Other than that, we also noticed squirrels running around the roof, going down our chimney. In short, the whole house was porous. So we got the chimney re-sealed, we did other rodent exclusion work and pretty much got the mouse problem in check. And we went to trim away the tree branches from the side of the house.

And that’s when I noticed it. Much of the thick, vibrant foliage on that dogwood wasn’t dogwood leaves. It was some sort of insane climbing invasive vine that had gotten to the top of the tree and completely established a canopy. It was a mess. And it was wild grape.

Well, tracing the vines back to a root location, I chopped them down and did my best to remove them, and I think the tree’s been doing better since losing its aggressive competitor. Hard to tell though, the damage was probably already done. Anyway, I cut back the vine and left it at that.

Well, fast forward a couple months, through the winter and into today, and I was out in that area raking up some dead leaves, pulling some ivy vines, etc, and one apparent vine was buried a bit better than the normal ivy runners. Pulling on it revealed a bigger thing that looked exactly like the above-ground grape vines. And more pulling and digging and following had me pulling out probably in the neighborhood of 30 foot long vines from just under the surface of the ground, snaked out into the lawn, running along the house … just everywhere. It was really phenomenal. I filled one of those kraft paper yard waste bags with ivy vines, late-fallen leaves and rogue wild grape roots, and I know for sure I didn’t get all of them either from that vine head, or from that part of the yard.

So let that be a lesson to anyone who’s paying attention. Wild grape is insane. Kill it. Kill it fast. Kill it with fire, if you can. Because if you don’t kill it, it’ll kill your trees, it’ll kill your grass, it’ll take over your whole damned yard from both above and below with a virulence and implacability that trumps even ivy.

That’s all.

2010, 2%. That’s the goal.

It’s interesting though. Now that I’m a full-time employee with a permanent position, I’ve sort of got a different mindset that I’m adjusting to.

See, when I was a student, I was working toward a specific, temporal goal. Even with setbacks, as long as I kept working at it and didn’t fail out, graduation was essentially a temporal inevitability. I always knew it was up ahead, always knew I was working towards some specific goal, some time at which things would resolve themselves if only I could hang on and keep it together until then.

Then I graduated. The temporal inevitability came and went. I survived, I made it, I crossed that line. And I looked ahead, and found another line: finding a full-time job.

I was pretty much always confident that I could get a job. I’m smart, I’m attentive, I’m friendly and generally easy to get along with, and I’ve got pretty absurdly good technical skills. I wasn’t always confident where I would get a job, but the fact of the matter never left me. Working was another temporal inevitable. It was, in my mind, an irrevocable fact that I would at some point in the indeterminate near future get a job.

And get a job I did. I accepted the CACI job in the end of July and started there in September, after really seriously starting the job hunt in September and having to basically choose between two possible places to go. And when I started there, it was as a contractor.

As a contractor on a limited-term contract-to-hire setup, I knew that it was basically inevitable that I would become a full-time employee. Of course, that turned out to be wrong, CACI turned out to be a bad fit for me, and got hit by a nasty budget crunch that caused my contract to get squeezed out. But I spent 8 years in college. I’m used to setbacks. And after a day or so of being confused and disoriented, I stood up and started searching for jobs, regrowing the sense of inevitability that I’d find a job after a couple of very positive, very successful interviews. And find a job I did, as a contractor again. This time on a 3-month instead of a 6-month, but the same deal: temp to perm.

And 3 months went by like nothing. I guess if I can spend 5 months at CACI being bored to tears and have it feel like an eternity, the 3 months just evaporating in front of me was a pretty good indicator that Mitre was a better fit. And then they made me a full time offer that was slightly better than what I’d initially negotiated, and I accepted, and became a full time employee. Again, all these events, to me, had a certain inevitability to them. I knew that it would happen. There was always room for doubt, but there was also always a sense that this was definitely going to happen, at some point. If not here, then somewhere else.

So now I’ve crossed that line. I’ve got a real position without an expiration date. It’s at a company consistently rated pretty high on the “best places to work” lists. It’s got great benefits, great vacation policies, and a healthy culture that really fits me. Things are great.

But now I’m faced with a problem. The only thing I see in the future that I’m confident about, that I see as inevitable is my own death, and that’s not for a long time. I don’t have a milestone to wait for anymore.

See, the last … I dunno, 27 years or so, I’ve been waiting for things. Waiting around to get into elementary school. Waiting to get out of it. Waiting to get out of middle school. Waiting to learn to drive. Waiting to get out of high school. Waiting to finish college. Waiting to get a permanent job. It’s so easy to justify killing time, wasting it, watching it slip by, knowing that the things you want to do are essentially inevitable. But now I am starting to feel guilty about it, because I feel like my time-wasting is finally, actually wasting it.

The momentum is gone. I don’t have anything pulling me forward anymore, so if I want to do anything before I die I’m going to have to do it on my own motivation. There’s nothing else. It’s a little disconcerting.

Maybe it’s time to build my own fire.

So about a block away from my house, there’s a wooded area that apparently used to be called Polinger Park, but is now apparently called Anderson Park. And through this park runs a little brook. I don’t know where it comes from, but I suspect it starts at the pond at Montgomery College, which I suspect may be spring-fed.

I walked down into the valley and explored a little today, and found no clearly defined paths past a couple feed into the woods. But it was walkable, with a pretty standard-issue forest floor lined with a spongy covering of accumulated fallen leaves and decayed wood. Lots of little undergrowth plants were just starting to grow, getting buds and shoots going. The trees were pretty typical too, with some old-growth canopy trees, some younger trees fighting with the old growth for light, and trees that had fallen and decayed.

I wandered down into the stream bed, where I noticed that parts of the stream had little minnows in it. There’s also a constant little waterfall spilling over an old concrete barrier connected to an erosion-exposed manhole sarcophagus with graffiti on the side. It’s … desolate and beautiful at the same time.

You know, staying on the paved paths, I had no idea where the storm drains on my street drained to. But now I know, they all run down into that little valley, into this little rock-bottomed creek with light random litter strewn about it, and eventually that stream links up with Upper Watts Branch stream, and trickles out into the Potomac, and ultimately into the Chesapeake. The water that I watched falling down a little concrete ledge ultimately ends up flowing where it does. That’s … sort of neat, you know? A couple of gallons a minute of the water rushing down the Potomac originated a couple hundred feet from my house.

Anyway, I was thinking how nice it would be to take pictures of what I was seeing. A lot of really pretty sights down in that little streambed. Erosion makes for interesting pictures, I tell ya. So I was thinking “I’ll go back tomorrow and do that”

But tomorrow it’s going to rain, which means that (1) the light’s not going to be the same, and (2) the whole area’s going to go from a fairly firm walking surface to a giant mudslick — at least down near the stream. That’s if the runoff from the rain doesn’t upgrade it from brook to creek, at any rate. And in a week, the plants will have sprouted, and the area’s going to be more impassable, and different looking. In the meantime, I’ll have work, and thus no chance to wander down there and re-explore. By the time I get down there again, it’ll have gone from what it is to what it will be.

Part of me feels like this was a missed opportunity — one of those “F/2.8 and be there” moments, if you will… where to get the pictures you want to get you need to have the camera with you, find the moment, and shoot the moment. Neither spend your time fiddling with the camera while the moment passes, nor spend your time cameraless while the moment’s there.

A bigger part of me feels like the “be there” part was more important than the “f/2.8″ part… and that I was probably more in the moment because I didn’t have a camera with me to try to frame pictures of it.

Anyway, it was a good day regardless. I think I’m going to try to do more exploration around here. The world is a really rich place, especially when you venture just a little out of the paved and mowed paths you usually walk.

But one of the interview questions that one of the unix guys I talked to asked me really struck me, and I think it’s an interesting point to think about.

The question was: do you consider yourself more of a strategic person, or more of a tactical person?

When I was asked that, I hadn’t really thought about it, so I sort of waffled and talked a bit, but didn’t really arrive at a conclusion. I’ve been thinking about it a bit more, both in terms of what I see myself as and in terms of what it’s asking as an interview question.

Basically, as an interview question, it’s almost a “do you see yourself as perpetually in the trenches, or as a planner/implementer type?” In other words, do you want to be frontline staff or are you aiming to be running the place someday? Or at least something to that effect.

As I’ve thought about it a bit, I think I definitely see myself as more of a strategic type. I don’t mind “putting out fires” when I need to, but I really like having a medium-term plan. Like, having someplace I’m going in the next couple months, in the next year, in the next 5 years. I think I’m happier crafting my own setup than tweaking someone else’s.

Now, in the sysadmin world, everything is someone else’s configs tweaked… every samba config is based on the example samba configs extended and flexed to your own specifications, for example. But I can say the biosecurity content distribution, while relying entirely on the work of other people (cron, shell, ssh, rsync, svn), is my own creation. A custom solution to a potentially difficult problem, that ultimately solves it in an elegant and usable way. I can take pride in the system I’ve crafted, even if it’s made of other people’s pieces assembled in a novel way.

Thinking about it, I like the question a lot. It frames a lot of self-evaluation into a very succinct question. It’s thought-provoking, and novel.

Just thought I’d share .