Letter to the South Hills ward

Before we moved, Bishop Brammer asked us to write when we got settled in up in Richland. I thought I would include the letter I sent:

It took us a while, but we found a nice little duplex to rent. We love being in a house, and look forward to being in one that we own. We live in what is called an 'ABC house'. Back in the 40's Hanford was chosen as a site for some of the Manhattan project work. As part of that the army corp of engineers came in and moved the city of Richland south by several miles, building everything new. There were about 6 floor plans, from small single houses to two story units, plans a - f. All old housing here is only 60-70 years old dating back to WWII. Another side effect of the army laying out the city is seen in the street names, many/all of the early streets are named after army or government people and places and the order of many of the streets is alphabetical.

Richland is in the high desert and gets about 10 inches of rain annually. I think we have gotten the 10 inches already, some snow, and then some extra already. It is evidently unusually wet this year. Laura does not believe people here when they say it does not rain.

Emily is growing up quickly. She is now about 4 1/2 months old, has her own room, and sleeps through the night. Laura has her on a pretty good schedule, which involves me waking them up from a nap when I get home from work. She can pull herself up into a sitting position now, and almost roll over. We are a bit worried looking forward to when she can walk, we are sure she will skip that and go straight to running and we will never be able to keep up with her. Emily has also developed a cute little laugh.

Laura is beginning to settle into the area up here. The transition is hardest on her, as she has to build up a new support group to help her being removed from friends and family. Each week she goes to a play group that the ward has for young children and is participating in the relief society activities.

I love being up here, work is challenging and interesting, and I get to be with my family two more hours a day. I work for CalTech on the LIGO project. LIGO is trying to directly measure gravity waves. The instrument they have here is incredibly sensitive and has to be to do its job. We can tell when cars go by on the local freeway, when logs go over the dam a few miles away, ... They are working now to double the sensitivity of the system and in a few years will tear everything apart and build a system that is 10 times more sensitive. At this point it will have reached the theoretical limit (quantum noise will limit any improvements) and they will have to account for the movement clouds overhead. Have they observed a gravity wave yet, maybe, there is a tremendous amount of number crunching that needs to be done in filtering out the background noise to be sure.

I have my hands in a lot of different areas at work. There is always more to learn. I work with everything from the physical network connecting systems, to helpdesk, to system admin, ... I stop a few wrungs below CTO. I love my job. Also the physicists meet weekly at lunch to keep themselves up on what is going on in the world of physics. I often sit in on these meetings, and while I cannot follow their math at least I have the exposure to new ideas.

The ward is friendly. It actually is the ward that I attended when I came up here to interview, good thing I helped the bishop set up chairs that day I guess. When we got up here we found an apartment we were interested in after a little looking. So we went to the ward that it was located in. I recognized the bishop, and was going to talk to him, but as soon as sacrament meeting ended the people in front of us started talking to us, and the bishop came up and remembered me. Then a member mentioned that they were looking for someone to rent out a house to, the couple that was in there was moving out in a while. So we liked the house better than the apartment and waited for the couple to move out. There are lots of children and younger couples here, although most of the couples our age already have three or more children, so our situation is a little closer to the youngest couples. The ward building here is one of the oldest non-governmental buildings (maybe the first) in Richland, and so is old enough that you can get lost in it.

The Tri-cities (Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco) are a mix of big and small town. There are about 200,000 people in the area, so it is large enough to support many of the stores and functions we enjoyed in the Covina area. It is still small though. I got my WA license plates in about 10-15 minutes (total). Getting the WA drivers license is more work (getting the right documentation is a pain for that). One thing that we love is that in about a five minute drive you are in the country side.