Adventures of a Seattle Dad

Some companies are taking this outsourcing and mobile computing thing too far. I say that because I have joined a sub culture of which I was previously unaware. I am now one of the High-Tech Homeless. Oh, I have a house, and I even have a cubicle somewhere, but I don't go there. I wonder the streets and corridors of Seattle looking for an electric outlet and Wifi. I started a contract as a program manager last fall. My employer handed me a laptop and assigned me a desk in a building where none of my co-workers sat. Also, I was not allowed to have a telephone. Contractors are not allowed to have a telephone. The company made $6 Billion last year, so it is not a money thing. I am just not allowed to have one. Recently they moved my desk to a building 9 miles away from my co-workers, plus my entire development team is 13 and a half timezones away in India. This isolation and lack of a phone has freed me from my desk. I just go to wherever my co-workers are, or wherever I feel like w

Recently my Dad passed away and my son and I went back to Kansas for the funeral. Things were about what we expected at the funeral. Lots of passive-aggressive relatives acting poorly, people we've never seen before claiming to be relatives or dear friends, etc. On the plus side my Mom seemed glad to see all of us and we helped clean out some junk from the house. I should mention that my parents have not been what one could call "social" or "friendly" in decades. I also secured and removed all of Dad's guns and ammo from my Mom's house. Mom wanted them out of the house and we didn't want her taking pot shots at the busybody neighbor that spys on her for my Dad's side of the family. My cousin did point out, however, that if my Mom started shooting up the neighborhood then her long term care would be taken care of by the State at no charge to us. I took this to mean that he didn't want me to unload the guns - just move them to a lower shelf whe

This year we went with my wife's extended family to Ocean Shores for new Years. They have been going for 20 years, or so, but we just never managed to get out there when my wife was alive. I decided that we needed to go because we have heard so many tall tales about family exploits at the ocean. Seattle gets a lot of days of rain, and some occasional wind, but really the weather is pretty moderate most of the time. Storms that come in off of the Pacific break against the Olympic Mountains before reaching Seattle, so we have it fairly easy. City slickers sometimes go out to the coast for "storm watching" because they have something approximating actual weather out there. Our first couple of days at the coast featured rain, sleet, hail, snow, wind, and occasional sun breaks. For my Seattle native relatives this was something to see, but as my cousin back home explained to me, that kind of variation is just a normal day in Kansas. The hotel is actually made up of ind