I don't know if anyone's there (except my dad I guess...) but I guess this is a good time to chat a bit about living here in Oregon. I'll pop in from time to time, I guess...

For some reason (climate change, probably) we've had some really weird weather this winter. Today, I woke up and it was snowing. By the time I was ready to ride my bike to work, it was sunny outside. Then at lunch, it hailed for about 10 minutes or so, rained a bit, and by the time I was ready to ride my bike back home, it was sunny again. They say it might snow again tonight. We live at about 400ft elevation, and snow this close to sea level is supposed to be really rare. But we've seen a fair amount of it -- only once was it enough for school to be delayed. Mostly it's just pretty.

I'm going to plant a garden this year. Last year we moved here too late to do much, but we did get a few tomatoes from some plants I got at the farmer's market. We planted a couple of strawberry plants, too, so I hope they produce some strawberries this year.

I've started some seeds in my kitchen window, and planted some snow peas outside. The seeds are mostly ok, though it's still too cold to put them outside, and the snow peas haven't sprouted yet. They may have rotted - I put them in a patch of ground that is very heavy with clay and doesn't drain well, and you know what they say about rain in the NW.

I'm also going to experiment with a straw-bale garden. I looked at craigslist and found a farmer nearby who was selling his leftover barley straw really cheap so I bought 9 bales (all that would fit in my truck!). Then my dog went crazy and kept digging at them so I had to put chicken wire around them, to keep her from tearing and scattering the straw. Crazy dog...

My dog kept getting in the compost pile, so I spent some time last weekend making it more secure. We have had a raccoon visiting us as well (making the dog bark in the middle of the night), so I hope the chicken wire I put up will keep it out of the compost pile too.

I put out some bird feeders for the house finches and the jays, and there are tons of robins and crows around. The daffodils have bloomed and the tulips are starting to come up. It looks like spring, but why is it still cold? I hope the climate doesn't change too radically here. The growing season is short enough as it is. One reason we didn't move to Boston was the severe winters and summers being brought on by climate change.

Working at IBM is pretty good. I'm learning a lot about Linux, and doing all sorts of new things. Sometimes it is overwhelming when I stop and think about all the things I still don't know and need to learn. Multithreading, hardware interrupts, drivers, apache and php configuration, working with cvs... whew. One big difference between being at IBM and the other places I've worked at is that in a small company, especially a startup, the pace is a lot faster. At IBM, there's plenty of time to learn what I need to know, and I don't feel like I have to put in ungodly hours.

My kids have adjusted pretty well. Their school is wonderful -- I couldn't have asked for better teachers to work with my son. He's been identified as having Asperger Syndrome (which explains a lot about him -- see, it wasn't my parenting that was the problem!), and he's getting special ed services from the school to help him learn to compensate for some of the weaknesses of AS. On the other hand, he's so smart academically, that he is bored with the normal curriculum. Right now, he's mostly working independently, and the focus is on getting his social skills and behavior on track. I've been continuing to teach him things at home, so he's not completely bored. I've also been volunteering at his school to run the Lego Robotics (Mindstorms) after-school club, and he's having a blast learning to program the Lego robots. It amazing how similar a class of 10 year olds is to a class of 16 year olds. I'm just glad I don't have them all day!

My daughter was in the chess club at school, and wants to take a tumbling class at the rec center this summer. She's done a great job learning to handle teasing and annoying boys, and she has a couple of good friends. Academically, she finds most things easy except writing. Her teacher has made an effort to keep her challenged and learning, so I'm not worried about her getting bored.

Now that we live in a safe neighborhood, I'm teaching my kids how to ride a bike, starting with my daughter. She's frustrated that it's taking so long - it looks so easy, so why should it be so hard? Ha! I bought her a too-small bike at Goodwill and took off the pedals, so she can learn to coast down a hill and be able to put her feet on the ground whenever she wants. She's learning to steer, too. Once she's figured out how to balance, she should find it easy enough to use the pedals to get her going, instead of using the hills. Luckily, the nearby park has several hills of different steepness, so as she gets better, we can use a steeper hill.

I've set my son up with an account on blogger, and showed him how to upload images. I'm hoping this will encourage him to write more. It will also give him a place to show off his Lego structures, and anything else he wants to share with people at school. Both of my kids have email addresses now (on gmail), but I haven't showed them how to use them yet. I've given them the standard speech about the importance of staying anonymous on the Internet, but I still have to talk to them about spam... One nice thing about gmail, is that it does a really good job of filtering your mail so you hardly ever see any spam.