A lengthy dissection of the potential impact on the San Jose Sharks the trade for Joe Thornton would suggest had ensued in this space as of Thursday and Friday, but its lack of completion kept it from attaining posted status. This, it turns out, is a blessing since any questions or concerns about the wisdom of trading three fan favorites for one marquee-name were resolutely hushed with the ringing of a shot off the post seven seconds into Thursday night’s game. Four assists in two games later (and, more significantly, two wins later) I think it is clear what Joe Thornton has meant for the Sharks and there is no “other hand” to speak of.

Regardless of how my favorite sports teams are doing, things of a personal note have begun to develop which outweigh in terms of both impact and importance any type of professional athletics.

I would prefer that we simply ignore the previously dropped hints and allusions to some key events since I can now speak of them clearly and without potentially negative repercussions. To the point, this coming Thursday marks my last official work day at the City. That date will dovetail nicely with my three-year mark here, meaning that I have worked here longer than I have worked at any other single place. It has been a long time for what was initially a mere stop in the road as I moved forward into bigger and better things.

In the end it wound up being a place that I felt comfortable with, at least from certain perspectives. I’ve made friends here (real friends, that I anticipate maintaining contact with even after I no longer have to see them on a daily basis), I’ve put a lot of myself into my various tasks and I have taken a significant sense of pride and ownership into building the site that has been my ward since 2002. Turning it over to someone else feels oddly like giving a pet to a stranger. I have a sense that it will be fine and in any case it should no longer be my concern, but I can’t help worrying that I didn’t do enough to get it ready to be without me.

My new employer is waiting for me to begin in one week’s time. There are tradeoffs, elements of the change that cannot be casually dismissed: I have a commute to contend with now, for one. Adjusting from the six-minute drive to the City offices to an hour-plus putter over congested freeways and busy surface streets will take some effort. My new job also requires a different sort of work than I’ve been used to and focused on since even before I began working at the City. And of course there is the transition from public servant to private-sector machine cog.

It takes some adjustment to get used to working for government agencies. It took me a good nine months before I really felt like I understood how things operated in the City. The crux of it is this: Things operate slowly. I can understand how talking about how inefficient things work in government would come across as griping, or even sniping at the job. That isn’t the case; there are actually many smart, talented and hard-working people here at the City and, I presume, elsewhere in government. What happens is that those people don’t have any opportunities to let those qualities show because there is a carefully crafted series of policy and historical mechanisms that literally prevent people from being truly productive.

The essence of this—how this actually manifests in a working environment—is that people are quite literally encouraged to maintain a slow and steady pace to progress because… well, honestly I still can’t exactly tell you the exact “whys” of it all. There is a sense that while the public pays for what is done in government, they themselves are resistant to change, as if the government staying on the cutting edge of technology, productivity, action and problem resolution would only be acceptable in certain historically-correct circumstances. For example, the public seems to have no problem with Fire Departments being fast to react to things, and they expect the Police to do so as well, but if street development projects were rolled through the process at breakneck speed, at least the perception is that there would be serious ramifications to not giving the public an unusually long time to debate, argue and nitpick the project to pieces.

Even where the public-facing elements are allowed to be quick, the internal workings have a tendency to move slowly with excessive commentary and meetings and committee intervention where, as best as I can tell, the thought is that we’re using public funds so we better make sure we get everything right on the first try. Which is ludicrous, of course, because no government agency gets things right on the first try all the time, no matter how ponderously they approach problems. But this is counted as gospel and there is little motivation to try and buck trends, and actual resistance to such efforts.

Still, while from a personal work ethic perspective being involved in City government may have been a little eroding, extracting the generalities of government work from the specific environment I can say that I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had a tremendous amount of freedom, had some interesting projects come my way, been involved in the largest-scale web site of my career, made more progress in a single organization than I ever had before and learned a lot about things I can’t imagine having otherwise been exposed to.

* * * * *

Fall has finally come to the Central Valley in California. I know this because my feet are cold. From the first significant series of rains until sometime in mid-May, my feet are perpetually frozen. I don’t know if this is indicative of some kind of circulation issue or just one of the reasons why I loathe the winter so much or what. Either way, very few things even help alleviate the icy feet symptoms, and nothing gets the deep chill out completely.

I stood outside at the gas station last night at about 10:30 pm, shivering in the cold—no comments about being a spoiled California dweeb necessary; I know I’m a wuss when it comes to cold, that’s why I live here in the first place—and trying to get my ATM card to work in the pump. Eventually I sighed and walked as briskly as my chilled feet would carry me toward the tiny register booth. The woman behind the counter informed me that they were in the process of updating their systems for the night and it would be five minutes before she could start the pump. She seemed to be suggesting that I go back out to the car to wait.

I had no intention of doing any such thing. While the register booth may not have been exactly toasty warm and inviting, it at least was a dozen degrees warmer than outside, so I just stood there next to the tiny rack of Hostess products: Zingers and Ho-Hos, Twinkies and Sno-Balls. I tried to find something interesting in the booth to examine while I waited, but there was very little aside from candy bars and rows of gum with increasingly frigid-sounding names. Cool Ice, Winterfresh, Frozen Chill, Arctic Blast. I couldn’t decide if it was fitting or unfortunate that all these gum manufacturers were trying to sell me breath mints using apt descriptions of the condition of my feet.

Finally the woman opened the cash register and started the pump for me. She seemed relieved to get me out of her booth so I was no longer lurking in what she obviously considered an uncomfortable silence. I felt a little bad about making her nervous, but I wasn’t about to risk frostbite on my toes for her social comfort. The gas tank filled as slowly as possible, as though the petrol from the pump were the consistency of molasses and someone was pouring them in using only gravity and trying to fight the same chill that was making my shoes increasingly uncomfortable.

At last finished with my chores, I replaced the nozzle, collected my receipt and climbed back into the car where the heater blasted hot air on my shoes. It helped a little. Once at home I retired toward bed, where Nik already lay sound asleep. I left my socks on and crawled under the covers, tucking my legs tightly around me. Eventually the rest of my body warmed up and felt contented to drift into sleep, but my feet stubbornly remained stiff and uncomfortable. I tried to force the thoughts of the unpleasant sensations from my mind, which worked for a few seconds until the empty spaces began to fill with dread for the coming changes.

I wondered how anyone ever knew if they were making a mistake. Is it something people really feel ahead of time and fail to heed, or when they say, “I knew that was a bad idea!” are they really saying, “I had no idea that was going to go badly but now that it has I will try to save face by claiming it was preordained and I merely chose to look the other way rather than admit that I didn’t see this coming”?

I want to be upbeat about my new job. In a lot of ways, I am indeed excited. Change has its own unique blend of inherent thrills, and there are some decidedly positive aspects of the new job. Still, it’s not comfortable. It’s not familiar. My mind filled with questions, all beginning with “What if…” I try to embrace the changes that come with life, with living it and doing it and being a person. How will this impact my life in this area? What will be the effect of that? I wondered if change can really be embraced with such trepidation. Is executing change enough to claim welcome for it, or does one have to raise up a chin and casually except the unknowns as insignificant in order to say that you have truly sought it?

I wondered what difference it made, whether I wanted this change completely or not. I decided that in the end, it didn’t matter. I would be an idiot if I wasn’t concerned for the well-being of my family and worried about the impact a new schedule, a new work environment, a new set of responsibilities and a new level of expectations would have on me. Only a fool looks at upheaval and thinks, “Who cares?”

As sleep began to overtake me, I noticed with an odd curiosity that for a brief second, my feet felt a bit warmer.

* * * * *

Check My Gat For the Bullets it Spat

• So, my wishlist has a new series of entries on it. They are filed under the category of “My New PC.” I suppose I don’t owe anyone an explanation, but I feel it would be warranted. If left entirely up to me, I’d be content with remaining a Mac-only household. However, there are two facets which leave that option suspect. The first is that with this new job I anticipate a level of expectation that I can work from home on occasion. Typically, the systems and configurations required to facilitate such a feat are focused squarely on the most common home-based hardware and software which, in our day and age, is Microsoft Windows running on a PC. Now I’ve toyed with the idea of building a PC before but what tends to stop me is that on one hand you have this sweet PC specced out and on the other you have everything you could possibly buy with that money: Video game consoles, Mac peripherals, newer Macs, Wargaming supplies, HDTVs, new sofas… I mean, the list is boundless. And the thing about all those other items is that for the most part their common thread is that I’d rather have them than install and try to maintain a PC. However, when it comes down to it, having a PC offers two distinct opportunities that cannot be denied: Telecommuting and sweet, sweet PC gaming. As much as the new XBox 360 increasingly intrigues me, patience with consoles is a virtue and eventually those things will be less of a $400 extravagance and more of a $250 whim, at which point there will be more and better games available, etc. With PCs, however, a decent gaming system will almost always cost roughly the same amount of money. Because whenever you buy a PC you want to make sure it has the best chance of staying current where a console is designed to grow old and die.

  Anyway, none of the components that I picked out are exactly cheap (if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right), but hopefully by the time I have saved enough for each bit and have enough of them to put something functioning together I’ll have the chance to do some of that telecommuting business. Of course I do realize that working from home on a machine that is admittedly designed to run the latest games as well as they can possibly be run is a bit suspect, but you’re just going to have to trust me.

• Saturday was our annual Christmas Party/White Elephant exchange. We had it over at Gin and HB‘a house this year, which was good because we had quite a few more people than we’ve had in the past (about 26 at the most I think). It was fun and I think the game went off pretty well. In the end we presented the winner of the “Best Gift” competition (Stylegirl) an iPod shuffle which she seemed excited about and hopefully everyone had a good time. The shuffle as supergift was a tough decision that we actually didn’t make until late in the planning stages of the party because while we had a decent idea of our budget we toyed for a long time with offering a TiVo and subscription card. TiVos are only $50 after a massive mail-in rebate these days which made it a pretty attractive idea, except that we weren’t sure the etiquette behind asking people to cut the UPC symbols off of a gift they just won. In the end we decided that we wanted to give the winner the option to return the gift for cash (or something else they wanted) if they weren’t thrilled with our selection and should someone return the TiVo we would have no hope of getting the rebate and would shoot ourselves quite far over the budget. It worked out pretty well in the end and I thank Nik for setting me straight on the logistics of the whole thing.
• Thursday is my last day because we get every other Friday off here at the City. That is one thing I’m going to miss quite a bit: It’s pretty easy to get used to slightly longer work days in exchange for two three-day weekends every month. But it works out well that the last Friday off that I have is this particular Friday because that’s the day Nik is having her nerve-blocking procedure done for her herniated disc in her spine. She’s a nervous wreck about it because she hates needles and there are likely to be more than just one involved. I’m taking her to the hospital and I’m supposed to drive her home afterward which suggests that she’ll either be somewhat loopy from the medication or perhaps uncomfortable for a while. Hopefully the end result is that her pain subsides for a long time and gives her a chance to really heal, but I’m glad that I have the chance to help her through it.