Bill and I had the pleasure of welcoming new neighbors Erin and Mike to our home the other evening where we learned so much about this fascinating couple who moved into their home on Goodwin St in August.
As with all of these interviews, unless I’m using quotes, know that I’m paraphrasing the answers, so blame me for any inaccuracies.
Why did you decide to move to Williamsburg?
This is one of those, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” questions. The couple have actually lived in Williamsburg for 23 years, the last 15 in Governor’s Land. They moved to Williamsburg from The Fan in Richmond. And before that they lived in NoVa.
So let me re-phrase the question. Why did you decide to move to Williamsburg 23 years ago?
Erin and Mike wanted to move somewhere with better schools and safer neighborhoods, given their growing family. Plus, M&E owned their own business, allowing them to work from anywhere so long as it had quick access to DC. Williamsburg, and especially Governor’s Land, checked all the boxes.
As an added incentive, Erin’s parents retired here in Williamsburg. Not only could she and her daughters be close to her parents, but her parents could babysit. YAY!
Why Burns Lane?
Like so many of our neighbors, Mike and Erin are now empty nesters. Their oldest daughter lives in Richmond, and the younger two are both attending college in Boston. The couple decided to move out of Governor’s Land to somewhere walkable, close to the historic area, the college, and restaurants. Somewhere with neighbors who say “hi,” look after one another without being nosy, and have dogs of course.
Because when I said Erin and Mike are empty-nesters, I didn’t mention Auggie, their miniature five-year-old labradoodle. Auggie often has words with Cuba, my daughter’s dog, through our back fence. Then he (Auggie) runs over to share some gossip with Sophie. It’s a busy life.
Erin would like everyone to know that although they brought Auggie home in 2020, “…he’s not a pandemic dog.” They purchased him before the US lockdown. He did have the advantages of a Covid dog, with all his people home with him all the time.
Tell us about your lives before moving here.
Mike grew up in Ventura California, joined the AF right out of High School with plans to get picked up by a commissioning program, then wanted to spend some quality time within that service. Unfortunately, he was medically discharged after serving in the Gulf War, before he could put his plan into action.
A door closes, a window opens. After leaving the AF, Mike attended ODU and ended up working in the banking industry, where he met his future wife Erin.
Erin was born in NC, but attended HS in Northern Virginia after her family relocated there when she was a teenager. After graduation she attended Radford, majoring in Political Science. She put that degree to good use by moving to Vail after graduation, working in hospitality. And Skiing.
She also ended up working in the banking industry in NoVa, met Mike, and from that point on their stories converge.
What cool adventures have you had?
Mike, Erin and their daughters have had their share of awesome adventures. Erin says Mike comes up with crazy ideas and she makes them happen.
For example, once they just decided to up-sticks and live in the Caymans for a year.
They also spent a year as vagabonds, traveling all over Europe, taking their three school-aged daughters along. Private tutors? Home schooling?
Nope. Instead the couple enrolled the girls in Virginia Virtual Academy. Effectively taking public school on the road with them. Not only did this allow the family to travel the world, it taught the girls to be disciplined about getting their schoolwork done without direct classroom supervision. Plus, they received a first-rate education by visiting sites US school children usually only read about. Mike called out the D-Day invasion as an example. Instead of just reading about Overlord, their daughters got to walk the beaches and visit the US Ranger Monument at Pointe du Hoc.
Then, 2020.
When Covid hit, the girls already had the discipline to attend online classes, so continued their education without a hiccup. Any number of recent articles bemoan the educational setbacks of students during the pandemic. According to this article, and many others like it, large numbers of students, mostly whose parents didn’t have the wherewithal to pay for private tutoring, never recovered from being out of formal education for over a year. Not so for the McMahon children, whose early experience with online learning prepared them for the pandemic years.
Tell us abut your home renovation saga.
With their youngest daughter off to college and the decision made to move, Mike and Erin purchased their home in October ’22. Refurbishment started in May ’23 and occupancy in August of ’24. For a refurbishment project, that is quite the timeframe. I asked Mike, “Did they have to take everything down to the studs?”
According to Mike, they not only had to take everything down to the studs, in most cases they replaced the studs as well. He said there is very little of the original house remaining, and nothing original on the outside. Then Mike asked the question, “Is a ‘historic’ 1956 house, with everything replaced, still a ‘historic’ 1956 house?”
Good question, and certainly not a new one. The biographer and author Plutarch (46 – 119 CE), one of those old, dead, white Greek dudes, asked the same thing about a certain boat a few years back. (Confession: I had to ping Bill to remember the name of the paradox. Being married to a philosopher occasionally has its upside.)
The Ship of Theseus Paradox
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
Plutarch, Life of Theseus
If you want to read the entire biography, Gutenberg has a free translation here. And please don’t ask if I’ve read the whole bio myself because I’ll be much too embarrassed to answer.
While the debate may still rage among philosophers, for the Williamsburg ARB the answer is clear: Yep, it is the same 1956 home. Therefore the couple had to replace like for like. Brand new wooden windows, brand new wooden doors, and brand new wooden clapboards. To add insult to injury, Erin and Mike didn’t know they were subject to ARB regulations when they purchased the home.
Surprise! And shame on their realtor.
All that is behind them, and they now have a beautifully restored (brand new?) home with amazing curb appeal and modern construction on the inside, if not on the outside.
The landscaping is a work in progress, the first order of business being to clear away some of the overgrown plantings. I’m happy to say they were able to cut down some of the loblolly pines (yay!) and are making inroads on invasive wisteria eradication.
Which answered a question I had after returning to Burns Lane in June after several months away: Why wasn’t I overrun with wisteria as usual? I’m grateful for neighbors that despise the weed as much as I do, and hope someday we can be rid of it forever. Probably mere wishful thinking. As this article from invasive.org points out, “Long term management is needed.” So my new neighbors and I will be battling this nasty vine for years to come.
But at least we can battle it together.
What next?
Mike and Erin sold their business last March, but have no plans to retire. Being serial entrepreneurs, they are of course starting another business. And being on-trend, their new business involves Artificial Intelligence. They plan to build a model that detects model drift in other models used in medicine, specifically within the VA.
I’ll explain, so bear with me.
There is a common misconception that AI models learn as they are used, which is not true. Except for a few lesser-known examples that employ expensive and slower learn-as-you-go algorithms, the large and famous models we hear about today are actually static. Here’s an overview of how it works.
- Get a boat-load of annotated data
- Cut the data into two sets
- Train the AI model on one set
- Test the AI model on the other set
- Freeze the model
- Use the model
And by ‘Use the model’ I mean offer up inputs to the model and harvest the outputs. In ChatGPT the input could be a request such as, “Write a 1000 word essay appropriate for an English 101 class discussing 5 words coined by Shakespeare.” Then when ChatGPT generates the essay, the student can cut, paste, and turn in the paper for a B+.
In the medical field, there are many existing AI models. For example, they can be used to differentiate between benign and cancerous tumors, make initial diagnoses of rare diseases, or identify probable prescription errors. This all sounds wonderful, but what happens when the outputs from the model start to become inaccurate? This phenomenon, called model drift, can happen for a number of reasons, the most likely being a richer set of inputs in post-training use than were available during training.
Most organizations can’t simply retrain the model because retraining is expensive. This article breaks down the training costs for ChatGPT 4 and concludes OpenAI has to shell out well over $23 million to train the model. And there is the tug. Models need to be retrained when they drift out of tolerance, but retraining too often could bring financial ruin on organizations without the financial resources of OpenAI or Amazon. Such as the VA.
Hence Erin and Mike’s new business. They want to work with the VA to identify when medically-related models actually need to be retrained. I hope they succeed.
What about fun?
In a word: travel. Everywhere, all the time, but perhaps not all at once. They especially want to visit parts of Asia they missed during their leisurely meander to New Zealand. I’ll leave the details of the NZ trip for the couple to talk about when you see them walking Auggie around the neighborhood.
That’s all for now. If you haven’t met them yet, be sure to introduce yourselves. Let them know about the cool places you’d recommend they visit in Asia, and ask about their personal Ship of Theseus standing right there on Goodwin Street.
KAS