Back to School, Nevada Style!

On Friday Ava, Elise, and Enzo finished their first week at their new school in Henderson. It was a big deal for us because not only was this a brand new school for them, but it was their first time being back in a traditional classroom setting in 18 months, or in Enzo’s case, ever. He was in pre-school when the pandemic began and did his entire Kindergarten year at home. Now we have Enzo in first grade, Elise in third, and Ava in fourth. We had a chance to visit the school and meet the teachers a few days before school began and everything seemed great.

As can be expected, it wasn’t easy getting back into the school routine, and there were definitely some emotions involved throughout the week, but Jessica and I couldn’t be more proud of how they handled everything. They’re already making friends and their teachers really like them. We haven’t met many of our neighbors yet but we’ve seen several other families from the neighborhood walking to and from school each day, so this will most likely be how we start getting to know some new people.

One of the many things that attracted us to the house we ended up buying was the fact that it was within the best school district in Nevada, and we’re already feeling the benefits of that. The school has been so welcoming and responsive to our needs. While we may not all be the most traditional learners, there’s no doubt we’re in the right place and setting the kids up for success at school. 

The other nice thing is how close we are to their school. Jessica walks the kids to school each morning and I often help with pickup in the afternoon, but we don’t always walk home simply because it’s still so hot right now when school gets out. As the crow flies, school is probably only a quarter mile from our house, but based on the way we have to walk it’s closer to a half mile. It’s still not bad at all, but when you’re dealing with triple digit heat and they’re already tired from a full day, walking home in their uniform can be a bit too hard on them, so we just deal with the traffic and bring the van to pick them up.

Overall we’re happy with the start we’ve gotten off to and are excited to see what this year will bring. We celebrated our first week by having a family swim party on Friday evening, then we picked up ice cream and watched the first Harry Potter movie at home. Yesterday we took the kids over to Nana’s house for a sleepover. She ended up taking them to a ranch today where they were able to ride horses, feed animals, and explore everything. It was hot and they were all beet red when they got home, but everyone had fun. Having my mom so close continues to be amazing and I’m not really sure who it benefits the most, but everyone is very happy.

Although Jessica no longer has to worry about being Mom and teacher combined, she is taking on a very serious role with the kids’ schooling again this year. She’s already so dedicated to working with them everyday on homework and other forms of tutoring. Her patience and dedication is awe inspiring and someday the kids will really begin to understand exactly how lucky they are to have a Mom like her who is so deeply involved and invested in their education. She is also weighing her options regarding ways to spend some of her free time during the weekdays, but for the moment there’s still enough for us to focus on here at the house, so there hasn’t been much downtime at all.

We’ve been staying very busy working on projects at the house, and it goes into overdrive whenever the kids go to Nana’s house. Jessica did a great job painting our kitchen nook and our new entertainment center area. That was a big project because we had to have the old built-in entertainment center removed, and we had to have a fireplace removed. This left a big opening in the wall, and even an entire whole through our house where the little gas chimney used to be. I ended up learning how to do the stucco repair to patch up the outside hole, but we had to hire a drywall specialist to come out and fix the wall inside the house. Once that was done we were unblocked on doing all the interior painting, which Jessica took care of this weekend. Both areas look great, and now the only other project we want to do in the family room is replace the carpet.

The other major project that I continue to work on in literally all of my spare time is our staircase railing. It’s all blond oak with a thick coat of clear varnish and wood posts, but what we want it to be is a dark stained railing with iron bars and a glossy white base under the bars. In order to get there you first need to remove the clear varnish from every square inch of the railing and the base. To do that you need to use a drill with different types of wire brushes attached. It’s very slow, tedious work and it’s hard on your body because you’re sitting or standing in all these weird positions trying to get every last bit of varnish scraped off.

One of the difficult things about this project is that scraping the varnish off isn’t enough to get things ready for staining and painting. The wire brushes work well, but they leave noticeable scrape lines in the wood, so you have to go back over everything with different types of sandpaper to smooth it out. You need at least 2 different grits of sandpaper (and in some cases 3) to get it ready, so this means you’re covering every square inch 3 or 4 times with different tools. It’s easily the most hands-on work I’ve ever put into a project and there’s still a lot left to do. I literally work on this every night after work, and most of the day on the weekends, but it’s still likely to be another week or two before we’re even ready to begin staining and replacing the bars. We’re leaning towards hiring a painter to handle painting the base, but again it’s going to be a while before we’re ready for that step. I look forward to sharing photos once it’s done, and I know it’s going to look amazing, but right now it’s prohibiting me from doing much of anything else (including jiu-jitsu) because it’s taking up so much time.

Once this project is done we’re definitely taking a break from home projects. At that point I’m planning on making another video giving a tour of the house because we will have completed everything we initially planned on doing when buying the house, and all of our new furniture will be in here. We’re so happy with everything we bought so I look forward to showing how it all came together, but it could easily be at least another month before we’re ready for that.

One other notable thing going on in my world involves another change at work. Back in March I moved from the Azure.com team, which I’d been on for 6 years, to the Treasury Engineering team. Before making that change, however, I had been interviewing with Microsoft Teams in hopes of landing a role on their Instrumentation team. Unfortunately that role didn’t work out, but the manager liked me and said she would stay in touch if something else came up in the future.

Shortly afterwards the Treasury team reached out to me and I ended up joining them a little while later. I was surprised when the manager from Teams reached out to me last month about a new open role on their Experimentation team. If you’re not familiar with Microsoft Teams, it’s the fastest growing platform at Microsoft. We use it for every meeting we hold, but in addition to being an excellent audio/video platform for meetings, it’s also what we use for person-to-person instant messaging, and team-wide communications. It was already growing fast but once the pandemic hit last year it’s growth skyrocketed.

The role on the Experimentation team was one that they hand-picked me for. Once an opening became available they reached out to me to see if I’d be interested. Part of the reason they did this was based on all my previous experience doing experimentation on azure.com. The main idea behind doing experimentation on websites and applications is that when you’re getting ready to roll out a big change, you wouldn’t just make the change for everyone to start using and hope for the best. You would run an experiment where only a certain percentage of your users are exposed to this new variation and you collect analytics on their usage to see if the variation performs better than the old version did. Once you can prove via the analytics that the new variation is an improvement, you start progressively rolling it out to more and more of your users. We’re all constantly included in these types of experiments on all the major sites we use without knowing it, and tons of data is collected on how we interact with the sites. Anytime you go to a site like Amazon or Facebook and see that a button has moved, or a new feature is available, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re part of an experiment on the site.

Based on all of my experience running these types of experiments on azure.com, the Teams Experimentation team was very interested in bringing me onboard. After I had a chance to talk with them I felt like this would be a better fit for me than my current role working in the treasury. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my new team after only 5 months, but I spent 6 years on the team before that, so I know I’m quite capable of showing loyalty and sticking it out long-term on a single team.

On Thursday I received the official offer to join Teams, and considering that this was my original goal, I decided to accept it. I had a nice talk with my manager in the treasury and he totally understood, so hopefully in the next couple weeks I’ll be making that transition. It’s a huge opportunity that I simply couldn’t pass up, so I can’t wait to get things going. Considering all the other major changes going on in our lives, the timing for this made a lot of sense to me.

I guess that’s about it for now. There’s certainly no shortage of exciting new things going on for us, and honestly I still can’t believe how everything has worked out. When I look back to our original conversations in March about moving to Nevada, it all made sense theoretically, but to actually make it happen and follow through with everything is a completely different story. I’m still amazed at how well everything has worked out, and although I really miss our family and friends in Washington, I have to be honest that I’m in love with how our lives have turned out in Nevada. I never expected to live in a house like this, and although I appreciate all the nice words we’ve received about working hard and doing everything right, it still never felt like the culmination of all that would lead to this. Maybe that’s because this wouldn’t even be a possibility in Washington. We keep having to pinch ourselves, but each day it feels a little more like home. 

Each time we complete a project, get something organized, or get a piece of furniture delivered it becomes that much more of a home. Not just any home either but our home, and it’s going to be that way for a long time. We seriously busted our asses moving down here and we’re never doing it again. We could have coughed up about ten grand and hired movers, but we decided to save the money and invest it in the new house rather than give it to a moving company. Jessica has already said she plans on dying here and has instructed me to spread her ashes in our beautiful backyard. All kidding aside, we’re never going to outgrow this house and we love everything about it so much that I expect us to be here for a very long time to come. Our guest room is already fully furnished so I hope it starts getting occupied with visitors very soon! Here’s a few recent pics