We've had construction going on outside our house for the last 8 months.  There used to be an empty lot.  Empty as in: a snag, overgrowth, an area that kids could play in unseen, an area that sometimes became a receptacle for garbage, and tall trees which were pretty when seen from our backyard or our bedroom, frequently sporting flickers and piliated woodpeckers.

Now we have noise, a big ugly dirt hole, construction machinery and crew; and a notable lack of woodpeckers.  When we moved in we knew that the "empty lot" wouldn't last forever; what I didn't realize was that it wasn't going to be one or two houses, but an entire subdivision.  Right now it looks like they are fitting at least two blocks of houses there.

Tonight is "reboot Friday" at work.  That means instead of being at work by 9:00am; I go in at 7:00pm and might not be home till after midnight.  I took the opportunity to get my car worked on this morning and then I took a nap.  I woke up to the happy sound of a flicker drumming.  Considering that I haven't seen a flicker in 8 months, this makes me hopeful that they haven't all abandoned us for good.

Not much.  This page is new.  I might be posting a few more recipes soon; and I'm thinking again about posting some more "How To Linux" stuff because I've been doing new things and documenting plenty.

At work I've been installing CVS respositories, installing MPICH, doing regular updates.   My most exciting project so far is installing apache 1.3 with mod_ssl (including php and mod_perl) from source.  Things are so much easier in Linux these days.  It is hard for me to know how much of that is that I've learned enough of the basics to make sense of the instructions, and how much is that the technology has gotten friendlier.

I'm still bicycle-commuting, but the distance is much shorter.  Even bicycling 5 times per week does not equal the milage I used to cover in 3 days at my old job.  I need to be doing more exercise because I've started to gain back some of the weight I dropped.

There are more visible and audible animals on my current commute because the trail follows the Sammammish River, (which back East would be called a "stream") and rolls past the park in the center of old Bothell, "Bothell Landing".  Yesterday on my commute in, I saw my first bunny in 4 months.  They must hibernate or semi-hibernate in the winter.  I'm also hearing frogs again, particularly on my evening commute home.

The Sammammish River has been full of mergansers under the bridge at Bothell Landing.  This is unusual.  The common waterfowl to see there are mallards and Canada geese.  There are some new fancy roosters in the wild chicken flock.  seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/outdoors/2002134158_nwwbike30.html