January 4, 2004

Happy New Year!

Now I know we are old. We did not stay awake for midnight. We comforted ourselves with the fact that we made to midnight in Ohio, but that was easy. Monday night is a bad night for a celebration. We made a normal dinner, enjoyed a bottle of champagne, watched a movie, and talked to our friends before calling it a night.

The new year is promising some big changes. I received a call from Chevron on January 2^nd. They are offering me a position, more than doubling my current salary, giving me the highest base salary I have ever earned and a significant annual bonus. I never thought I would be wishing for $100 a barrel oil. Come on, $4 a gallon gasoline! Wow, that’s a twisted thought.

The job should be interesting. I will be working with my old supervisor and she and I will be responsible for assuring compliance with air regulations for about a dozen oil platforms in Cook Inlet, a few land based facilities in the area, and at least one facility under development 700 miles north of here on the North Slope. Five years ago I had no idea that I was going to create a new career in the environmental field. What a long strange trip its been.

It will be awhile before I start my new job. They will be sending me a formal offer letter and I need to formally accept. Then I have to go through a physical and drug testing. I will probably not even give my two weeks notice at my current job until late this month. It does change my perspective on my work. I also keep hoping that I don’t have any dealings with Chevron in my last month with the state. It could be a conflict of interest that might force my hand. I haven’t had much dealing with them in the past so I think I can get through the rest of this with integrity.

The weekend was nice. We skied, of course. We spent Saturday with a friend. The conditions were nice. North Face finally opened all the way to the bottom. Sunday was just an average day. The parking lots were packed both days. We felt like real locals driving by all the filled parking lots up to the hidden back lot with slope side parking. Oddly, the slopes weren’t crowded and the lift lines were short. Some of the problem was the visibility was variable, with banks of thick fog moving through. It takes some talent to ski bumpy terrain when you can’t see.

Tuesday was a great day for skiing. We got up early, beating all the hungover skiers to the slopes. It was like we had the place to ourselves. We haven’t had much new snow, but the wind was depositing soft snow into the troughs of the moguls. It really softened things up and we had tremendous fun. We skied North Face 3 times in spite of the pain of having to ride the tram. Some days are so much fun that you just can’t quit. We skied much longer than I had imagined. My legs were really fatigued the next morning.

We still managed to get home in time to make our traditional New Year’s dinner - pork, saurkraut, and dumplings. It was a really good pork roast.

We seem to be on a spending spree this year, perhaps feeling freed up by our job/income changes. We still seem to struggle to spend money. We bought some mittens for skiing and both had a hard time spending that much, trying on every available pair looking for the best bargain. I bought some socks and Kris bought some clothes. There was much more that we could have purchased, but we seem to be reluctant spenders.

Then we noticed that we lost some channels on the TV. I saw on the news that our cable company was converting to digital on January 15^th, a year ahead of the deadline. We decided it must be time to buy a new TV, time to replace the tiny 14” TV we have been proudly using as our only TV since moving up here. Watching television still isn’t a priority to us so we knew we just wanted a modest LCD digital TV. We ordered a pizza, ran to Best Buy, picked up a TV, came home and hooked it up, and then went out and picked up our pizza. Yes, we were that quick.

Unfortunately, we hadn’t noticed the fine print from our cable company. We didn’t really need to upgrade the TV, we only needed to get a cable box. The information we had said that the cable box was free for 3 months and then we would have to pay an extra couple bucks a month. I wasn’t too happy since I didn’t want a cable box and I didn’t want to have an increase in our TV costs. It was frustrating that we had just unnecessarily bought a new TV, but it seems like a nice TV and Kris seems to be looking forward to finally being able to read the scores during a football game so we decided to keep it.

After eating our pizza, we ran up to the cable company’s store in the mall and picked up our cable box. I was in a foul mood for their surprise removal of channels and impending increase in our bill. I think they are getting beat up pretty good for this change. When they pulled a giant cable box off the pile, Kris commented on its ugly clunkiness. The clerk explained that they had a few smaller boxes so she pulled out a small box from a drawer. Then she explained that we had a choice of getting the stripped down version and that would not cost us the additional monthly cost after the three free months. So we brought that home and now we seem to have several hundred channels. I have purposely stayed to basic cable so that I wouldn’t have any desire to watch more TV. I have no idea if we are going to lose access to all these channels or if we are going to be charged for the box in the future, but for now we seem to be set.