Happy Birthday, Kittie

I keep intending to write here and something always throws me off, and I wait a day or two and then the spirit no longer moves me. Now guilt moves me, since it's been over two weeks. Not a lot to report, at least of significance.

Today is my sister's birthday, so that's a really good reason to write something, like "Happy Birthday Kittie!"

The first thing that held me back is not new: a job interview and a hope for landing said job. I was interviewing for graphic designer in the marketing department of the International Code Council, a big old corporation that helps develop and standardize building codes and then prints them up and sells them to people. They're all over the place, but the marketing department is in Whittier. I interviewed with them on April 20th and found out I hadn't gotten the job a week later.

The marketing director was a really great guy, and I asked him for feedback on my interview, seeing if there were things I could do to improve my presentation of myself or my work. He said I had really good presentational skills, but perhaps I could explain how I used my design skills to solve problems in previous jobs. So I added that to my list.

Beyond being bummed at getting so close (he said quite candidly that I was the second choice of all the candidates), I take heart that there were two close calls with employment within the same month. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come … soon, I hope.

As for starting up my own studio, I've decided that if July arrives and my final unemployment extension ends (God bless those checks), I'm going to go ahead and set up books and get the permits for running a studio, as it will only cost about $250. That way, I can make some kind of cash legally while waiting for full employment to arrive. If I'm successful, it will be self-employment by default, since I'm not big on marketing or self-promotion.

Well, beyond the confines of my feverish, self-involved cranium, there was the royal wedding that Friday (1 a.m. PDT), up for which I simply could not stay. I think I've finally overcome my insomnia, since I've been getting to bed by midnight or 12:30, instead of staying up until the wee hours, and I'm waking up on my own by 8 or 9 in the morning.

So I caught the courtly nuptials Friday at noon on KCET, which reran the original BBC feed. Waiting around for over an hour for something to happen was boring. When it did start, it was all very formal.

Mainly, I recall seeing an overall shot of the inside of Westminster Abbey, crammed with people: it looked like a sea of hats from Whoville. I almost expected the first hymn to be "Yahoo Dooray."

Also, yellow is not her majesty's best color; not by a long shot, but she did have the only sensible hat in the place.

And now for a moment of levity: I believe I related a while ago that our cat Patty likes to chase shadows. Only in the bedroom, it seems. Every time one of us climbs the stairs in the evening to change or get into our robe, Patty dashes ahead and is waiting for us at the bedroom door, waiting for the overhead lights to go on. When they do she's ready to do her thing, a short bit of which is shown here.

Now, then. Saturday was a kickback day. We got the next-to-the-last disc of Season 1 of "Heroes," which is a really fun, freaky show. I'm finding DVDs are the way to watch these shows with season-long plot arcs. You don't get distracted by the commercials, and you can watch several episodes in a row, which makes it much easier to follow.

The biggest problem I have with Netflix is keeping the queue stocked so they don't run out of movies to send us. It's a real statement on the recent productions that I really don't find lots that I'd like to view. I try to split it up into one drama, one comedy and one TV series per week.

Our other 'flix picks for the week were "Auntie Mame" and "The First Wives Club," which we watched as a double-feature on Sunday. Then, after dinner and "60 Minutes," they killed Osama bin Laden and the rest of the evening was waiting for information to come in.

Steve gave up around 10:30, when it was obvious they weren't going to be doing weather on the news (or even news on the news) but repeating the few pieces they had to report on killing Osama. I moved from ABC to CNN to see if they had anything new or different: the answer was "no." So I switched over to KCET, which had a film listed on the schedule (can't remember which one) and they were showing the live feed of Al Jazeera's English news broadcast. I watched this until about 1 a.m., since they had absolutely excellent coverage and the first images from on the ground. Their interviews were global in scale (including lots of U.S. ones), the coverage was informed and even-handed, and it was interesting to see the reaction of the Islamic world (almost entirely positive and relieved; not one comment about America stepping on the sovereignty of Pakistan). They were also the first ones to report that bin Laden had been buried at sea with a Muslim ceremony.

Here in L.A., the reaction of the police has been to close down everything and anything when something "abnormal" is detected. Problem is, this is a very abnormal town. So they shut down the light rail today. They shut down a freeway. They shut down access to the LAX air terminals. It was like this for a couple weeks after 9/11 and it will be the same way for the next couple weeks.

So life goes on, if in a slightly more paranoid vein.

I think a job for me is near, because several times a day I think of how I'm going to miss all this leisure time when I'm employed again, and how I'll quickly begin to think of all the things I could have done with my idle time that I never thought of when bored by my unemployed status.