Kathy and I met. Big Fish has motivated me to write that story up now; I should have it ready to share in a few days.

P.S. For a more interesting reflection on this film, see Real Live Preacher.

A poem I’ve been working on:

I have a painting on my wall of a flaming bush.
Its leaves and branches sear the eye,
painted with the brightest titanium hues
in the artist’s palette.
A man stands nearby, shoes off,
a stricken look upon his worn face.
He has eyes for nothing but this smoldering shrub

which has sundered his life
of muted green and brown and rust.

On an aimless walk through my neighborhood,
I keep an eye on the foliage I pass,
on the off chance that it should suddenly erupt
into lucid light and give my walk direction.
Or perhaps a column of cloud will precede me,
or a post-rain puddle part
as I promenade around the suburbs,
hoping for transcendence,
but ultimately having to be content
with just a bit of exercise.

Later I sit and stare
at the painting again,
and I will the bush
to be something more than
brushstrokes and globs of paint,
to burst the two dimensions of the canvas,
and to manifest there in my living room,
igniting the carpet and maybe some furniture,
and thoroughly frightening the cat.
But a painting it stubbornly remains,
even though I double and triple-check
long after the kids have all gone to bed.

It’s the loveliest time of the year in central Texas. The Mountain Laurel and Redbud had burst into extravagant and fragrant bloom a few weeks back, rendering walks through the neighborhood full of delightful visual and olfactory surprises. Lady Bird Johnson’s legacy of highways seeded with wildflowers has again made itself evident, as the Black-Eyed Susans, Indian Paintbrushes, Indian Blankets, Verbenas, and (most of all) Bluebonnets adorn the hill country roadways. The weather is so wonderful that it feels criminal to be indoors for nearly any reason whatsoever. The prickly pear and magnolia are now presenting the grand blossoms that they have been patiently growing while the eager wildflowers spent their glory.

And I’m stuck inside preparing for tests. Figuring that this would be a great time to add some official credentials to my resume, I signed up for one of Sun’s Java certification exams for Tuesday. Then, somewhat to my surprise, I got another call from the University yesterday, and now have a Thursday interview with the staff there. Being a University, the interview also includes a written test. So, I’m doing my best to be prepared for both tests by digging into my Java and J2EE materials.

One of the positions for which I’m applying, that of a Technical Advisor for a law firm, requires a writing sample as part of the job application. Realizing that most of what I have written and posted on this site might not be directly germane to such a job, I’ve written up a short primer on mesh networking which I plan to submit for this purpose.

If any of you technical and/or writerly types are so inclined and have time, I’d welcome your feedback so that I can hone the piece a bit before submitting it.