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So this came in yesterday’s mail.

Of course it’s for Kyra.

I saw this picture on the internet this morning:

It evoked all kinds of 1990’s nostalgia:

* A thirteen-inch screen in a compact, fifty-pound CRT monitor
* A mid-tower case with a 24X CD-ROM drive (eventually technology reached screaming speeds like 52X)
* CD-ROMs, or maybe music CD’s… either way, you don’t see many of those any more
* Doom!
* 3.5″ floppy disks in their little cardboard boxes

But best of all…

* The “turbo” button that changed the computer’s clock speed when you really wanted to run stuff quickly (note this particular computer is set to “HI”)

Ahh, good times.

A couple of years ago, Kyra worked for our friend Emily, who owns a goat-herding business. She rents the goats to organizations– typically municipalities– who want them to handle weed control. Kyra’s job is to put up fencing around the area that needs to be “trimmed”, and then herd the goats into the fenced area. They remain there throughout the day, munching happily on weeds but generally leaving grass alone. At the end of the day, she herds them back into the truck and takes down the fencing.

It’s actually pretty tough work on a hot day, but Kyra enjoys it and has fun with her friend. Moreover, it provides a great conversation-starter whenever people are talking about summer jobs or “what I did yesterday”. For example, yesterday Kyra was working with a llama who got a little excited and spit on her. Why a llama? Because they’re very good goat-herders who protect the little guys from predators (or aggressive people, I suppose). When you’re a sandwich artist at Subway, you don’t get to tell funny stories about being spat upon by a llama.

All in a day’s work…

I received my 2017 property valuation notice from Boulder County, and they listed the value of my house way above what it’s worth. According to them, it increased in value by over $80,000 last year! It’ll mean another $700 in property taxes. Not cool.

So I went to the Boulder County assessor’s site to figure out how to protest this valuation, and they provide some search tools so you can find comparable properties. They use “time-adjusted” sale prices, all calculated for June 2016 (the time of the valuation), so it’s a relatively simple matter of finding homes like mine, seeing their sale prices, and finding an average.

Of course, with tens of thousands of homes in Longmont alone, that “relatively simple” matter gets complicated quickly. Looking at a map isn’t a good way to identify homes of roughly the same square footage, or with a similar basement or yard or year of construction or whatever. Luckily the county provides a downloadable Excel spreadsheet that lists properties which sold in the past two years (which is the time period for the valuation). I downloaded it, and was a little dismayed to find that it contained 5,900 property records. Hmm.

Sorting by square footage was a first step, but not useful because I’d find houses the same size as mine, but 50 years older… or without a garage… or in a ranch style. After a few futile attempts to sort the spreadsheet in a way that would show me comparable homes, it occurred to me what to do. I’m a database programmer, right? So I wrote a little PHP script to load the spreadsheet data into a database that I’d quickly created, and pulled all of those values into the appropriate fields.

Then it was a relatively simple (I keep using that phrase…) matter of writing some SQL queries to find homes that matched my criteria, and calculate the average of their sale prices. I could look for homes with floor space within 100 square feet of mine, or built within a few years of mine, and so forth. After a few queries I narrowed it down enough to identify some houses that were more similar to mine than the ones the county had selected. I went back to their web site, filled out the protest form, and submitted my calculations. In three months they’ll respond whether they accept my proposed valuation, and hopefully my tax bill will be $700 lower.

I’m not sure what other people do in a situation like this, but if you’re a database guy…

The other day I was driving with Zaque, and out of the blue he said, “You know, Kyra is pretty cool.” I asked whether she’d done something in particular to merit such high praise, but he just shrugged. “No, she’s just cool.”

This cracked me the heck up.

American astronaut Jack Fischer reached the International Space Station yesterday, and described the experience as

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could all have experiences like that frequently?

It’s official: we’re on the way to Hawaii.

Over twenty years ago, Laralee and I talked about taking a trip to the islands for our honeymoon. Of course we were flat broke back then, so we kept putting off the vacation. Finally, a couple of months ago our friends Kurt and Megan decided they wanted to go to Hawaii for Kurt’s 40th birthday. They invited us, we accepted, and now we’ve booked our trip. Well, technically Megan booked our trip and paid for everything. She texted this:

Yeah, she picked up some broccoli for Laralee at the store, so I guess we owe her for that too.

Happy belated honeymoon!

This is me today.

Last night Zaque participated in a youth activity at church where they played “bigger and better”. They divided into teams of about four teenagers, and each team was given a standard #2 pencil. Then they were supposed to go out to the surrounding neighborhoods and talk to people to see if they could “trade up” for something better. Whoever had the coolest thing at the end of the night was the winner, so to speak.

One team headed off to the home of one of the kids, and came back with their SUV. I don’t think that was in the spirit of the game, though…

Anyway, Zaque’s team walked to our neighborhood and saw an older woman sitting on her front porch smoking a cigarette. They walked up to her, explained who they were and what they were doing, and asked if she’d be willing to trade for a #2 pencil. She agreed, went into the house, and came back with a nice souvenir pocketknife. Very nice!

They went to another house and knocked on the door to find an “older dude”. That’s what Zaque said– he could’ve been 30 or 60, I don’t know. Anyway, this guy apparently used the phrase “right on” quite a bit, so after the boys explained what they were doing, he kept nodding and saying “right on”. After thinking a moment, he told them to wait while he found something in the house.

Returning to the door, he gave them sixty dollars in cash. Yeah. Apparently Zaque and his friends were dumbfounded… they didn’t expect that at all. Of course they were pretty happy about it! They were going to leave, but the man asked if they’d be willing to pray with him for a minute. Since they were from a church, he thought maybe they could all pray together. Zaque said they knelt in a circle, held hands, and the guy delivered sort of a rambling prayer that, at points, asked that the boys be blessed as they walked around the neighborhood looking for good things.

After that I guess they decided they didn’t want to give away cold hard cash, so they went straight back to the church. Splitting that four ways worked out pretty well, and Zaque said it was a “really fun activity”. Now I’m sure he’ll blow it all on Hot Cheetos or something.

Still, that’s admittedly better than a #2 pencil.