Cathy began the work of finding us a front door, getting a PO box set up, and other such critical things, from a temporary home base in Wasilla, the Grand View Inn. She started to learn the layout of the area, pursue leads on things like where to have the baby and where we might rent a house for the first year, and generally get us an established presence on the new frontier.
She got results. On a recommendation from Meaghan to check out Mat-Su Midwifery, a birthing center in Wasilla, Cathy found out that it was about a 3-minute walk from the Grand View. (How about that!) This turned out to be a fantastic find, in the end. She also got us set up with that PO box, and got candidates narrowed down for an initial rental house. This latter certainly had its own adventures, including various non-answers from places like the “immaculate cottage”. In the end, we got lucky running across Tony and Julie, who not only had the best house available for our needs, but who have turned out to be great people as well. How you get on with your landlord is definitely a factor when considering a rental house. By the time I arrived in Alaska, Cathy had already done the groundwork and by the time I got to see the place, it was pretty obvious that it was the right way to go.
While her early work was going on, I traveled to Nashville for the WebSphere Portal Technical Conference, my last significant duty for IBM. (I had already accepted the role with Davalen and was wrapping things up as best I could.) I actually flew out the weekend before the conference and drove out to Asheville, NC, to see Hunter and Julie and family. This was a really fantastic opportunity; I could hardly have engineered it better. Asheville is a truly beautiful place, and it was a pleasure to see everyone on home turf. We managed to cram in soccer games, a drive through the considerable fall foliage, full family performances with Rock Band on the Wii, a genuine sweet tea (gratifying) downtown, and of course just visiting a bit. It was especially touching to me that when the time came for me to go, Evan and Nola got a bit glassy-eyed; man, no amount of money can buy that feeling. Great kids!
After the conference, it was back home to conclude with IBM. After not quite three years with Big Blue, it was definitely time for me to take the opportunity I had been asking for since well back into the Bowstreet days, but I must say that IBM was good to me. I did the best I could to hand things over to Jack in a usable state, and again came to a point where I had to admit that it was done.
And then, for three days I was unemployed, essentially homeless (with an empty house ready to be taken over by someone else), worldly belongings somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, no permanent address where I was going, missing the pregnant wife I hadn't seen in three weeks, exhausted from trying to get it all done, and with the same small set of belongings I'd kept at hand after sealing up the pallets. “It was an adventure” just doesn't quite capture it. :-)
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