Stuff

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plant under construction near Interstate 17 and Loop 303 in north Phoenix. TSMC

When we dismantled the partitions on the main floor of the new house we saved the doors and cabinets. I was under the impression that we could reuse them when we built the new partitions. Silly me. The girls decided they wanted all new stuff, so now I've got a bunch of perfectly good doors and cabinets that I need to get rid of. I put an ad on Craigslist offering them for free but the only response was from a couple of people who wanted the one louvered door. After a bunch of fiddle farting we finally agreed on a time they could come by and get it, so I drove the 15 miles to hand over this one door.

The person who showed up was a cheerful middle-aged Chinese woman with her equally cheerful sister. They were both wearing dungarees and are totally into doing things on their own. We're talking, I mention I used to work for Intel and she tells me her niece (cousin? daughter? some relative) has recently graduated from school and has gone to work for TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) in Taiwan and will be transferring to their new plant in Phoenix once it is completed. I was surprised to hear this because I thought something like this would be big news, but I hadn't heard a word about it. Probably because I don't follow the correct propaganda, er, news feeds.

TSMC is one of the big three semiconductor manufacturers in the world these days, the other two being Intel  (USA) and Samsung (South Korea). Intel has big plants in central Arizona, New Mexico and well as in Silicon Valley and just down the road from my home in Hillsboro.

I still have rest of the old doors and cabinets. I could have just relegated them to the dumpster, but Portland has a place the deals in reclaimed building materials, so they will probably accept them. All I have to do it haul them down there. It's funny how much perfectly useful stuff goes to the landfill because people can't be bothered with it, while at the same time we have people who spend hours or even years restoring a piece of junk.