the occasional occurrence

I was just talking with my friend Steve* the other day about how I used to post to my blog all the time when I lived in IL, but now I don’t so much. A lot of it was Python related stuff, but I did get in the occasional post to catch family in Ohio up with our lives.

Now that we are back in Ohio, I have slacked on the blogging front. But that is why this blog is named as it is. The Occasional Occurrence. Anyhow…

Here is a post to keep those of you who care and who aren’t in Ohio connected with what is going on over here. Now commencing the brain dump…

We are quite settled in here in Canton, OH. The city itself is just bleh. Kind of a suffering industrial city with all of the standard strip malls and restaurants and such on the outskirts. A few parks, some hospitals and of course a Wal Mart Super Center. There’s probably more than that, but it is quite forgettable.

Our neighborhood, on the other hand, is quite nice. We live on a nice deadend street in a smallish 4 bedroom house. It is basically the same size as our house in Greenville, with smaller rooms to make space for the 2 extra bedrooms. So far, it fits the 5 of us just fine.

That’s right, 5. Sarah, Curtis, Eli, myself and my mother-in-law Roberta. She is living with us because her husband moved out on her one day. A real class act. Anyhow, don’t think that it is the typical miserable-mother-in-law-moving-in-with-the-family situation. It has really gone better than Sarah or I expected, and she really is an easy to get along with person. So we are doing well in our strange little family arrangement.

We have made some friends since moving here. We have a really nice family that lives caddy-corner from our back yard. They have a couple of young kids, who are Curtis’s new best friends (although he has not forgotten his friends from IL, and mentions them often). His latest adventure was falling off a little scooter and busting his chin open. He needed 4 stitches and was a brave little guy through the whole ordeal.

Eli is a fat little baby who is almost always in a happy mood. He has recently learned to clap and wave, he has 4 teeth and he says “mama” all the time, and sometimes “dada”. He is very skilled at small particle finding and ingesting.

Sarah is doing an awesome job as a mother to the boys and a wife for me. She is taking Curtis to “school” (a preschool where the parents stay and chat while the kids play and learn) a couple times per week and doing all sorts of other things, like making random friends at Aldi and dreaming about adopting some kids.

I don’t know if I ever really outright said what I am doing now back in Ohio. Well, I am a full-time-payin’-twice-the-social-security-and-medicare
-plus-my-own-health-insurance-self-employed-programmer. Whew. I currently have two contract jobs, both for organizations in California.

The one that I have been working since moving here to Ohio is for Amor Ministries in San Diego. They are a very cool organization that takes short-term service/mission groups into Mexico to build homes for families in need. Local pastors do follow up ministry with the families after they are in their new home. A cool organization. I am fixing bugs, enhancing current features and adding new features to their inhouse database driven web application. As part of the job, I get to make occasional contributions to a couple open source projects: CherryPy (a way to write web applications in Python) and Dejavu (a nice way to interact with data).

The other job is for Polimetrix, a cutting edge polling/statistics startup. I just started about a week ago and I am getting up to speed on writing a language parser using PLY. Pretty intense stuff, but very fun and challenging. The project has a pretty clear set of goals which is nice - more of what I would imagine is typical of a contract job, whereas with Amor I am almost like a remote employee who tackles any of a number of problems - which is also nice but in a different way. What can I say, I like variety

Other than work and other day to day stuff, we have got involved in a local church. It is called First Mennonite and is in downtown Canton. It is our first real experience with the Mennonite denomination, and let me tell you, they take being Mennonite very seriously. For the 4+ years that we spent at the Free Methodist church in Greenville, nothing big was ever made of Free Methodism. It wasn’t a big deal. But these Mennonites, why, they are always talking about what it means to be Mennonite. Which really isn’t a bad thing. I imagine it helps keep them aligned with the core beliefs of the denomination. Notable things so far:

• They are active in trying to help make the world a better place.
• They are pacifists.
• They believe that the role of men and women in marriage is due to sin (Adam and Eve and the fall of mankind and whatnot).

Just some Menno snippets there. Maybe I’ll blog more about them sometime (esp. the middle bullet point). All in all, we love the church and the family atmosphere. We just got involved in a discussion group so we’ll see how it all goes.

There you have it. The life and times of us ‘dowskis.

cw

* Steve, who should rename his blog to “There was this one time it occurred.” I linked to it for the pure humor value; he hasn’t posted in 2 years.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 9:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.