daverea.com

According to the little 6-inch screen that protrudes from my armrest, we’re at 31,000 feet. Climbing toward cruising altitude, the big 777 barely feels like it’s moving – but the cloud ceiling, a mile below, reminds me otherwise as it slides beneath us. If that weren’t enough, the screen flicks to a new view that says our ground speed is 550MPH. Edwin McCain is covering Treehouse’s “Losing Tonight” in my headphones.

The fact that my two colleagues and I are returning from Germany a day early doesn’t make me any less homesick, and doesn’t make the trip any shorter: we’re 45 minutes into an 8-hour flight, and to survive the East-to-West time change, you’ve got to stay awake. “Power through it,” I say every time we make this trip. The jury’s still out on how well I’ll be able to resist the urge to sleep – several fellow occupants of business class have slipped the surly bonds of consciousness already…

As my iPod vectors over to “The Kiss” (which is about a lipstick kiss left on the outside of an airplane window) I think about how long it’s been since Kelly and I have flown anywhere together. My mind wanders toward home… It’s a little before 8AM there now – I bet she’s reaching to snooze the alarm clock as I type this. By some combination of careful secrecy and dumb luck, she has no idea I’m here in 15A twenty four hours ahead of schedule. She doesn’t know I’ll be touching down in Rochester right around the time she sits down to dinner, and she won’t expect it when I call to tell her I’m waiting for her on the far side of the front door with a weary grin and a few bottles of German wine.

The pilot banks a bit, and the slivers of sunlight sneaking through the closed windows shift an inch or two. I glance again at the screen: a little over four hours of airtime to go. The meal and movie are over now, and the darkness of the cabin is interrupted only by the glow from reading lights, laptop screens and the galley. Despite how many people you can pack into them, airplanes can be lonely places. But their redemption from our human perspective? Outside the obvious, they enable all the feelings that inevitably go along with travelling: excitement, anxiety, longing, homesickness, and the joy of reunion.

“The Riddle” from Train is playing now:

“I guess we’re big and I guess we’re small…
If you think about it, man you know we’ve got it all.
‘Cause we’re all we’ve got on this bouncing ball…
and I love you free, I love you free so…
Here’s a riddle for you…find the answer:
There’s a reason for the world:
You and I.”

As I left church this morning, the weather was (for once) just beginning to follow last night’s forecast… The sun was clearing, the temperature was rising, and I was headed for Finger Lakes Coffee Roasters to pick up a cup of Jamaican blend. About a thousand different ways to spend the day ran through my head – hence the title of this post. I went with #608.

Unfinished projects are very low on my list of “things that make me feel good about my life,” so finding one to finish was a high priority. The sun helped out there – over the past few months, the clouds have muddied up the light on most of my days off, keeping me from finishing the great “let’s replace all the light switches and electric jacks in the house” project. Seriously, the work is desperately needed – but awfully hard to do without some natural light to work by!

My triumph for today? Knocking off another two rooms from “pending” to “done”. Our family room now has nice new decora switches, and jacks that plugs don’t fall out of! The office has a nice simple new switch (as opposed to the motion detector that never worked) and the front lights are now controlled by a snazzy new digital timer wallswitch. Thank you, Leviton!

After an afternoon of enjoying the sunlight, sampling new music, playing with the cat and doing a bunch of other things that life hasn’t had room for in months, I headed out to Tooley’s furniture. Why? To buy a pair of shaker tables to use as desks in our new office. It was a good day to do things better-not-put-off.

In 4 weeks, hopefully I’ll be typing from a new office that can finally be called “done”!

Every few months (or, in some guys’ brains, every few minutes) conditions line up just right for me to go car shopping. Sometimes I’m just “being a car guy” – strolling the lots on a Sunday afternoon, with no interest in actually buying (or even pricing) anything. Other times, something on my car will break or malfunction, and I’ll start wondering (again) if it might be getting close to trade-in time. Yet other times (like tonight), I’ll visit an auto show or see some juicy tidbit of automotive news, and it’ll send me browsing on autotrader or running GM employee price sheets…

But any time I do get serious enough about car shopping to calculate prices and payments, that’s usually where the fun – and the shopping experience – ends! I’ve got a nifty little spreadsheet that allows me to punch in a bunch of information – from the price of the car I’ve got my eye on, to the rate and term of a car loan – and spits out a nice little table of down-payment amounts versus monthly payments. Yes, I’m already aware I’m a geek, no need to remind me…

Now I’m just gonna throw something out here: Call me crazy, but I think it’s a little nuts to spend $300+ per month on something, for five years, that will be worth nowhere near what you’ve spent on it when you’re ready to sell. OK, OK, I realize we’re talking about cars here and not mutual funds… And I realize that this is just the way the car world works… But… Geez!

I already know what many of you (OK, well, at least 2 of you) are probably saying: just buy a cheaper car, Dave! And I’m sure I could get a nice low car payment (probably under $100/month) if I took out a 60-month loan on a Chevy Aveo. The problem there is, when I buy a new car, I’d sorta like it to actually be a bit of an upgrade from what I’m driving now. And while a brand-spankin-new Aveo would probably be more reliable than my big Oldsmobile sedan, it just doesn’t measure up in my eyes. I want a smooth ride, a reasonable dose of performance, comfortable seats and minimum wind noise. My Olds already has all this stuff, and I’m even willing to overlook its quirks and gremlins to keep my butt in a comfy leather bucket seat.

No matter how you slice it, the proposition just isn’t worth it to me. If I get a cheap car, I exchange comfort and luxury for reliability. If I lease a nicer car, I exchange ownership for a low payment. If I buy a used car, I give up a long warranty in exchange for lower cost. And if I just hang onto my Olds? Well, I get to sock away $300 in savings each month!

And this is pretty much how my thought process goes each time I get the urge to price out cars. And this is why, every time I set my cruise control just to find it’s not working today, or every time my transmission goes on the fritz, or every time my climate control decides to go braindead, I just tell myself: I’m getting paid three hundred bucks a month to drive this car!

And then I keep on motoring down the road…

This morning, I’m deviating from my routine just a bit – and paying a visit to a local supplier instead of heading straight to the office. As a result, I’ve found myself with – holy wow! – a whopping 30 minutes of unexpected free time! What better time to update my dusty and all-but-forgotten weblog?

Yes, I know – it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. But I guess it’s not without good reason … we’ve been up to lots of good stuff! The office remodel is coming along great, and in about 10 days we’re hoping to have the new floor installed. After that, we lay in baseboard and install a new cabinet in the closet, and the room is finissimo! We’ve already finished the front foyer…

In between all this, Kelly has somehow managed to find the time to hunt down a new job! That’s right folks … now that she’s officially an NP, she even gets to use her skills! I couldn’t be more proud – she’s worked hard through years of grad school, and now she finally gets to enjoy the fruits of her labor.

Me, on the other hand? I guess I’ve been keeping pretty busy too – between 60-hour weeks, a trip to Detroit in February, lots of project work at home, and prep for an upcoming jaunt over to Germany, I’m managing to reach new heights of utter dependence on my PDA… [grin]

Of course, there’s lots to talk/complain/rant/whine about, and in the weeks since I last posted, I must have had a hundred experiences that made me think, “oh I should totally blog about this”. Unfortunately, most of them fade from memory (or, more accurately, are pushed out by a multitude of pending tasks) before they make it into Wordpress. But the one I’ll leave you with today was too good to forget…

About 2 weeks ago, Ken (one of my fellow engineers at GM) and I were unpacking a large whiteboard to hang on the wall of the electronics lab that we co-manage and inhabit almost daily. After removing the board, I reached into the box to grab the plastic bag of hardware at the bottom. The box was about 4′ high, and caught the middle of my chest as I reached in – and as I reached for the hardware, I was surprised at just how strong this cardboard actually was! Reaching farther and farther, my feet started to lose traction on the dusty floor – and if you’d have walked into the lab that moment, you would have found me skidding frantically to keep from falling head-first into the box, shouting “insufficient traction! insufficient traction! get me outta here!” at Ken as he laughed uncontrollably – still holding the whiteboard and unable to come to my aid.

Eventually, he managed to put down the board, stroll over (after he stopped laughing) and pull me out of the whiteboard box by my collar. The moral of the story? Well, obviously, don’t cut a 4-foot-high box open at the rim then reach in for something at the bottom? But the deeper moral? I guess it comes down to this: Whatever hardship you must endure today, there’s a good chance it’s not as embarassing (or as funny, for that matter) as nearly falling face-first into a 5-inch-wide cardboard box.