Administrivia

Welcome, buttoned-down reader, as I ensure that every 'i' is dotted and 't' is crossed. Yes, it's time to put our house in order and deal with some administrative details.

You'll remember from a recent blog that I'd been having some fun with my friends at the DMV, attempting to finalize the purchase of my car from the lease company. The last update on this was the best part of two months ago now, where the DMV said to me, "Great! Thanks for scanning all those documents and handing over $1600, but to get this finished off... you need to send us the originals!"

This required me to transact business with two paragons of American efficiency: the DMV themselves, and the USPS. These are venerable bodies with a tradition of excellent service, so what did I have to fear? Well, anyway, I trusted those important-looking original documents to the regular postal service, assuming this would all resolve pretty quickly.

I was mildly panicked when I started getting emails at regular intervals from the DMV saying "We still haven't had your original documents yet". They seemed to send me these roughly weekly, and by the time the fourth one arrived I was starting to get worried; worried enough to reply and point out I'd sent the documents 4 weeks ago. It turns out there was no cause for alarm, as I got an email back saying, "Just ignore those; we've got a big stack of original documents to work through and it could take up to 60 days". OK.

Well, the DMV genuinely under-promised and over-delivered, because this week, a mere 45 days or so since I sent those documents off, I was told the transaction had completed. The race is now on between my updated documents arriving here, and the registration on my car expiring at the end of the month...

Dealing with the DMV certainly made me feel like chewing a tree...

In other exciting Palo Alto news, the US Geological Survey looks like it's moving out of its Menlo Park campus, which is just a stone's throw from our house. Now, these are the folks that study rocks and track and predict earthquakes. Do they know something we don't, reader? Should we be worried? The good news is, they're not exactly going far - just down to Moffett Field in Mountain View - but it's sad to see this rather cool institution moving out.

And this week in "free stuff available on the pavement in Palo Alto", I bring you these exciting text books:

Are these topics somehow related, reader? And what "applications" of jet propulsion are there other than the obvious one? It's almost worth spending the time reading the book to find out.

Summer continues to roll on in its usual manner here; it's sunny and 25-27 degrees C every day, and as yet we're fortunate that the sea breezes are keeping smoke from the fires in the very North of the state away from us. Helen's first open book sale since early 2020 is happening tomorrow, and the kids have gone back to school. Things are still pretty uncertain with COVID, but otherwise it's a fairly typical Californian late summer for us. Until next week!