This afternoon I would have said that the basement was close to being finished. The painting was almost done, the carpet was due to come in tomorrow, and the window will arrive in two-to-three weeks. But we've had a setback.

Since the last update, I have finished painting the spare bedroom. Emma will move in there as soon as I finish writing this post. She was waiting for the paint fumes to dissipate.

After Lowe's sent someone out to measure the new window hole, I boarded it up with some plywood and 2x4s.

Dipankar spent Wednesday afternoon helping me paint the basement -- at least the parts that we could do with rollers.

This evening, I was going around the basement, filling in the spots that the rollers couldn't reach. I was crawling along the floor, painting the bottom of the panels on the walls, when I noticed a very small amount of water seeping out from under one of them. If I hadn't been painting the bottom of the wall, I probably wouldn't have noticed it.

Four years ago, we had a leak in the basement. The kitchen waste water pipe, which runs along the front of the house, had collapsed, as seventy-year-old concrete pipe is wont to do. Water had built up and found a crack in the foundation wall. We came down to the basement one morning, after a night of heavy rain, to find two inches of water in the basement. The carpet that was down there at the time was destroyed. We had to rip off half the panels on the walls to isolate the problem.

We had a contractor come out then. He drained the water from the basement, and ripped out the sodden carpet, exposing really horrible linoleum tiles. He dug down to the bottom of the foundations on the front (west) and south sides of the house, and sealed the walls on the outside.

We never got around to fixing up the basement, until the last few weeks, when we put up replacement panels, along with a host of other work.

I looked around outside and found that the downspout was misaligned with the drainpipe. It's been windy all day and raining all night. I cobbled together a funnel out of an aluminum foil pan, which seems to be working.

In retrospect, we recall seeing occasional small amounts of water at the bottom of the west wall, but we had never done anything about it.

I'm going to defer the carpet layers from tomorrow until next week, so that I can do something about sealing the inside wall. And that means that I have to rip down the panels that we put up last weekend. Aaaargh! At least this happened before the new carpet got put down.

What has to be done to complete the basement? (Not in strict chronological order.)

• Seal the walls.
• Finish painting the trim in the basement.
• Finish painting the wall around the furnace.
• Hang the bifold doors in front of the furnace.
• Order accordion doors for the entrance; get them installed.
• Have the carpet layed.
• Finish the window well.
  
• Have the window installed.
• Install fresh paneling around the new window.
  
• Haul away the debris.
• Bring in the furniture.
• Find the people!

Work on the basement proceeds.

Our neighbor Leo helped me out with carpentry in the basement on Saturday. Emma and Delf went to Oregon on Friday for the Flock and Fiber Festival, and didn't get back until Saturday night. Leo and I stablized the framing around the furnace, put up all the paneling, routed the TV cables above the ceiling, and replaced the missing ceiling tiles.

On Sunday, we planned to paint the spare bedroom and the basement. It didn't work out as planned. Just before lunch, Emma fell off a stepstool while priming the walls of the spare bedroom, and hurt herself. She spent six hours waiting in the Emergency Room at Swedish Hospital. She has a severe contusion of the heel, and will be on crutches for a while.

Delf and I did some additional framing around the furnace, and tried to figure out what to do with the 11-foot-wide doorway into the new basement bedroom. The floor is uneven and the height of the opening varies from 74 to 76 inches. Standard doors are all 80 inches high: 82", if you buy a pre-hung door in a casing. It's not practical to cut six inches off the bottom of a hollow-core door. I think we're going to put up some plastic accordion doors for now. Not great, but it will provide some privacy and keep heat in. Eventually, we'll level the floor and build some custom doors.

Louise finished priming the spare bedroom and helped me demolish the frame around the basement window, and to seal off a 6'x6' area around the window with plastic sheeting. Dakota Concrete Cutters cut out a 39"x19" lump of concrete at the bottom of the window, dropping the bottom edge to 40" above the basement floor. Amazingly, he made almost no mess and vacuumed up most of what mess he did make, so the remaining cleanup will be easy. Milgard are coming out this afternoon to measure the hole, so that we can get a window put in.

Last night, I painted the ceiling of the spare bedroom. Emma is going to be the first tenant of the spare bedroom. There's no bathroom upstairs, where we normally sleep, and she can't climb the stairs. Last night, she slept on the fold-out couch in the living room. I'll paint the walls of the spare bedroom this afternoon, and it should be habitable by tonight.

It's a good thing that I don't start work at Atlas until next Monday. I should be able to finish the painting during the week, and the carpet should be installed towards the end of this week.

Two weeks ago, I completed a year as a contractor at Microsoft. After the permatemps lawsuits, no contractor may work more than 12 months at Microsoft without taking a 100-day break. (Contractors are free to work elsewhere, of course, during the break.)

Emma quit her job at washington Mutual the same week in order to set up her own business. It will be months before she starts making money, so it seemed prudent for me to find a full-time job.

Last week, I interviewed with Amazon. This week, I interviewed with the group at Microsoft that I just left, Atlas DMT, and Google.

Microsoft and Atlas both made very attractive offers. This afternoon, I accepted the position of Senior Software Engineer at Atlas.

I had a very good year at Microsoft in Windows Emerging Markets. I did some really interesting work on an as-yet unannounced product (some day I hope to be able to talk about what I did) and I worked on a first-class team. I have two longtime friends on the team, Muhsin and Delf, and the three of us became very close to my officemate, Dipankar. Dipankar's contract ends next week; he received two offers of fulltime jobs from Microsoft this week, and he's accepted the position on the codec team.

While I very much liked the team and the product, I'm not nearly so keen on Microsoft the company. Between full-time employment and contracts, I've spent almost 10 out of the last 13 years at Microsoft, and that's more than enough. (It seems mildly ironic to be writing this on the day of the annual Microsoft Company Meeting, celebrating Microsoft's 30th anniversary.)

Atlas is a technology company, specializing in web advertising. I'm joining a team that's working on advertising in video-on-demand. I was very impressed by the team when I interviewed there on Wednesday, and they liked me too. They were a sharp bunch of guys who conducted a well-balanced series of interview that was both testing and welcoming.

The team has been using Scrum for a while and they've migrated towards XP, which they speak highly of. I've wanted to get first-hand experience in Agile development for years. They're also using C# and .NET. After 15 years of C and C++, I'm ready for managed code. They seem to be very committed to work/life balance. Not least, they're in the International District of downtown Seattle, 3 miles from my house. Every job I've had in my 13 years of living here has required me to commute across Lake Washington.

Last weekend, we made good progress on the basement. On Saturday, Dale and Ernest helped us out, doing some demolition in the basement, and bringing loads to Goodwill and to the dump in their truck.

On Sunday, Jill and Delf helped us clean the remaining stuff out of the basement. Louise excavated a hole outside the window that we're going to enlarge. Deb, currently hors de combat with a pinched nerve, dropped by to provide moral support, as did Frank and Lyndol. Delf spent nearly twelve hours with us that day, and thanks to his experience in construction, he and I built framing around the furnace.

Peter and Lucinda have provided some cash to help cover our costs, and Deb has promised to give us some furniture as soon as we're ready to take it.

Tomorrow and Sunday, we'll have more work parties, which should largely complete the basement. We need to finish the framing, tack up some panels around the walls, add some new ceiling tiles, and do something about the ten-foot wide entry into the basement bedroom. We also need to prime and paint both the basement and the spare bedroom.

On Monday, the concrete cutters will be enlarging the basement window, so that area of the basement needs to be sealed off to stop dust blowing everywhere. We've arranged for someone to measure the opening on Monday afternoon, so that a new window can be installed ASAP. We bought carpet a week ago, and it will be installed early next week.

We still do not yet have Katrina evacuees lined up to stay with us. We have not been able to reach Roy, though we did hear early this week that nobody had seen him in the preceding week. Perhaps he's gone to New Orleans? We heard from the same source that he had mentioned Emma's offer to him, so we know he hasn't forgotten. Meanwhile, we've posted offers on several websites, such as Rainbow Relief.

Hurricane Rita is sure to swell the numbers of homeless. The best thing we can do is to finish up the basement as soon as possible, so that we're ready to take people in.

We extend our profound thanks to everyone who's helped out. (I think I've mentioned everyone. I apologize if I've left anyone out.)

I learned a really clever trick at our workparty on Sunday.

We were using a dolly that we had borrowed from our neighbor Mary to haul a heavy credenza up from the basement. One of the tires was flat, which made the exercise even more difficult.

I got out my bicycle floor pump and started pumping, but it was a waste of time. The tire was tubeless and without any air, so it just slipped loosely around the rim. After a few minutes of futility, Dale remembered something he had seen years before at a gas station.

He got a bowl of soapy water and a sponge, and coated the metal rim and both rims of the tire with soapy water. This created a film which held the air in. Once there was a little air inside the tire, it started inflating when I pumped and the rim of the tire pushed against the metal rim, creating an airtight seal. After that, it was only a minute's work to bring the tire up to the recommended 30psi.

Shifting boxes

We've made some progress on getting our house ready to take in some Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

On Labor Day, Emma and I thoroughly cleaned out the garage in the alley, then put everything back much more efficiently, so that we would have somewhere to store all of the stuff that was in our basement.

On Thursday, Emma made contact with Roy, a doorman at her chiropractor's and a native of New Orleans. Roy and his other family members in the Seattle area are looking to bring up about 20 of their extended family. Roy was very keen to learn that we were offering space. Unfortunately, Emma forgot to get contact information from Roy, although she left her card with him, and we have not been able to reach him since, despite leaving messages at his workplace. He was supposed to call her on Monday, but didn't. We'll try to reach him again tomorrow. If we don't hear from him soon, we'll look elsewhere.

On Sunday, half a dozen of our friends came over and did a ton of work in clearing out our basement. Literally on the order of a ton of shelving, boxes, and other impedimentia was moved out of our basement, through the back yard, and into the garage. We thank Delf, Dale, Ernest, Mary, Ariana, and Ray for their hours of help, and Lyndol and Frank who dropped by with a batch of cookies.

Earlier today, our friend Barb came by and spent a few hours helping us empty out the spare bedroom. That room is just about ready to go. Incidentally, Barb told me the other day that Alaska Airlines are currently offering one-way fares from Dallas to Seattle for as little as $89, so that's a likely avenue for bringing people up from the Gulf Coast.

We hope to see several of our friends back on Saturday and Sunday for more work parties.

Scaling back

We've thought through what we hope to achieve and what we can reasonably achieve, and we're scaling our plans back. It's better to set a more modest goal and do it well, than to set an ambitious goal and flounder badly.

We still intend to offer the spare bedroom, which is fairly comfortable, for up to a year. But we're going to be doing much less with the basement.

We arranged for a few contractors come in and make bids on what it would cost to convert the large room in the basement into two bedrooms. This includes cutting two egress windows (as fire escapes), leveling the floor, repaneling the walls, framing a dividing wall, fixing the drop ceiling, adding doors, and so on. The cheapest bid was $18,000!

Instead, we now plan to make much more modest changes to the basement: cut egress holes, install cheap windows, cover the unleveled floor with carpet, repair the damaged paneling on the wall, drape some cloths for privacy in the doorways, and get some beds from somewhere.

We intend to make the basement available just for a few months. It won't be as comfortable as we had originally hoped, but it will be an improvement on sleeping on a cot in the middle of the Astrodome.

I had other concerns too, apart from the upfront cost of renovating half of the basement. Even if we did most of the work ourselves, with help from friends, how timely would we be? It's several weeks of part-time work and realistically, we can't hope to get a large amount of volunteer work to see a full project through. In the long term moreover, creating two nice bedrooms is a waste of effort, as we have very different plans for the basement.

I also have concerns about taking on half-a-dozen people for up to a year. Going from a childless couple in sole occupancy of our house to an eight-person household completely changes the dynamic. I don't want to feel like a stranger in my own home. Having two extra people for a year with a few more for a few months is more emotionally manageable.

The ongoing cost of running the household is also a concern. My contract at Microsoft ended last week, but I've got four interviews lined up, so I expect to be back at work shortly. However, Emma just quit her job to start her own business, so we're going to be losing money on that for quite a while.

In short, I want to do right by the evacuees, but I also have to do right by us.

I mentioned recently that I would be walking in this year's AIDS Walk. And so I did.

After months of dry, sunny weather in Seattle, I have grown unaccustomed to rain. It was an unpleasant morning and an unpleasant shock. The skies opened and I stood in an endless line waiting to register. I raised $1180, which entitled me to huddle in the VIP tent, as the rain continued. The rain finally let up about halfway along the route, as we debouched onto Broadway.

Thanks to my fellow Team BiNet Seattle fundraisers, Emily and Meghan, who raised a few hundred more between them. Double thanks to Emily for giving me a ride home afterwards.

My good friend Frank Maloney turned 60 the other day. A few months ago, he invited Emma and me to join him and his partner, Lyndol, at The Herbfarm. The Herbfarm is one of the very best restaurants in the Seattle area. Certainly one of the most expensive.

Frank brought us to The Herbfarm, but not at his own expense. One of Frank's college roommates was Ron Zimmerman, the owner of The Herbfarm, and Ron had invited Frank to bring Lyndol and two guests over for his 60th birthday. Ron semi-seriously credits Frank with introducing him to good wine, when Frank was a sommelier in the Seventies.

We had a marvelous time. This was our first visit. It won't be our last, but dinner runs nearly $200 per person, so we'll never be regulars.

The Herbfarm is in the Sammamish River valley, right next to the Red Hook Brewery, near Woodinville. The building looks like a traditional farmhouse, though I'm sure it was recently built. Inside, it's both cosy and elegant, with some eccentric touches in the dining room.

Dinner is an all-evening experience with a nine-course dinner. We arrived not long after six, and left just after midnight. On arrival, we toured the premises, finding Ron in his alarmingly well-stocked wine cellar.

At six-thirty, Carrie Van Dyck, Ron's wife, brought the forty or so guests on a tour of the herb garden, describing the herbs that were to be featured in that evening's menu. She told us how to grow each herb, passing out fresh samples of herbs, including lemon thyme, lemon geranium, lemon basil, and anise hyssop. We also saw the truffling pigs and the ducks they keep in one corner of the garden.

We sat down at seven, starting out with small servings of crab soup, mussels, and baby corn. I detest fish -- I cannot stand the smell or the taste -- so I passed the soup and mussels on to Emma and Frank, who were more than happy to have my share.

After we had finished the first course, Ron brought out his chef, Jerry Traunfeld, and they launched into a long description of both that night's menu and upcoming menus, paying particular attention to the wines. They concluded by introducing the dozen or so staff. I've never seen such a full-blown introduction to dinner, but they had a lot to talk about, and it lived up to the promise.

The next course was smoked black cod, which I passed on to Frank, but not before nibbling on a corner of it. Every couple of years, I give in to my companions and try a piece of some highly recommended fish dish. As always, it did nothing for me, but everyone else liked theirs. I comforted myself with the two different Chardonnays that were served with the cod. My life would be simpler if I weren't so averse to fish.

After that point, all the food was to my liking. There followed a goat cheese ravioli with figs, which was succeeded by a grilled squab. We washed that down with apple-shiso ice.

I love lamb, and I greatly enjoyed the loin of lamb. The cheese that followed was a fine blend of sharp and nutty.

I was starting to flag at this point, from all the wine and food, but I gamely took on the desserts: a small cone of ice cream and a peach cobbler.

The final two courses were coffee and small treats with madeira. I couldn't face the latter, but we boxed them up, and I just ate a couple now.

Throughout the evening, Ron was a gracious and thoughtful host, paying particular attention to our table.

Many years ago, Frank published a small volume of poetry called How to Eat a Slug.

Imagine our delight when Ron produced a chocolate slug.

Frank had been very sick earlier in the summer and we had wondered for a while if he would be well enough to go. His health is still not good, but he was well enough to thoroughly enjoy a truly memorable evening.

Here's to many more birthdays, Frank!

A few hours ago, Emma sent this email out to our friends:

After long thought and a lot of heart searching, George & I have decided to take in a family from Louisiana. We are now starting to look for someone who can help us make arrangements to get people here. Meanwhile, we need anyone who wants to volunteer to help us clean out our basement and fix it up to house people. We have a guest room on our first floor, but we also need to rearrange the entire house to allow us to add 4-6 people to our lives for up to the next year.

At the very least, we need anyone who can donate money to help with travel costs for the family we get, to buy supplies to make our basement livable, to donate beds/bunk beds and other bedroom furniture (tho' this can wait on when we know the make up of the family we get), etc. Whatever family we get is going to became part of our family. We don't want them to feel like refugees being tolerated in our home in make-shift conditions, we want them to feel like FAMILY and that our home is their HOME.

If any of you have contact with a poor family that needs a new start, please let us know. We'll be looking for a way to get a family here.

Blessings, Emma Bartholomew & George Reilly

This was Emma's idea. I've always known that she had a big heart. I'm particularly proud of her this time.

She later sent this out:

Thanks for everyone's responses so far. George & I have contacted various groups about providing housing and are waiting to hear back. Meanwhile, we've come to the conclusion that we need to get some professionals in here to bring our basement up-to-code for housing a family. Does anyone know of a reputable contractor/firm that we could hire to do the work? With a good, fast firm, we can add two to three bedrooms with escape windows to our basement, while upgrading the basement bathroom to be able to handle the additional use.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Emma & George

It's going to be a busy few days around here. We have a lot of crap that we need to shift around.

I just sent the following letter to Jim McDermott, Patty Murray, and Maria Cantwell. An abbreviated version went to the Seattle Times.

In August 2001, George W. Bush ignored a warning that Osama Bin Laden would attack the US. Thousands died.

In March 2003, Bush started an unnecessary war against Iraq. Tens of thousands died.

In August 2005, Bush ignored warnings that a major hurricane would strike New Orleans, and stayed on vacation. He played guitar in Arizona while New Orleans drowned. Uncounted thousands died.

Not until Wednesday did he return to Washington. Even now, he has yet to show leadership. Photo ops are not leadership. Platitudes are not leadership.

For four years, the Bush administration has played the terror card, warning us again and again that terrorists would strike our cities. Billions have been spent on homeland defense. Where did the money go? Where were the contingency plans? Why was FEMA's response so outrageously incompetent? Why are thousands of people still trapped in New Orleans? Why are thousands dead?

The small-government conservatives in their zeal to drown government in the bathtub have drowned New Orleans instead.

Bush gutted FEMA, replacing the competent Witt with two cronies, Allbaugh and Brown.

Bush repeatedly gutted the budget for the levees, to pay for his unconscionable tax cuts.

Bush gutted the National Guard, sending them off to die in Iraq.

Bush ignores global warming, while the hurricanes grow fiercer every year.

Bush could not avert Hurricane Katrina. No one could. But he is responsible for the inadequate preparation, and for the wretchedly inept followup.

It is time for George Bush's accountability moment. The president's job is serve and protect the American people. He has failed to do either. It is time for him to go.

Impeach him!