The Aerie
I guess I was lucky. The week I spent in Rotterdam was the week that it rained non stop for hundreds of hours in a row. Meanwhile in Rotterdam the weather was fine.
Now that I've returned, the fair weather has followed me - I take full responsibility for it! Today it's supposed to be in the upper Sixties, and the weekend was gorgeous. On Friday I actually rode my bike to work - twelve miles each way, but it was very nice. Unfortunately I can't afford to allocate ten hours a week to commuting or I would bike every day.
Saturday my wife and I attended to a few chores, most notably we emptied all the junk out of the garage that I had moved there during the cleaning of the basement this summer. More remains to be done, but it's so nice to have gotten rid of a lot of that junk. Many ancient and precious children's books and toys are now in the bins at the used-goods store, waiting to entertain another generation of children.
I also trimmed our maple tree out front. When we moved in it was thinner than my wrist, and I nearly killed it when I bumped and gouged its trunk with the lawnmower. Now it's a good foot or more in diameter, with branches that always want to droop down onto my roof and that of my neighbor. However after many years of diligent pruning, it seems to have gotten the message and is growing more UP than OVER. Hopefully autumn is the right time to be pruning branches, because that's when I did it. I used the pole saw that I bought last year to very good effect - it really worked well, possibly because it's so new and sharp.
On Sunday I worked at the church some more, where I'm trying to get the wireless network to reach from one end of the structure to the other. I've got a donated Linksys onto which I've loaded the routing software that allows for linked wireless nodes, but so far no luck getting it to talk to my base station. It can SEE it, but it doesn't want to share bits yet.
Finally got to some biology homework last night, after weeks of being too busy. My whole college coursework thing is really upsetting me, I just can't seem to find the time to work on it, and soon I'm going to have to pay the piper. To say nothing of actually paying my tuition bill, which has been overdue since April. With my summer underemployment I just haven't had the cash, and won't til probably December. Oy.
Well back to work for now. Hopefully I'll have something interesting to write about sometime soon, 'cause goodness knows a weekend chore update is about as boring as it gets!
Okay, this is kind of weird. One of the photographs that I snapped on my walking tour of Amsterdam was of a tall guy with long light brown hair performing with a marionette. The act looked familiar, because it involved the marionette playing rock and roll music to a CD. When I posted my comments for the photo, I said that he reminded me of a fellow we'd passed on the street in Paris last year.
Well the reason he looked so familiar was that he WAS the same guy! What are the chances?
Okay, so it's not ENTIRELY surprising - I was a tourist, and he selected tourist areas in order to perform. Still, why would he leave Paris, and of all the places he could go, why Amsterdam?
I wish I had stopped to ask him, but of course at the time I had no idea that he was the same fellow. When I saw him in Amsterdam it wasn't a strong recognition, it was more "Oh, weird, that puppet reminds me of something..." and later when I saw my photo I thought "didn't I see that in Paris?"
In other news yesterday was the day of the Big Interview... A Director-level position with a very big firm. The idea of taking this job is scary as hell to me, it feels like I'd be 'way over my head, but of course if they offer it to me I'll take it! No point in turning away from an opportunity. Worst I can do is get fired, and that wouldn't be the first time.
The interview itself was fine, I'm good at interviewing. My potential future boss turned out to be a lot less sociable than his online biography suggested - very stiff and reserved - so it was hard for me to tell if I was connecting with him. The two other people with whom I interviewed seemed to like me.
Aside from that, I've just been BUSY. Every night this week has had something packed into it. Haven't been able to do homework, haven't been able to rest. Monday was a meeting, Tuesday was a movie, Wednesday was visiting a friend, and yesterday was seeing "The Crucible" at the U of M theater. I'm looking forward to the weekend, even if my spouse WILL have me doing the autumn yard work...
Finally, I rode my bike to work today - a very long ride, about 12 miles at about 12 miles an hour, meaning it took an hour of course. It was pretty cold setting out, but otherwise uneventful. I took a route south away from my house, and then west towards work - going back I'll head north away from work, and go east to my house. That is if I'm still able to move...
Okay, back to work!
Been waiting to use that pun all week.
So I finally escaped from Rotterdam and now I am home. The tale in between is a good one, in which most everything worked out fine. I took a kazillion photos which are available here... Sunday in Rotterdam, Friday in Amsterdam and Saturday in Amsterdam.
I began on Thursday night by packing. The plan was to abandon the paid hotel room in Rotterdam, but not to check out. In case I couldn't find anything in Amsterdam, I wanted to have a place to sleep even if it meant returning by train.
In the morning I woke up early completely by accident, so I slipped out of the hotel by a back exit and made my way to class an hour early. The plan was to grab some breakfast in the hour before class, but what I discovered was that it is impossible to get breakfast in the Rotterdam suburbs! The Burger King and the surrounding cafes didn't open until nine. So by the time class began, I was starving.
Fortunately we had gotten about an hour ahead in the coursework, so class ended at 1:00 p.m. I wrapped up my paperwork, forgot to return the classroom key (I mailed it back Monday), and headed off to Amsterdam.
I caught the train to Rotterdam, changed at Rotterdam Central for the Amsterdam train, and then went right back to my suburban station: instead of grabbing the express, I'd grabbed the train that looped around through central part of the Netherlands. But I didn't mind, I wasn't in a hurry, and this would give me the chance to see some of central Netherlands.
What I noticed as we crossed the landscape was, first, how rural it was - with a sharp division between urban areas and fields of cattle. Secondly, the Netherlanders have a very intimate relationship with water, with each set of fields cut by frequent canals.
I had noticed this in the city as well. My first day in the hotel I tried strolling over to the nearby mall. I approached the nearest corner, only to discover that there was a moat around the mall. I ended up circumnavigating more than half of the mall, walking along a busy road with no sidewalk and a brittle ground cover. When I got to the far end of the mall I had to scamper quickly across the parking ramp entrance, which was a spiral ramp positioned directly above a big pool of scummy water at the end of the channel.
The water in the countryside was equally ubiquitous, with channels running everywhere. It was also very strange to glance out the window across a field and see, first, a van speeding along a road and following just behind it an enormous barge... And no, I tried to grab a photo but it didn't come out...
Eventually we rolled into Amsterdam, and I caught some shots of the city from the train. I disembarked, and with my roller-luggage clicking along the cobbles attempted to find a hotel. My method was inefficient - I walked from hotel to hotel asking after rooms and prices. Unfortunately I discovered that there was a marathon in town over the weekend, and most rooms were booked. Those that were available began at about $200, and I started to anticipate a return trip to Rotterdam, but I headed out of the center of Amsterdam in hope of finding an available room in an outlying hotel.
Along the way I passed a wedding emerging onto the street. Aside from the fact that it was in Amsterdam it looked much like an American wedding, with lots of happy, well dressed people blowing bubbles for the couple. Then a pair of vehicles came down the street and everyone had to squeeze onto the sidewalk.
My wanderings had no success and eventually I found myself back in the ganja-scented heart of Amsterdam, headed to a hotel-placement booth that a helpful clerk had described, when I was astonished to find a single room available for one night for one person, for only $120. By this time, it looked like a bargain, particularly since it was just around the corner from the train station. Happily I dragged my luggage up the vertical set of shelves provided as a staircase to my room.
The room itself was a classic overpriced European tourist hotel room. The sagging bed bore a leopard-print blanket that depicted an actual leopard. A small table and chair were positioned beside a window which had obviously been forced open multiple times - a big gouge was carved in the lintel where the latching pin was supposed to hold it closed. The window opened onto a cramped light-well between several buildings, at least one of which was a discotheque.
There was one power outlet in the room, atop another shelf-like flight of "steps" to the bathroom. The angle of the stairs was so severe that the only way to use them was facing the steps, like a ladder. But I HAD a bathroom, as well as a shower, and a decent toilet. There was no towel, so I ended up skipping the shower the next day, but really it was a pretty good room, if weird. My concerns regarding safety prompted me to hide my laptop underneath the stairs whenever I left it in the room. It was small enough to escape a casual glance, I hoped the thieves, entering through the window, would simply grab my backpack and depart.
My belongings sort of secured I hit the streets again, first to get dinner and then to take photographs. I got a nice dinner of escargo, pizza and wine at a joint next to the hotel, and then began wandering. I wandered far and wide, following a generally westerly path as I snapped sunset photographs of Amsterdam.
Eventually I found myself far from my hotel and made my increasingly-chilly way back along the waterfront, happy that I had worn my warm leather jacket, but wishing I had brought my hat. Turning a corner, I beheld an unusual sight - on an empty dirt field beside the bay, a spooky circus tent had been erected far back from the road. I looked around but did not spot Rod Serling leaning against a pier. What do you do when you're alone in a strange foreign city at night, and you spot a creepy circus tent pitched in a dark field beside the bay?
Why you go in of course!
My timing was apparently perfect, because when I entered the tent there was no one taking tickets, or waiting by the entrance. So I slipped inside unnoticed. I had apparently stumbled upon Circus Zanzara, "the smallest circus in the Netherlands." About four-dozen people, half children, were gathered around the central ring. Events were overseen by a Ringmistress, dressed like a frumpy housewife in a dingy housedress and wig. Since I couldn't understand what she was saying I missed a lot of the jokes, but she was clearly playing up a kind of trailer-trash image...
I got to see an acrobat perform suspended from hanging curtains, and a clown herd a flock of ducks around the tent. In between the ringmistress made a point of dragging a father from the audience, getting him to help her tie off the acrobat's curtains, and then having him take a bow as if he had accomplished an acrobatic feat. I was very happy to be hiding way back in the shadows, since I couldn't understand a word being said.
After the performance ended I snapped a few shots of ships in the harbor, and finally wandered footsore back to my hotel room, where I was relieved to find my room undisturbed. Putting aside my concern over the sagging bed and its doubtless dubious history, I collapsed and passed out.
The next morning I woke early and packed, the better to spend a few remaining hours taking Amsterdam sunrise photographs. I wandered around the eastern side of the city this time, stumbling across several farmer's markets and getting lots of photographs of autumn leaves over canals. Eventually however my time was up, and I returned tofetch my luggage and check out of my room.
My plans to reach the airport were fortunately extremely generous - I planned to be at the train station at 11, airport at noon, for the fliight at 2:00. I got in line to check in for Iceland air, and what do you think of course, I got in the line with The Problem. The couple in front of me was flying with two babies, and apparently you can buy a ticket where a baby sits on the mother's lap, but not one where the baby sits on the father's lap. Resolving this took nearly an hour, including the agent leaving her desk for a long time. After checking in, I then stood in line for the security checkpoint for over another hour.
More exhausted than after my photographic excursions, I found my gate and eventually boarded the plane. Here I had a delightful pair of surprises. On my flight to Iceland I had switched at the last moment to a window seat, and found myself in seat 4A, directly behind First Class, in a First Class sized seat. Whee! This was fortunate, because my neighbor was one of those alpha males who has to assert his dominance by sprawling all over his territory. The big seat allowed him to drape himself across the armrest without actually gettnig into my space. Also he ate like a starving dog, great sweeping scoops of food into a gaping, gulping maw, and I was afraid if I got too close I'd lose a finger.
The second surprise was on the flight from Iceland to Minneapolis, where my window seat had an empty neighbor, meaning I and the fellow in the aisle seat could stretch out. I counted myself very lucky on both flights.
In between I managed to get a couple shots of Iceland as well as Greenland. The body of the trip was fun, particularly since my laptop batteries lasted through more than three hours of collected clips from The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Yeah, I couldn't believe I had that much either, I'd simply scraped them off of Crooks and Liars for a couple weeks in advance of the trip.
Finally we were descending to land in Minneapolis, and as we approached from the north I got some excellent shots of downtown in the sunset. Unfortunately my camera batteries ran out over Lake Calhoun, meaning I missed a few really good shots, including the sunset from the airport itself.
I made record time, being the first person off the plane - an advantage of not having anything in the overhead bins. I breezed through customs, only to be one of the last to retrieve his luggage. My spouse picked me up and soon I was, once again, back home. I'd been traveling for three out of the past six weeks, and frankly I think I'm done for a while...
Not exhausted tonight. Not sure why. Maybe yesterday was the peak of the jetlag, not sure. Last night I was SO bloody tired... When my alarm went off this morning, I found workers in my hotel bathroom, and when I asked what the heck they were doing one of them crooked a finger at me and pointed at a pile of white sugar on the floor of the bathroom. "What!?" I insisted, "I didn't spill it!" They just shook their heads at me ruefully and started to sweep up all the sugar.
Then my SECOND alarm went off, and I woke up.
Today was the first occasion of non-perfect weather on this trip - this morning dawned gray and rainy. I considered walking the mile anyway, but I left my hat home because I couldn't find my foldable hat and I didn't want to lug around the regular hat.
So I called for a cab, and then sat down to wait. Another woman had already been waiting when I came down to the lobby, and when my cab finally arrived she was very disappointed. So I asked her to share the cab, since I was only going a mile. To my delight, when we reached my building, she refused to let me pay for the ride. Free cab ride!
Class was fine. The students are a silent bunch, but they pay attention which is helpful. My crew in Stockholm was much more friendly, but they sat and clicked away on the computers in the training room the whole week. These guys are paying attention, but when we go to lunch they sit silently and chew their sandwiches. I've never met such a quiet bunch.
The rain passed by the end of the day, and I was able tolisten to the The Stephanie Miller Show while strolling home. A California drive-time morning show, it runs 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. here.
After class I considered just hopping on the train and going to Rotterdam or even Amsterdam, but I was still carrying my laptop, and I didn't really want to carry it all around strange large cities. One mugging and the rest of my class would be a wash, to say nothing of my laptop. Unfortunately, the train station is next to my class, meaning that dropping off my laptop slices an hour out of my day. So I'm considering locking my computer into the classroom tomorrow night, and then hopping a train right into Amsterdam, 45 minutes away.
We'll see, I've also got it my head to try to get some of my college work done this week. So do I stay and do work, or go and tour Amsterdam? Hard to say. Certainly it's easier to go back to the hotel and do work - but I've been doing that all week and not getting any work done - mostly just passing out from exhaustion.
Tonight after a brief nap I forced myself to go for a walk. The sun sets so early that only an hour after getting back to my room the sun was set. Rotterdam is more than 51 degrees north, six more than Minneapolis, and nearly as far north as Edmonton Canada. So the days get pretty short.
Anyway I decided to explore, so I strolled away from the hotel in the direction opposite of the one I take to class. It turns out that I'tm buried in a large housing tract - blocks and blocks of oppressively-similar apartment buildings in all directions. I managed to walk about half a mile, and found a strip mall with a fast-food joint alled "Verhage". I ordered something that looked like meat. and turned out to be a big sliced-up meatball. I carried it back to my room, returning more than half an hour after I left. It was tasty...
Anyway I went for a walk, ate dinner,blogged a bit, and suddenly it's time for bed. Sigh. It seems foolish to spend a week in Rotterdam by myself, and neither get my homework done nor actually see much of Rotterdam. But you can't do everything...
So we'll see what I can manage tomorrow - maybe I'll catch a train, maybe I'll tryto get some homework done. We'll see...
Gawd, I'm exhausted. Jetlag and people phoning me up from the States at 11:30 p.m. and insomnia have combined to turn my eyeballs into crusty hot coals rotating in dry sockets. But for some reason time is just zooming past tonight, and its already 11:00 p.m. again. But I wanted to get my Rotterdam photos posted before time had it's way with the idea and I never got it posted.
I am glad I got out on Sunday to stroll around Rotterdam, although I was dying to find a place that would rent bicycles. You'd think a city literally crawling with bikes would have a used bike shop someplace, but none I could find! So I hoofed it all day, and it wasn't too bad walking.
Rotterdam wasn't as nice as Stockholm - it's more industrial and shabby - but its' still an attractive city. And I love the bike paths everywhere. Light-rail everywhere. Canals with boats everywhere. Subways and trains everywhere. I can get anyplace I need to get without a car.
Well I wanted to blog lots and lots, but time has just zipped away. So click on SLAGBOOM up above and enjoy my photos of Rotterdam, hopefully I'll have the energy to post more tomorrow....
The skies are gray as they were when I started this job last week, but the temperature is down around 45 degrees Fahrenheit and it's intermittently drizzly. In other words it's autumn in Minnesota.
For the past two days I've been trying to convince my self to bike to Buy More, despite its being 12 miles away from home. For the past two days I've successfully convinced myself to do almost anything else instead, so the first bike ride will have to wait until I get back from Rotterdam.
Today I'm feeilng (needlessly) blue and anxious about the Rotterdam trip. I mean, it wall turn out fine and everything, but I really regret having committed to go. At the end of the trip, I will have been traveling for three out of the past five weeks, and it's just a bit much is all. I'm not in a mood to tour Europe right now, regrettably, and I'm not in a mood to battle jet lag for a week, and I'm not in a mood to experience variety and change. This is an unusual situation for me, I usually thrive on such things. But right now I'd like nothing more than to settle into a routine for a few weeks - home, work, school, exercise - and get my finances, my coursework, and my life into some kind of order. Well, time enough for that when I get back from Rotterdam I guess.
But I'll go, I'll teach, I'll yawn a lot, and I'll sleep on the flight home (after Stockholm I've decided to just stay awake until the plane leaves the next morning, then sleep all the way across the Atlantic). And I will get to see Iceland, however briefly.
And then, the week after that I'll have a chance to settle into a quiet routine, and we'll see how long it takes before that drives me crazy and I'm begging for some overseas teaching opportunities...
So that was the weekend. I could talk about something more interesting to the world at large if I could think of it, but I can't, so we'll start with that. The funny thing about the weekend is how little of it I can recall. Saturday, for example, is a blur. Ah, right, it started with Church. My spouse was off teaching her class at the Loft, so it was up to me to get my youngest to church. He's part of the "Visiting Faiths" program which takes the religious education kids around to various churches, temples, and mosques in order to expose them to other religions.
This is one of the characteristics of UU'ism that I like so much. When I was in Religious Ed we sat around and read the Bible: discussion of other faiths was limited to informal slander about how they had everything wrong - a habit that's hard to break, as you see. Our church informs our kids about the other religions and teaches the common themes connecting one faith to another. Inasmuch as the Latin root of "religion" means 'to reconnect,' this strikes me as a good way to do it.
Since I was heading over to the church anyway I brought along the wireless equipment for my self-assigned project to link the church library to the rest of the building network and hence the Internet. I'm about ready to break down and buy a spool of cat-5 cable, but I'm going to try turning a WRT54G access point into a repeater first. Sorry, I've just lost half of you, haven't I?
Anyway I was going to work on that impenetrable mass of technobabble, but the church was closed, so I went home. In the afternoon i took my daughter out for Dad 'n Kid Day, where we had a wonderful conversation while eating good Chinese food at Camdi in Dinkytown.
Sunday was church, where I worked on the wireless task, and then I had an appointment to donate platelets at the Red Cross, which ended up eating the rest of the afternoon. I spent the 2+ hours on the needle catching up on reading my Biology coursework. After dinner my spouse invited me out to see the Simpsons Movie, so now I can say I've seen that.
And that was the weekend! Sorry, but the blog updates can't all be gems.
Oh, one thing that happened this weekend was interesting: a character in the ancient "Funky Winkerbean" comic strip finally succumbed to cancer. Reading the strips leading up to the death brought back for me a lot of the feelings surrounding the cancer deaths over the past few years of my friend Moldy, my father, and my birthfather, and before that my mentor Noel Johnson. One fellow referred to my post about these feelings as being PTSD and he may be right: certainly it was harrowing reading through the three- and four-year-old posts about their deaths. It's hard to believe that it has already been so many years.
Oy. Why do I like slow computers? Because if it weren't for a slow computer, I wouldn't have gotten any sleep at all last night.
Everything started to go to heck when Buy More insisted on placing a meeting on top of my 4:00 p.m. scheduled meeting with a domestic client. A 'domestic client' is some individual whose home computer I support. I take these jobs largely in order to keep my hand in on that level of computer support and technology - it would be very easy for me to spend all my time on abstract, high-level computer architectures without any remaining idea of how to run a desktop.
So last night i went over to the home of a new acquaintance to help her upgrade to her new computer, in preparation for moving from dial-up to high-speed Internet. And then all heck broke loose...
First of all, instead of having plenty of time to work on her computer (from 5:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. when I was supposed to visit Professor Barker), I had to start at 7;30 because of the Buy More meeting. Still that would have been okay.
In preparation for migration to the new computer, the first thing I did was remove the hard drive from her old computer, connect it to the new computer, and copy all the files into a folder on the new computer. I would have copied them by some less drastic means, but her eight year old computer had no network card, so the only other alternative was the floppy drive. When the copy process reached the "My Documents" folder, it said something like "Could not copy file, data error 0x001001" and stopped.
Great.
So I copy everything that WOULD copy, and then showed the client the folder. Her folder was supposed to have many, many document files, but instead it had three Microsoft Word documents, a folder named "p", and a 1.4 Meg file named "box, division sign, box".
Wonderful.
While this was going on, the client was running me in circles about configuring her applications. I'd be halfway through one when she would think of another she urgently needed, and start me on that one. I managed to get her Quicken set up, and made a start on her e-mail (got the messages, not the address book), and then I made another mistake.
She lives in a building made of poured concrete and rebar, and is expecting Comcast to show up next week and install cable Internet service to her computer. She mentioned that Comcast had promised to "do what it takes" to get the cable installed. I said "Yeah, but the engineer could very well show up, look at the concrete walls, and say 'We don't have any equipment to work with that.'"
She became very anxious over that possibility, which anxiety was interrupted only when I told her the bad news about her My Documents folder, at which point she was a total wreck.
So I packed up her hard drive and my equipment and headed home about 11:30, having gotten no dinner, leaving her under a cloud of depression. At home I ate a bowl of cereal while I hooked up the file-recovery software and got it configured. This took a long while for various reasons, not the least which being that the computer I use for these tasks wouldn't talk to my network for some reason. So I broke out my son's computer, which is waiting for me to work on it for other issues. I loaded up the recovery software and ran a couple of test scans, which were not thorough enough.
So about 2:00 a.m. I set the machine to doing the maximum scan, a "surface scan," looking over every inch of the hard drive for anything shaped like a Word file. Since my son's computer was very slow, I finally had an excuse to go to bed: any sleep I got last night was due to the computer being so slow!
As I laid down in bed, the phone rang momentarily - but no one was on the line. I drifted off to sleep, only to be awakened a short time later by booms of thunder. I covered my head with my pillow and tried to sleep, but as I drifted off again the phone rang another time. Apparently the thunderstorm was causing so much interference on the wire that my phone was interpreting the line noise as a ring signal. I unplugged the phone at 2:30 (it has a clock on it) and tried to sleep, but now the thunderstorm was going in earnest, and I was hungry.
Downstairs I ate a second bowl of cereal, monitored the progress of the recovery (10% done), crossed my fingers that the power would not go out (while my malfunctioning support computer is plugged into a battery backup system, I had not thought to plug my son's computer into it), and finally got to sleep about 3:00 a.m.
My wife let me sleep in until 8:00 a.m., and I spent an hour going through the recovered files, selecting which ones were worth restoring, completing the restoration and burning the files to CD. Then I drove over to the client's house, where she was on the phone with Comcast making it very clear to them that they would be installing her service next week, come Hell, high water, or concrete walls. She was, well, not "happy," but certainly considerably less troubled to see that at a good portion of her files had been recovered. I anticipate she will find a couple are missing, and I only hope they are not important.
I finally got into Buy More at 10:00 a.m., inadvertently re-appropriating the hour they had seized from me yesterday. I can only hope that my client is busy enough, or simply tired enough of the sight of me, that she won't call me back repeatedly over the weekend.
Meanwhile, it's good to be back at work where I can get a little rest...
Couldn't find a bit of work for months, and relied on teaching to pay the bills.
Come October, I have two network security scans begging for resources, one secure network design, and a bunch of domestic computer support projects. If only I could line up some technical resources, I could become suddenly wealthy! Serves to remember for next year in the Fall: maybe I can squirrel away some unemployed computer experts beneath a bridge someplace and break them out when the leaves turn.
Last night I stayed up very late fixing my neighbor's computer, paying for it by spending the day bleary-eyed. This evening after work I have to pick up another client's computer and install it under her watchful, anxious gaze. Then I head over to Professor Barker's, and slump home exhausted after a couple of games of 9-8-7...
The brief honeymoon with Buy More is over, and she's farting in the heart-shaped tub. First, of course, I am moved from the Nice Normal Cube to the Shelf Off the Aisle cube where I am now. It's delightful. Behind me, other contractors crammed two-to-a-normal-cube maintain a constant drone of talk. Occasionally they gather in large crowds in the aisle for chummy chats, bumping into the back of my chair. I spent a couple of hours scrubbing dust and hair and coffee stains off my desk, and performing anti-crud surgery on a mouse that was left in a drawer. That latter was a waste of time when I realized the Buy-More issued laptop has no mouse port, so I need a USB converter.
As I settled into my de-crudified desk I received a meeting notice. Now, having just started, it's not like I have a lot of meetings set up yet. But my plan for today was to leave at 4:00 in order to get some dinner at home before I attend to my elderly client, so I had scheduled that time as busy. So when was the one meeting scheduled for today? Right, precisely at 4:00 p.m., despite the fact that i make my calendar public and I had marked that time as busy.
Buy More is sitting around the honeymoon suite in a dingy linen muu-muu, chain-smoking Camels and scratching at the hair growing back in her armpits. When I responded to the meeting notice as 'tenative" I received a message from the organizer stressing how VERY important the meeting is - so important, apparently, that it could be scheduled into other people's busy time without consideration... Okay I'm grumpy, but I have a headache, too.
So now I have to leave at 5:00, get the computer, drive over to the client's site, install her computer, grab some dinner, and then head over to the Professor's.
And of course somewhere in there I'm supposed to be working on my college homework...
Well of course THAT was too good to last! Yep, it took only two days for me to be moved from the Very Nice Ordinary Cube that I was assigned to the Shelf Against the Wall off the Aisle cube where I have move tomorrow. Can't let the contractors get all uppity and start thinking that they're as good as regular employees now...
Yeah, it's not like this original cube is any great shakes. It only has those crappy four-foot walls that say "Privacy, Schmivacy;" its storage space is limited, and the only way to sit that fits my personal Feng Shui is facing out towards the aisle. Nevertheless it has ample shelf space and plenty of surface to spread out on. As of tomorrow I'm confined to an 18"X36" surface, with my ass hanging out for passersby to bump into.
This will certainly enhance my productivity and general satisfaction!
Not to be a total whiner, it is kind of entertaining working here at Buy More. A gigantically successful company, it has some of the arrogance and energy of a 1990's Dot-Com, including video games and pool tables in the atrium lounge area, an absurdly large food service, and big special events and giveaways.
Today's was "Hispanic Day," celebrating not merely Hispanic culture, but the rollout of Buy More stores to much of Central America over the next few years. There was food (which I belatedly discovered after buying a dreadful, dreadful gyro from the cafeteria), music, drawings for flat-panel TVs and cameras, and giveaways of CDs and DVDs. I ended up with "Ivy Queen: Flashback," but I haven't listened to it yet or watched its DVD.
I was afraid this morning when I left that I was going to have to build an ark if I kept working here, but the sun came out around 10:00 a.m., bringing an end to days of gray, dreary weather. At least until winter sets in.
Also, I measured the distance from home to work along a likely bike route and found it would be about 12 miles one-way. That's a bit much for me, but maybe I'll try biking it Friday and see what happens. One idea that I had was to take my bike on the Light Rail line down to the Mall of America and then bike over from there. It would probably cut the distance in half, but riding the light rail kind of kills the whole "reducing the carbon footprint" point of it, to say nothing of the whole "getting some exercise" point.
And of course there aren't going to be a lot of days where I can afford to spend two hours in transit.
Last night was fun! We went to see Kevin Kling reading from his new book. Kevin Kling serves as an example of perseverance: having grown up with a withered left arm, he crippled his right arm in a near-fatal motorcycle accident a few years ago. With only about 30% of an uninjured person's arm function remaining, he has nonetheless continued his already successful career as a writer and radio personality. His stories were hilarious, both due to his writing as well as his capture of Minnesota colloquialisms. His "training phrase" for learning Minnesotan is "Ain't no way I'm payin' a whole dollar for a corn muffin dat's half dough." Draw the O's out and flatten the A's and you too may be qualified to 'walk among us' as he put it.
Topping off the fun, I was parking the car when Ruth and Laurie climbed out of their vehicle up the street. Ruth is a friend who used to go to our church; Laurie was the contractor who finished our upstairs bathroom and bedroom last year. They have an on-again-off-again relationship which is currently on-again. They sat in front of us and we all got to have a nice chat before the show started. One of Ruth's neighbors was a member of the musical group accompanying Kevin Kling, "Brass Messengers." All in all a fun evening that served as a reminder of what a small town Minnesota really is.
So far so good. Not fired yet.
However ever since I've started here at Buy More, it's been overcast. Gray. Hopefully there is no cause-and-effect between my hiring and this weather, because I would like to keep this contract for a long time, but I can't in good conscience turn Minneapolis into Seattle for the sake of my bank account. If it hasn't cleared up in six months I promise to quit.
On my second day some things have improved. Yesterday I couldn't get anywhere on the Internet, kept running into blocks of some sort. Today I'm able to get to things, all sorts of things. As if all the restrictions have been lifted. I even was able to see a YouTube video, which suggests to me that nothing is being filtered, since I wouldn't be permitting YouTube if I were setting up the firewall rules.
However my telephone is still registered to some person, so I need to get that arranged. And I still can't get to my group's private folders.
Yesterday was very exciting from a different point of view. A couple years back I started writing a novel based on the Modjadji, the Rain Queen of South Africa. Very shortly after I began, the last surviving Rain Queen, a young woman named Makobo, died at the age of 25. The deaths of her mother and grandmother had been very mysterious - her mother had died the day before the grandma who was ruling as Queen. The young Makobo had waited a few years to take the throne, and was reportedly rebellious and independent minded. Two years later she was dead, too, and that night the house containing her coffin caught fire, although the coffin was removed safely.
Anyway I set up a Google News Alert on the South African Google for any references to "Modjadji." Most of what I get are updates on the career of a racehorse by that name, but a week or two ago I got a hit that a new book had been published regarding the Rain Queen's death. Actually it was just one story in a collection, but I immediately ordered the book anyway.
The book arrived yesterday, and my spouse had a small stroke when she read the price of the book... in South African Rands. Fortunately for me the Rand trades at 14/1 dollar, so the price of the book, including shipping, was a not unreasonable $40 (seeing as it came halfway 'round the planet to reach me).
Anyway the story was worth it. The author, Liz McGregor, took the exact steps that I would have liked to take. She traveled to the Rain Queen compound and asked those in charge what was going on. Well, not in so many words, but she got in there and talked to those involved, and her descriptions and discussions were enlightening. I was excited to read of her encounters with people who my own researches had hinted at being involved.
I read it in bed last night and after shutting off the light I lay there, wide awake, wanting to run down to my computer and continue writing my long-neglected novel. But reality is that I had to be up in a few hours for work, and I have U of Mn schoolwork to complete... it will be a while before I can get back to my writing...
Anyway I wrote to the author to thank her and describe my own researches. I will be interested in what she has to day.
Work will be done soon, and then the family will be off to see Kevin Kling, a local writer of humorous self-involved folktales, delivered in a broad Minnesota accent. Ought to be fun...
Wow, THREE weeks that time. No excuse as usual. However, now I am at Buy More, my new client, so hopefully I will have an opportunity to blog on a more regular basis. Certainly today is easy enough: walked me in, sat me down, said "we'll have a meeting tomorrow," and left. Didn't give me so much as a User Policy manual to start with. If the prior occupant of my desk had not left me with her 2005 edition, I would have had nothing at all.
As it is I'm employed here as a security person, so I've begun to keep a log of all the insecure practices I'm finding. I'm up to eleven.
On the plus side (as if being paid to do nothing isn't a plus) I wasn't here three hours before I ran into the fellow with whom I shared a cube the last time I worked at Buy More back in the Nineties... A classically nice fellow, it was very pleasant to see him again and to have someone with whom to share lunch.
As for the title of this entry... can you believe that it's day 1 of the fourth quarter, and the year is already 75% over? For that matter, that the DECADE is already 75% over? Holy smokes, my twins are less than two years from graduation! AAAA! It's like I'm on a rocket-sled to the grave! To say nothing of the fact that I'm sucking wind on my college work and running out of time on that, too...
Well, now that I'm working a 9-to-5 again, I can only anticipate that the rate of time-passage will only accelerate. Before i know it my twins will be seniors...
But here I am, back earning money, and that's a good feeling...