Amber and Ollie

    We few days ago, Noah took the top off his Jeep and was unable to get it back on.  Naturally, it began to rain and snow.  On Tuesday, Olli and I noticed the snow was fairly wet and good snowman building snow.  We decided Noah needed a passenger.  The massive snowfall that would blanket the area had already begun as we were rolling the snow person and you can see in the shot, flakes from the insuring storm.

    Thursday night coffee at Denny's.  I worked from home today since the roads were labeled as "impassable" this morning dot website.  I took some time through out the day to read about yesterdays storm and it was pretty interesting.  Wisconsin had to call in the national guard to come in with snowmobiles and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (Humvees) to check on people stranded in their cars on the interstate.  All the road crews were working non-stop with just time off to sleep.  Cities are worried about running out of road salt before the winter is over and have been mixing the salt with sand to conserve.  And we have high winds forecast to start drifting over the already covered roads.  What a winter :)

    My first day of work was greeted with 20-inches of snowfall.  This was likely the most insane driving I've ever had to do.  Most of my trip to Madison was near white-out conditions with visibility limited to around 100 feet.  Interstate 90 was moving about 40 MPH for the first 20 miles or so, then dropped down to around 25 MPH.  Around Stoughton, traffic just stopped completely for about 45 minutes.  When it began moving again, it was at around 20 MPH or lower all the way to Madison.
    The picture today is from my drive up.  I was moving about 5-10 MPH when I took this shot.  There are four vehicles in the ditch in this picture: two simi trucks and two cars.  A little behind the car, there was an other simi truck in the ditch.  The road at this point wasn't really visible, which actually made it nicer to drive on.  The areas were it looked like you could see the road meant the road was covered in a thin layer of ice.  It's interesting to see how a 3,000 pound truck does on solid ice.  For the most part, I could travel at whatever speed I felt like.  But trying to stop was a serious issue.  Any application of the breaks locked them up.  I found it was best to either let off the gas to allow the engine to apply negative acceleration, or shift to neutral and pulse the breaks.
    The drive up was around 2 hours, but it was nothing compared to the drive back.  I started by fighting my way through the Madison belt-line.  When I got to the I-90 ramp, it was blocked by an emergency truck because a simi truck had jackknifed.  I decided I'd just got on going north and spin around on the next ramp.  But when I reached the next on ramp, it too was blocked--this time by two simi trucks--one of which had jackknifed.  I drove until I could turn around and figured I'd just hit the on ramp from the other direction.  This time, a squad car was blocking the ramp--and sure enough, some way up the ramp, a jackknifed simi truck.
    After fueling up and getting some snacks, I got onto Hwy 51 and slowly made my way south.  I knew there was an on ramp in Stoughton.  That took about an hour of travel time, including a pit stop at an auto parts store to buy some new windshield wipers and de-icing window fluid (you can see in the picture that there are streaks on my window--they kept getting worse as the ice shredded my wipers).  I reached I-90 to find they had just pulled out the simi truck that had jackknifed and was blocking the on ramp.  After boarding 90, I was soon sorry I had.  Traffic was mostly simi trucks, and everything was one lane moving between 15-20 MPH.  However, I was happy we were moving that fast.  The north bound traffic was completely stopped.  Cars had their lights off and piles of snow around 8 inches had piled up between vehicles.  It was clear they had been there for awhile and were not going to be moving anytime soon.  I existed just north of Edgerton and figured my odds were better on Hwy 51.  The driving was rough, but I was able to go around 40 MPH.  The stretch between Edgerton and Janesville was kind of fun.  My truck was being kicked around, but I managed to hold my speed.  I ended up home about 3 and a half hours latter--dead tired, but alive and my truck still in one piece. 
    I was to find we received 20 inches with this storm and that over 800 cars and trucks were stuck on I-90 overnight.  It's turning out to be a real Wisconsin winter this year!

    I am quite pleased to announce that I am a member of the programming team for a local company.  Unfortunately, I don't think I get to talk about the details of the company or the project--so that doesn't give me much to write about.
    It has been three weeks since I posted my resume on dice.com and since then I've received calls from about 25 different staffing agencies/consulting firms wanting to know more.  It's been 15 days and I'm employed.  I'm not sure if being attacked by staffing firms is standard for people posting their resume online, but I didn't mind.  Seems everyone liked the 10+ years of experience, which seems almost a little strange to think about--I've been a professional programmer for over 10 years.  (I'm old.)  Most of the staffing firms that called didn't seem to have a clue that there was a difference between systems programming and embedded systems programming.  I got a lot of offers for mainframe and/or database related projects, which I don't really have any interest in doing.
    After being employed, I went about removing my resume from the job sites.  I found it had been viewed 53 times at monster.com.  I expect I'll get a couple more calls for late comers or people following-up.  I'm pretty happy about the whole setup though.  I would tell anyone (who has experience) to list themselves online.
    In celebration of my new job, I took Tyson, Zen and Amy out for sushi.  It's been a couple of years since I've had sushi--and it was good!

    TMNT cake!

    Jodie and her daughter Zoe.  It's cute--they have the same expression.

    Kiefer and Allison (lovingly known as Fat Girl)

    This a shot looking into the rear-view mirror of a car.  It's dark and you don't notice it's a reflection at first.

    Last night Liz celebrated her birthday.  Liz is pictured blowing out the candles on her TMNT cake.