My head is spinning...

Well today was the first day of the new job! I'm sure the 2 or 3 people that actually read this blog are interested in how it went.

Well to put it plainly--I'm totally baffled. Apparantly it's just a tad more complex than just taking customer orders. It's more like--juggle 30 different orders at the same time, all of which are at different stages of production and have different designations and different destinations, all the while answering the phone, helping do copy jobs, help people that walk in the front, and whatever else might come up. I don't know if I can put into words how complex all of this--inboxes and outboxes everywhere, all for different purposes, and so forth. I don't know, maybe I'm just a wimp or something, or I'm just whining. But after the first day, I still only have a very vague understanding of the mechanics of the job. It was like going to an automobile factory, trying to observe as closely as possible a car being built, but only seeing it at various, random stages of production. Or maybe just simply put, its like reading a novel out of sequence. You may be able to understand some of the themes in the story being told, but they don't make any sense because there's no order.

I was told, or at least reassured, by the person that interviewed me that I definitely am qualified for the job, and that I had the "aptitude" for it. It makes me wonder what the hell kind of score I got on those tests they gave me when I interviewed! Or maybe I just lack all kinds of self confidence. Hopefully at some point, it will all unfold before me, and it will all make sense. But right now, I guess I have to just hold on for dear life and hope it all works out in the end.

But other than that, the day went fairly well. The commute was non-existant, fortunately. Damn, I need another car though. It looks like the deal with my neighbor's Toyota isn't going to work out--he wants too much for it right now, and he wants to wait too long, or at least too long for me. I'm not sure what the heck he's waiting for--he's got a buyer whose willing to pay, so why not sell? Oh well, its his car, he has the right to do what he pleases with it.

Until tomarrow...

Somewhat productive yet not really weekend

Last night, I worked the final time...well let me clarify a bit, as I told them I would work for them in case of a dire emergency, and I would work the few remaining movie presentations later this summer (since I've done it so much I'm the only other person besides my boss who knows how everything is set up)...but it's the final time as a regular employee for the City of Walnut Creek. Last night was a huge party, so after that, I can't say I'm all too broken up about leaving! But still as it stands, it was the best job I ever had.

And that brings me to tomarrow, when I'll start a brand new job for the first time in 3 years. My working history is kind of spotty--I've only ever really had part time and/or seasonal work (the job I worked for in the summers of 1999 and 2000 were only a few months at a time, but they were full time...in fact, longer than that...). But this will be the first real full time regular job I've ever taken. Heh, have I gone on enough about that crap?

I mainly laid around today. My throat felt a lot better, though still not 100%. I did go for a nice walk through the park, then got some new wiper blades for my stepdad's truck. I figure if he's nice enough to let me drive it for a few days, I can at least do something to improve the car.

More tomarrow..

Just a few days left now...

...'till I start my job. I went out and spent a shitload on clothes yesterday and today. Actually, I found some really good prices, but since I only had like 3 dress shirts and one pair of slacks, there's no way that would have gotten me through an entire week, even if I wore stuff multiple times (wearing the same pair of pants every day=incredibly lame, as if you didn't already know...). Special thanks to the store JC Penny for having a decent big and tall selection of clothing, all of it on sale for half (or more) off. Yes, I would be a dude that would fit into the "big" section of "big and tall", and finding nicer clothes like slacks and button-up dress shirts can be a pain. Stuff like thshirts and jeans are pretty easy to get though, but they have a lot more, ahem, give and take, heh.

Okay, enough of that!

The car situation is sort of on hold. My neighbor knows I want to buy his Toyota, yet for whatever reason (he didn't want to discuss it at the time), he's not prepared for any negotiations, or whatever. So its my stepdad's '71 Blazer for the time being, until I can either get that car, or get something else entirely different. In some ways, I love driving that old Blazer. It's rough and tough, and beat all to hell, so you can drive it literally anywhere without having to worry at all. And plus, it does look kind of cool. However, it doesn't have working a/c right now, so with temps over 100, its like a sauna on 4 wheels.. Plus, the gas mileage is just horrendous. I mean, a big truck with a 350 ci motor with a 4bbl carb isn't going to save much gas anyway, but when the thing is 35 years old, it's going to be just incredibly wasteful no matter what you do, short of changing out the motor. It's a love/hate relationship with that vehicle. I'm convinced my family will have it forever. It will be in a museum in 500 years, quite possibly, still in general working condition.

I only have 2 more days left at my part-time job, but I did agree to help them out on a few select weekends, or if they were in a particularly sticky jam. Hey, for better or worse, they've given me the best job I've ever had, so its the least I can do.

To Make Money, You Gotta Spend...I guess...

Well here it is, the final week of life before I start a new chapter of my existance with a full time job. Okay, I don't mean to make it sound so dramatic, but changes like this are so rare to me, that I tend to focus, perhaps too much, on them.

Basically at this point I need two things--transportation and clothing. As I've mentioned, the van is more or less out of comission...well thats not entirely true. It does run and is driveable. But it's not running at full power, and could go at any moment. I've more or less decided I want to get my neighbors sister's Toyota, but I haven't really had the time to go over and discuss things with them. Getting all that worked out this week is fairly important, as I'd like to have the car for when I start a week from today. But if it doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world either.

Okay, I also need clothing. Well check that, I need nice clothing. I'm not going to buy a half dozen 3-piece suits or anything (as if I had the money to do that in the first place), but of course I've gone my entire life wearing mostly t-shirts and jeans, so thats what I mostly have. The new job doesn't exactly want that kind of dress code, so it's time for an upgrade. I could also use more basic things like socks and underwear. Just as an aside--how is it when youre a kid, you're always getting things like that when you don't want it, but as an adult when you absolutely need it, you can't get it? Ahh, the irony of life. Or some shit like that.

It was still fucking goddamn HOT yesterday. 111 if you believe The Weather Channel, 112 if you believe Yahoo Weather. We had more power trouble yesterday too. A good half dozen brownouts, with a blackout lasting around 30 minutes. And with it being a regular work week, of course with buisness energy use demand being higher, it could be worse today. Again, I'm trying to conserve as much as I can--I'm back on the laptop, forgoing the energy used by the desktop system.

I went and saw the second "Pirate of the Caribbean" movie last night. Fun stuff! However I think I already know the plot for the 3rd movie...

Still Friggin Hot

Today's Weather, courtesy of Yahoo.com. Look at the predicted high...

Yes thats right, 109 degrees. And I've usually found that wherever they measure the temperture according to yahoo is usually a degree or two cooler than what it actually is on my side of town.

This isn't Palm Springs, or Barstow, or Las Vegas. Concord is only about 30/35 miles from the ocean. The city itself is only a mile or two from the mouth of the Sacramento River. We have temps into the 100s during the summer, but anything pushing 105 is almost unheard of. I'm not here to whine, and trust me, after spending summer after summer in Palm Springs, I know what heat feels like. I've been outside in 115+. But there's no good reason that this town should be feeling that same kind of heat. To boot, the power was off all night here.

Well at least yesterday, I had a hell of a time. I took my mom and my best friends to the Legion of Honor art museum in San Francisco to see an exhibition of Monet paintings. Granted, because it was a Friday, the place was mobbed--the Monet exhibition especially. But those paintings are *magic*. It's one thing to see the more textured works in a book, but another to actually see the light and shadow created by the texture in Monet's work.

The museum also had a collection of Baroque and Romantic era art, as well as some very anchient Egyptian and Greek art. The Baroque stuff is amazingly done, but frankly, give me a good Monet (or even better, a Matisse, Picasso, Dali, or even Kandinsky) or some incredibly well done painting of a king. I did see a still life of animals with a weasel in it though! My friend and I then proceeded to have an absurd conversation over whether it was a weasel, or a ferret.

The museum also had a huge collection of Rodin sculptures, all the bronze ones cast by Rodin himself from his original molds. The most famous of his scupltures, "The Thinker", is there.

After that we headed to the beach for a few hours to eat lunch. I hadn't been to the beach all year, and that was really nice for me to go dip my oversized toes into the frigid pacific. There were quite a few surfers there too, in spite of the fact that the surf looked absolutely shitty.

HOT Week

Damn, will this heat ever break? We had a "cool down" here where the temps only dropped down into the mid 90s. It's been averaging damn near 100 degrees (or damn well over) for the past week or so. Okay, I know some of you in more arid regions may be saying "so what?", but when you're 30 or so miles from the sea, you expect a slightly milder summer climate than that of the Mojave Desert in July.

Went to the Giants game yesterday. The beauty of their ballpark always amazes me. Watching live baseball can be fantastic, and yesterday it was especially so, as the Giants had a come-from-behind victory in the bottom of the 9th inning. It doesn't get much better than that.

I met with my future boss on Tuesday to get aquainted with the place I'll be working, and the people within. My first impression--damn, they have a lot of bureaucracy. Starting out, being what they call a "customer service rep", that looks like exactly what I'll be dealing with most of the time. They fed a lot of information to me off the bat, but fortunately it looks like they didn't expect me to remember a word of it...which is good because I don't! Heh. I'm the kind of person where if theres a task before me, ultimately I won't fully understand it until I actually do it. So just telling me how to do something doesn't always register with me. It will take the actual experience of doing all this stuff to actually, well, learn how to do all this stuff. They even said as much, which was fortunate for me. The owner seems to remind me of myself a bit even--kind of shy towards new people, a bit sheepish, lost for conversation. I will be fairly paid right off the bat though. Also, theres a chance I might be going out of town in a few weeks on buisness; apparantly they belong to a nationwide organization of printers, and they have their workers go away on seminars out of town. That could be really interesting, as I haven't even spent much time out of California.

The initial shock (I guess you could say) of actually getting the job has finally worn off, and now I'm starting to get a bit nervous about it. I keep thinking to myself--will I even be able to do this job? Then I tell myself, I always feel like this when starting something new. In college, whenever a new semester would start, after the first day I would rack my brains in worry thinking "how the hell am I going to be able to do these assignments? Read all these books? Write all these papers? I'M DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED". Then a week or two in, everything was fine and I was right in the groove, heh. I suspect its the same thing here, because after all, they wouldn't have hired me to do anything that they thought I couldn't handle (they made me take 3 tests, after all). And if for some reason I can't handle it, well, so be it...actually that will suck huge ones if I crap out here. Fortunately, I've yet to crap out at a job (though I have had crappy jobs...).

Lastly, I had a pair of strange dreams last night. I was doing some job, I can't quite remember what, but it had to do with working in a department store...anyway, one of my coworkers who was generally being a dick, and had been a dick to me for a long time, takes a gun and shoots me 4 times in the leg! Oddly enough, it must have only been BB's or something, because it didn't hurt that much, but it still was highly annoying--enough so that I had to tell my boss what happened. Obviously he was so angry that he fired my coworker, to which the coworker starting complaining what a baby and a whiner I am, heh.

The other dream was slightly more disturbing. My mom and I are walking along this trail above a river or lake or something, and I come around a corner and see a dog...but he has flies all over him, and a frothy mouth from rabies. I jump into the river to try and swim away, but he follows. Eventually I get to my house and jump to the roof, and I'm relatively safe there until animal control shows up.

Tomarrow, its back to San Francisco...

Counting Out Time

Well crap, my computer crashed without warning, so here I am re-writing that same post. Fortunately I was only a paragraph in.

Well in slightly over 2 weeks time, I will be gainfully employed, full time. I only have a scant idea of what to expect. I go in on Tuesday to meet again with the owner of the print shop I'll be working at, presumably to work out details like when to be there, what to wear, various paperwork, etc. Until then, its only a few more weeks of "Freedom" left. Well, sort of. I still have a few days of work at my part time job.

It will be a big adjustment though, having to adhere to a 9-to-5 schedule. Not that I haven't done it before. Of course going to (public) school, the hours are about the same. When I worked at the water park those many years ago, I was working 5 days a week, actually 7-5. In college I would show up sometimes at 8:30 in the AM, and not leave until 9:30 in the PM. And last summer, when my mom had surgery, I was having to get my younger brother up before 7 am. But for the most part, I have been able to keep to my own schedule, and basically get up whenever I want, and go to sleep whever I want. Of course I still have a little more latitude with going to sleep, but I probably can't stay up until 3 am or whatever and be up by 7. I know some people can do, but I've never been someone who can go without sleep for long periods of time.

But thats okay, because right now I'll gladly accept the loss of such freedoms in exchange for the freedoms that regular employment and income will grant me. It's been so frustrating, over the past year or so, looking and looking, and in some cases coming up *just* short. Other cases, I've nearly walked into a diaster, only to realise at the last second to get out. The community center job I've had has been great to me, and has been the best job I've ever had, and I'm thankful for that. But lately, because of the frustration I've had with finding full time work, I've felt horrible going into that job. I've felt like I don't belong there, and that I've far overstayed my welcome. Other people in the office who have been there for years have left. And yet, I continued to remain there. But that's no longer the case.

Next week will prove to be fairly busy. As I mentioned, I'm meeting with my new employer on Tuesday. Wednesday I'm going to a baseball game, and I'm taking my mom, because 1) I couldn't find anyone else to go with, and 2) she's never been to the Giants' new stadium. Friday, I'm going with my mom again, and possibly my friend as well to the Legion of Honor Art Museum in San Francisco to see a Monet exhibit. Afterwards we'll probably go the beach or something.


Theres also the issue of my car, which right now is more or less toast. Maybe I'm overstating the case, but there's no way I'm fixing a blown head gasket on a 91 Ford Aerostar. Nope, sorry, I don't want to do it. Hopefully, someone else will, but that will be my parents' concern since it is still legally their vehicle. I was more or less, ahem, "leasing" it from them for a few years. I treated it as well as I could, but it was on its way down. However, with almost excellent timing, my next door neighbor looks like he has a pretty decent car probably for sale. If the price is right (hell, maybe if it's not), I'll buy it from him. I need a car, and it looks like a fairly nice one.

Yeah, I can finally say for the first time in a long time--things are looking up.

Crap, its hot tonight though...

And then without warning...

...My life completely changes. Life has been pretty cruddy lately. I was incredibly pessimistic about the job I interviewed for a few weeks back. At the beginning of the month, my van took a sour turn for the worse. I bought a new battery for it, and new spark plug wires, but neither seemed to work. Yesterday I was told I possibly had a bad head gasket on the thing, and today, as I saw water squirt out of the exhaust, that suspicion has been confirmed.

But that doesn't really seem to matter anymore. I got a call from the people I interviewed with 2 weeks back, and they are offering me the position I interviewed for. Customer service at a print shop. I accepted. It still hasn't quite sunk in yet, but it feels good already. I'm going to get another car as soon as I can (my neighbor is selling one that looks quite good for the time being). I'll probably get a cell phone too. And maybe, just maybe, depending on how the thing pays, I can finally think about moving out. Yeah, I'll finally be able to get my life *started*. After all these months...hell over a year now since I've graduated college, I've met with nothing but frustration. *FINALLY*, with luck, that is going to change.

Sunday Afternoon

Its the end of the first week of July...check that, it's the beginning of the second week of July. And it's hot. Almost oppressively so, but not quite.

The 4th was incredibly uneventful, but I made something of it. I drove out to Rasputins and picked up a few new CDs by Adrian Belew and the California Guitar Trio, then drove all the way out to the bayside town of Crockett for lunch. Crockett is a neat old town that lies on the edge of where the Sacramento River meets the San Pablo Bay...or at least, more or less. I ate at a restaurant called "The Nantucket", which is a your typical dockside kitschy seafood place, with fantastic, affordable cuisine. Its right next to the railroad tracks, and when a train goes by, the entire place rumbles.

The week itself wasn't all that special though. My poor Aerostar is ailing, and I'm not sure what the problem is. For the past week or two, I'd noticed its performance really going south, running very rough when the engine is cold, and miss-firing even under normal warm conditions. This is in addition to the constant radiator problem battle that I've been having for a while now. I changed the spark plug wires on Friday (what a pain in the ass that is, btw...) but there was little, if any improvement. With the bad wires, it might have fouled a plug or two, and thats the next thing I'm going to check. Theres also a possibility that its as simple as something like the injectors being dirty, in which case I can put a bottle of cleaner stuff in the gas tank and hope for the best. But...with the cooling system problems its had over its life, theres also the possibility that it could be the beginning of something far more severe. I hope for the best, but fear the worst. This all coming on the heels of the new $100 battery that I bought for it last weekend too. Cars are a real drag. Its served myself and my family quite well, but maybe it's time to really get something else.

The job situation is looking less optimistic. The place I interviewed with a week and a half ago indicated that they would get back to me "some time after the 4th"; it's after the 4th, and I've had no indications yet. I'll give them a call tomarrow or Tuesday to see. But I have a strong feeling I'm going to get passed over for this one.

Maybe it might be for the best too, as I desperately want to go to Catalina next month. My older brother wanted to take his daughter too, but he's yet to confir with me any travel plans or arrangements. I'd probably perfer to go by car, because even with the extraordinary gas prices, its still the cheapest mode of transportation for multiple people, as well as the most mobile. He has a newer car that could easily make the trip, and get decent mileage to boot.

Thats pretty much it for now...

New Photos

Just as a reminder, a few new photographs can be found on my Flickr site. http://www.flickr.com/photos/71303076@N00/

There are 12 new ones, 6 from the auto race, and 6 from a graveyard. Enjoy!

Onward to July

Already the first day of July, and a definite uncertainty is hanging over me. Of course it has everything to do with the job I interviewed for on Wednesday. Those 3 "tests" honestly have me feeling pessimistic, because there's no way I know I could have "aced" all of them (as though on a personality test there are right and wrong answers...). I don't know, I just have it in my head that I'm not going to get hired for that position. It looks like a good enough job, but they are really critical, and I know there are others with more experience and more skill than I have. They wanted someone, for example, who knew how to used Adobe Acrobat, and I have limited experience with that. Likewise, I know almost nothing about printing in general (except how to, on the design side, prepare a file for print, or at the least make it easier for a printer). Then again, it just a low level "customer service" position--they don't expect me to be running the place.

Its a pretty warm Saturday afternoon--much warmer than I anticipated. I'm going into work around 7, so I still have a little while to relax before then. This morning I had to get a new battery for my van, which set me back about a hundred bucks. Ouch. But the thing only had maybe a week or two of starts left in it. I also went by a radiator shop to inquire about the constant cooling system problems my van has. I think possibly next week I'll take in the radiator and have it checked out, and see at the least if I need a new one.

Later in the day I aquired a new piece of furniture. Fortunately for me, it was completely free, as we already owned it. Its an old stereo/record cabinet that was sitting in our garage, being used as nothing more than a receptical for old boating magazines that my stepdad wanted to throw away. I took it, cleaned it up a bit, and put all my LP records in it. Originally I wanted to put my whole stereo system in it, but unfortunately the shelves weren't big enough to accomadate my amp and CD player. Perhaps eventually though I'll get a vintage amp and some speakers, throw my record player in it, and use it as a "records only" set. Until then, its a pretty handsome piece of furniture to hold LPs, and put books on top of.

I've got no plans at all for the Fourth of July, yet again. Oh well...