Adventure Move #2

This time toward heat, not cold

Back in 2011 I was working at a CNC company in a dumpy part of Los Angeles, writing the software to make machines move accurately along pre-programmed paths to create parts. It was uninspiring. One morning I saw this photo on Drudge Report (before it became a Communist propaganda machine)

I became a long time friend with Dave, the guy on the left with the goatee.

A rag tag group of engineers had taken CES by storm with a… robotic ball.It was driven by your smartphone. It was called a Sphero by a start-up named Orbotix. I thought “Wow, this is the best of America in invention right here, right now!” So I emailed them to see if they needed a control systems engineer. They did. I ran it past my new girlfriend Karen – who would later marry me – to see what she thought. “I would never stand in the way of your success, Dan.”

Three months later I pulled up roots, rented out my house to an LAPD cop and his family, and moved to Boulder, CO.

Heading east past Great Basin National Park, minimal stuff in tow. The Jeep was still young at 92,000 miles.

The Colorado lifestyle was great. Karen and I bought 40 acres up in the Rockies that had a stream, two fresh water springs and enough pine growing there to supply 4 cords of wood per year. I spent a few years building out a Plan B retreat for us.

This was from my apartment patio in Boulder.

I spent a lot of time developing the prep resources you’ve read about on this blog through the times up there in the Rockies. It was real training. Real hard training at times (like when I smashed my fingers under a 20 lb. concrete block and broke the tufts off of two of them; the dude at the ER center the next day said “I am surprised you are not screaming in pain.”)

Plus 13 Years

As you’ve read earlier, I’m on to the next season of my life, no wife. Same Jeep, same U-Haul trailer though this time I was bound for Austin, TX.

This time, the Jeep and trailer were massively overloaded; probably 2,500 lb. in the twin axle and 700 in the Jeep. Odometer read 401,050 miles so that engine was not happy. But it persevered.

Unfortunately I discovered that two weapons were stolen from me, likely by contractors she let in to work in the house. They left the gun cases to make it seem like they were still full and delay my discovery.

What cowards.

I did a custom paint job on my Ruger 10/22 takedown rifle. It was sweet.

Here in Austin the moving helpers flaked out of me so I got to unload it all by myself. Took four hours but I was good for it.

About 1/4 of what I unloaded. The ammo cases (not shown) were the worst.

I start my new engineering job later this morning in Bluetooth software development. I am really looking forward to going in to the office every day to sit at a desk – the last 6.5 years of working remotely was certainly convenient but ultimately it just sucked due to a lack of human interaction.

I don’t want to get preachy here but I was absolutely crushed by my divorce and the necessity of selling off my machine shop in order to sell the house. Not to mention the dissolution of my extensive preps; I literally gave away 3,000 lb. of gear to the guys in my Prescott tribe that came to help me load up the shipping containers.

My current situation is: if things go to heck, I have 72 hours of food and water in the Jeep. It will take me months to rebuild a reasonable level of resilience here in this apartment.

I can now say that it did me a great service by bringing me back to the understanding that as much as I rationally plan and execute, the outcome isn’t really up to me. I simply get a (weak) vote. It is God that charts my path. When Jesus fed the 5,000 by dividing up the fish and barley loaves He was showing that “Oh hey, I do this every day by making the plants grow and the fish swim.”

I am glad to be here to execute in my new future.

Dan