Career Jackpot

I am so fortunate to be here. Here at Lonza, in Bend, in Tumalo, in the land of the last Blockbuster, and on the Twin Bridges scenic bike route. I cannot wait for the family to join me. They are going to find even more ways to love this.

Sunrise from my balcony

Sunrise from my balcony, with a view of the pond

Sunset from my balcony

Professionally, my first week was excellent in all the ways that I had hoped, and not so great in the very predictable ways (namely, setting my computer up to meet my needs and figuring out how to navigate all the different bits and pieces of administration. I still need to figure out how to get this awesome 401K set up, but it seems to require that I override some information from my last job in ADP...I cannot seem to make ADP forget APx. I think I need to submit an HR ticket.)

A bag filled with swag

Here is a list of the excellent:

1. It is apparent that I have full autonomy over my work, access to the department's business direction, and clearly achievable goals. There will be no micromanagement here.

2. The pace is much slower than what I am used to. Doing things well, slowly, and correctly is the order of the day. 

3. I will own the NMR and its capabilities. The scientist who performed this function is leaving to go be a consultant in the coming weeks, so I jumped in and remembered how to use it. In November, the old Varian console will be upgraded to a state-of-the-art Bruker Neo, so I will be heavily involved in the installation, training, and relationship-building with the vendor's application scientists.

4. My first deliverable is a document summarizing the PAT opportunities within Bend R&D. I started musing right away and my manager quickly said, "No hurry! You don't have to finish today or even next week." I am going to start by meeting with my new solid form colleague this week to understand their current vibrational spectroscopic equipment.

5. The perks. Oh my goodness, the perks! Where to begin? 

Someone has really been empowered to implement real employee retention policies here. First, there are the on-site fitness classes, trails, teams, showers, towel service, and a fitness app, where you can earn points when you work out or check in at your gym, where you get gym rebates through the app. You then redeem the points for prizes like gift cards and vouchers, such as Amazon, Southwest Airlines, Target, various spas, Best Buy, Nike, Athleta, Macy's, etc. That's all pretty fun, but you can also save up lots of points for gear like Garmin, Fitbit, and Apple watches. I think I will try to save points for one of those. 

There are yoga classes twice a week and fitness classes twice a week at lunch time, in addition to things that I probably cannot participate in due to aches and pains and lack of any kind of athletic ability: lunchtime running club, soccer club, and and ultimate frisbee.

Every single desk has two monitors and a compatible dock for a company laptop, and all the desks can be raised to standing height, just in case you are tired of sitting on your butt.

I will split my time between North Central Bend ("Bend Research Inc. Central" or BRIC) and Tumalo (BRIT), but my office will be at BRIT. The person in charge of the seating arrangement confirmed this with me on Friday afternoon. This starts to narrow down the area where we might want to look for houses next spring. I want to be bikeable to both locations and probably in the Mountain View High School zone.

The break room at BRIT looks like this.

This stuff is all free...as much Bubly as you can drink (I will stop buying it now), bread and bagels, a cupboard full of soup, peanut butter and jelly, honey, teas, coffee, etc. There are two fridges. One for your private lunch bag and another for communal foods like every single flavor of cream cheese ever invented.

Someone here is caring for this squash, tomato, and herb garden, and the veggies are piled up on a platter for people to take.

Here is my fantastic new NMR. I don't want to look suspicious by taking a bunch of photos of the labs, but this is a domain over which I have been assigned leadership, so pictures feel fine.

A magnet for me to love, with other people assigned to its care and feeding. (The worst burn I have ever had was not when I grabbed onto a panhandle after finishing steaks in the oven. It was when I branded my arm with a transfer tube as it emerged from a dewar of liquid helium. I didn't even feel it at first, it was so cold. Then my skin throbbed, blistered, and wept for several days.)

Old computer that isn't connected to a cloud? No problem. Here's your own personal 8-GB secure thumb drive issued by the front desk. Do what you need to do to get the job done!

A 12-sample autosampler, ensuring that no one has to wait around to run their samples.

This is starting to get pretty long. I have some bike ride videos to share, but I'm going to stop for now and just share some pictures from this week. More to come!

My odometer rolled over this week!

Morning views on the bike ride to BRIT

I stumbled on the last Blockbuster! My GenX brain was so tickled that I had to go in!

My favorite trumpet player, hamming with his friends

Glass art on the path to Braveheart's horse barn

Saturday's workout

Some pictures from Texas:

Finally, this silliness.

Lonza

I am here, no longer unemployed. What a crazy, awful, wonderful summer. I report to work today at 9 am.

I put 70 miles on my new bike this weekend. The sweet owner of my Airbnb also has an ebike ("I was a skeptic, but then I rode one and felt like Super Woman," she said), and she showed me how to get to Sisters on the back roads (a total of 33 miles) on Saturday. I'll go ahead and refer to her by her Airbnb name, "Braveheart," since I haven't told her about this blog yet. She might want to preserve her privacy. 

On Sunday, I met my new supervisor for coffee and confirmed that I would be splitting my time between the Tumalo and Bend labs, so I took a meandering ride to the Tumalo site from my studio. It's an easy 20 minutes. The ride to Bend will take about twice as long, but it isn't hot at all, and so this is really pleasant. I wandered around a lot longer on the bike, ended up on a sandy dirt road, and took my first spill...sand is slick! My body and my bike are unharmed, so all's well that ends well. Wouldn't you know I captured it on video, too? The GoPro is also unharmed, thank goodness. I am still working out how to make the best movies of my bike rides (apologies for the dizzying camera position adjustments during this ride...it was only meant to be experimental footage), but here's the clip of my spill!

Bike Ride Wipeout! (opens in Google drive)

Here are Braveheart's ranch goats. They are wondering what I have brought for them to eat :-)

I had dinner last night with another new-to-Bend Austin-Texan. The restaurant was Jackson's Corner. It was mostly good. We are going to start working our way through the reasonably priced restaurants in Bend and this general area. We'll try to go to some of the festivals, too! 

Last, some miscellaneous photos and the lunch bag drawings I completed this weekend. Have a good week everyone!

Not pictured in the bike setup: the saddle bag on the far side and the new rearview mirror that I mounted on the left grip yesterday. Isn't this a pretty bike? I think I'll call her Monica. Braveheart said, "Do you want to use a hose to keep her clean?" I think not so much. I'll wipe down the disk brakes and front suspension, but if she gets dirty, that just makes her less tempting to thieves.

First Full Day in Bend

There were lots of things that I could've/should've/would've done today....but I did none of that. 

Instead, I went from bike shop to bike shop. By the end of the day, I had an obvious winner. The electric bike I finally got is comfortable and easy to ride, and I am so pleased!

Salt Lake to Boise

Since yesterday's copyrighted music selections caused some problems, I'm dumping YouTube and putting my videos in Google Drive. Sony Music is so silly. I'm not monetizing these videos, and if anything, I could be making Alexandre Desplat an extra fan or two, so they should be thanking me, not blocking my videos.

Here's yesterday's video, with a stop at Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls, Idaho.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IEzkiWcVEz9O64SLV2zDpC4BrwRnJvwM/view?usp=drive_link

Here's the link to Tuesday's spectacular video that goes through southern Utah. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wFzOMJC1rUQVLFkhwEk0EsjhFWJdDvsQ/view?usp=drive_link

Today is my last day on the road. I woke up late, so I need to get going. I will be sleeping in Bend tonight!

From Farmington, NM to Salt Lake City

I'm finally getting the hang of making the kinds of travel videos I want to make! 

Things to look for: a hail storm, a rainbow, snowcapped mountains near Salt Lake.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wFzOMJC1rUQVLFkhwEk0EsjhFWJdDvsQ/view?usp=sharing

The drive from Farmington, New Mexico, through the southwestern corner of Colorado, and on to Salt Lake City through Moab is gorgeous except for a stretch of I-70 that made me think of a scene in Cars. 

"They're driving right by and they don't even know what they're missing."

https://youtu.be/wZBVWLNtVlA?si=jP_akRer6IBixTMd

Here's the one from New Mexico on Monday. I struggled just to get this onto YouTube, so it doesn't have as much entertainment value. I didn't set it to music or anything. Feel free to speed these up or scroll through them. They are longer than I expected them to be.

I'm off to Boise!

Quick edit: Hey, Tru by Hilton! What kind of crap is this? No coffee makers in the rooms and the communal coffee pot at breakfast has been out of coffee for 10 minutes?...my caffeine addiction is making me feel pretty hateful right now.

New Mexico

I drove almost all the way across New Mexico yesterday with stops in Albuquerque and Cuba. The video is linked below was going to be linked below, but early this morning I found out that it didn't upload, so I'll post it tonight. It's missing some stretches of nothingness between Lubbock and I-40, which is a shame, because the colors of the earth, grass, and sky on that little stretch between the Billy the Kid Museum and I-40 made me want to paint. The second half of the video, between Albuquerque and Farmington, is gorgeous. I have just strung all the video together and haven't really edited out any of the boring bits, so you can scroll through it at your leisure. I promise that tomorrow's southern Utah video will be a little more curated (and timely).

Note the thunderstorm toward the end. It's raining in the desert.

In Albuquerque, I spent about an hour stretching my legs and checking out the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. There was less science and more history than I had hoped for, and the volume on the Geiger counters was set too high and was pretty grating, but it was still worth the stop.

In Cuba, I stopped for dinner at a little local business called Mel's Chicken and BBQ. If you are ever in Cuba, NM, don't opt for McDonalds. The elote en vaso and anything on one of their super-soft rolls is the way to go.