Another Bird, More Similar Feathers

I was talking to a friend about coming for a BBQ today at 4 and asked how it would work for his son. AJ is 4 months old, so naturally what I meant was whether it was a good time with respect to naps. My friend, in just my sarcastic manner, said "I checked his schedule and he is definitely free in the afternoon and evening."

Birds of a Feather

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to talk a neighbor into interviewing for one of our engineering jobs. He's not going to right now because his wife is pregnant, and the baby is due in May. They don't know the gender, yet.

"Are you going to find out?"
"Well, yeah, eventually."
"Oh, yeah. You'd fit in fine at our office."

When else?

Rachel often spends Wednesday afternoons and evenings with my parents. The other night, my mother was getting out vitamins after dinner:

"What are you doing, Carol?"
"Getting out the evening vitamins."
"What about the evening dessert?"

Stick It to the Man

Thursday, we got something in the mail from the state controller's office, addressed to the previous owner, a woman who was in her 90s, living a convalescent home, when we bought the house 6 years ago this month. We opened the letter to make sure it wasn't something about the property that would matter to us.

It's not. It's a notice that some account is going to be turned over to the state later this year if they don't hear from her. At first glance, I thought it was about $39k, so I figured I'd call the realtor and see if she knew how to get in touch with him. This was easy; until we decided to put an offer on the house, she was also our realtor, and she has been the buyer's realtor for every property anyone in my family as bought in the last 25 years.

She said she'd do some searching; the family was actually represented by the second son and she had a fax that seemed to have been his. She told me his name and said she put out some feelers and to let her know if I found anything. I was going to leave it at that until I took a closer look at the letter. It turns out that it's not 39k dollars, it's 39k shares of Franklin CA tax-free income, a mutual fund worth $7 a share. If you don't feel like doing the math yourself, 30k shares would be 210,000 and 40k shares would be 280,000. Dollars.

I typed the name into Zaba Search, though I don't really think much of that organization, based on some of what they planned to do and how they planned to do it. They were going to allow anyone to write anything about anyone and have almost no way for people to refute the statements or find out who wrote it. Haven't paid much attention to find out whether they did.

The search turned up a variety of people with the name, something like 54 in the state, one of whom appeared to live in the Bay Area and be the right general age (71). I clicked on one of the links, to intellius.com, and got back an initial list of names. One of them happened to show that the first name is an abbreviation (Leo), and the 71 year-old I was looking at is named Leonard and happens to have lived in Berkeley.

I paid $7.90 to get a list of 14 of these Leonards, starting with that one. I probably could have stuck with the $2.95 version but figured I might as well splurge for the extra $5 to see if they had any address or phone number confirmation. I called the phone number (same area code and prefix of the fax number Gaby gave me) and spoke to the woman who answered.

I tried to establish some credibility by giving her my whole name (and by calling on my unblocked cell phone) and telling her that I'd bought my house in Berkeley from him. She asked me if it was a certain address, which is next door, so I corrected her. That seemed to do it. Leo was out at the time, but she's going to have him call back and was very appreciative - I think she thanked me about 6 times when we were getting off the phone, and I didn't even tell her how much it was worth. I did mention that it seemed as if it was a fair amount of money.

Trying to Organize

"Look rubber gloves!"

"I called to say hi and see how you're doing, not have you ridicule my collections of crap."

Waiting for Butter

Look! There is the plastic wrap for the butter. Waiting, patiently, for the butter to come back.

Really?

Yes! And it's going to be upset if it gets thrown in the trash, rather than used for the butter. Because it's waiting for the butter.

OK!

And this is NOT like waiting for Godot!

Recipe Rescue

I have been making sourdough rye muffins, with buttermilk, every Saturday morning for several weeks. My father has been doing the same for most, if not all, of my life, and Rachel has enjoyed helping him occasionally when she's at his house, so now we make them too.

Last weekend, apparently, the recipe fell down between the oven and the cabinet. I guess Dawn knew it was down there, because yesterday when she wanted to make sure we had everything we would need to make them today, she started trying to get it back out.

Rachel was home sick from school, and had the idea to put a piece of tape on the end of a stick (that we normally use for getting the cats' toys out from under things) and getting it to stick to the paper. It was a great idea, and saved us having to move the stove!

Projecting Something

I've never really enjoyed project management all that much, but I'm starting to have to be more active about it to make things work well in my current job. As a result, I actually (gasp) created a project plan from scratch today.

In the process, I learned something kind of cool about Microsoft Project. We do our production deployments for one customer on Tuesdays, so when I put in tasks for deploying to production, I want them always to show up on the next available Tuesday, but I don't want to have to adjust it any time I change other things in the sequence.

I happened across a page somewhere that talked about 'task calendars', so I started monkeying around with them. Ultimately, I created a calendar called 'Production Runs' that has working hours only from 5pm to 11:59 pm on Tuesdays and assigned the production deployment tasks to that calendar.

Project complains when I do that the first time for a task that there aren't enough working hours, and I haven't figured out why, but it does what it should - as I change other things about the sequence of tasks, the production deployment tasks automatically shift to the proper Tuesday.

Now I just need to go back in and change the weeks when we'll be deploying late because of Monday holidays.

Keeping Track Of Things

So, one of my co-workers uses a notebook (meaning actual pen and paper) to keep track of things she needs to work on and notes about what to do and how and why. She finds it very helpful. For some reason, I'm perpetually amused by how much she writes down. None of this is to say I couldn't help myself by keeping better notes (or perhaps recapturing some of the really good memory I seem to remember having) as evidenced by this exchange today:

her: I just wrote that all down in my notebook for my next to-do list
me: You and you're notebook. I prefer just to forget things at random.

Tom, Meet Rachel

We took groceries over to our friends K & J's house and made dinner for them tonight; their son is 4 weeks old today, having been born coincidentally on our anniversary. We told them several stories, including this one Dawn told that I'd forgotten until she started telling it...

When Rachel was very young, maybe as little as 4 weeks old or younger, but certainly before 5 months, since we were still in the old house, we were showing her to Tom, or maybe showing her him. One of us was holding her down very low to the floor and he came right up and sniffed her, as cats so often do.

As he was doing this, completely and utterly without warning, she sneezed right in his face. One of those gooey sneezes that sends several tendrils of spit into his fur and whiskers. His ears flattened out, he lowered his body and flinched away from her, squinting. Then after a moment's stunned silence he jumped away and ran downstairs.

It was hysterical.