SixFeetOver version 4.0

Growing Up

Sometimes I wonder what I will be when I grow up. I'm currently a software developer, a field in which age discrimination is rampant. Software developers have trouble finding work after age 40, at least work as a software developer. That's probably one reason so many become managers.

I had a couple chance meetings a couple months ago that struck me. The first was at the Topsfield Fair. I stopped by to see the blacksmith display (which, incidentally, was really great) and spoke to one of the guys there. He asked me what my line of work was, and when I said "software engineer", he replied by saying "Ah yes. I did my time as a software engineer on the North Shore, too. I gave it up and now I'm doing what I  love." What he loved was being a blacksmith and a martial artist (martial arts being the second thing we had in common).

The other meeting was at Red Hook brewery. Alice and I took the tour there (which is only $1, and you get plenty of beer samples, and keep the glass - a great deal). Same response from this guy when he asked after my line of work: "Oh yeah, I did my time doing that. Now I'm doing what I love." What he loved was hanging out with his buddies, giving tours, and drinking great beer all day.

It makes me wonder what I will be doing for work when I'm 40. Of course, there's a big difference between those guys and me: I don't feel at all like I am "doing my time" - I love my job and will be happy to work there for a long time yet.

In Awe

Lately I am in a constant state of awe.

I've been continuously overwhelmed by the many blessings I have recieved, especially in the last year. My apartment, job, church, and wife are all amazing.  Our one year anniversary just passed, and Alice and I have had a wonderful first year of marriage. It's certainly taken some getting used to - especially learning to jointly manage finances - but it's been great.

My apartment is about as great as I could possibly ask for. We've got plenty of space, appliances that work, fast maintenance, and we're in a great location. We have noise from the people above us issues, but in the grand scheme of things, that is a very small complaint. I even have two bathrooms. Amazing.

My job is fantastic. The people I work with are fabulous, and the environment is great. The stuff we put together is pretty incredible, too. When I first started there, I was distracted at how "ugly" our main software offering is, but now I understand the crazy power of it. I can build UIs in a desktop application without ever writing any code, and push out those changes immediately to our clients. That's crazy. I've learned just a phenomenal amount about programming, team work, business, sales, and more in my year and a half there. I've got the freedom to be creative in my solutions and to bring my own set of skills to the company in a way that complements my strengths, with no beaurocracy getting in the way. My boss is even a developer himself - not at all the pointy haired clueless stereotype, but a brilliant programmer and manager combo. Amazing.

Mike and Amy got married last month as well. I was able to organize a sailing trip for Mike's bachelor party. The family of my friend Chris stepped in and took us sailing for free. And the weather that day was perfect. They had no reason to take us sailing - Chris wasn't even able to make it - and yet, they did, and were happy to do it. Amazing.

Church is amazing, too. Our congregation has stepped up and found the funds to do some incredible renovations to our church, due in large part to a huge matching gift that someone was able to offer. The teaching there is great, and Alice and I have just gotten involved with the College Ministry - a ministry that was a huge blessing to me while I was in college. Amazing.

Of course, there is plenty going on right now for some people very dear to me that is not wonderful. However, it looks to me like God is fully in control of my life and is taking great care of me and the people around me. I spend a lot of time feeling stuck not knowing what to do about the bad things going on, but when I stop and realize that it's not up to me to figure it out, but to follow the guidance of He who is in control, that's pretty...well, amazing.

Offline

We're Getting ready to go camping tommorow. It's actually going to be quite nice to be away from screens and beeps and flourescent lights and such. Looking forward to it...although I should have been asleep two hours ago. Shame on me. Anyway, here's hoping it doesn't rain the whole time.

Okay, okay

So, Mike eloquently pointed out to me that I've had a blog for nearly a decade.  That's quite something.  Of course, over those 10 years, I've posted less than some people post in a month or two, which is also quite something, but in a negative way. Not only that, but after decided to finally post yesterday, I was unable to access my site, and today as I wrote this, Verizon (internet by Satan, Inc.) decided to disconnect me again.When last we met, I had posted about my immentent EoB (End of Bacherlorhood).  Our wedding was fantastic.  It went exactly like we hoped it would.  The only downside to the whole thing was that it was in 110% humidity, which makes wearing a tux a bit uncomfortable.  Nate was able to be a groomsman, which was awesome.  Mike was the best-best man-man one could hope for.  And of course, my bride was the most beautiful bride that ever has been. I mean that in the most objective way possible.Our honeymoon was great, too. We went on a cruise in the Carribean, hung out with hurricaine Ike a bit (which resulted in us missing one stop, but getting some awesome thunderstorms), and caught up on tons of sleep.We've settled nicely in to our apartment, which is in a great location, right near routes 95, 1, and 62.   We had a huge fiasco getting our second car, but that's all settled now and we're finally able to start going full force against the Evil Student Loan Demon.Alice is now working at Breuer with me as a project manager, which is great. We save lots on gas by driving together to work.  It's been an interesting adjustment in some ways, because Alice used to get out of work a couple hours before me and was able to do wonderful things like getting groceries, which we now have to do at odd times because we usually work till 5:30-6:00 ish (sometimes til past 7:00, but that's rare).   It's definitely interesting for me to now be getting support tickets and programming projects assigned to me by my wife!Anyway, that's all for now. I'm actually home sick and working from home today (which is great that I can do that when needed!).  Sorry Mike, no pictures this time.  Maybe soon though!

Down to the Wire

Currently, it is 10:15AM on Friday, September 5th.  In 25 hours - tomorrow at 11:00 or so - my wedding ceremony will commence.  These are my final hours as a bachelor.  It's been a wild ride planning and getting ready for a wedding - not to mention getting ready for a marriage.  But Alice, my bride, is so wonderful, and I am so excited to spend my life with her.  I can't imagine anyone else for me.

It's exciting, and scary, and fun, and every possible emotion rolled in to one.   But primarily it is exciting, and I am very much looking forward to being married to my beautiful bride.

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Busy Year

Wow, this has been / will continue to be quite a year.

This year, 2008, I graduated with honors from Gordon College, was inducted in to the Phi Alpha Chi honors society, got engaged, will get married, will become officially moved out of my house in New Hampshire (although I haven't really lived there in awhile, except over last Christmas break), was accepted into two PhD. graduate programs for mathematics, deferred for one of them, got a job as a software/database developer, and will eventually purchase my second car.

Not only that, but I have been out to Minnesota once already this year (where I proposed), am flying to Colorado tomorrow, will be taking a honeymoon somewhere in September, and then will be going back to Minnesota for a second wedding reception for all of Alice's friends and family who could not make it out here.

I don't think I've ever done so many things in any one year of my life before...or even any five years!

I'm so thankful for how blessed Alice and I have been this year - blessed by God and our families. Alice and I are even going to be working close to each other (just a town or two apart), which will make our living situation very manageable. And, since Mike is PhD'ing himself in Amherst, we'll still be able to get together semi-regularly. And we'll be living a whole 20ish minutes closer! w00t!

Engaged

This post is a little late, but on March 14th I proposed to Alice, and we are now engaged!  We went out to Minnesota for spring break to visit her family, and I popped the question while we were out there.  Her parents were in on the plot, which added to the fun.  We of course called quite a few people that afternoon to share the news, and it turns out that her grandparents got engaged 55 years and 1 day before we did.  Interestingly, we hope to get married in September, which would potentially mean we would also get married 55 years and 1 day after her grandparents did!

Now we are kind of scrambling to find a church to have the ceremony in, and a place to do the reception.  Most places are extremely expensive.  Google informs me that the average cost of a wedding these days is $15,000-$30,000 - ridiculous.  We are going to spend only a fraction of that, and it will still be nice.  If you have any ideas for venues to look in to, please tell us - we'd love to hear it.  We're going for rustic but elegant, like a big lodge or something.

In other news, I was accepted with a full ride and stipend to Colorado State University for the PhD program in math; however, I am now planning on taking the year off so Alice and I can get married.  That means I'm now in the job market, something I despise - I hate applying for things.  Hopefully I'll find a technical job though - something to do with math and programming would be great.

I'm not sure if anyone still checks this site, but if so - thanks.   I foresee myself keeping it more up to date in the near future, especially after graduation.  I'll have to document all my photo trips with Alice, Mike, and Amy.

August 17th

So much happened last Friday (August 17th) that I can't come up with an appropriate title for this post.

First of all, it was the last day of my twelve weeks of summer research. It wrapped up pretty quietly. I had been working on a proof that ended up being incorrect, and a program that ended up not working as we hoped, but my professor tells me he thinks both will still be useful in the future, at least as a starting point for something else. Perhaps it is true, and perhaps he means to make me feel better. I'm not sure.  It was also Alice's last day as a camp councilor. It was also our anniversary!

Alice called me at about 1:00 PM on Friday, which was unusual - she had never made a phone call from work before, that I was aware of. She said "Hey - how would you like to go to the Patriots game tonight? My boss can give me two free tickets, worth $90.00 each." Well! I said of course I'd like to go, I've never been to a professional sporting event before, and a Patriots game would be my first choice of one to go to. Unfortunately, she hung up and as soon as she did I realized that we had no real way to get to Gilette stadium in Foxboro - neither one of us have cars, and the train doesn't go out there. (Actually, it does - but only one train goes, and we couldn't catch that one in time.) So I attempted calling back, but she had put her phone back on silent. I guessed (correctly) that she thought the stadium was right in Boston, which it isn't - if it had been, we could have taken the train in no problem.

Anyway, we ended up finding a car to borrow. Actually, a massive, handicap-ramp equipped van is what we found, but it still got us there. We left for our supposed 1-hour journey at 6:45 (kickoff was at 8:00), knowing we'd be late but figuring we'd get in by 8:30ish. We were both very naive, having never done this before. We had about $17 between us when we got near the stadium (at 8:15), and soon discovered that traffic was crazy and horrible, and parking costs $40. Long story short: after much driving, and me running into the stadium to find an ATM, and Alice driving around to find one, Alice ended up getting cash first but getting to the lot so late in the game that they didn't charge for parking (which was nice). We ended up getting to see all of the second half of the game. I saw the last bits of the first half while I wait for Alice to park too.

We had decent seats. Several people came down to get their pictures taken next to our seat since there was a good view of the stadium there; all who came said it was either their first game, their anniversary, or both. The guys behind us asked us "Say, it doesn't happen to be your first game too, does it?" We said "Actually, it is, AND it's our anniversary!" So he kindly took our picture for us, and we got a good laugh.

The Patriots ended up loosing to the Titans (my grandfather in Tennessee is happy, at least), and despite the headache of getting there and not getting to bed till really late (nearly 2:30 AM), it was a good experience and a lot of fun.

The next day I was up at about 7:50AM, preparing to move out. Dad came and helped me move out and move back to Gordon; Alice also came to help out, which was very nice. I finished unpacking and moving in by around 10:30 that night. So now I'm back at Gordon, and have one more day off before I start work again, and one week until classes resume. Here comes my senior year.