High Finance

Thanks for all your kind words of sympathy and occasional snorts of laughter regarding the great fence disaster of '07. My neighbor informs me it will probably be around $500 to fix.... So whenever he gets around to doing it, I'll need to hand him a check. Which is totally fine; on one hand, I feel like I ought to ask for a receipt or something just to know he's not rooking me, but on the other hand I destroyed his damn fence, and he's fixing it himself, and I should really be glad it's not worse than $500. So it'll be no questions asked, I think. That plus the $1200 in taxes, plus the $800 in dental work, has me wound up a bit tight this month.

I find out about the big job next week. Right now I'm doing contract work for them, so I keep getting sympathetic glances from the people in the office who know I'm up for a job.... I actually found a page from one of my competator's "tree briefs" on the copier on Monday, and I was all like, "Hmm, I probably shouldn't read this.... oops! Too late!" It made me feel better, it wasn't all cool lookin' and stuff (obviously, that applicant didn't know Bushi!) and the content was.... well, let's say it was kind of scattered. Part of the fun and challenge of exhibit design, for me, is needing to keep a focus on a Big Idea--what's the point we're hoping to get across here to kids and adults? How does each element of the exhibit point back at that idea while expanding on it in some way? It reminds me a bit of theatre design, back when I thought I was going to be a drama major and design sets and lights--because your space is limited, and you have to achieve purposes X, Y, and Z with your set or your lighting, you have to stay very focused and keep asking yourself, "Is this necessary? How can I make this work in the context of the play?" So I tried hard to keep my project tight, and made a point to clearly relate everything back to my big uber-idea. The person whose project was on the copier? Not so much. So who knows? I could be top of the pile, or someplace in the middle... but don't think I'm at the rock bottom. Small favors, eh?

Dude.... Where's My Car?

You know what's even better than waking up painfully early to go to the dentist to get a crown installed, after a late night of wargaming?

Waking up painfully early to go to the dentist and finding, as you walk out the door, that your car is no longer where you left it at 1:00 AM. Rather, it is down near the end of your gently sloped driveway, halfway through your neighbor's cyclone fence. Apparently I failed to set the parking brake. And while ordinarily the car will start to roll instantly if I don't put the brake on, I gather that last night I parked in some sort of slight divot which kept the car in place while I debarked and headed into the house, blissfully ignorant that sometime during the night, the heavy rainstorms that went on for hours would cause a loosening of my driveway's substrate.... resulting in Car In Ditch Syndrome. When I came lurching out my door yelling "What the fuck!?!" at 7:30 this morning, the town marshal was already there, patiently filling out an accident report. So I called the dentist to postpone my appointment. Called Triple A to winch my car out of the ditch (said rainstorms had made mud soup of the embankment.) And called my neighbor to say, I'm so terribly sorry I destroyed your fence, do let me pay for it or fix it myself, or something... Gah. What a great start to the day.

Trees: Can't See the Forest For 'Em

With the extremely able and generous assistance of Bushi, I've finally completed my sample project for the job interview. My cluelessness about Pagemaker and associated software knows no bounds; Bushi kindly took my document in hand, and turned it from a pile of lifeless text with randomly inserted images into a thing of beauty and refinement. In exchange for.....lunch. Admittedly, it was a very good lunch--but I'm very, very lucky to have such awesome friends.

Some of my other awesome friends assisted me by suggesting possible titles for my topic, which was "Trees."

"Trees: Nature's Phallic Symbols"
"Trees: Haven for Terrorists"
"Acorn to End Table: A Tree's Odyssey"
"Fear the Tree: A Million Dwarves Can't Be Wrong"
and my personal favorite:
"Silent But Deadly: When A Tree Falls in the Forest"

Ok, technically only one friend suggested all of those, but she's still awesome. And kind of sick. I told her I thought the end table one would make children cry....

Up to My Ass in Alligators

I still have over a hundred exams to grade, and this is weighing so heavily on my mind that I've been unable to rise from the chair where I've been screwing around on the internet for the last hour and a half. Sad, but oh so true. Much of my brain space is currently taken up with the writing assignment which is phase II of the job app I've been whining about, and I need to divert at least long enough to finish the grading before Spring Break.

My comment about getting the suit too soon proved incorrect; I wore it to a funeral this week. It was the father of a childhood friend of mine; we were thick like thieves from ages 6 to 12, then parted ways as she went through a much rougher adolescence than I did. At the time, I just thought she'd gotten mean for no good reason, and started messing with drugs, and she was no fun to hang around with anymore. Later on, with a bit of perspective, I realized that there was a lot going on in her life--not the least of which was that her extremely unpleasant and (I gather) emotionally abusive father had left her mother for another woman. At least, that's what I think happened; adults are pretty sparing with the details on these crises when you're a kid. She and I kept in touch--I think even as the teenage years were treating her badly, she kept thinking back to our hours playing in the woods and acting out Star Wars drama as the happy part of her life--and though she's moved to Portland now, she touches base with me a couple times a year and we usually get together for lunch or something when she's back in town. I found out her dad had died the day before his funeral, and decided I should probably bust my ass to get there. She and her mom and sister all seemed really happy I'd come. It was odd to sit through the mass hearing the present wife's eulogy of what a wonderful husband he'd been to her over the last 20+ years, knowing what a devastating effect his various actions had had on his 3 kids and his ex.... But I guess this is pretty standard at funerals; there will always be someone listening to the eulogy and saying, "That's not the guy I remember."

Is it just me, or is it odd that the priest invites non-Catholics to come up during communion, not to actually receive communion but to refuse it and then receive his blessing instead? If I'm not Catholic, why would I want a blessing from a Catholic priest? To me, that's about as inappropriate as going up to receive the eucharist--neither holds meaning for me as a non-catholic, so why would I even go up there? Odd.

Teeter-Totter

I have 260 exams to grade. Boo.

I'm almost done with a project I've been working on for a year. Yay!

The online class I'm teaching is yomping my ass. Boo.

I made it through the first cut of candidates for the job I interviewed for last month. Yay!

Now there's another 3 weeks of tension in store before the next cut. Boo.

I don't have an abcess in my lower left wisdom tooth, which would probably eventually require oral surgery. Yay!

I have to get another crown instead, requiring approximately $700. Boooooo.

It's been a fun week! I'm also still trying to get my downstairs den back in order, which involves going through every damn thing I took out of there (boo) and either keeping it, Goodwilling it, or selling it on ebay. Last week I got $20 for a Playmobil toy I've had for 10 years; apparently there are people who collect that stuff just as rabidly as I do Star Wars figures or Green Arrow merchandise. (I'm thinking of spending my ebay proceeds on some original Mike Grell artwork.... it's like Geekswap.) This week I have 8 people avidly watching my auction for a box set of the Paranoia RPG--I'm hoping this will result in a brutal bidding war on the last day. And there's oh so much more to sell. Joy, joy. But there's also all the stuff I can't sell, or don't want to sell, or need to keep ("Hey! So that's what happened to my copy of my 2004 tax return!") and going through it piece by piece is just fabulously slow and boring. I'll finish.... but it's not fun.

De-Funked

I'm about out of my funk (well, the most recent one, I'm sure I'll have another soon. I'm due to find out I didn't get the uber job any day now. In retrospect, I should've waited to buy the suit.) I've finally been forced to migrate my other blog to New Blogger, and so far nothing disastrous seems to have happened. One thing I do like in New Blogger is the ability to tinker with my template on the fly, as evidenced by my continual adding of links in the last week. Old Blogger required you to go into the template html, and dig around to find where you wanted to stick your new link, and then copy and paste code from existing links to make sure what you did matched up. New Blogger gives you this keen little toolkit icon when you're logged into Google, that lets you add links to the roll on the side of the blog pretty much at will. So I've been going "oh yeah, I forgot to add so-and-so!" to my little blogroll all week, and I've added a few comics that I've picked up in my daily reading regimen. I've finally added Beaver and Steve, which is sometimes a little sick, but usually impresses me with its all-out weirdness; and Questionable Content, which didn't impress me the first couple times I ran across it but now it's grown on me a bit--we'll see if I stick with it. Animals Have Problems Too isn't to everyone's taste, but there's something about it that just hits my funny bone consistantly--I'm even thinking of buying his book, and I've not even done that with Sluggy, my first and best internet comic love.

I'm debating putting PvP on there, even though I do read it daily. Not sure why, other than that I've been finding it less and less funny lately, and Scott Kurtz's persistant ranting about the cruel unfairness of a world that won't let him easily transition from webcomics to newspapers gets on my nerves. Come on, dude--your comic is targeted at a very narrow market, in the grand scheme of things, and wouldn't fly to the average newspaper reader; there's nothing wrong with being a webcomic. If you wanted to be in print medium, you need to be doing something that appeals to a wider range of ages/interests/personality types. Hell, I'm a big ol' nerd, and half the time I don't get the joke in PvP coz it's about World of Warcraft, or an in-joke about Penny Arcade, which I don't read.... So I get annoyed with PvP, and keep thinking I'm going to stop reading it, and so I've not added it to my list. Kind of lame, really. Much like this post! But I figure, even if you didn't like the post, you can go read some of the comics...

Little Mary Gloom-shine

I'm fighting off a mood crash, and it's not helped by the fact that the entire downstairs of my house is an utter Pit of Despair at the moment. Everything from the den has been disgorged into the other 3 rooms down there, in order to make it possible for the gentlemen from the carpet place to remove my stinky and gross old carpet, and replace it with newer, fresh smelling carpet. Which is a great thing, and I'm happy about it, but the prospect of going through all the crap and disposing of the excess before reinstalling it in the room is..... well, depressing. Add to that the fact that I didn't get a call for job #2--not even an interview, at the place where I've been volunteering for 4 years and you'd think they'd at least give me a courtesy call for god's sake--and I'm beginning to strongly suspect I didn't make the cut for job #1. So my prospects for the summer are bleak. One of my friends keeps offering to get me a job at the brokerage house where he works.... and while the prospect of steady income is tempting, the thought of working there makes me cringe. Not my cup of tea, plus I just can't stand the thought of throwing away yet another degree. Why did I bother with grad school at all (I ask myself in my more frowny moments) if all that work and time and money isn't going to get me a job I like and want? Which means, the summer will likely be much like last summer--ie, a financial near-disaster, with correspondingly spikeing stress levels. Lord, but I'm tired of this.

This May will be the 5th anniversary of my losing my job at the Game Store. And while I do often get fed up and tired of my present situation, depending on my parents for money and working piecemeal jobs, I very seldom have any regrets about getting off that boat when I did. Though my leaving was not by choice, and though the experience was very emotionally painful and damaging in some ways, I think I'm far better off now than I would have been had I stayed. Even with all the frustration of unemployment now, it frankly beats one of my alternatives! So things aren't so bad after all.