Sunday night here in Portland. I just got back here after spending a weekend with Jennifer, her sister, her brother-in-law, and her niece in Washington. And now here I am, back in Portland, in a different hotel than I normally stay in while I’m up here, and it is raining. Not that hard, but it’s wet everywhere around here. It rained most of the time that we were up near Seattle, which is fine with me. I like rain. I like walking in rain. I like listening to the rain on the roof. I like watching the rain come down. I even like sitting in a hot tub while the rain comes down on top of me.

Unfortunately, I never really got to learn to like driving in the rain.

I’ve reached another first this week: I’ve never before rented a car. After we drove back from Seattle-ish (actually, a tiny town about thirty miles from Seattle) in the rental car that Jennifer had picked up, we went back to the rental car headquarters, dropped off her car, and picked up one for me. Normally, the company I work for wouldn’t spring for a rental car, but this week, for some reason, all of the hotels in downtown Portland are booked solid, so we wound up having to rent rooms in another hotel, located several miles from Corporate offices. And since I’m the first one from the Sacramento office to arrive in Portland this week, it’s my job to rent the car.

Driving in a strange city is always nervewracking for me; I’ve never gotten in an accident and I’ve never even gotten lost, but I’m always afraid that I will. So, if driving my own car in a strange city makes me nervous, imagine how nervous I am driving a rental car in a city I’ve never driven in before, in a state — actually two, since the route from the airport to the new hotel loops up briefly into Washington — several hundred miles from home makes me feel.

And doing it in the rain makes it even more fun.

But here I am. I made it. I didn’t get lost, I didn’t crash the car, I didn’t even make a wrong turn and have to backtrack. The only problem I had was mistaking one hotel lobby for another and ending up at the wrong counter. And even that wasn’t that bad; the clerk at the wrong hotel gave me very clear directions to the right one, which happened to be just a few hundred yards away.

The hotel I’m in this week is much nicer than the one I’ve been staying in downtown. The room is much bigger, the bathroom is nicer, there are even more channels on the television to choose from (not that there is anything good to watch, of course).

So here it is, the beginning of a new week. A month into this new job, and the intensity level as we build a new company is really rising. Even though last week was a short week because of the Labor Day holiday, I still managed to put in nearly sixty hours of work. New migrations are being implemented, new data structures, new processes, and so on. I’m finding myself drifting into the murky realm of project management, but I’m not doing nearly as much coding as I would like to. I’ve been doing website mockups in imaging programs, but not designing the HTML behind them as I would like to, nor am I delving into SQL or Oracle as much as I had hoped I would be at this point. These will probably come soon, though; we’re in the process of hiring a webmaster, who will probably end up being tasked with design finalization while I step back from front end UI and start doing some more straight coding.

Portland is, as I’ve said before, a beautiful city. When Jennifer and I drove around Washington, we discovered that the entire Pacific Northwest is gorgeous (actually, Jennifer already knew that, having been up in the area several times already). We actually began to think that perhaps we had made a mistake in deciding to build our house in the Greater Central Valley of California, where things get so hot and dry in the summer time. But, of course, where we’re building is much closer to our families, and that is very important to both of us. Of course, we also realized that the way our careers are going, it’s possible that we will be, within five to ten years, in a situation where we can consider purchasing a second home. We’ve decided that, should we reach that point, we’re going to buy in the Pacific Northwest somewhere. Probably near Seattle.

I’m still experiencing career angst. Yes, it’s ludicrous; I have an opportunity that very few people ever get. I’m learning a lot in this job, not just about web development but also about project management and Oracle and database development. I have an incredible boss that I really enjoy working for, and co-workers that most people would kill for. And I have the feeling that even over the next year, I will probably move upwards very quickly.

But at the same time, the resentment that I’ve felt is still there. I’ve reviewed some of the career goals that I’ve explored over the past few years, and I’m amazed that the career that I’ve been pursuing over the past few months and which I’m in now has nothing at all to do with the goals that I had just a year ago — heck, back in December, I was pursuing a goal that was more HR-related than IT-related. I’m not sure what it is that made me decide to move into this new career, but here I am. And I think I’m much better off; and in less than a year, I will probably be in a position that I wouldn’t have even dreamed of just a year ago.

So why the angst? I have no idea. Jennifer has been more patient with me than I probably deserve as I fuss about this, and very inspiring to me at the same time. She gave me more encouragement to seek this new job than anyone else, and this is much closer to where I want to be than I was just two months ago. I suppose it’s all rooted in the fact that if I had started pursuing this five years ago, I’d be much better off than I am now; but, at the same time, who knows?

The rain has stopped, but the weather reports say that more is on its way. Streams of water are no longer falling out of the sky, and streams of consciousness are no longer flowing from my mind and onto the keyboard. So, until next time.