Bad news today on the work front. I am getting really tired of the rollercoaster that is Acme’s reorganization fetish. We *thought* we knew what we were doing after our business unit leader switched business units and took L and I with him.

Today, after a week of settling in and planning work schedules, we found out that Bob is not going to be able to keep us in his business unit. It isn’t Bob’s fault, he clearly didn’t find out for sure until earlier in the day.

Bottom line: We have an interview on Tuesday with another  business unit leader in a different part of the company (I would say a different “division” but that is a word we aren’t allowed to use at Acme) who would like to integrate us into his team.

It’ll be “Services” instead of “Alliances” which means a more customer-centric, contracting kind of role than the generic development and support role we’ve been doing.

Let’s hope it works out.

A few days later

Well, we had the interview with our new business unit leader yesterday. Seemed to go ok, because later on we got contacted by the Acme-equivalent of human resources to facilitate the transfer.

So it goes… one year ago we changed business unit leaders, right during the associate review period – so we end up being reviewed by one leader and discussing the future with another. It’s going to happen again this year.

We’ll be working on a project with a deadline at the end of July, and we have to go to Chicago for three days at the end of next week. This is a pain, because it’s right at the end of the time that Derek and Teresa are staying with us. We figured something out – they’ll spend a night with Stan and Jeanne and Stan will take them to the airport the following day. We will have flown out the previous day.

Today we finalised plans to visit Seattle in the middle of July. We’ll see our good friends Walt and Sherri, and catch the opening night of the Classic Yes 2002 tour at the Paramount Theater in Seattle.

While L was online booking the National airline tickets, I was on Ticketmaster.com ordering the Yes/Paramount Theatre ones. As you may have read, our last adventure with Ticketmaster wasn’t good (the tickets never arrived in the mail; the customer service people said show up anyway with the email confirmation; then at the venue they said we’re not in their records.)

This time I selected the ticketfast(tm) option. A .PDF was emailed to me, and I printed them out on the inkjet. I now have the actual, legal tickets sitting on my desk. Very cool… no waiting. The Internet rocks!

The planets were simply beautiful in the early evening sky tonight. At 8:00pm I suggested to L that she come out and take a look. Jupiter was highest, then a little triangle cluster of Mars, Saturn, and Venus, with Mercury somewhat closer to the horizon. Aparently the triangle gets even closer tomorrow night, but who knows? It might be cloudy.

Karma came out and watched with us. The neighbourhood went on with whatever it does at that time of night, but I was in a little bubble of astro-joy.

Here’s a phrase that came to my mind today (I believe Derek sent me a reference to the band Slipknot, saying that that he didn’t believe it could be a serious group. They are.)

“There is no satire so outrageous that someone somewhere won’t think it a seriously good idea.”

I don’t think this is an original thought, because I rarely have those, but I couldn’t find an Internet reference attributing anything like it to anyone else.

So there’s the challenge for the month.

The wind picked up late last night and hasn’t stopped all day. Our three trees still seem rooted, although the one outside my office window looks like it needs to be re-staked – again.

Unlike most cities, where wind is good because it clears the air of all the smog, in Vegas the wind picks up the dust and hurls it into the air, making the sky go beige. I swept outside our front door this weekend, and now it’s coated with red dust again.

When I went out to check the mail, I noticed all the mountains had disappeared entirely. The sky was grey above my head, and pinky-beige down near the horizon, which had kind of moved closer, as if the earth’s curvature had increased.

I got a buzz out of pretending that I was walking around on the surface of a terraformed Martian landscape – which would probably look very similar.

(April 16 Update: Turns out this was a record wind storm, causing much disruption down in the valley.)

Yesterday we had a Home Depot experience, because the backflow vacuum preventer valve thingy was leaking. Not good. When Fernando the Plumber was here, he described the steps needed to fix the leak, and it sounded like something I could do.

Turned out that in addition to a length of PVC pipe, PCV cement, couplings, and a replacement brass shutoff valve, we also needed a 12″ crescent wrench.

The job itself was reasonably straightforward, although I did need to shut of the water to the house and remove more of the brass fitting (i.e. all of it) than I wanted to in order to unscrew the faulty part, which was stuck so tight that if I had forced it it would have broken the PVC pipe.

This morning I finished the job by wrapping the backflow valve pipes in insulation material, taping it all down with Duct Tape, and put the fake rock back over them.

Then we drove out to Summerlin to visit the Bagel Cafe to restock on that most vital of foods, but we were too late, only odd unattractive flavors left in the available selection. A six-pack of rye ones will have to do.

A quick stop at Trader Joe’s for dried apricots, slivered almonds and ginger beer, followed by another quick stop at an unfinished furniture place recommended by E. It turns out they have the same brand of shelves that we previously ordered online, and although the prices are about the same, it works out more cost efficient to get them here locally. Hooray! Although we love the internet commerce wave, we do try and support our local vendors – when they can actually vend the stuff we want.

We dropped in to Stan and Jeanne’s to return a casserole dish and fix a computer file problem, and I fell asleep in the afternoon sun  for a couple of hours. Very restful, in a kind of heavy, Sunday afternoon stupourish kind of way.

Mum rang up tonight and confirmed what I had suspected after a terse email from Dad earlier in the day: my grandmother died this afternoon.

Grandma V had been living in a managed care facility for the last couple of years, on the whole experiencing a good quality of life, with occasional bouts of depression, confusion and mischief, from what Mum has related to me from time to time.

Mum said that she’d been doing poorly for several weeks – among other things, she’d forgotten all her nouns, but could use adjectives fine! Just last week she started eating again and got her nouns back, and reached the notable age of 94 years.

She had a heart attack last night, stablised for a bit, but died this afternoon in her sleep at about 3:00pm NZ time, of a pulmonary endema or some related complication.

Some of the family were in town anyway for a get-together to celebrate her 94th birthday, so my Aunt Wendy, Mum, and my sister Vivienne were able to be there with her.

Now is the point at which I am supposed to write something profound and touching, drawing on my memories of her, but frankly, I don’t think I’m going to be able succeed. Let’s see… 

She taught me (and Walter) piano for 4 or 5 years, and I have this vague feeling I was a difficult pupil, which I kind of regret now. I know she heard some of the music Walter and I have produced in recent years, and I hope she knew she could take some credit in building up a foundation of technique that we both take for granted now.

The last time I saw her was just before L and I left for the States and we were helping her out with hearing aid batteries, and seeing her off at the airport as she flew down to Christchurch to visit her brother Kelvin. I said my goodbyes to her then, I think I knew I wouldn’t see her again.