House pictures
Here are some pictures of the new place:
It looks like we will sign the mountains of paperwork and get the keys next Tuesday!
1 comment May 11th, 2006
Archive for May, 2006
Huge news!
Big apologies for not posting regularly for quite a while. Things have been quite hectic at work.
My department used to have about 15 people in it, then a reorganization moved some people to other departments, cutting us down to about 12. Another reorg resulted in several layoffs, cutting our numbers to 8. Then, economic factors outside the organization’s control resulted in management making the decision to layoff 10% of the workforce. Because of federal, state and local laws governing our financial structure (we are a large public agency), the 80+ positions would be removed from departments that made up about 50%-60% of the organization. My department was hit the hardest, with half being laid off, including my infamous manager Ted. You can read more about Ted here (and here, here, here, here, here and here.) We were all not so surprised that Ted somehow managed to be the only laid off employee interviewed on the air by KOIN 6 news on the day the layoffs were announced (yup, it was that big a deal when that many people were laid off here, it was one of the top news storys on that day back in September 2004.)
So aaanywaaaay, at that point there were four of us, in effect doing what 15 people used to do, doing all the end-user IT support for an organization with close to 1000 users. Just recently, after our industry’s economy started picking up again, it was announced that we would be hiring another Technical Analyst like the four of us, as well as a supervisor, bringing our number up to six. We all applied for the supervisor position as well as many people from outside the organization, and one of my co-workers got the position. I’m not at all upset at the decision (you know I would have no problem venting my frustration here otherwise), and I’m really glad that management and HR decided to promote from within.
However, in addition to all that is happening at work, I have even bigger news: we bought a house. It is a three bedroom, 2.5 bath common-wall (one half of a duplex) here in Beaverton, with 1480 square feet. It sits right next to a greenspace that will never be developed, so the kids have literally acres of fields right outside the back door to run and play. It was built in 1995, and is in great shape.
Several things were found when the home inspector walked through the place. Most are pretty minor, like the garage door opener not working, but a few were pretty serious, like failing LP siding. So far, the seller has agreed to all of our requests for repairs. If nothing goes wrong, we will be signing all the paperwork in a few weeks, and we will pick up the keys on May 18th.
I’ll post some pictures of the place here as soon as I can, so keep checking back!
Add comment May 1st, 2006