PLO Style

Gave notice at work today. May will be my last month there. I’m moving to Portland, Oregon. Not 100% sure what I’m going to do when I get there but I’ve always loved Portland.

Oakland/Bay area is cool and all. I mean, it’s beautiful here, I love the climate, lots of different and cool things to do and people to meet, it’s not really far from anywhere no more than a days drive to most places you want to go. Thing is it’s also a bit douchey, dirty, crime ridden, over-crowded, and super expensive. I’m kind of over it, although I expect to miss it as well.

The biggest reason we’re moving is my daughter. School’s here are either outrageously expensive; we’re talking more a year than most people pay for college, and that’s just for pre-school and Kindergarten, or you have to live in a more expensive neighborhood to get into any decent public schools. Oh you could “win” a spot in one of the lotteries for the decent charter schools as well. It’s such a headache.

We have a hook-up in Portland and if we move into this family’s neighborhood we can get into a really awesome school. Although the cutoff for school age in Portland is they have to be 5 by September 1st but Ruby’s birthday is Sept. 22nd. So I’ve become all to familiar with an ongoing child development debate of when kids should enter Kindergarten. Do you hold your child in pre-K until they are almost 6, or do you push them into class with kids almost a year older than they are?

As for me I’m going to focus on finishing up Grad School. I’ve taken a 3 semester leave while I was working and going through a bunch of life stuff. I only have like 3 or 4 semesters left tops so I can plow through it. If I can focus on it and get an internship I can do it in a year. That will be cool.

Plan is to stop work end of May. Pack and take it easy first couple weeks of June while Ruby finishes school, move all our stuff up to Portland. Then I’m going New Jersey and New York for a month or so while Nicole stays in Portland and finds us a house to rent. Back to Portland late July or Early August.

So yeah, big move. Exciting stuff.

In other news I’m buying a new PC. I can spend upwards of 1200ish on it which gives me lots of options. I can’t decide if I want a kind of future-proof mega-machine or more of something that will be more than enough but one I’ll want to upgrade sooner like when octocores are the norm. Basically do I go all out for an AMD x6 or i7930 with like a Radeon 5850 or nVidia GTS250 and 6 or 8GBs + big PSU; or do I just get a cheaper decent AMD x4 with like a 5450 and 4GBs? Either will do and then some, it’s just a matter of how much I want to do down the road and how soon down the road I want to do it. I’m not one to build my own, yet, I expect to build my next one; but there are some decent deals out there right now. I just have to pull the trigger on one.

Started playing some cards a little bit tonight. Just a small session of Rush PLO. Started off super spewy but reigned it in and managed to play decent for a while. I can’t wait to put in a bunch of hands this month.

cheers