Friday, May 27, 2011

Just Around the Corner

Well, I had the interview with the woman who called me in Wisconsin while I was busy packing to get home. She was leaving L.A. the day I was arriving, so we didn't meet until yesterday (Thursday). It was a rather unique meeting.

We arranged to meet at 9:30 a.m. at the Corner Bakery, an upscale coffee-sandwich-pastry place on South Lake (which has been described as "the Rodeo Drive of Pasadena," though I don't think it's nearly that pretentious). So I got my portfolio together and shlepped down Lake and got to the shop a minute or two early. She had said she'd be the one with the newspapers (samples of their publications) but, looking around, I realized about a third of the folks in the place had newspapers, seeing as they were having their morning coffee.

I gave her a call and got her voice mail. Left a message and got in line for a latte (can't have just regular coffee in a place like this). By the time I had given my order, as I was waiting for it, she called back and said she was on her way. I snagged a table in the corner that looked large enough to spread out my book on for display and waited.

It was a really good interview, and (I knew we've heard this before) I think I have a really good shot at the position. Doesn't pay much, and it's only part-time, but it's enough to cover the bills and, from what she said, the position will probably go to full-time salaried over the course of the next few months.

So I'm kicking back today and got a call from an agency that's trying to fill a contract position with Disney for a three-month gig creating marketing and merchandising collateral/point-of-purchase graphics for some big push that's coming up for them. After the interview on the phone, the guy said he'd put my name in the hopper.

This afternoon, I took two overripe bananas and made banana bread. (Steve buys them to put in his lunch, and I think he's been getting extras just so there'll be leftovers and I will be compelled to make bread instead of throwing them out.) It's a really good recipe:
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup mashed bananas
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup nuts (optional)
Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs and beat until fluffy. Add the bananas and beat until smooth. Fold in dry ingredients in two parts. Turn dough into loaf pan. Bake 1 hour at 350°. Let sit 15 minutes, then remove from pan and cool.
So easy an idiot can make it.

Well, Steve's home from work, so I'm signing off: This is the start of a three-day weekend for him. For me it only means no mail on Monday. Hopefully that will change soon.

Happy Memorial Day, and remember all those who died so we can have the luxury of whining about high gas prices, failing diets and our low-end kitchen finishes. God bless America.

Friday, May 20, 2011

A Trip to the Better Dairy State

Last week was a trip to Wisconsin for me to visit my brother Steve and his family. It started about three weeks before, when my niece Amanda put a video on Facebook of her daughter, Natalie, taking her first steps. Fearful that I was going to miss out on her babyhood, I decided to fly back for a couple of days and visit, since I had found a flight from Los Angeles to La Crosse that was dirt cheap.

The flight left at 8:05 a.m. on Thursday. The shuttle service reserved me for a 4:45 a.m. departure from home. I did all my packing and cleaning the night before, so all I had to do was get up, get dressed, grab the suitcase and the shoulder bag and I was off.

I set my clock for 4 a.m. but it didn't go off. I awoke at 4:17 and started racing around, getting ready. About eight minutes later, while I was still trying to wake up all the way, the shuttle showed up at the curb. I powered up my cell phone and found a voice message on it, delivered at 3 a.m., saying the shuttle would be early, and I should adjust my plans accordingly. I dashed down to the shuttle without even time for a quick cup of coffee.

The flight to Minneapolis wasn't too bad, except that my legs always get cramped after about an hour. Upon arriving at MPS airport, I found that I had plenty of opportunity to stretch my legs, seeing that my flight arrived at gate G-22, which is about six miles from the main terminal (or so it seems). This airport makes Heathrow in London look compact. There are moving walkways to help you along, but it's still a hike, especially lugging bags.

I got down to the main concourse and found a food court, where I experienced the most inedible hamburger I have ever encountered at the A&W booth. Of course, I ate it.

Stepping outside for the cigarette also becomes a major effort in this airport, as there seems to be only one entrance that opens up to something other than a boarding gate. Finding the main entrance meant another long walk down the main concourse to the ticketing area. Along the way, I ran into this person dressed like a bear wearing a Twins uniform. After some research (post-trip), I discovered this was T.C. Bear (T.C. standing for Twin Cities).Luckily, I had a two-hour layover, so I could get all this stuff in.

My flight to La Crosse left from the B concourse, which meant a tram ride (I had found the tram by then) and then a much shorter hike down the B concourse to my flight. Both coming and going, I had the seat on the plane to myself and the flight's less than an hour.

Now, you have to understand that my experience with visiting Steve and Pam and Amanda and Emily (and now Natalie) is that things just move a whole lot slower there, and that's one of the reasons I like it so much. Steve picked me up at the airport around 5 o'clock and we set off for their home in Ettrick, which is about 35 miles north of La Crosse. For dinner, we had Pam's Positively Potent Pepper Pot soup (my moniker, not hers). In more primitive days, folks would have thought she was trying to put a curse on them: It was very tasty, but very peppery. The rest of the evening was sitting and visiting and doting on Natalie.

Friday, Steve and I drove Pam in to her office, as she was winding up the school year and prepping for summer session simultaneously. Steve was also mired in papers to grade, but he has the summer off. Both of them spent a lot of time with their laptops, grading papers, while we visited. So while Pam was at the office, Steve and I went to lunch. Afterward, we stopped by his office (Pam works at the technical college and Steve worked at UW La Crosse), and got a chance to meet some of his academic cohorts.

After picking up Pam, we stopped and got a take-and-bake pizza, then popped into the supermarket to pick up makings for my French toast (which Emily had requested I make sometime during my visit). When we got back to Ettrick, we stopped into Weiner's bar where Emily works. It's a slightly run-down neighborhood bar, shabby around the edges but with a barback that's at least 130 years old and a pretty impressive collection of sports memorabilia.

Back home, Steve baked the pizza. Amanda had picked up some fish and chips from a local place that does it once a week as a Friday special. I ended up eating the fish. Friday night is movie night, and since they now have a Wii console, they can stream films (although there are lots of buffering problems which interrupt the film numerous times for several minutes each. After some of this, we reverted to a rental disk.

All this time, of course, Natalie is the absolute center of attention. She has a huge basket full of toys and a couple free-standing pieces. All of them are electronic and make lots of noise. My favorite one is a table completely covered with shiny flashing plastic buttons. A Seussesque piano keyboard has rainbow keys that sing out their colors; another counts every time you push it; a tab slide sings "up" and "down," depending on which direction you push; press the letter keys and the table sings the ABCs song with a downbeat. Natalie loves dancing to that one. I turned to Amanda as the table sang ABCs and colors and numbers. "You know what's happening there, don't you?" I asked her. "What?" was her reply. "That table is programming your child."

Also, now that she's walking, she is also reaching for everything she can, which mean tabletop have everything on them pushed to the back, and everyone is on alert when she toddles near. Of course, the upshot of all this Natalie activity is that every toy gets a workout and everything must come out of the basket during playtime (which at 1 year old is all the time). So here are before and after shots of her busywork.

On Saturday fulfilled my promise and made French toast for the crowd (real French toast, from stale French bread and an egg-custard batter).
I think we just hung out at the house all day, because I can't remember anything of importance happening.

On Sunday we went into La Crosse for some sort of festival at Riverside Park. There was a tent in the park and 25¢ hot dogs, popcorn and root beer floats (though the floats were gone by the time we reached them). The steamboat museum was open, but we didn't go in. Walking over to the tent, it seemed like it was more a community-service type of event than a festival. It reminded me of some of the more dismal job fairs I've been to during my unemployment.

There were folks dressed up in period costumes (a fairly popular pastime, Pam tells me) and the giant cow with which I am pictured above. It put me in mind of the giant perch, the giant six-pack and the giant native American statues which I posed before and were photo-chronicled on my previous visit. These people seem to like oversized representations of mundane but significant things.

We snagged some of the last tickets on the ersatz paddle boat that plies up and down the Mississippi on hour-long "cruises." We got to the park about 1 p.m., and all the 1:30 tickets were sold out, so we had to hang around for a while and wait for the boat to return. During that time we ran into Pam's siblings, who I hadn't met.

We started out on the upper deck of the boat, but the wind was cutting through several layers of clothing, so Steve and I headed down into the cabin, where it was warmer. Soon, Amanda and Natalie joined us. By this time, I think Natalie had figured out that I was kin of some sort and, therefore, exploitable. Here she's squirming and playing between Steve and me, pulling his hat off and modeling it herself, then chewing some on it.

After the cruise, we piled back into the minivan and headed back to Ettrick, where Steve and Pam and I went to the monthly community dinner at the Lutheran Church. Not a soup kitchen, not food for the poor; just a group of people who gather donations of food and put together a meal for everyone in the community. They even do take-out, and we took some back home for the girls.

Monday I slept in and pretty much vegetated the rest of the day, spending time with Natalie and the minions.

Tuesday, my flight left at 2:30, so I spent the morning visiting with the girls and packing up. Right in the middle of all this the phone rings (I do not get cell phone reception at their place, so I had put my phone on call forwarding to their land line). It was a woman from La CaƱada Flintridge who was calling to set up an interview with me. Oddly enough, she was leaving town the next day, so I told her I would call once I got in and we could set something up. The interview will be sometime in the afternoon on the 26th.

We stopped at McDonald's on our way to the airport and had lunch before I got on the plane. Natalie seems to be doing quite well with solid foods, as long as she premasticates everything with her fingers. It still amazes me that babies are smelly, messy, uncompromising and loud, and yet we just find them adorable. Anyone else would get ostracized or worse for that kind of behavior.

Of course, on an airplane on an extended flight, they lose their adorable qualities very quickly indeed, especially if you're not related to them. But, luckily, there were no small kids on any of my flights, to or back. On the flight from La Crosse, we had this really funny flight attendant named Oscar. He was lots of fun and, as I said, I had the seat all to myself. On the flight from Minneapolis to L.A., I sat next to an incredibly skinny teen who looked like an avatar from the Sims: Justin Timberlake hat, RayBan specs and several electronic devices. He pretended to sleep through the entire flight, which was OK by me, since he kind of creeped me out.

After arriving at LAX, it took about 10 minutes to find my shuttle and I was home by 9 p.m. The trip was great and just the getaway I needed to recharge my batteries for the continued job search. And, as usual, it was really nice to be home, sleep in my own bed, and share my life with the person I love the most.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Subtleties of the Job Search
And the End of the World

It's not just dealing with the hundreds of job positions they now call "graphic designer" (from back-end web coders and database gurus through packaging, marketing, branding, 2D and 3D animation, video editing and game design), but also those out there who prey upon the unemployed seeking honest, gainful work.

Farmers Insurance is the No. 1 abuser. For nearly two years now, I get an e-mail every two or three days saying that they've reviewed my resume and think they have the perfect job for me, which is, of course, selling Farmers Insurance. Having never followed up on it, I'm not sure what that involves.

Then there are the vaguely named corporations who have a position open for funds exchange, which you can do from your home in only a few hours every day. Just receive payments from out-of-country sources and process them through a special account. I'm sure at some point they try to tap into one's information and rip off what little money an unemployed person has.

Then there's the come-on from franchise parasites: if you can't find a job, be your own boss. Some invite you to free seminars, some want you to send them your information so they can let you know what fabulous franchise opportunities are available in your area. There are never any websites associated with these folks, of course because, again, they're just trying to suck your identity and cash from you.

I haven't heard word one from any government agency about these scams, and I'm sure someone less intelligent than myself, in a moment of desperation, would probably fall for some of them. The saddest part is that they are probably working and succeeding with impunity.

I got the best one yet today, though. It read:
Greetings.
We have vacancy in Au-Log Inc.
Your personal information has been reviewed.

If you meet the requirements, please kindly send your respond.

Please NOTE: this position is only for US residents.
Regards

It supposedly came from a Francesca Snyder with a yahoo address of winniekennemurub416b. Why not just au-log.com? It reminds me of that credit card commercial with the bearded Russian answering the phone, "Hello, my name is Peggy."

Now, May 12 is coming up next week, which I thought was supposed to be the end of the world. I'm flying back to Wisconsin to visit my brother's family on that day, so I did some quick research, and I found that this is erroneous (thank goodness; it's a nonrefundable ticket).

Well… If you go with the quicky Mayan-calendar theory, then the end of the world is going to be Dec. 21, 2012 (at least we'll find out if Obama's going to be re-elected or not). And even though we have a Mayan calendar (or a resin replica of one) hanging in the patio, I've never been able to read it, so I just can't buy into that.

I much prefer the charismatic Christians' forecast. I've been brushing up on this at ebiblefellowship.com. I really like this site because it goes into great detail about the blindingly obvious clues that God has left for his chosen about this exact date. There's lots of scriptural quotes and lots of simple math that gets metaphysically jiggered around to come up with these dates.

First of all, some Christians are saying May 21 is the end of the world, but that's not true: May 21 is Judgment Day (quite different altogether). It's all in the math.

See, creation was in 11,013 BC, and the flood was in 4,990 BC and in Genesis 7:4 God told Noah he had seven days to finish the ark. But God was really telling sinners that they had 7,000 years to get their act together because in 2 Peter 3:8 He says that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day.

Got that? (OK, so there's 5,000 years between the two communications, but who's counting?)

So if we start at 4,990 BC and add 7,000 years (remembering there's no year 0), we come up with 2011. The rest of the math and scripture quotes are quite complicated (some might say delusional), and arrive at May 21 as Judgment Day and the rapture. This is when God will take up into heaven His "elect people," including those interred for He only knows how long. (Now that's an A-list.) The same day God will also raise the bodies of the unsaved and leave the remains scattered around all over the place; no real explanation why.

Question: Why do it on a Saturday? If He waited until Sunday, the elect would all be in church; they could even take their hot dish with them. (Are you required to bring your own table service in heaven?)

So that's this month. Still, don't worry: it's not the end of the world.

The end of the world will be on Oct. 21, after five months of horrible torment. (I'm not sure whether there's any kind of grace period in there to get saved because I was just skimming after the 50th paragraph.)

I did note that on Oct. 21, the unsaved will be destroyed, along with creation, and they will cease to exist from that point forward.

Wait a minute. What about hell? Wasn't there like eternal damnation or something? So, if you're lucky enough to make it through to the end of the world and you're not saved, it's only five months of horrible torment and then you just die, kaput?

Is it just me, or does this make no sense at all? Where's the retribution, the opportunity for the saved to smugly watch the rest of humanity suffer for all eternity (not just five months). Isn't that what Christianity is all about? Isn't that what any organized religion is about: Us versus Them? The Anointed versus the Unwashed?

I'll have to ask my brother, the Lutheran deacon, when I'm visiting. He knows lots of stuff.

One last shot I just have to share with you, which I received in an e-mail from my cousin Robin Riker. This has got to be my favorite candid shot of the week.

So often, people have asked, in whispered tones, "What's that thing on his head?" Now we know: An alien life form has been curled up on his scalp, having burrowed into his brain. It explains a lot. Now that Judgment Day is approaching, it must be awakening, getting ready to take the non-terrestrial entities off this planet and into another dimension.

Hey, I'm getting good at this!

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

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.