2012 Year in Review: Country Living

I wouldn't exactly say that I lived in the city before.  So, obviously, I was pretty damned shocked when my wife informed me that we had not been living in the country the first three years we were in Bend, Oregon.  The solution was to find a place in the country and secure her agreement that it was, in fact, in the middle of nowhere.

So now I live in the wilderness.  Am I happy with it?  I don't know.  I'm probably happier than I was in Bend but that's more a function of being in a nicer house with a little more privacy than I had in "the big city" and less a function of living in the middle of the desert.

The drive sucks but all the tolerance I built up for long commutes came rushing back as soon as I moved out here.  Even with the long drive, it's still incalculably better than living in a real city with a commute that takes the same amount of time.  In Seattle, a half-hour commute would have carried me about three or four miles at best.  Here, at least, my long drive covers a lot of ground and I'm not constantly slamming on the breaks.

None of those things compare to the affect this new house has on my wife and our cats.  All seven of whom love the place.  It's a little rough on the cats to be tempted by such untouched landscape and not be able to go play in it but it's better than just looking at our neighbors' bathroom window when they look outside.  There's a lot more "romping" room inside the house.  My wife, of course, loves this place because it is big enough for all our crap, it's private, and her commute didn't change at all.

All told, I'm still not sold on this being any better than living in a city - especially when compared to the suburb of a real city like Los Angeles or San Diego - but I'm no less happy than I was in Bend and my wife is much happier with it so it's an improvement.

Happy New Year, End of Year Wrap Up

Well, everyone, the year is wrapping up right now.  For many, it's already over and 2013 has already begun.  For others, there are several hours to go.  Any way you slice it, now seems like a good time to do a year in review.  I know you are all super interested in my life.

The landmark events in my life for this year were as follows:

• finally got off my but and started self-publishing the Sleight of Mind series
• finished development of my book, Test-Driven Database Development
• moved into a new house out in the country
• getting some real traction in implementing test-driven development as well as other process improvements where I work

I'll drill into each of these in a subsequent post.

My New Country Home

I've moved, recently.  From the "city," as people in Central Oregon think of it, to the country.  Truly the country.

I wasn't sure I was going to care for it at first.  I was dreading the commute and I was a little worried about the isolation and lack of services out here.  To reinforce this fear, I recently needed an emergency veterinarian and had to drive a half hour into Bend to get one.  That definitely sucks.

Turns out it's not so bad.  I'm sure there's an on-call vet closer and we'll find them.  The commute turns out to be not so bad and there are even some people I can carpool with to make it a little less bad still.  In addition, there are some really nice things about it.

In the country we can afford about five acres more land than we could in Bend.  That is, we can afford about five acres of land.  It's a nice little lot.  It even has a sound-facing slope we might use to grow grapes, if we can find grapes that like Central Oregon.

Our indoor/outdoor cat is really digging the new digs as well.  Five acres is a lot of roaming space with all kinds of new things to smell and a new kind of soil in which to roll around.  She still hasn't figured out what her territory is going to be but I imagine the neighboring dogs will help her define those boundaries.  I knew this would matter to me, our cats' quality of life is important to us.

We're on top of a knoll - that's why we have a south-facing slope - so we have a view in all directions.  I didn't think I'd care about that but it appears I do.  To further improve upon things, the house is two stories with the living area on the second story and a wrap-around deck so the view is enhanced by being above the juniper trees.

Out here, I can afford a much bigger place.  The living area here is just shy of the whole house we had in bend.  Then downstairs area has a real two car garage; meaning there's two doors with ample room to fit two large American cars.

Even better, there's a very large shop.  I'm not really a "shop" guy but my wife and I have a plan to turn that into a work out/recreation room.  The wrap-around deck also has two enlarged areas where tables, chairs, etc. can be put.  That means we don't have to store as much of our outdoor junk in our garage!

Better still, there are a couple of small out-buildings for storage, one of them with power and phone that I'm considering turning in to my home office.  I'm not sure about that, yet.  It could get chilly in the winter.  If nothing else, those sheds are about as much storage as we had in our old garage.

So, all told, the number of square feet we have to put our junk in has dramatically improved.  I didn't think that would matter either but I was wrong.  Having a nice, light, open space as a sanctuary in which to work with lots of potential for development ended up having an immediate and dramatic psychological impact for the better that outweighs the drawbacks many times over.