With Pat out of town, I've been trying to leave work at 4:30 this week, to get home and walk the Mdog before dark and have a brief nap before whatever else I need to do for the evening. This afternoon the training dragged on until 5:00 as I watched a great sunset develop then fade away outside the classroom window. It really agitated me - seeing that I was missing the sunset, the dog walk, probably the nap. I really wonder if it's worth it. The less time I have remaining on the planet, the more things like this matter.

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Jonna seated on her 'front porch', with a map of her travels visible behind her, on the right.

Two and a half years ago, I went up to see an RV encampment in Cheyenne, and meet a guy who's blog I had read about his life post-retirement roaming about without a permanent fixed residence. He introduced me to two very independent and adventurous women from the Bay Area who had also shifted from a fixed address to life in a large comfortable RV which had allowed them to travel extensively in the US and Mexico. During this visit, and again later in Wyoming where they stayed at a reservoir near the ranch, we chatted about Mexico, and our interest in Merida especially. A year later, they were in Merida and bought a hundred-year-old house to renovate. Since then, I have been watching their project through Jonna's blog, and absorbing their take on life in Merida in general as their house evolved and neared completion.

When Patrick went down there this week, I emailed Jonna and she graciously invited Patrick to contact her to see if there was an opportunity to hang out and see the house. This happened, and Pat had an opportunity to see the house almost ready to move in, and enjoyed an evening with Jonna and Mimi and some of their friends at the in-town RV park where they have been staying while construction has been underway.

Jonna and Mimi have been building quite a network of friends in Merida (and elsewhere on the Yucatan peninsula), which is encouraging to me as I consider being so far from the few remaining friends we have here in the North.

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Yesterday morning I took Pat to the Denver airport so he could catch a flight to Merida - the capital of Mexican state Yucatan. If you go back to the first entries of this blog, at the end of 2003, you will see that Merida is where it originated. We sold our house in California expecting to move there, and Colorado has been an ill-fitting detour along the way.



Pat is there partly to escape the harsh and bleak winter for a week or so, and partly to get a reality check on how he feels about trying again to get on track for a life in Merida. He once made an offer on a house there when we made the first attempt, but the sellers decided not to let the place go after all, and we never got back on the path for various reasons.



Today the weather in Merida was clear, with a high of 93 and a low of 68. Fort Collins had a low in the 20's and high of maybe mid thirties - an improvement over last week when we had a high one day of 17 degrees.


The old rail station has been totally refurbished since I took this a couple of years ago, and is now a college for the arts.


Merida is always alive and vibrant at night.


Neighborhood produce stand - in front of the local Carniceria (meat market).


Mayan lady with a few items to sell. A common scene.


One of the gateways to the old inner city.

I had to place a few of my old photos here from previous visits, as Pat's visit has triggered a flood of old feelings of excitement and longing to live in such an elegant and exotic place. In the morning I will need to get up in the cold darkness to prepare to start my day at the big high-tech campus a few miles away from here, and complete the final (seventh) week of training to work in their support call center. It often seems unreal to me there , and while I started with an open mind about how this might play out, it is increasingly hard to imagine a continuing daily life wearing a headset, seated in the little dual-occupancy cubicle with the coffee stained carpet.



What life would you choose, if you had a choice?

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After several years of not doing any holiday baking, I got inspired this week to make a batch of my favorite Christmas cookies remembered from my mom and (recently departed, bless her heart) grandma's seasonal efforts.



They are almond crescents, and the basic recipe is so easy it does not need to be written down, but I will pass along the details here, since this batch turned out so well.

In its simplest form, there is just one pound of almonds, one pound of butter, one pound of sugar, and one pound of flour. The details: Set out one pound of fresh butter to reach cool room temperature several hours before beginning. I used two sticks each of salted and unsalted butter. Take the whole raw almonds and either run them through a course blade in a vintage cast-aluminum food grinder (the way I used to) or pulse them in small batches until you get a texture you like in a food-processor type appliance. I used a chopper attachment for my blender this time. I chose to have a lot of coarse chunks (like fine granola) along with some mealy texture.

Cream the butter in a large bowl with a heavy wooden spoon - it will be hard to work, then begin adding the sugar in small increments. Two cups sugar equals about a pound. I used about half a cup of light brown sugar with the rest white granulated. After the sugar is creamed into the butter, add the almond meal in small batches and continue blending. I ended up using a potatoe masher to supplement the spoon efforts as the dough got denser. Finally, begin adding the flour, working it with your hands into a uniform dough. Four cups of flour equals about a pound. I used one cup of whole wheat flour and three of white.

Gather a small handful of dough into your palm, and shape it into a flat crescent shape sized to your liking by pressing it into shape on the ungreased cookie sheet. Ten to twelve should fill a standard cookie sheet in two rows. They will not flatten or spread much when baked. Place two sheets full of cookies at a time in a preheated oven, probably about 350 degrees. I used my gas convection oven set for 335 degrees, and it took about 16 minutes to get the noticeably browned bottom edges I like. Your mileage may vary. It may be necessary to swap cookie sheets from top to bottom at some point to even browning. After removing from the oven, let them cool a bit before using a spatula to transfer them to cooling racks. They will become quite hard and crunchy after cooling. Cool the pans a bit and repeat until all the dough has been baked.

After the cookies are well cooled (I placed mine on the rack outside in the 5 degree chill for about ten minutes - at least the horrid winter climate here is good for something), begin dredging them in powdered sugar, and tapping off the excess before stacking them on a plate. I do this in a plastic produce bag containing about a cup of the powdered sugar.

These cookies keep well for a week or so in a cool place. I am freezing some (in a coffee can set outside on a patio table) to be dispensed over the coming days.

Hell, Pat even strung a row of lights over our front door - this is major Christmas involvement for us. We'll be going up to the ranch in Wyoming on Christmas day to share the cheer with Mona and Clark. Mona always gets her place decorated a bit with ornaments and candles and such, so that is nice, and we'll have a lots of good things to eat and drink. I hope you all will too. Merry Christmas!

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We went to the New Belgium brewery today for the tour - something we've been meaning to do since we arived here several years ago. It was bitterly cold today, maybe 12 degrees with some wind that whipped up sprays of dry abrasive snow here and there, as if to say "yeah, it looks sunny and nice, but you don't want to be out here, sucker".

The tour was OK - we had some samples of their beers, and got invited in to a taste test that resulted in us taking home a few complimentary 22 oz 'bombers' of Fat Tire.

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Last night we went to a Christmas party here in town, invited by a woman who did some major electrical upgrades on our house shortly after we bought it. There were about thirty womyn there - seemed like mostly gals who enjoy the company of other gals. We were the only men there. It was a pleasant evening, but I wish we could have been back in California for the more diverse gatherings we enjoyed in years past.

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Every year for almost two decades we used to spend an evening in the weeks before Christmas at the home of our friends Erik and De Ann in Alameda. I met them when I was a flight instructor, about twenty years ago now. They were single professionals, and both received their pilot certificates after training with me. Erik continued to obtain his instrument rating, while De Ann devoted more of her time to giving birth to and raising two daughters.

Later, with Erik as a one of my role models, I became a network engineer. We continued to to see them occasionally, and once attended the most decadent of all pre-collapse dot-com holiday parties when Erik and Pat worked together at one of those big boom and bust Internet companies that forgot to make a profit.

Receiving this invitation makes me homesick for California and the life we left behind there. It doesn't help that yesterday morning it was minus-8 degrees when I woke up, and the high all day was 3 degrees. This morning it's a little warmer - zero. In a half hour, I'll be out the door to go to my low-wage cubicle farm day, driving over the crunching snow and ice...

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I finished the Cocula (Jalisco, Mexico) street scene that has been sitting on the easel for the past several months. I tried a few new things with style and technique this time, taking a little more risk with the project. Perhaps not quite as successful as a few of the previous works in that series, but I'll be happy to see it on the wall when I get around to framing it. A larger view can be seen here.

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I spent the better part of this afternoon in lectures at work watching PowerPoint slides about (among other things) the virtues of teamwork, and hearing about how we (me and my fellow contractor new-hires) are now part of a big happy family of caring, sharing fellow engineers. In fact, that is how it has felt being there for the past several weeks - they are nice people, and very helpful.

Then, around the end of my day back in my little shared cubicle, someone stopped by to ask if I was 'coming tonight'. "To what?", I asked. The questioner, a genuine Big IT employee, looked embarrassed and quickly changed the subject. I surmised that the department's Christmas party was tonight, and only the more elite non-contractor staff was expected to participate.

I cleaned out the hearth and left for the night.

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Yesterday I was able to imagine for a while being settled in the workplace, at least or some period of time. Today - not so much. It was a bad day in class, as I struggled to focus on a technology I have always found a little baffling, and which for some reason I have always found to be profoundly uninteresting and tedious.

Try digesting this stuff with your lunch around 2pm, when civilized folks are in the midst of their afternoon naps...

"...Bridges encode an MD5 digest of their VLAN to instance table in the MSTP BPDU. This digest is then used by other MSTP bridges, along with other administratively configured values, to determine if the neighboring bridge is in the same MST region as itself. MSTP is fully compatible with RSTP bridges, in that an MSTP BPDU can be interpreted by an RSTP bridge as an RSTP BPDU. This not only allows compatibility with RSTP bridges without configuration changes, but also causes any RSTP bridges outside of an MSTP region to see the region as a single RSTP bridge, regardless of the number of MSTP bridges inside the region itself. In order to further facilitate this view of an MST region as a single RSTP bridge, the MSTP protocol uses a variable known as remaining hops as a time to live counter instead of the message age timer used by RSTP. The message age time is only incremented once when spanning tree information enters an MST region, and therefore RSTP bridges will see a region as only one "hop" in the spanning tree..."

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The little girl in the center is gone tonight.

My grandmother died a few hours ago in Ohio. In her mid-ninetees, she had outlived about the majority of her eight children, including my mom, her oldest daughter. I was grateful to have an opportunity to visit her in October, in the company of her youngest daughter, who was with her today. Aunt Susan told me this morning that Grandma had said she was ready to join those children who had so saddened her when they preceded her in leaving this life.

During my early years, our family moved frequently from state to state, and it seemed as though the only continuity in my life was the presence of Grandma Flury in her big comfortable white rural Ohio house, with various aunts, uncles and cousins nearby. We would often visit there for Christmas, and nearly every summer would find us returning to keep her busy for at least a few weeks.

There was always ice cream in the big chest freezer out in the laundry room.


July 23, 1913 - December 6, 2008

It's really something, all her kids, and their wives and their kids - all the lives and memories she leaves them with. With her passing, there are no remaining grandparents or parents, and I will not be leaving anyone in my wake as she did.

On my way to visit her a few months ago, I stopped along the way at the old house in upstate New York where I spent most of my teen years. A mature forest had covered what I remembered as a hay field. It made me aware of my own advancing age, as do each of these losses in the stream of life's continuity.

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This was the site that greeted me this morning on the front porch. I was up at 4am, as Pat was preparing to leave for Silver City (New Mexico) for a scouting trip. He shoveled the driveway and sidewalk before leaving, but a couple of hours later before I left for work (how odd that still sounds) I had to shovel again - then again after I returned home.

When I got to my car in the Big IT Company parking lot after class today, it was like someone had dumped a barrel of oatmeal mixed with white glue on it. With the day-long snowfall continuing after I parked there warm enough for it to melt and refreeze, it took about twenty minutes to chip, brush, scrape, and thaw enough to commence the slippery ride home. Yesterday on my way from the building exit to the car in the lot the sidewalks and parking asphalt were covered with a uniform glaze of slick ice - walking was trecherous.

Oddly, as much as I have resented being in the winter climate here I found myself in good humor over the past two days of arctic weather. I actually appreciated the shoveling when I returned home tonight, as I need the exercise and the cold didn't seem bad with still air and the exertion. Mdog's walk had to be kept short, though, lest her little feet get frostbitten in the 14 degree air and snow.



Pat called from Silver City tonight, and it sounded like he was not very impressed with what he has encountered so far. In any event, I am slowly growing accustomed to the work schedule and warming up to the opportunity to work with the intricate technology of networking again. There were many gaps previously in my knowledge, which are now being filled with the excellent instruction that is now wrapping up week three of seven.



It seems like just a few weeks ago there was excellent fall weather as we visited the ranch before Mona's trip to Japan. Today's snowfall and hard freeze were a reminder that winter is bearing down on us. A good time to work, I suppose - except for the not-napping thing.

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Turns out we can have social justice and salvage the economy at the same time...

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The third week of training is underway at the Big IT Company here in Fort Collins, and from my perspective its still one day at a time. I can't say I would continue there soley for the money, although it is nice to have a little cash flow these days. If I can't find some satisfaction from the work performed post-training my tenure there will likely be short. And oh, to have access to an afternoon nap again...

This morning was very tedious, with product line familiarization - features, history, capabilities, limitations, etc. Several hours of dry lecture with a little white board embelishment. The afternoon session was more engaging, as we built a big complex network in the lab. After configuring everything to work normally, we four trainees were asked to leave the room, as our instructors proceeded to create problems and failures through various hardware and configuration changes. Upon returning to the lab we were directed to identify and correct all the faults (which we did - quickly and completely).

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