Most people who read this will actually have met me before. For you few who haven't, here are a few words by way of introduction.
My name is Lorrie Wood. Due to the ever-invasive nature of spam cataloguing bots on the Internet, I'm not going to write my e-mail address out for you, but if you look at the URL of this page, take the word after the ˜, then an at sign, then the domain snugharbor.com, that should work.
I'm a unix systems administrator living in Berkeley, California. What this basically means, to the non-technical, is that I'm one of those people who makes go, and stay going. I naturally have a resumé available on request. For the technical in the audience, people usually pay me for my Solaris skills, but at home I primarily use Red Hat Linux. Socially, between my friends and curiosity, I've gotten downright cozy with MacOS (these articles, in fact, are being written and submitted from a "blueberry" iBook), Windows of several kinds, and in past jobs I've even diddled with FreeBSD.
On the other hand, I also think cooking a medieval feast at a dance for three hundred people is a fine way to spend a weekend, my friends think I need to visit a good old-fashioned war, and I'm known to be fond of rather disreputable gods. I think life would be immeasurably more fun if I lived in my own personal musical. I've sailed, travelled a little, lived several places (strangely, never more than fifty miles from Interstate 80), and generally lived by one of Heinlein's better-known maxims:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
In short, I like to hack my skillset as I go. It keeps me busy, employed, and without too many people on my Better Dead List. If anything, my husband's better at the skillset-hacking thing than I am -- he's had rather a bit more practice, though, so that's to be expected.
I'm working, currently, as an independent consultant. The money's good, but the job security's pretty much non-existent. Still, the dot-com 'downturn' isn't half as bad as the media would like you to believe, at least not at my level of expertise.
Anyway, a few months ago, I had the strong urge to do as a fellow I admired had done: chuck everything I could reasonably leave behind and go off on a drive for awhile. Out. Anywhere. I'm not nearly as sick of where I am and what I'm doing as he was, though -- I found alternatives to ending up in the kind of soul-sucking situation he did -- so while I felt entitled to a Flaming Road-Trip of Wasted Youth, I always figured on coming back. The core truth of the man, the myth, the legend behind Enlightenment with a Vengeance, though, was incontrovertible: Sometimes you can't be where you are anymore.
Road-trip buddies were scarce so I chickened out on the driving idea. Sorry, I just didn't need as big of a break as he did. So I'm taking a mess of trains. Now that you know who I am (after a fashion), and what this is about, (sort of), why not mosey on back a page to the list o' links or just forge ahead to February: The Plan?