Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

It's official. Dana has left Amgen. Early last fall she interviewed for a legal internship at a large intellectual property focused law firm in Denver. In December they finally gave her the word that they wanted her. Although she tried to take a Leave of Absence for the semester-long internship, the good people in Amgen's middle management couldn't come to agreeable terms. So Dana said a fond "sayonara" to all the friends she made over the last 5 years in Longmont, and packed up her rubber gloves and little magnetic molecule models, and left biotech manufacturing behind.

We'll miss her pretty good health benefits, but I expect she won't miss a start time of 6am.

This week she's recovering, and preparing for her new internship, along with the usual studying and cooking and keeping her two boys happy.

I am flying to Houston tomorrow (Tuesday) for a business trip til Friday. Dana's Mom Susan is here to help out in my absence, and she and Ryanne appear to be getting along famously. I'm dreading this trip -- I'm to give a presentation Thursday about the 1/2 of my job that I really don't care for much, open source middleware. I need to ask my boss Phil if I can transition that part of my job to somebody else and pick up something new and fresh and exciting. I'm the "last man standing" on the engineering side, at least in the US. It's no fun, because the program has been starved for resources by management, to the point that we really can't even maintain our current position and offerings. Add to that huge changes recently in the marketplace, and we just cannot keep up. It is depressing, and even if business was doing great, I'm just tired of the subject matter. I've been doing this since before Dana and I got married, and I'm ready for a breath of fresh air.

But enough complaining. We'll have fun in Houston. If anyone in Houston wants to get together, drop me a line. I'm incredibly disorganized this week and haven't even finished the presentation I'm giving on Thursday, but I should have a few hours here and there (Densmores I'm looking vaguely in your direction).

Today I got the recessed light bezels in the mail for the closet upstairs. I kept trying to order these from online stores, and everyone had a minimum order of something like $100. Well, the two light covers together were less than $50, so no dice. But I finally found them at Beverly Hills Electric, for a decent price, and ordered them last week. Even Home Depot couldn't get these Halo 4" shower covers! Well, as soon as I opened the box tonight I knew I had nailed it. They look great. They will satisfy the building inspector (if I ever see him again...). It is yet one more step closer to actually finishing my crazy project upstairs. Now we pretty much just need heat. Grrr.. Don't get me started on the heating contractor. They went out of business last year. They promised me they'd take care of me anyway. I have to call them again...

I decided to also strip the white paint off the inside of the old closet door that now serves as a passageway into the bathroom from the new front bedroom. I'm about 60% done, and then I need to stain and polyurethane it. I figured since I was already staining and finishing several other pieces of trim in the room, I might as well finish the job. Paint remover, even the "All natural" stuff, is horrible.