60 inches is big!
updates on recent trips and stuff, soon, I promise!
Archive for the 'Work' Category
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Camp is a much easier than adventure ed, but the hours are longer. We (the adventure ed facilitators) complained amongst ourselves about not being paid for all the time between classes, but those hours were nice, relaxing breaks. Breaks just don’t happen in the summer. I don’t have to think nearly as much; I’m barely doing any programming at all, only running or playing games a couple times a week. But all the running around and gathering supplies, moving lunches, taking pictures, etc. keeps me busy all day and makes me exhausted by the time I get home. I should be taking more days off, especially these weekend days doing front desk at the Y. I took next Sunday off, since it’s the day after Can’t Stop the Serenity in Chicago… and I’ve got the the first weekend in August, including the Friday, all blocked out for our theater / trolls / house on the rock weekend. No more 15 days in a row, this summer.
In other news, I’ve found a new feed aggregator that I like: Swurl. It has a much more blog-like design, and the timeline feature is really neat. Here’s my swurl. I also got a new camera bag. The one that came with the Pentax owed me nothing, since it was, essentially, free… it finally got too beat up to be used, so I got a Crumpler 6 Million Dollar Home
I have survived the first week of camp. It’s very similar to last year. A few more kids and a few more staff; a little more structure, a little less “free to wander” time. I should still be able to get a lot of pictures. I don’t have a schedule of what field trips are during what weeks… or if we’re repeating any of last year’s trips, but so far, it’s been good. Riding the train and the buses to work has been ok. My cool bus pass card thing fell out of my pocket on the way to work on Thursday, though. Unfortunately, we had a staff meeting and the extra time it took me to get some cash out and break it into small bills, so I could pay for the bus, made me too late to get to CTA headquarters to get my replacement card until the next morning. I got spoiled on that card really fast; carrying cash is really annoying. I also managed to lose my hat in the same day. I’m really good at losing stuff. It’s possible that I was simply getting more and more exhausted each day of camp. I feel like I’m either getting sick or my occasional seasonl allergies are attacking my throat. Thursday morning may have been my low point. I did manage to stay awake and alert enough to take a ride out to REI and get a new hat after work on Thursday night… which I don’t think I could have accomplished earlier that week. Friday, I stayed in the city and met up with Emily and Brett and Sarah and had dinner at a place called Earwax (which was yummy) and shopped a little at a bookstore. I was still exhausted after a few hours, but more awake than those first couple days. Hopefully my body can adjust.
Today, we took a drive up to Wisconsin. We stopped at the Jelly Belly factory on the way and picked up some candy. Our main draw up there was a couple breweries that make good root beers around Milwaukee. We managed to visit both of them and bought four cases of soda between them. We also ate at a great German place that had a very tasty Sauerbraten. We walked across the street and picked up a bunch of sausage and cheese.
And now, I’m feeling a little bit more tired than I think I should, given that it’s only 9.30… so it’s definitely not just camp that’s got me so exhausted.
Just got through the camp training for this year. Lots of returning staff, which is a good thing. I’m an assistant/floater again, and there are four of us this year. There are also more kids, but hopefully, as we get into the swing of things, I’ll be able to break out and take a lot of pictures, like last year. One big difference is that I won’t be driving into the city, all summer, unless some special circumstance comes up at camp, or I find a band that wants to practice on a weekday evening. I did some trial runs on the trains and buses, this week, and I think I’ve figured out all my options. The rides don’t take any less time than driving, but much less gas, and will give me a chance to really listen to much more music. Camp will keep me pretty busy during the week and pretty tired in the evenings, so I will probably not blog much. This is normal summer procedure for me – I’m not dead. If I die, I’ll let you know.
Not driving a lot in the summer has put the new GPS device decision on hold… which is fine, since I can’t decide on a unit, now. XM NavTraffic is the clear choice for traffic service, but only older portable units have it, and I definitely don’t want to replace the head unit in the Mazda. Maybe by the time I’m driving a lot, again, another traffic service will have improved or NavTraffic will score some new portable placements.
I’m too tired to remember what else I wanted to blog about. Summer is already kicking in.
This page has some videos of me performing in my high school’s song and dance group (the ones with titles that include years back in the 90s – cause I’m old). Totally embarrassing. Enjoy.
It’s been a fun week. The weather was fairly nice and we went to the Flea Market, today. We’ve been teased with warm spells and then temperatures dropping back near freezing overnight, so it was nice to walk around in a t-shirt today. The overnight trips for Adventure Ed. are this week, so I hope this warm spell continues. We saw Iron Man on Friday. It was pretty darn good, especially for a comic book movie. We also went yard saling that morning and attended Fly Bird‘s 4th birthday bash-thing and picked up some weird stuff. I think we’re doing a double date tonight and seeing another movie, maybe Forgetting Sarah Marshall or maybe Baby Mama… I really liked the intriguing “is that for real?” ad campaign that Forgetting Sarah Marshall did with their billboards and busboards.
I also did something bad to my knee at some point this week. I think I may have injured it on Tuesday night when I was doing a balancing-on-one-foot-and-tying-my-shoe dance. It was kinda sore on Wednesday, worse on Thursday and really really painful on Friday. Yesterday it was much better and today it feels fine… but it really made me feel old. I was all gimpy and hobbling around the yard sales on Friday.
Oh, and while it wasn’t my boss, this time… a director at the YMCA I work at was let go this week. I’m not directly involved and, as I said, it wasn’t my boss, so it has nothing to do with the curse that I bring along to every after-school day care that I’ve ever worked for, but I am curious to see how they fill his position. I haven’t yet worked for a YMCA that filled a vacant position with anyone half-as-good as the person that left/they fired. They usually cut corners and give some of their responsibilities to other directors and maybe hire a new assistant.
I tried out a different Mazda dealership when I needed to replace my headlight, a couple weeks ago, and I liked them, so I’m at their place, now, using their free wireless connection while my car gets a full inspection/fluid change and gets the seat belt retractors replaced. I mentioned the dimming lights when operating windows and the wind noise from the door/post right behind my head, but I doubt much can really be done about either. I’m still considering buffing the paint off from where the ground wire meets the body. One of the fitness instructors at the Y is trying out a Mazda5 for a couple days and I told her about how much I like my car. I guess she’s having troubles convincing her husband that the 5 is the car for them. I did my part, to help, I feel.
I’m back on a normal schedule, this week, at work. Last week was daytrip week. We did three in a row, and had good weather for the first, but rainy/snowy freezing temps on the second and a cold start on the last one. It tired me out pretty good. We’re moving on to bigger and better problem solving initiatives. The boss is throwing some weird rules at us, that I really feel are hindering the natural progression of the groups… but apparently, we’re all about skills this season, not teams. Yet, we’re still experiential… so wouldn’t building a good team and forming naturally and working together in the best team possible be the best way to experience the skills needed in a community or team? Whatever. The daytrips were a great environment, but I’m glad that I’m back to the schedule that I’ve sort of grown accustomed to. I do have to start getting the stats from the initial surveys entered this week, but it shouldn’t take too much extra time.
I also made some eMail changes this week. I was playing around with Google Apps, and it really made me realize the superiority of GMail. I now have GMail retrieving (and then deleting from the server, thus solidifying my committment) all my POP accounts AND I’ve got the old HoTMaiL (I like to pretend that Microsoft didn’t take it over and ruin it, and therefore still spell it with the, admittedly obnoxious, capitalization that it originally debuted with) account forwarding there. Right now, I have them filtering into separate labels for each account, but I’m sure I’ll make up a set of labels and filters like the folders I have in Thunderbird now. I also enabled IMAP for the whole GMail account, so I can still use Thunderbird and see all my old mail and my new mail in one program, though in separate inboxes. I’m happy with it so far. Next web project: upgrade this blog to WordPress 2.5.
Now that Michigan is behind us, we’re rapidly approaching our Seattle trip. Sarah and her mom are all about having a good plan, so they’ve started asking around and researching attractions “not to miss” in the Seattle, Victoria & Vancouver areas. My first thought, when Seattle is mentioned, is Kurt Cobain. While I appreciated him as a songwriter and musician, I’m not enough of a fanatic to go seeking out any of his old hangouts or the house he died in or anything creepy/weird like that. We’ve got a week there, so I guess one of my goals is to find some great places to eat. I’ll definitely be using Yelp to see what the locals think.
I’d come upon reviews on Yelp while searching, but never realized what a big and active site it was, until Friendfeed tempted me to sign up for my own account. If you’ve got an account on Digg, Google Reader, Reddit, del.icio.us, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Gmail/Google Talk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Seesmic, Vimeo, YouTube, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Zooomr, Tumblr, iLike, Last.fm, Pandora, Amazon Wishlists, Disqus, LinkedIn, Netflix, SlideShare, Upcoming, Yelp or a blog with an RSS feed, you should sign up for friendfeed. Then we can be friends and I can get updates about your stuff without having to make up an “imaginary friend” feed for you… and you can see updates from all your friends’ stuff on one page. I think it’s a brilliant use of RSS technology.
Next week, not this week, is Spring break for Chicago public schools. Sarah has just given notice at her job (seems like a sinking ship, doing what it can to cut costs by cutting hours). We think we should take another road-trip/vacation… last year was our trek across Missouri. Where should we go this time? Sarah wants to go somewhere “green,” so I guess maybe we need to head somewhat South-ish? At some point, we want to go see Mom, with Sarah’s mom, but that’ll wait until we all make some time at the same time and Mom has her guest room ready… and New England is probably no more green than it is here.
I walked around the Y and changed all the clocks, again, today. Last time the time changed, I was late for work when my clock changed on the wrong weekend. It was too smart for its own good. My new clock has a daylight savings time mode, so I got there with no problem… and I think we only had one guy show up late because he hadn’t changed his clocks.
And yes, the amp and equipment and stuff all still seems to be working great, I’ve got a couple opportunities to go play with some people in the city this week… to try some stuff out, see if there’s a good fit. I plugged my bass into my computer and played along with some tracks yesterday. It was fun. Looking forward to playing with people… hoping something comes together.
Went to a meeting for work at the downtown corporate offices. The meeting was at 11.30 and included free lunch, which was cool. Then, around 1.00, when we got out, I got my parking validated for the whole day. I decided that I couldn’t just pass up free parking in the city, so I called Sarah and her mom and asked for some suggestions on how to take advantage of my free parking. I took a walk over to Millennium Park and took a few pictures on Sarah’s suggestion. I walked around a few blocks looking for other things worth shooting, but architecture is only so interesting and I wasn’t feeling cityscape or urban fragment sort of inspiration. Plus, it was still pretty cold and windy, so the longer I wandered, the more I felt pulled toward the car and heading home. It was fun, though. Still working through this modified Holga roll… no idea how many pictures I’ve taken or how many should be left. I shot with the digital a little bit. I think I’ve got a couple new icon/userpics for all the various sites.
I thought that the Dell had ended it’s extended lease on life, again, but it turned out to be bad drivers for my network card. It took way too long to narrow the problem from random freezing to maybe the Firefox beta to maybe just Firefox to anything internet to the new drivers from windows update. It’s been running normally again since I updated a few power management settings that were suggested on some forum. Acceptable solution, I guess. Before all that narrowing down was done, I opened it up again to make sure it wasn’t simply overheating. There wasn’t a whole lot of dust to blow out, though. Opening up laptops and fiddling with them isn’t as much fun as full sized PCs. Yet another reason my next laptop will be a Macbook Pro. Still don’t know when I’ll make that upgrade, but I thought about it a lot more, while trying to figure this thing out.
In other computer-related news, two of the hard drives I sent in for recovery have come back to be by way of a new external drive. Most of the data is intact and there are some original versions of photos from a couple events (shooting the house in Bedford, trip to Philly with Drew to see Olivia) from 2003 and 2002. The oldest drive was not recoverable, at least not by the company I went with, and should have all the photography from my first year or two with my Olympus and a bunch of other old band-related and website-related stuff that I’d like to recover. I’ll probably call around and see if anyone’s up for the task.
Adventure Ed starts up this month. We have a some new blood with us this season, so that should make things interesting. We’re also trying to shift the focus to skills training, which sort of sounds like what my last program was all about. There, we had a big long talk with the kids coming in to the program… explaining what we were going to work on. Here, we’re going to do it in a more subtle way, I guess, but there will be some frontloading of teamwork concepts, which I’m cool with it… just don’t know how it fits with the timeframe. We’ll see how it actually goes.
It’s been snowing a lot. I’m a fan of winter, I really am, but we’ve had enough of this stuff, now, I think. We still have rolls of film to finish, but there hasn’t been a great day to do it… either too cold or too gray. It was kinda fun to go through the House on the Rock stuff and get it uploaded. I think Sarah and I are both itching for a vacation. Maybe we should do another short road-trip. Montreal was suggested, but that’s a bit long for road-trip. I’m all for it, though. Sure it’s not the right season to go North, and sure the state of affairs with needing a passport/not needing a passport to go to Canada is still up in the air… but what’s the worst that could happen, we get stuck in Canada forever? Or take a road-trip and be denied at the border because our birth certificates aren’t notarized? It’s still sounds like a vacation.
Cookie week has come to a close. The cookies are being packed into boxes to be sent to friends and family across the country. I need to bring them to the post office tomorrow, after work, I guess, and get them all in the mail. Round three included chocolate covered pretzel rods, in white and semi-sweet chocolate, with lots of fun decorations like itty bitty snowflakes and candy cane pieces, icing and putting sparkly sugar on the gingerbread snowflakes and the chocolate and almond slivers to finish off the Czech bear paws. The bear paws only called for a little bit of choclate, but we decided that more chocolate is always better. They turned out adorable and delicious. It was a mostly decorative day and quite a fun one. I put more pictures up yesterday and today, and you can see all of Sarah’s pics together with mine, since we tagged them all COOKIEpalooza 2007. Most of mine are wider shots with many, many cookies in them and Sarah’s are detail shots on a couple cookies. Peanut watched the whole thing, but had no comment.
Kinda sad that I have to actually go to work in the morning. It’s been a fun week of being a total bum. Not that I did nothing… we did plenty …but I’ve totally pushed off all the other work-related stuff I should’ve been doing. Adventure Ed stats aren’t done yet; gotta finish those this weekend and make a nice presentable summary file. I definitely blew off a staff holiday party tonight, probably gonna blow off one, if not both, tomorrow night as well. Might work one long day in the city, on Monday. I need to turn in the stats and help pass out t-shirts.
I had a couple little geek triumphs this week when I successfully added reCAPTCHA and tinyMCE to the simple blog script running Sarah’s site. Technically, I just got reCAPTCHA working and displaying the simplest of custom themes, we haven’t tweaked it to the way we actually want it to look yet… and the tinyMCE is running on my testing site until I get a chance to add it to Sarah’s code. It truly makes me appreciate all the work that goes into a CMS package, when I try to integrate a seemingly simple feature… meanwhile, my old friend and bandmate, Shana, is putting my web adventures to shame with her new site, Stylastic. It’s kind of like Hot or Not for style. I signed up. Those rating sites are a guilty pleasure, always have been. I know what your thinking… shouldn’t an existential fashion disaster be the arch-nemesis of such a site? Well… maybe … but we all know that’s just a witty name for my blog and it has nothing to do with fashion or clothes (of which I have a lot) or style (of which I have only a little). My Threadless obsession doesn’t count.
Work early tomorrow… should be sleeping. Off I go.
