As I was “transitioning” out of my job at AMI Semiconductor, one of the most asked questions was, “What are you going to do next?” Since I had no better answer, I would reply, “I’m going to stain my deck.” So that’s what I did. The deck and fence haven’t been stained in two years and they really need the attention. Yesterday I scrubbed the deck and then applied the acid stuff that makes the wood ready to be stained. This morning I began the staining process. It took most of the day (and included a trip to Home Depot for some more stain), but it is now finished. Tomorrow morning I’ll move everything back onto the deck. Now I have to decide what to do next. Can’t do the fence just yet; need to get mother and dad’s fence finished first. I’ve got a load of dirt in the front yard needing attention, so I’ll continue working on that tomorrow. It’s a lot of work and I don’t think I can do more than a couple of hours in the dirt pile at a time.

We will also do some traveling (unless by some happy circumstance I get a consulting gig). When is still up in the air. Nina’s calendar is much busier than mine is! But, the deck is done….

This Sunday was a very normal Sunday here. Nina left about 7:30 a.m. to go up to the prison. I had a normal quiet morning at home. This afternoon Nina went to church with a woman who was released from prison on Friday (Nina spent the entire day and well into the evening on Friday assisting the woman get into an apartment and reasonably situated) and I went to our ward. It continues to be very hot here and I’m thankful for air conditioning. I spent part of the morning and most of the evening getting a couple of additional sets of pictures from the Norway Cruise into the picture album. There are pictures from Flåm and from Tromsø Norway if you’re interested.

Tomorrow I’ll start the process of looking for gainful employment. What comes from that will certainly be blogworthy over the next while. It’s amazing how many people have asked me in the past two days “What are your plans?” and “Do you think you’ll have to move?” Questions I certainly have no answers for. So, the plan is to find something else to do and if possible, not to move. But whatever is in store for us, we’ll do.

I’ve officially joined the ranks of people no longer employed. Next week I’ll go to the unemployment office and file for unemployment. That should be interesting! The outprocessing took about a half hour and now I’m back home ready to do stuff around the house. There’s plenty to do (and Nina probably has other things in mind that she’d like me to do that I haven’t thought about). So I’m now off to change clothes and do something really useful.

Three … Two … One … ZERO! Sometimes Zero is a great number, like how many days I have left working for AMI Semiconductor. Tomorrow morning I stop by to do the Human Resources exit process, turn in my badge, and leave. As part of the separation I’ve signed an agreement that says I can’t say anything bad about the company. So I won’t. I’m just happy to have this one over with.

So what’s next? Perhaps semi-retirement. There’s too many things we want to do yet to completely stop working (we probably can stop working, but then we can’t play as much we’d like). While we’re deciding about that, we’re going to sometime Real Soon Now load up the RV and head east visiting family and friends along the way. When will that be? I’m not sure! After tomorrow morning, I have a very free calendar. Nina, on the other hand, is the one with the busy calendar now. I like Zero today.

I was reading the Wired website today. On the right panel and along the bottom panel were pictures of naked butts with a title overtop called “Washlets”. The pictures were supposed to be links, but the links were empty. That is, nothing happened when I clicked on the links. The logo was something like “clean is happy”. After cycling through a number of naked butts, the picture resolved to a toilet seat. Now I’ve seen these seats before, have used them, have coveted them, and have wondered why they haven’t yet made it from Japan to the US.

So, I did a google search and found www.washlet.com and went to their website. Someone has spent a LOT of time and money making a very fancy web page. Pictures of naked butts first get displayed across the screen. Then they resolve into people’s faces. Each of the people talk. After they’re finished, if you mouse over, the facial expression changes … but more importantly, it plays a note! While waiting for you to mouse over, eyes blink, heads kind of move, giving the impression that they’re all alive. So I had fun mousing over different faces to see what kind of a tune I could play. Then I discovered that there were little colored bars to the left of all the faces. Each bar corresponded to a face. When mousing over the colored bar, the same facial reaction occurs and a note plays. There’s only five notes. However, quite the composition can come out of five notes (think of Bach’s Air on a G String which was all played on one violin string). So, have fun making music on Washlet!

Monday seems to come around with surprising regularity. For some reason, lately I feel like there’s been more Mondays than any other day of the week. This one is just about finished and for that I’m glad. I did put up some additional pictures yesterday from Stavanger, Norway. It’s been fun sorting through the pictures. There are many of them that only mean something to me and would take a lot of explanation to put on the blog. On the other hand, I’ve got lots of pictures of the same things. For instance: houses with grass roofs. We saw the first of these in Stavanger and they were quite novel. Then at each additional port of call, we saw others. I think I’ve got well over a hundred pictures of houses with grass roofs! Finding the one or two pictures to represent all of them has not been an easy task. Now if I’d seen one with a goat on top of the roof … well that would have trumped all of the grass roof pictures. Alas, no goats were seen on roofs. Maybe Norway has a law against that? In any event, Monday is over for another week.

Some pictures have made it to the picture album. We started this vacation in Copenhagen where I took many, many pictures. After going through them, I found sixty nine of them that just had to go into the picture album. The next stop was also in Denmark in the little village of Skagen. There I only found fourteen pictures that had to go into the picture album. The rest of the pictures are yet to come. It’s been fun going through all the pictures. This afternoon I spent some time putting together about nine minutes of video about the cruise ship. It’s in two versions. For the Windows people, click here. For those wanting it in QuickTime (like the Apple folks), click here. For those completely uninterested, don’t click anywhere!

The trip is over. The suitcases are 90% unpacked and put away (with only the other 90% remaining). It’s bedtime. Tomorrow reality starts once again. It’s good to be home.