I started with Multnomah County working as a system administrator this week and aside from all the paperwork, I have been enjoying the new job. I was rather happy to learn that I won't have to be part of the 5am maintenance window very frequently. I had been trying to shift my sleep schedule to being up at 4am and had mixed results, though I'll still need to be getting up about 90 minutes before I did previously.

Something that came to mind after I left the old job is a line from Bilbo, about feeling thin, like butter spread over too much bread. I think the metaphor works on many levels and just the driving alone was kinda driving me crazy, it looks like I'll be able to reduce the driving to 1/5 of previous total and maybe even less then that.

Monday was a interesting day, I signed the paperwork for the new job with Multnomah County and turned in my two weeks notice with Xerox. I'm still getting use to the idea that I can bike to work now faster then I could drive previously, and I'm rather happy about that. The job will start out being pretty similar but I won't have to keep tabs on the systems on the weekends or any weekend work in general.

I had started to do book reviews at biohabit.org, but have found that www.GoodReads.com is much better and faster so I'll be getting the RSS feed posted here as soon as my site stops being difficult.

Last Tuesday was rather memorable, particularly the sound that my head made slamming into the sheet of plywood. It was kinda of a squishy sound, kinda like a watermelon being dropped on it's end from about a foot. Believe it or not I do happen to know that sound well from the case of watermelons I dropped when working in the kitchen's of Many Glacier Hotel.

Something I have been grappling with is about if I should sell my house or not.  Getting a bunch of cash out of the house would be nice, but given housing prices are so freaking insane I would be blowing all of the cash I would get out of my house and end up with much higher monthly mortgage payments.

Currently all signs point to me staying put for a while but I'm trying to proceed with options that I would need to do anyway.  Replace the front room window, fix the gutters, fix or rebuild the back porch and maybe replace the furnace.  I'm also having Mr. Sun Solar come out my house tomorrow to look at options for putting in photo-voltaic, solar hotwater and maybe a radiant floor heat system (see furnace).   Some of the changes I would fully expect to break even if I sold the house in the not too distant future, but I likely wouldn't break even with the photo-voltaic and possibly break even with the radiant floor heating system.