2015

In April of 2015, I turned 42 years old. In August, Ben turned four and stayed at Portland Montessori School. In October, John turned six, and he started Kindergarten at OES that year.

//TODO: Ukraine oes, forest house

Sitecore grew relatively quickly and did really well. Over the years, I had lots of interesting experiences there, including attending parties at Kronborg Castle (known from Shakespeare's Hamlet) and at the top of one of the towers of Tower Bridge in London. I had to give presentations to large groups occasionally, and the first one went really well, but I think they eventually realized that I was not very good at public speaking and I didn't have to do that for more than a few years. Actually, I think it was my presentation to the Most Valuable Professionals group (something like Sitecore insiders) about the SPEAK UI technology that Sitecore had developed but which I really didn't like. That entire presentation had an Star Wars theme with quotes like Darth Vader saying omminously, "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed".

In 2015, Sitecore took external investment and went through a restructuring. I moved from engineering to marketing, where I really didn't belong. I was responsible for architecture of Sitecore's web properties including its marketing site. My first project was a documentation site. I did something that I thought was really cool technologically - using WebDAV fields in Sitecore to facilitate editing documentation in Word, and then some .NET code to convert the word documents to HTML, including image extraction. Mark, the guy that ran the documentation team, wanted to use FrameMaker or something instead, which I thought was ridiculos because the content is not reusable and formatting doesn't/shoudn't really matter that much to a technical audience. I believe that the documentation solution that I helped to develop went into production, but I don't think it lasted long there.

Next, I was supposed to re-architect the marketing site. Michael, the CEO of Sitecore, wanted to use Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA), which was some technology that Sitecore had acquired, previously named Sitecore Zen Garden. I didn't like SXA - I thought it was a tool for agencies to develop small sites. I wanted to use BrainJocks score, which I considered to be better technology from BrainJocks. Some time previously, BrainJocks had actually sent Brian, the company's founder, and Pavel, the main technologist behind SCORE, to Portland so that they could come to my house and teach me SCORE. At the time, I considered these guys to be my friends, and we kept in touch for some years afterwards, but long-distance friendships often fade.

At this point, I feel like I was barely working, but the work that I did was pretty brutal. I had to wake up around 4:30 every day to work with the teams in Ukraine and Denmark, and I wasn't happy with the type of responsibilities I had. I didn't get to code or write documentation or blog or do anything that I was good at; I got to sit on calls and write emails and make suggestions that generally wouldn't be followed.

Anyway, Michael and I disagreed about the foundational technology for the marketing site. He was CEO and so I didn't really have a choice. I highly doubt that the marketing site uses SXA today, but it probably wouldn't use SCORE either. By the end of 2015, it was pretty clear that I was done at Sitecore. The Chief Marketing Officer at Sitecore, who was now my boss's boss (meaning I had been moved down a wrung in the company), eventually asked Bjarne, my business partner of 12 years, who basically gave me a piece of Sitecore USA when he and Eric founded it, why marketing was paying such an outrageous salary. Early in 2016, Bjarne suggested that we have a call. Since he and hadn't really worked together in years, and Bjarne doesn't waste time, I basically knew what this call would be about. I said I had already been thinking about bringing in my laptop; Bjarne told me to keep it, gave me what was basically a token parting bonus, and that was the end of it. I had no hard feelings towards Bjarne, but I did have some resentment about how Sitecore had treated me towards the end. Anyway, working there was mostly a good experience, and certainly a major factor in my career and financial success. I have nothing to complain about.

I think it was 2015 when I started buying BMW E36 M3s because I really missed the one that I had sold around the time that John was born. I don't remember which one I bought first.

I think I first drove up to Washington and bought a 1998 the Estoril Blue one that was in amazing condition from a young guy, I think Russian. It was too nice to drive, especially every day, and it was quick to sell when I dediced to seveal years later.

From a young guy in Portland that was probably Russian, I bought a black 1999 that had had more than ten owners and some kind of salvage title. The body was riddled with Bondo and it had been extensively modified, including custom wheel locks and a fuel cutoff switch stuck in the crack mext to the rear seat. At some point, I found a "for sale" sign that listed it at something like $4,000, which was less than I had paid for it. I got the impression that it had been crashed for a movie or by someone in LA. That car gave me endless problems. It took a bit longer to sell, and the person that purchased it intended to convert it to a drift car.

I think I was mostly looking for parts on craigslist when I came accross a 1995 Mugello red one that I bought from a young guy in Washington. It was so nice that I couldn't resist. According to the VIN, it was the 84th E36 M3 built, and this was one of the last models that BMW made by hand. The 1995 has a different engine that has less power but supposedly more options for customization. From years of ownership and working on them, I know too much about these cars. This is a really rare car that I still own and intend to give my younger son Ben when he gets his license.

I was getting fed up with driving accross Portland once or twice a day to drop John off or collect him from school. For one thing, I felt that Susan should have done half of this driving, but she used her job as an excuse to make it my responsibility. For another thing, Portland traffic can be horrible, especially as I neede to cross the Wilammette River each way. Some days, this was costing me about four hours of driving. I had even leased a little plug-in hybrid Ford just for this purpose.

On a flight back from Hawaii, I had met a Realtor and gotten her contact information. We started looking at options near the school, but there were not many that would work. Susan looked at one place with me, but it was not a good fit.

Eventually the Realtor showed me a property that had some advantages and disadvantages. It was on almost an acre of forested lot with no visible nearby neighbors on three sides, which was nice because I wanted privacy. iving in suburbs where I couldn't avoid seeing into my neighbors yards and even houses always felt wrong to me.

This property felt more like three acres because it had an easement through some niehboring properties that provided a back driveway, which functionally has turned out to be the primary driveway. The property itself had more than thirty mature douglas fir and broadleaf maple or dogwood trees, some as high as maybe sixty or seventy feet. The surrounding properties were mostly similar.

I knew that the trees would be a problem because some were close to the house. Not only do they need maintenance or they might drop large branches on the decks and structure, especially in storms, but three needed to be removed immediately to avoid risk to the house, and it appeared that others would need to be removed over time. In addition to risk, this all presents significant cost. It has since turned out that the pollen, cones, needls, seeds, leaves, sticks, branches, and whatever else they drop constantly is a bigger problem.

Another problem was that the house was on a slope. This is good for drainage, which can be important in Portland, but limited the area for playing ball with the boys. For this and floorplan reasons, it probably couldn't be subdivided, which lowered its potential long-term value. It was clear from the beginning the structure would eventually need to be torn down.Due to the slope, over time, we lost several balls in the ravine at the edge of the property.

While I liked the property, I was concerned about these and other issues, as well as the floorplan of the house. I told Susan to not even look. She took Devan, the guy that built the treehouse on our existing property, who told her that it would cost about $50,000 to address some issues with the house. Susan wanted to make an offer, so we did. The night that seller accepted the offer, she said that she did not want the house, which make me livid with anger. It probably would have been possible to back out of the deal, but this could have cost earnest money, we didn't have many options, we were already in process, and there really were some good things about the house.

I also found a Realtor to sell the old house. Always trying to get as much money as possible, Susan wanted to rent it out. She worked with a neighbor that did property management. They found an unmarried couple with six children between them, but after about three months of looking and negotiation, that family flaked. We ended up putting more money into the place and selling it through another Realtor for a price significantly below what my Realtor thought that he could have gotten.

Because Susan worked, the new house was my responsibility, especially before we sold the old house. I would typically take John from the old house to school, work on the new house, and then collect John and take him back to the old house. Ben was still in a school that was walking distance from the old house, which was a nice walk through the Laurelhurst neighborhood. In her incredible physical laziness and lack of interest in nature, she typically drove Ben to school, if I didn't drop him on my way with John.

One day I went to Home Depot and asked some employees if they could recommend a handyman. I believe that this is against corporate policy, but one gave me contact information for a guy named Steve.

Steve made a great first impression. He was primarily a carpenter, but could do almost anything including plumbing and electrical. He immediately showed me a relatively serious injury that he had from cutting off the tip of a finger with a razor knife, which seemed to make him proud. We shared a lack of concern for permitting everything with the city.

We've stayed friends since then, going out for beers or meals and attending shows by Pink Floyd cover bands together. Like Judah, Steve is the kind of person that checks in by phone almost weekely. I am a person that might not have any long-term friends without people like that.

I don't know why I was at the house alone one night. I had some electric heaters running on extension cords that were bunched up on the floor under a mat. At some point I smelled something and found that one of them was starting a fire. I unplugged everything and put it out, but there was a burn on the carpet. It was small enough that a piece of furniture could cover it. We didn't replace the carpet in the house for several years.

Steve and I got the house into decent shape, but there was endless work to do. Tim and his daughter, who was still going by Savannah at the time, came to visit for Christmas. Unfortunately, the house flooded at that time, especially the utility room in the basement, but the entire basement required new flooring. I had heated tile installed, which was a big expensive project.

There was an exterior door in the living room that Susan considered to be "white trash". Thinking back, I believe that she used phrases like this to control me in an abusive way. It seemed like a waste of money, but I eventually had steve replace the door with a wall. Now I wish that I had left the door or put a window there.

We also added a wall with a door in the basement to close in an office for Susan. I am quite sure that we did this for her as she chose the paint color.

I can't even list all of the other projects, but I would estimate that I've spent at least $300,000 on that place since I bought it for $605,000. Much of that work was necessary, far exceeding the $50,000 that Devan ad suggested to Susan.

I created paths all over the property. I thought they would be for mountain biking, but the ground was so loose and the slope so steep that they were too dangerous even for me, let alone the children.