eventful weeks.

I meant to take a photo of all the empty space on our lot: the garage looked nicer as a debris pile than it had as a garage, and yet it's even better now that it's all gone, and better still since our neighbors (who we're friends with) took down the shared fence. Even once we give them back the 8"-12" the old fence stole from their property, there's so much space to work with: not just the 19'x19' building, but the 6' wide Shed of Doom on the far side, and the metal-roofed, low-ceilinged, termite-ridden shade structure over the patio. There's so much space for things that are...not ugly! Someone on Nextdoor even wants the old well pump from 1955 or whenever.

In an improbable coincidence, the garage was demolished and then suddenly our permit to demolish+rebuild–which permit has been stalled for, no joke, 2 years–was approved. Not that any of us have the bandwidth for that, whether it's the project management, or the construction noise that we can't get away from because...there's nowhere to go. Instead, we'll put up a nicer shade structure, and a couple of sheds for secure bike and tool storage, and big gates across the driveway to screen everything from the street. It's gonna be awesome.

One thing startups don't like to tell young engineers is that any given startup, no matter how carefully they think they've chosen, is almost certainly not going to be the kind of success that will let them retire in luxury at 27. Silicon Valley relies on that heady brew of intelligence, optimism, ignorance, and heedless energy. Many of us keep working at startups even when we no longer have all of those things, because the money's good enough (depending on your lifestyle) and we don't like working at big companies. And there's a place for us, too. Or we hope so, as we get older.

This is not to say that companies don't find a way to "exit," as we say. The venture capitalists funding your startups are VCs because they're good at making money, for themselves and others. They know all the other VCs, who are also good at making money, and so it's not remarkably difficult for VCs to make money for each other–at the very least, to get their investment back–by buying each other's companies. If you own millions of shares, this can be a hefty down payment on your new Learjet; if you're an engineer who was employee #40, it will likely come out somewhere between "a weekend at the Four Seasons" and "buy a new Volvo." I've worked at a lot of startups–I think a dozen?–and all but the single most idiotic managed to fumble their way into a half-assed demise of being bought by Microsoft or Facebook or something. As a rule, VCs are good at getting paid.

I did manage to extract some real, non-hypothetical money from this last one, which means reserving money for taxes, paying off a lot of debt, and buying more musical instruments I've been eyeing for months or years. And probably adding to the list, since that is the way of things.

I've been mostly enjoying this round of job searching, which is new. I was a people-manager for 4 years at a name-brand company that everyone in tech recognizes, so I just have to talk fluently and convincingly about people and teams and organizations and relationships, which I can do easily, unlike programming interviews, which I can't. I'd already been unemployed for 3 months when the comically awful January struck, I'm pretty ready to stop looking and start working. I've been talking to so many companies, this week especially, that it's been hard to keep them straight, as I give similar answers to the same questions from different small companies on the same day. I'm happy to find places that value emotional intelligence (or would like to), and I'm expecting two or three offers to land next week, though, and then I can get busy hiring my Army of Dread Software Minions.

For my birthday I bought my first truly nice violin bow. It's carbon fiber, so far the only material to really compete with the incredibly problematic high-quality pernambuco wood that is still the musical standard. (Pernambuco is as messed up as any other tropical hardwood, and also it's even more wasteful than ebony, which is saying something.) This one has a funky kind of design and balance, which they suggest is for "high-octane" performances, perhaps well-suited to unusual instruments like my 5-string violin.

I love it. But I don't really understand why. I've measured and weighed and checked the balance points among the 3 very different bows I have: the carbon fiber, a yellow sandalwood, and a "hybrid" which is wood over a carbon fiber core. The differences don't look so big on paper, but our human power of honing our perceptions make these things matter. There's a story of an Olympic-level fencing match, where one fencer stops and accuses his opponent of cheating via a longer weapon. Sure enough, Mr. Cheaterpants's weapon was...1/16" too long. I don't think this is exaggerated: in aikido, I adjust my timing by fractions of a blink, maybe 50-150 milliseconds objectively. Get the timing wrong and your technique won't work.

So the new bow bounces "right," and seems to draw the right sound out of the instrument, including the low C string. I dunno. I just like it.