I've been out of work since January 1.

I'm about 200 applications deep and not any real traction.

A friend called the other day (well-intended) to offer me a job for 1/3 of what I was making.

I have a few leads from old coworkers/friends - but none of them will turn into anything until at least June 9.

It's a wild ride.

Who's got two thumbs and decided this year's big project would be to get 16 governments to sign a multi-million euro contract together to establish a regional bikesharing system? This guuyyy. The good parts are that I'm essentially in the lead for deciding how the system will look like, as I've written of the requirements specification and partnership agreement. There's a blend of pragmatism, idealism and knowledge of the abstruse ways bikesharing works that I'm proud to have been able to put into it. The downside is that when you run a pack of 16 governments in a particular direction, there's a significant risk of the pace being defined by the slowest of the pack. And the biggest municipality in this ordeal has been plodding along with a breathtaking lack of competence even after escalating it to the highest level possible. I think we'll find a way? But I'm not as sure about that as I'd like to be.

I vibecoded a game this week! Inspired by mike's game I wondered if there is a game like that that I'd like to play and make. Being a bit of a public transit ("OV") and of course mapping nerd, I ended up with the idea to take GeoGuessr and apply that best-of-5 game mode to guessing the location of Dutch train stations based on the name alone: OVGuesser. If you're really good at triangulating you might get some points, but I've made it kinda hard on purpose. The combo of Replit and Claude 4 meant I had a prototype up and running in, like, half an hour? Most of the rest of the time was me finnicking with the UI and UX to get it to look and feel like I wanted it to.

It did break spectacularly when I shared it (first on Linkedin, because who isn't on Linkedin for distractions?). Since I never said I wanted the game to be scalable, the AI decided to give each game session its own sessionID stored locally. Which worked fine when I played it solo but caused every single person to be unable to progress past their first guess to the next station. Cue me being unable to panic-fix that issue. In the end I realized pretty quickly that scalability must be the issue. Refactoring AI-generated code is...not great at the moment. Claude 4 is very cheery and happy about everything it makes, and for sure not critical enough about its own capabilities. In the end I just got Gemini 2.5 Pro to act as the sceptical senior dev, double-checking everything to make sure the refactor actually solved the problem. That worked much better than I expected.

I'm still kinda surprised that the word vibecoding was coined just this year. It is very obviously an imperfect system? But man is it fun and quick and good at side projects like this.

So I guess it's been eight weeks since a house update? steve mentioned he liked them so you can blame him.

Perhaps more importantly there was enough blood in my eye that the ophthalmologist missed a second tear when he lasered me the first time, so my follow-up became "hold still this hurts you more than it hurts me." Speaking as someone who has done three fillings without novocaine, if you're given a choice between a filling with no novocaine or a laser to the eye, pick the tooth. I'm going back on Monday, hopefully not for a third bout of eye lasering. It was edifying to hear that there was so much schmutz in my eye that the ophthalmologist missed a whole-ass tear (bigger than the first, thank god my retina didn't detach out of spite) because it was a fuckin' pain in the ass getting the Russian Woodpecker up and running while staring through 4ml of blood.

That's technically nine antennas, bought as two, a 1-bay VHF that exists almost entirely for PBS and two banked, steerable 4-bays that exist for pretty much everything else. All in all I paid like $500 for absolute broadcast dominance that shows up on my network as four RTSP streams I can pluck down to any device in the house. Theoretically the house gets 82 channels although most of them are worthless and a third of them are repeats. But hey. Downton Abbey and the NFL without any shitty compression artifacts. And now I can put insulation back in the attic. Or I can once I add another alarm capture point and hardwire the remaining fifty dozen window sensors.

Another adventure that happened was "well the pool is back up, time to figure out a heater" which went like this

- "huh, the heater I should put in according to calcs requires 40GPM to work. I'm running... less than ten WTF"

- "apparently that's because my filter is full of paint because if you have a painted pool it should be backwashed every week and I haven't backwashed it since August because it unleashes a torrent of milk into my neighbor's driveway"

- "except now it's so clogged that it won't even prime"

- "maybe if I put it in bypass it'll work"

- "huh if I put it in bypass it spews a quarter cup of water out the backwash port which shouldn't be a problem because this pump is rated IPX6"

- "why is it steaming"

- "why is it faulting"

- "why is my new ethernet controller dead"

- "Huh, this must be why you can't by Jandy pumps within a 500 mile radius of Seattle - THEY AREN'T FUCKING RAIN TIGHT AND THEY DON'T HONOR THE WARRANTIES"

- "but if I flip out of Jandy I need to replace a $500 valve and a $1500 sand filter while I'm at it"

- "and that fucking board is $900"

- "and a new pump is $1400"

So. "what size heater do I need" (the previous one cracked like a fucking egg because the former homeowners didn't empty it before the freeze) became "I guess I'm installing a horse trough while waiting two weeks for Amazon to ship me a 1.85HP variable speed pool pump goddamnit." Even the local pool store went "goddamn, klein, this pool is giving you a hard time" (we're on a first name basis and they give me a steep discount because they like my stories)

The pump showed up and changed out without drama because apparently I know what the fuck I'm doing. The pipe coming out of the backwash is clear PVC, specially ordered at $1 an INCH, so that I can actually see what's going on, seeing as it's backwashing on the other side of a wall 20 feet away. And the plan is to backwash into the horse trough until it's clear, rinse into the horse trough until it's clear, let the paint settle out for a day or so and then empty the horse trough either into my now-officially-headlands-of-Lyon-Creek wetlands (an environmental consultant and 4 state officials later) or into my giant Sequoia.

Here's 90 SECONDS of backwashing and rinsing.

There are now nine zones of irrigation. I'm glad I'm not doing any of that. It's plumbing, under the dirt, in the sun. I'm a 2 1/2" hole away from having that shit connected to the Internet because I also activated the last two racks. Garage is wired. I'm running out of CAT5 on one of three spools; I've probably put 2000 feet of data cable into this house already. Part of the reason I'm able to stop down today is I need to order more speaker cable... and nobody is waiting on me right now. The door store had a labor day sale which allowed me to buy eight doors, pre-hung, for $1200. Oh, fuck, we didn't even talk about the beam.

So the living room floor was kinda... spongey? And also kind of a skateboard ramp. It definitely bowed in the middle. Structural came out and looked at it and said "congratulations, you've passed your torture test" and moved on. My Tasmanian Devil contractor kept harping on it, though, and I'm glad he did. Eventually he cut away the sheetrock around the beam and this is what we saw.

So yeah. Not only did the old guy go "my wife thinks it's cold in this room, could you put in a duct" and get a fake duct, he went "it feels like things settled after the Nisqually Quake, could you reinforce the floor" and got a fake beam.

This finally got structural to get off his ass and give me drawings to reinforce the fireplace. Of course, he reinforced the wrong fireplace because he's a lazy asshole who can't read drawings. So when I went "lol that one is slab on grade you ass" (only much more politely) he said "no worries the details are the same" and took three days to correct his bone-head mistake. So now the beam is real and it's got 2" LVL on either side of it with cross-bolts so I said "we're staining that fucker" and now the shop looks like I've been stealing structure from REI

That shit was done weeks ago but I don't have time to dwell on this shit so I don't even have a picture of it done. It's now resting on 4x6 pillars which are resting on concrete footings which had to be cut out of the existing concrete floor and once that concrete was cut away they found MOAR CONCRETE because this house is Hogwart's.

It's never going to be done. It's endless. It doesn't matter that I now have six racks up and running with eight cameras (there will be thirteen, I think) and we're now legit picking out paint. I had nine contractors show up unannounced (the day my eye sprung a leak) and I had to tell them all to move their trucks because cabinets were being dropped off. It also doesn't matter that the big stuff is done and we're to the point of wrapping up. It's dumb shit like "I'm ready to backwash my pool, looks like I need to buy a new pump" and "there's water in the garage now so I can determine beyond a reasonable doubt that the icemaker is broken on this fridge even though it's brand new because it's a Samsung."

The Tasmanian Devil contractor was tasked with demoing some shit. This included a door and frame. He destroyed the frame, despite the fact that we needed it, and tried to throw away the door, despite the fact that it's an apex transitional solid oak 8-core that would cost roughly $3200 to recreate (I looked into it - I had to steal a closet door from downstairs for my new laundry room because I'm not a pay-$3200-for-doors kinda guy and in that one area there are SIX in immediate view so they better fuckin' match). Day before yesterday I tasked him with installing some bypass doors in two closets next week. He asked if we had more trim "because I'm likely to destroy it." WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TOUCHING THE GODDAMN TRIM IT'S BYPASS DOORS. He does great work when it's big and involving power tools? But he also thinks he's a finish carpenter and I have to go "let me show you the fifteen page environmental impact statement you generated by not waiting until my go-ahead before clearing out my wetlands." I'm exchanging bifolds for bypass, buy new trim because EVERYTHING IS DEMO

Check this shit out tho

The last three contractors to come through had either (A) worked on the house before I bought it (B) worked on the house early on and said "Holy shit this place has come along way" "wow you really opened the place up" or "this is amazing."

I think it's gonna be a nice house.

And I'm coming to terms with the fact that what started out as "a kitchen and bathroom remodel" has become the Mount Everest of renovations. It has been edifying to hear one contractor after another go "this is my favorite project" or "I get it now. I see what you're going for. This is fucking cool."

Maybe I'll live long enough to move in. Jury's still out.

I have five more speaker lines to run and the living room can be buttoned back up. That means I need to order speaker wire, which I am not doing while I write this up. Once the speaker wire is up we can fix the drywall in there.

And I can move on to this.

uhaul pickup june 30, moving july 1. it's down to the wire and i'm touching the third rail. we do not have jobs locked up yet. i'm decided on the emt stuff - i have a program picked out to register for june 2nd - because it's the only thing that has given me passion in maybe ever, and also fuck it, this is the perfect opportunity to go crazy - and also my mom's mom said that she could so see me doing that "because {I'm} so empathetic"

i need something to hold us down for the first 6-ish months. I'm looking for hospital or doctor's office type jobs. I'm scared shitless about everything to be honest - and my boyfriend is too, because he's withdrawing into himself like he does at times like this. it's really hard. I'm gonna bring up couples' therapy to attend once we get there for a bunch of things, but generally the stress of the move and settling in.

i am checking procedural stuff off the list steadily, but there is still a lot to do, and i really really need to lock in on the job front because i've scoped out places but i haven't actually applied anywhere

I'm going to chicago on juneteenth to do some more procedurals at the utility companies and also to tour the apartment/neighborhood because we haven't actually done that yet because we had to snap it up right away because they were the only place to actually get back to us and so on and such as and etc

i had a 3-hour cry yesterday spilling my guts to a friend of mine who has navigated something similar (relationship strain while doing a long distance move). it's a lot, man. i feel like that one girl in the sitcom: I'm so excited, I'm so excited, I'm so scared

I'm trying to see as many people as i can before leaving. I'm pre-missing them. I've never had this many friends, really good friends, and i get this thought when i head home that every time might be the last in a long time or ever. so with all that being said I'm tweaking

Japan has been wonderful! So not ready to leave and return to work next week. It's going to be a chaotic return too. Conference presentation Wednesday that's a 2 hour drive away, monthly meeting Friday that will take a bunch of prep. And we close on the house Friday too, so we have a ton of work on that front as well, with walkthrough and organizing everything. 60 day rent back, so at least we don't need to pack up everything and move! Two weeks of vacation per year is criminal, I hate that US standard. This was a great use of it.