Stepping Out for a Breath of Fresh Air

Today was my last day at work for a while. For those of you who don't already know, I've gone and quit my job again. What is it they say? "Quitters Never Win. Winners Never Quit. But those who never win and never quit are idiots."

So the house of houses is complete and has been so for about a month. I've spent the last 30 days slowly checking items off an ever growing punch list of running toilets, nicks in the siding, stained floors, missing smoke detectors, wood encrusted concrete, room temperature fluctuations, etc, etc, etc. The list was about 4 pages long and seemed to grow as fast or faster than I could make it shrink. I now feel a tinge of guilt (at least for the next few hours) for leaving Joe (the co-superintendent on the project) with a load of potential changes from the owner including such items as an additional window shade in the guest house to block out the light coming from the additional window in the guest house added last year($50,000), raising the kitchen counters 2" so that his wife won't strain her back placing dirty dishes in the sink for the maid to wash ($80,000), or moving the $20,000 plasma TV in the library over one bay because the temp desk he placed in there makes the TV look un-centered in the room ($150,000). Do I sound overly cynical? Maybe this was the right time to get out. The long and short of it is, it feels done, it looks done, I'm proud of what I did and it's time to move on before I have to re-do half of it.

So.... what's next? Well... that's a very good question, I'm glad you asked.

Suwei and I are moving to Colorado. We will move out of our apartment next Friday, then we'll go to Red Rocks in Las Vegas for a week's worth of climbing, then we'll haul a load out to Colorado in order to fill up more of her parent's basement, then we'll return to the bay area so that Suwei can spend two more weeks working for "The Man", then she'll start her leave of absence and we'll fly to China and points beyond for a six month-ish holiday of loosely planned but wholly un-thought out adventures.

In order to keep in touch with our many good friends and to keep some kind of record of how the hell we're spending these many long months of absolute freedom, I have decided to venture into the world of blogging.

So, here we are with the first entry and my awkward return to the digital version of putting a very rusty pen to paper. I hope you all enjoy and stay tuned for more.

Here is a link to a few more photos of the Creekside house: http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AZNGbFw3aM2yq

Here is a link to my Picasa slideshow:

Creekside House, Woodside, CA