Category: Personal

Watching some of the last equipment from our chemistry labs head out the door today with the people who won the auctions, I noticed this:

My first thought was, I know someone who’d see about that. My money would be that Boomerite beats refrigerator. If we were located in Idaho, I would have bid on this freezer just to put that to the test :)

… I’m in the middle of trying doing something recklessly entrepreneurial. How reckless? That is still to be determined, but I spend time on the drive home with Bitter talking about how, “This whole damned thing is crazy, and I’m crazy for staying involved in it.”

I wish I could reveal more, but for a lot of reasons I have to keep my personal life just that. I am not the one at the tip of this spear, but I am the one who knows how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. There are many cats in need of herding between here and not having to go look for another job. This is consuming the spare CPU cycles.

The good news is that our temporary offices now have Internet access that is not hopelessly bad. We should be returning to our somewhat regularly scheduled routine somewhat soon. I appreciate your patience in the matter. Previously I had a fairly well-regulated routine for supplying the blog with fresh material, which has hence had a wrench thrown in that formula.

Yay for backup power! We lost our main power a few minutes ago. Everything was fine and stifling hot, and then the wind came up out of no where. It went nuts. I regret having put the garbage out already since it is already knocked over. I checked radar on my phone and there’s a wall of red headed this way. Sebastian is at the gun club a few minutes east of here, so I called to give him a warning since they are shooting outside.

(And now we’re back on for a few more minutes.) What a world we live in that I can call him to tell him exactly what the radar looks like even as the power starts to flicker here at home. I guess it shouldn’t amuse me any more than tweeting during the multiple blizzards we had just a couple of winters ago.

Sorry for the somewhat off-topic commentary about home life. But I just have to admit that while we don’t have flying cars yet, life is still pretty damn cool.

UPDATE (By Sebastian):  UPS power is definitely a Godsend, but one interesting thing is that no one bid on our natural gas powered generator at work. It could be had for three grand. This is a 30,000 KVA three phase setup. If I had the land, and a pad, I’d totally go for it. As it stands now the blog is backed up by about an hour’s worth of battery. The downside to natural gas power is that you still need some kind of grid to run it. Diesel engines could probably run off fish oil if you needed them to.

Internet at the old offices has been cancelled, and I’m no longer spending the day in front of a computer. I have a board meeting for my club tonight, so I will be getting some posts up thereafter. My company has essentially leased a closet from a short term leasing company for the three of us to finish the wind up, so space is going to be tight. We are very nearly out of our building, and ready to turn it back to the landlord, who is currently rather unhappy with us.

As far as my personal job situation goes, I have a few irons in the fire, which I’ll be able to speak about a bit more if one of them strikes.

So the auction for my company’s assets is just about over, as we speak, and it turns out I’m walking away with a couple of thousand dollar living room set for about 450 bucks. Two years ago our company spent a little bit of money to set up an employee lounge, so we’d have a place to relax and spend some quiet time during the day. Turns out it made a much better area for all hands meetings and various other company presentations. The sofa sets were barely used, were leather, and will look great in whatever I end up turning my den into eventually.

More importantly, my long month nightmare of preparing our entire technological infrastructure: sorting, cataloging and archiving data, shutting things down in an orderly manner, and finally making sure not a hard drive leaves the place that wasn’t either physically annihilated (total around 250 so far) or electronically shredded (total maybe 50), is almost at an end. I should soon have more time for blogging, and more importantly, thinking about what comes next. I appreciate everyone’s patience through what are and may continue to be difficult times for me. I am still on the payroll until the end of the month, but hopefully the rest of the ride down on the bomb has a certain inevitability to it, and won’t be as draining. In a few days I will celebrate my tenth year with this company. I am one of the few remaining of the early employees, having survived four different CEOs, just as many directors.

By now I was hoping to have some more video, commentary and pictures posted from the Lucky Gunner blogger shoot, but I just arrived home. What was supposed to be an 11 hour drive turned into a 13 hour drive thanks to the incident Bitter mentioned in the previous post. I am both simultaneously exhausted and wide awake. Not normally being a coffee drinker, I make exceptions in cases where I need to stay alert for a protracted period of time. Thank God for Starbucks double espressos, or I never would have made it.

Despite being willing to drive 10 hours at the drop of a hat by myself in my 20s, I think my days of doing that are over. It’s not the body having difficulty so much as the mind. I find I just get fatigued a lot sooner than I did 10 years ago. When I was in my 20s, I’d be throwing back Mountain Dews all the way, arrive at my destination, and go right to sleep. No problem. Now I get back, want to sleep, but can’t because I’m wired from all the caffeine. Nothing a couple of drinks won’t fix, but counteracting stims with depressants is one step away from being found dead on your toilet. If Lucky Gunner does this next year, I’m definitely bringing someone I can share the driving with.

I guess the 10,000 dollar question is, was the weekend worth the drive? You bet it was. More video coming. It’s going to make our opponents wet themselves.

Sebastian should be about an hour away from home by now. Unfortunately, he’s still probably about four hours away. Why? Because of a 16 mile back up on I-81 northbound in Southwest Virginia.

Why was traffic backed up for 16 miles? Because a sheriff’s deputy got in his official vehicle, stalked his ex-wife to a gas station, pulled his rifle out and shot her multiple times in front of a child in her car & bystanders nearby. Then he got back in his out-of-county sheriff’s vehicle, evaded state police for a while, then pulled over and shot a state trooper in the leg before getting about a mile down the road and engaging in another shoot-out with two additional state troopers.

Unfortunately, Sebastian didn’t see the traffic until he was just past an exit. Then he spent over an hour trapped while trying to get 5 more miles to the next exit. In an attempt to use AT&T’s cell network, I routed him around the roads where the state police were dropping the rest of 81’s traffic, but it added another hour and a half to his time.

The good news is that the state trooper who was shot is doing fine. The sheriff’s deputy has “life threatening” wounds.

Turns out liquidating a company is hard work, and unbelievably depressing work when you’ve spent nearly a quarter of your life working on the same “project.” It’s not much different than watching a beloved sailboat sink beneath the waves.

I’m spending my days busy, and at night I just don’t have the time or energy to look for blog material. I think all of this will work out in the end, I just need to have faith that it will all come together the way I’m praying it will.

This is the last functional day of our company. Everyone’s last day except mine and the two other people who are being kept on for two additional months to facilitate the liquidation. Blogging will be light until a little later.