Goodbye to all that

By now, I was supposed to have been in Montana for a week. But those ubiquitous unforeseen circumstances have pushed it back. I'm still in Boise, but all set to leave tomorrow morning.

So here are my excuses:

First, I stayed in town for a few days so that my former co-workers could fete me with a going away lunch. The highlight of this was the going-away gift they gave me. You have to be a bit of a nerd to be impressed by this, but they made a going away card that was 4 microns by 4 microns large, with a picture that was about 3 nanometers high. It was oxide grown on silicon. They did this using the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) that I trained most of them to use. Since the actual picture they created is too small to be seen well even with a powerful optical microscope, they then used the same AFM to make an image which they printed out on a greeting card which they all signed. The picture they created was from a bitmap file of a photo of me in the lab with the words "Happy Trails" added. If you are not a nerd, and don't fully appreciate the wonders of this technology, here is something to help you be impressed. The size of the actual image is about 1/10 the diameter of a human hair. So if you took one of your hairs and cut it lengthwise ten times, the picture they created could sit on the cross section of one of the pieces. As for the height of the image, a nanometer is 1/1000 of that tenth-of-a-hair piece. Three nanometers is roughly the spacing of ten atoms. Really small. Really cool. I have my scanner packed up, so I can't show you the image, but here is an old picture (from two and a half years ago) of the lab with three of us interrupted by the photographer in the process of using the AFM. All the students in this picture have gone off to work in the real world and are no longer with the lab.



So after the party, I still couldn't go to Montana, because I had ordered a new cell phone and a new computer over the internet, and the ship date had been delayed. Since one of the main things I need to do when I get to Montana is get phone and internet set up, I couldn't leave without them. The next day the cell phone came and I spent the day playing with it and checking out all the cool features (I can hear all you cell phone users who have rolled your eyes at my refusal to ever use a cell phone laughing at me) and I took it over to Whidbey Island to see how the signal reception was there. This also gave me a chance to mow the lawn there (which has not been cut since March, and was hip-high to a tall giraffe and sodden from the normal rainy June weather in that part of the world) and make sure everything is intact and to move some things there that will not fit in the Montana house.
Here is a picture of my Whidbey house on a rainy Fourth of July:
And, to understand why mowing the lawn is a big deal, you have to understand how fast things grow in western Washington. There were blackberry vines and alder trees already starting to come up everywhere. Here are some foxglove that grew in front of the woodshed, blocking access (they were so beautiful I left them there since it is summer and I don't really need to get into the woodshed).


Drive ten hours to Whidbey, stay two days, drive ten hours back. Then spend two days packing up clothes and other things I'll need to get started in Montana. So far retirement is more hectic than work.

Yesterday my computer came, and I've been installing software on it and getting it hooked up to the mobile broadband internet we'll use in Montana. My old computer is on its last legs, and has become very unreliable. It is ancient: seven years old - that's probably 140 years old in computer years. I hate the wasteful rapid obsolescence of consumer electronics, but I can't live without them. Anyway, I'm happy with my new one, although it will take a long time to get it to have everything where I want it like my old one. Working on my old one was like hanging around at home - comfortable and familiar, decorated to my taste, and reassuringly cluttered with my stuff. This new one is quite glamorous (it is purple, with a bright yellow mouse), but feels like a strange neighborhood still. Well, that's appropriate for my new life, I guess.

So now I can leave for Montana at last. For those of you who never visited, here is the house in Boise we'll be moving out of this summer (kind of bland, but what do you expect from a rental?):

So that's it. Next post WILL be from Montana.