Been a while... in Life in General

Sheesh, I’m horrible at keeping a journal nowadays - 2.5 years since my last entry?

Some things have changed, others haven’t. I’m a grandpa now. My daughter gave birth to an adorable little red-headed boy last November. I’m still not entirely comfortable with the title “grandpa” - grandpas are wise and funny and have zillions of great stories. I feel old like a grandpa but not really sure about the wise part and I feel mostly grumpy rather than funny. Ah well, this too shall pass…

Elliott will be 6 in about 2 months. He’s doing pretty - we’re waiting to get a detailed evaluation from his pediatric neurologist that we hope will give us a clearer picture of what we need to be doing to make his life as good as it can be. He went to a development pre-kindergarten school for a year - before he was kicked out because his IQ/abilities were too high :-) They couldn’t give us an exact IQ because the tests aren’t accurate for children his age and he’s definitely “different”. Some things like verbalization he struggles with but his abstract thinking and pattern recognition are in the high range of “above average”.

We’re going to take him to the Russian School of Math (http://www.russianschool.com/) this fall and see how he likes that. I didn’t get to talk to the folks there (because I’m living about 7 hours away from home at the moment) but my wife said the administrator guy was really interested in meeting me since I have a degree in mathematics - she thinks they’d like to recruit me to come teach there. shudders I’m not a teacher, I don’t have that gift.

I’m currently living in Michigan while my family is still in Indiana. I took a contract job up here … well, because the money was just too good to pass up. They’re sunsetting a legacy system and migrating to a Microsoft platform. I was supposed to keep the lights on with the old system and architect the new system. Though now I’ve found out they’re going to farm the whole thing (architecture, design, development and testing) off to offshore contractors. When it’s all done there won’t be anyone here in the U.S. who knows how the new platform actually works.

Personally, I think that’s um, not a good idea. I think that because the staff and I receive at least a dozen e-mails a day asking how XYZ Process works. I can’t imagine how fucked these folks are going to be at the end of next year when we’re all gone and they have to work with contractors to do every little thing. shakes head I won’t be here by then, that’s for sure. I don’t want any part of that catastrophe.