New Bike!

Zap

I heard our rainfall last month was more then the four previous.. Apparently August is going to be a wet one too.. This was accompanied by pouring rain..

Decisions, Decisions..

So a lot of things have been going on here lately.  About three weeks ago I quit my job at Synthes with a new job at a company called Thermo Fisher Scientific waiting for me after about a week of vacation.  This job was a mechanical engineering position with their x-ray and neutron generators.  It was a very challenging and rewarding job, with some serious engineering involved.  This was the type of job you get a masters degree for.  Good money, good people, and interesting work, sounds like a good choice to me. 

Then SRAM (a bike company) came out of nowhere on my last day at Synthes, and asked me "if I was still looking for a job with them".  SRAM is a very large bicycle component company, which happens to have a development center 5 miles from my house.  I've been in there interviewing for a number of different jobs, and each time I didn't get hired.  For an engineer that loves mountain biking, working for them would be a dream job.  Surrounded by like minded people, riding bikes as part of the job, great company culture, and close enough to ride to.  Sounds great, right?

I told SRAM about Thermo Fisher and that I was going to start a new job there in a little over a week.  I told them that I wouldn't be interested after I started at Thermo, but until then I was very interested.  So the next day (a Friday) I came in for another interview at SRAM for an Existing Product Design Engineer.  It went well, and Lianna and I packed up our things for a vacation to Michigan for the week between jobs. 

We were barely out of Colorado when I got a call from the engineering manager at SRAM.  He said the interview went well, but there is still one more person they really want me to meet.  Unfortunately, he was traveling when I was there earlier and was going to be gone when I got back.  Not to mention I wasn't going to be back until the Thermo job was about to start, outside of the window I gave SRAM to make a decision.  So the engineering manager made a proposal, that I could meet this guy in the Chicago airport during his layover home from vacation.  We worked out the details, and I was giving a plane ticket and a hotel reservation in Chicago for the following Monday.  Follow so far?


I'll write about the vacation itself in a separate chapter, so we'll skip right to the flight out of the tiny airport in Pellston MI, and down to Chicago through Detroit.  Everything went ok, and I talked with the guy for about an hour before he went off to his second flight.  I went into Chicago that night, had a deep dish from the originial Pizzaria Uno, and flew back into Pellston the next day (Tuesday).  Then I get a call from the engineering manager at SRAM the next day saying they want to offer me the job.  I'm in! 

So now I'm in a position where I can go one of two ways.  The first is a lucrative career with Thermo Fisher doing some high end, difficult engineering and making a fitting salary for such a job.  The second is a job in the bike industry making significantly less (still pretty good, it is engineering and all), but enjoying the job and the atmosphere.  I think I would of enjoyed the challenges at Thermo, but In the end I chose SRAM.  That meant I had to make a difficult call to Thermo Fisher to tell them I wasn't coming in for work the next week, that I wasn't coming in ever.  It wasn't great to be in that position, but it was better than it would of been after I've been working for a few months and they had invested more time and money into me.  So I accepted the offer from SRAM, made the call to Thermo, and got everything squared away.  I think I'm going to always feel bad about what I did to Thermo, but it's ultimately my decision and my life that was top priority. So now I'm hanging out with my brother and his girlfriend in Bozeman on the tail end of an almost month long vacation, and pretty excited to start next week with my new job!

Post a day

Sproing!

Blogginating

So I haven't been putting much here lately due to to the stupid facebook. Seems like a much better way to get validated with my audience, what do you (5 a day if I'm lucky), the readers of this think? More here?

Surgery

So I had a pretty significant surgery last Wed. removing hardware from my spine that had been used to correct kyphosis 9 years ago. It was time to take it out as the bottom two hooks were loose and probably contributing to my chronic pain and one of the rods was even broken. The procedure was a sucess and lasted about 4 hours. The surgean said the entire thing had bone grown over it and removing it was akin to "removing rebar from concrete". They are too bent up and stripped to put back to the way there were inside me, but I did play around mounting the hooks and things on the bars. Maybe some kind of windchime?

So I'm a little sore, and plan on being that way for another month or so.






It really is pretty crazy to think that all that crap (15oz of it) was attatched to my spine for the last 9 years and I've been able to do what I do. Modern medicine kicks ass.

Japan

Has some low doorways and lots of lights..

 
 
 

 

another

The Bomb

 

Winter?

Lianna and I climbed a 14,100 foot peak called Mt. Belford on Saturday. It was cold, but pretty scenic.

Lightning!

 

The Wet Mountains

Bikes!

The Rock

This little guy was playing with a rock and eventually lost interest and walked off. So I grabbed the rock and went over to him and gave it back. He recognized it immediately and took it back, played with a while and wondered off. It was pretty cool, reminded me of playing with a 1 year old human.

 

Bikes!

 
 
 
 

Perspective

I found this interesting and wanted to share. Notice how much just a little frame of reference changes the picture. Both of these mountains are huge and cool looking, but the Monk (without the umlout, I know) looks much more impressive. Obvious when you think about it, but if you see a huge mountain it really pays to get some perspective in the picture otherwise it won't look nearly as cool when you look at the picture later...