Thanks to Jason, I now have a Gmail account to play with. (Gmail is Google’s in-testing web mail service, which provides a full gig of storage and strong information management features, as one would expect from Google.) If you want to help me try it out, shoot me a mail at seanmctex@gmail.com . (Yes, that’s an open invitation, Spambots — let’s test their Spam filtering too!)

My step-brother Adam and his wife Celeste were in town last weekend from Arizona, where Adam is attending school to become a certified Harley Davidson mechanic. We enjoyed a happy few hours with them at Taco Cabana after their arrival. Adam’s doing the best he ever has with school, and seems to be quite enjoying the experience. Celeste has finished up a painting of a Sphinx that she had been working on, and is taking a bit of a break before launching into another painting project. It was great to get to see them, and to hear how life in Arizona is treating them. (The short version: they’re anxious to get back to Texas.)

I also got to see my old friend Chip, with whom I ran around a lot in middle and high school, and his wife and child. (Chip, if you’re reading this, the dang email address on your business card bounced when I tried it. Grr.)

It was wholly delightful to get to renew those relationships, though I only wished we could have had longer to do so!

We put The Adams Family on a plane back to Virginia this past Wednesday after a wonderful 10 day visit with them. Jeff had originally been planning on going back earlier, but was able to extend his stay and depart with the rest of the family. It was an immense treat to get to spend the time with them. While I didn’t get to show off this beautiful part of Texas as much as my inner tour guide would have liked, we greatly enjoyed the chance to catch up with these dear people before they leave for Uganda later this year.

Some highlights:

• Playing Balderdash, initially for points, and later for laughs.
• A trip to Schlitterbahn. True to Texas weather form, the day started out beautifully. Then, around 2:00, there was a huge clap of thunder, and the rain began. We took shelter in an arcade, and watched the rain turn to torrents. Then, amid the thunder, we started to hear sharper sounds of impact, and soon saw marble-sized hail plummeting earthward. While we expected it to escalate to plagues of frogs, the wave pool turning to blood, and locust next, it instead let up and turned beautiful and sunny again by 3:00pm, but not before a nearby tuber had been struck by lightning. (He was fine, thanks to some quick resuscitation on the part of the Schlitterbahn staff.)
• Bleary-eyed, late night, far reaching discussions over politics, the state of the Episcopal church, college friends, parenting, history, family, and more.
• Trips to the lovely, crystalline San Marcos river.

While it slipped by without my mentioning it on the appropriate date, Kathy and I celebrated our 9th anniversary on May 27. Our visiting relatives kept an eye on the kids for us while we went out for a dinner at Palmer’s, followed by a visit to the $1.50 second run theater to take in 50 First Dates, which was alternately quite vulgar and very sweet, and which we quite enjoyed between the walrus barf jokes.

In celebration of our anniversary and my gainful employment, Kathy slipped out to Grant’s store and presented me with an amazing gift: A Fender GB-41 SCE Acoustic Electric Cutaway Bass. Easily the nicest guitar I’ve ever had, it has a great unamplified sound, loud enough for acoustic jamming with traditional guitars, and works well plugged in too. When I played it at Cheatham Street for the first time, I had three different people come up and comment on how much they liked the sound of the new instrument. I’ll probably be using it exclusively with the band once I get a few little issues worked out.

Anyway, it’s hard for me to believe it’s been nine years now. As ever, I’m grateful for the time, and for a partner who, through her support, doesn’t make me into what she wants, but helps me to be even more the person I want to be. Thanks, Kathy, for everything.

Today, Kathy came home from Target or the grocery store or Ye Olde Candy Shoppe with an amazing find: Ginger Altoids. Being the fine woman she is, she had thought of me immediately upon seeing this breathtaking item, and brought a tin back for my enjoyment.

Remarkably, they’re exactly like what you’d expect: Ginger Ale’s bigger, meaner brother. I can’t decide whether I love or hate them, but have been compulsively popping them all day.

Ginger Altoids. What a wonderful world. (Now, all they need is a curry flavor…)

Rather a lot going on right now, which leaves little time to write about it:

• Kathy’s brother Dan arrived from New York. He’s been planning for a while to come down and stay with us, but only just managed to pull up stakes and make the trip. We’re enjoying having him stay with us, and Liam and I are grateful for another man around the house!
• Last weekend, Chris came into town for the weekend and to visit down at UT Health Science Center. We celebrated Emily’s birthday and his presence on Saturday with one of our usual backyard bacchanals: lots of eating, swimming, piñata bashing, and visiting with wonderful people, most of whom we don’t get to spend as much time with as we’d like. Thanks to all of you who helped make that a wonderful time, and to Chris and Emily for giving us a reason to celebrate.
• My friend Mark McFail had his bachelor party this week. We went camping out at a stunning spot in the hill country owned by Travis Schrank’s family, a little bit south of Kerrville. We reveled in manly company, hill country views, spring-fed creeks, Dr. Pepper, Fredericksburg peaches, cherries, and strawberries, music, and a testosterone-fueled, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to shoot a pig for dinner. I slept out in a hammock under a thick, wooly blanket that was waterproof enough that I didn’t notice that it rained on me during the night.
• I started the new job at the University. It’s been a bit of adjustment to get used to the University culture again after being in corporate America for nearly a decade, but I’m enjoying it a great deal. The library in which my office is located is amazing, and it’s a great perk to be able to find nearly any book, map, journal, or government document I might be interested in just by popping upstairs.
• My old friend Greg was in town for business and stayed with us Wednesday night. It was a great treat to get to hang out with him for an evening, enjoy good conversation and brew, and to show him a bit of what I like about San Marcos.
• Kathy’s sister Karen and her husband Jeff (who’s an old college friend of mine) are coming in this afternoon with their kids to stay with us for a week. We’re greatly looking forward to the time with them, though anticipate that having five adults and seven children under our roof may get a bit lively at times! Unfortunately, I won’t be able to skip out on work during the time they’re here, but I’ll be racing home quickly afterwards to make the most of the time with them before they head off to Africa.

Though we’re not having the party proper until Saturday, today is Emily’s 12th birthday. Congratulations, kiddo! We love you immensely, couldn’t be more proud of you, and thank God that you’re a part of our family.

• The Job Title: Systems Programmer II
• What it actually is: The University is going to be pulling all of the various departmental web sites and tools that have sprung up over time under the umbrella of one centralized Content Management System (Vignette, in this case). I’ll be programming and porting apps to the new system, doing user support, and doing some sysadmin work. This will give me a chance to dig even deeper into Java and to see whether Vignette is worth the huge price premium over Conversant! Should be a fun and interesting project, and plays much better to my professional strengths and direction than did being on the Server team at EA.
• The Pay: While it’s one of the best-paying jobs I’ve seen posted on the University’s job beard, this position pays about 20% less than my old job at EA did. While this represents a fairly significant drop to our family’s income, it should still be enough for us all to live on, especially with Kathy’s mad garage-sale skillz. (Heck, with gas prices shooting up, the mere savings from not having to drive to Austin daily will make up a fair portion of that cut.)
• The Compensatory Factors: There are a number of things that make the pay cut worth it to us. The fact that the University is about seven blocks from our house means that I’ll be able to bike to work daily, enjoy lunch with family and friends in San Marcos, and not have to spend two hours a day in the car. The University provides good educational benefits, and good leave policies. (No 100 hour per week crunch here!) The creativity and diversity of Universities is something I’ve always found a treat to be around, and was what I missed most after leaving my job at UNT. And finally, the stability has some appeal after being through this last layoff at EA.
• When: I should be starting on Monday, or Wednesday if the paperwork gets delayed.

I want to thank all the people who prayed, prodded, supported, encouraged, enquired, and reconnoitered over the past couple of months. (A special thanks to the folks who encouraged me to go back and apply a second time after they’d closed the position without hiring anybody the first time around.) I’m immensely grateful for all of your support and help.

P.S. Everyone enjoyed the soup.

Just heard from the University, and they extended me an offer! I should be starting on Monday.

More details later on; I’ve got soup to cook for tonight.

Whew, it’s been a busy day for learning. Since the job offers aren’t yet coming in at a furious rate, I’m taking advantage of the time to cram more into my brain, especially in the area of enterprise Java programming, where I hope to nail down my next job. Today I installed Tomcat on my Powerbook (which lets me run Java Server Pages), installed ant (which automates a bunch of build chores), created a pretty basic JavaBean, created unit tests for that JavaBean, created an ant buildfile that compiles the code and runs the unit tests, caught and corrected an error in the JavaBean with the unit tests, and wrote a JSP to use the JavaBean in another context. The only significant speedbump was that I’m evidently an idiot, and can’t tell “CircleTest” from “TestCircle”.

While I’ve been reading lots of Java material for the past few weeks, and have worked through many of the included examples, there’s nothing like actually writing your own stuff from scratch to come to grips with a new set of material. (I must admit I love the frisson when things actually come together and work the way they’re supposed to.)

Many thanks to Kathy for running interference with the kids while I dug into brain-work.