Kayaking, the 4th and the golden hour..

I'll be honest, I just had to read over what I last blogged about because it seems so much has happened since then. Although the time has passed quite quickly, it still seems to be something of a blur. Last week was a short one because of Independence day on July 4 and the department let us IT guys go at 2pm on Thursday for an early start to the bank holiday weekend. It was nice to have the time off but it did me no favours at 6.45am on Monday morning when the alarm went- making Starbucks a natural part of the route to work that morning.

So my second week at work was better, towards the end of it challenging work was starting to head my way and I am more settled into the department. I was invited out by Bill my Quality Assurance supervisor to go to Newman Lake on the friday for July 4 and then by the administrator in HR to go out for dinner on Sunday of last week. The day at Newman lake was great, Bills friend has a house looking over the lake with a platform for his boat. I went out onto the lake kayaking, the first time I’ve tried it and I would have had another go if there was time! There were about 20 people there, mostly American families and it wasn’t difficult to strike conversation. There was much interest taken in England and the differences in our society, but most of all our history. I was under the impression Americans were quite ignorant about anything outside of the US and I think that might be true with less educated people here, the point being that many I spoke to at the lake on Wednesday enjoyed travel and either had visited England or wanted to.

On the Saturday I didn’t do a great deal, just went into town and decided to relax. On Sunday I met with Ellen and her husband, we went for lunch in a fish restaurant overlooking some of the falls leading to Spokane river. Afterwards we went to North Spokane, saw some of the faming land and orchards as well as getting some Huckleberry jam (a local East Washington speciality). Ellen also pointed out a few things, one thing being that here a lot of movie directors like the location for what is called the golden hour. In Spokane the way the sunshine sets means it hits the trees in at a certain angle and causes the light to glow from them – hence they look golden. She also mentioned that the reason wheat is produced so much here is because of the silty sediment Loess that blew across from China and settled on the soil.


The weekend passed by pretty quickly to be honest. I was soon back to work on Monday, this week I have been testing web services written in .NET and C# as well as spending more time in connectivity getting to know the interfaces better and how they handle HL7 messaging. Coming up I am going to get another web project and also get to go out and see a patient service centre and a doctors office. I may also get to go to Seattle soon- it’ll be nice to get out of the office and see some more of the setup.

The only thing to say is that someone in the department has given me a bike for the summer. So now I can get around a little more easily. It’s unbelievable how difficult it can be to even get around here without a car. They have drive ‘thru’ ATMs, coffee shops, restaurants, etc. Its pretty lazy and the site of somebody walking is rare, talk about carrying your shopping home. The bus service isn’t all that great either.

Not much more to report on really, each day is just as busy as the next and time is flying.