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Life Updates (was Annafest)

Posted by Nick B. (formerly in Erlangen) on 2019-08-21 00:58:03

Thanks both of youse for the details. I loved the Nevada desert, and it was supposedly unusually humid last summer, so I guess I experienced the worst of it. We (dog and I) didn't get bitten by the monsterous black widows we encountered, which helped! Never saw a live scorpion, nor a snake either.

Austin sounds too hip and cool. And too large. Music...I did pick up bass playing before I left Erlangen, and did intend to get back into it after 20 or so years out of it, but got distracted by other stuff going on. Suburban Dallas FW might be an option, at least for a start.

Am now thinking pretty seriously about Florida. My crazy sister is there in Gainesville, but if I'm going to live in FL, it's gonna be on the coast. And things didn't work out so well last time I saw my sister, so...anyway.

Oregon was a great place for Becki & me for 11 years, but revisiting it after a decade away in 2015...NO WAY would I consider Portland again. The Urban Growth Boundary is a two-edged sword.

A few nights in Corvallis were very nice, though bittersweet. It didn't seem to have changed too much, and benefitted from HP's huge presence having shrunk after my departure in 1997. Bittersweet, because moving and living there for a year or so was probably the high point of my adult life, when I really had my act together. Moved across country for a job I would never have thought I could get, WITHOUT any help from acquaintences, just my own interviewing and engineering experience, even without a proper engineering degree. (BS Manufacturing Tech, 1989, St. Cloud State U, aka "Discount State")

And Becki gave up HER career path in Mpls to follow me there! That was the real high point.

The grey, wet winter would be a challenge now, though a non-issue in Central or Eastern Oregon's High Desert. Something putting B & I off the idea of returning is the impending 9.0 Megaquake too. It will happen, and when it does...a million or so armed people without water, sewage, or electricity for months on end. National emergency to make Hurricane Katrina look like a party.

"Portland [OR] and Seattle are America's beer capitols." -- Michael Jackson, for whom I stewarded a couple of times at homebrew comp's and drank & bantered with at a couple of other shindigs.