December Is Here

The lst of December. It's in the low 70s during the day and dips into the upper 30s at night and that translates to cold, wintery weather here in Southern California. Add a little rain to that, and everyone starts singing Christmas carols.

I thought this was an appropriate day to make my first holiday posting, since Hanukkah started this evening.

So here is my first holiday season cartoon. I started this last year and decided to continue the tradition this year. This is actually a reprise of the first cartoon from last December. It was so popular back then, I decided to repeat it.



On the work front, no official word yet from Variety, but I'm pretty sure they hired someone younger and prettier, since I'm not getting answers back from my e-mails to the HR manager there. Same goes for the HR person at Thibiant, so I seem to be back at Square One, jobwise. And, thanks to the Republicans, my unemployment will run out at the end of the month and we get to start dipping into savings to pay the bills.

I did get a call from a woman at a temp agency in West L.A., and I've got an appointment with her on Friday to come in and take their tests and sign up for possible temp assignments. I told her I wasn't really interested in anything less than three months in length, and what I'm really looking for is permanent full time. She said a lot of places are hiring temp to feel the waters before they start adding back to the staffs they cut back in the last few years. It may just be a line temp agencies use, but it would make sense to have some short-term gigs on the resume and keep my hand in the game, as it were.

I'm seriously considering starting up a design business of my own, since I have pretty much everything I need to make that happen. I'm really lousy at marketing, though, so the first year or two might be rough going, but I'm getting really sick of sending out resumes and getting nothing back. I have yet to sit down and crunch the numbers on the idea, but perhaps now is the time to take just such a dramatic step in my life.

We got a new Christmas tree from Stats last weekend, a prelighted one. The old tree has seen a decade of seasonal service and was looking rather ragged. The new one has branch tips that look just like the real thing, not green bottle brushes. We started putting ornaments on it this evening. Photos will follow once it is fully decked.

Hope your holiday season is starting off well and will continue to bring happiness and joy.

Homes That Are Just Houses Now

Nothing of significance to report on the job front at the moment, so I thought I'd take a break from obsessing about my employment status and the upgrades to home and hearth and share a little cyberspelunking I've been doing the last few nights.

It started with a discussion with Steve about all the useless crap from decades ago that still resides in one's head. I can't remember what I'm supposed to pick up at the grocery store, but I can remember all the lyrics of "Itsy Bitsy Teeney Weeney Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" from half a century ago. One other example for me is knowing the address I lived at in Tigard, Ore., when I was in first grade.

On a whim, I put the address into Google maps and, bam, there's the house, as old as the lyrics I remember so easily. The neighborhood around it is vastly different from my mental map of childhood, and the shed next to the house where we used to keep chickens is torn down, but I could clearly envision the interior spaces behind those domicile walls. I even recognized the house across the street (though many new ones have been added). I lived in this house when America sent its first astronaut into space, and it's the place we lived when my sister Kittie was born. Here's a picture of me taking brownies out of the oven in that house and one of dad cooking (check out the push-button cooktop controls).

This success got me going on a quest for more pictures of houses we'd lived in and what they look like today. The house in Tigard was the only one I remembered by address, but others I felt I could locate just by looking at the maps and satellite views of the various communities.

So I started with the first house I could really remember, which was when I was four. It was the projects we lived in on Clyborne Avenue in Chicago when dad was going to med school at Northwestern. It took some doing, but I found the projects and even the building (we were in the two-story unit on the right, second or third unit down). The place looks just as pleasant as I remember it. This is where my older brother and I had our pictures taken on a pony (an expense that sent my father through the roof at the time). Here's my pony picture and one of dad with my brother David (you can guess by now mom was the picture-taker in our family).

The next house was in Lake Oswego, Ore., and I located it because I remembered the park across the street. The entire block of bungalow houses was torn down and replaced with apartments. The houses used to back onto a dirt alley, and I remember my brother David (about three at the time) would get up early on Sunday mornings and go door to door down the alley, bare-ass naked, asking for cookies. He was the hit of the neighborhood and all the housewives and little old ladies loved him. Here are shots of David and a Christmas tree we had in that house.

The next house was near Lloyd's Center, which had just opened in Portland, Ore. This house, too, is gone, along with the entire neighborhood. It's now a parking lot amid lots of hotels, high-rises and the convention center. It was an old neighborhood with big houses and bigger trees. I remember that was where I first became aware of politics, having heated debates with my first-grade companions about the Kennedy-Nixon contest. Nixon fans said the pope would run the country if a Catholic was elected. It was on Wasco Street, and we lived there about a year and then moved to Tigard, which you've already seen.

From Tigard we moved to San Bernardino, Calif., where dad took his psychiatric residency. Our first house was a rental on Argyle Street, and it's still there. I can remember being fascinated by the fact that the entire back yard was cultivated with cactus. It was kind of like living on Mars. This is where my brother Jim inadvertently put a dart in my brother David's back, and where David almost got sucked into a storm control drain during a summer flash flood.

After a few months, we moved into the house on 18th Street. It was part of a brand new tract home development (in fact, about a third of the homes weren't even completed yet). Our back yard butted up against an abandoned orange grove and, again, it was other worldly to wander back among the trees and just pluck oranges off and eat them right there for free. The place looks kind of worn out and run down now, doesn't it? All those big trees were barely six feet tall during our residency there.

When Dad finished his residency, we moved to Morro Bay and he started work at Atascadero State Hospital. It was amazing living just up the hill from the beach, and every night we fell asleep hearing the surf in the distance. I remember once we were evacuated from school because of a tsunami warning (the high school is on the beach and actually below sea level), and everybody came up to our house on high ground to watch the town get washed away: it didn't happen.

From Morro Bay we moved into San Luis Obispo on Johnson Ave. It was a very nice house. Now the front yard has a wall and terracing that hides the spanish colonial look of the place, but here's a shot of what it looked like when we moved in. Below that is an antiquated Polaroid print of one of our Christmas trees there.

We spent several years in this house (you may have guessed by now we moved around a lot), except for one year when dad took a job in Reedley in the California Central Valley, and we lived in a huge house on Ward's River Ranch (a thoroughbred horse breeding and training farm). I couldn't get a street shot of it, since the house sits in the middle of the ranch, which is probably about 50 acres. We all loathed the Central Valley, so we moved back to San Luis Obispo the next year.

From San Luis Obispo, the family moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, because my dad got a job as chief of mental health services for the Gateway Borough. The house we lived in there was being completely remodeled when Google passed by with its cameras, so who knows what it looks like now.

Dad came down with triple pneumonia in Ketchikan (he was always an overachiever), and when he recovered the family moved back down to San Luis Obispo, they bought a house up Johnson Avenue from the old one, and that was home for a good 30 years. You can barely see the house in this photo. Since it was on a busy street, we planted hedges that grew up to block the traffic noise. They also blocked the view of the house, and people often commented they didn't know there was a house there until they got out of their cars.

This is the house I lived in when I went to college, and from there, I've moved on to many places of my own. But it seems just amazing to me that, here in the 21st Century, I can take such an extensive walk down memory lane and visit so many places I called home. Perhaps in an upcoming entry I'll do all the places that I've lived since graduating from college. Or maybe not. Weigh in on the idea and I'll see if on it's worth up following. Well, you know what I mean.

A Vacuum Does Not Suck, It Is Suck

That's my quasi-Zen for the week, and that's how I'm feeling: I'm living in a special vacuum all my own.

I've had two interviews in the last month, which is a bountiful harvest in this job market. One was with Thibiant International, which was about three weeks ago. I still haven't heard from them, so I sent an e-mail Monday to their HR person and have yet to get an answer back.

The second interview (the one I didn't want to jinx) was an interview with Variety. My heart still leaps a little when I type the word.

For those of you who don't know, Variety is the daily trade publication that, until recently, was in direct competition with the Hollywood Reporter. Now that the latter publication has gone rather Us Weekly, Variety is really the only daily covering the entertainment industry.

The job they were advertising is pretty much exactly what I was doing at the Reporter, so it would be like picking up where I left off, careerwise, with a better publication.

I've followed up with a couple e-mails making additional comments I forgot to make during the interview and telling them how good a fit I would be and how much I want the job. Not obsequious, you understand, but with genuine ardor.

The interview was about a week and a half ago, and I'm anxiously awaiting their final decision. I sent their HR person an e-mail on Monday, too, and got an immediate reply: they're still interviewing. And I'm thinking to myself, without feeling vain, "Why? You've found the person you should hire: Me."

These are both really good prospects and jobs I'm confident I could excel at, and my greatest fear is that, like with McGraw-Hill earlier this year, something's going to fall through and I'll end up back at Square One. That's a real anxiety-provoker for me. "My God," I'm thinking, wringing my mental hands, "Am I ever going to get another job, much less one that will further my career?"

As meditation, I imagine sitting with Steve on a pleasant, sunny day years from now, maybe in rocking chairs on a porch, all wrinkled and blissed out in our retirement. I turn to him and say, "Remember when I was unemployed, back in aught-nine and ten? Sure was a rough patch, all right, what with mom and aunt Kit passing, too. Seemed like I'd never get through that."

And I concentrate on the peace and confidence I'll feel reflecting back on what's my current here and now. The only thing that makes the image ring hollow is the fact that I don't know how this "rough patch" is going to resolve itself. And, being an American, I want to know everything and I want to know it now.

To mitigate all the anxiety of waiting, I cull the job postings online (Fritz Perls said anxiety is just excitement you feel compelled to repress). Of course, this would be one of those weeks where nothing new or appropriate for me is being listed, so I don't even have sending out resumes as a way to fill this vacuum.

Speaking of vacuums, we picked up a canister vacuum to use on the bamboo floors because the upright we had wasn't cutting it. (I refuse to say that it sucked.) The exhaust blows out the front of the upright and kicks up all the dust you're trying to pick up.

The new one is small, weighs only about nine pounds and is easy to carry around. It works really well, especially on the stairs. Since we're in kind of a lull in the remodeling, I'm finding housework an adequate substitute diversion to interior design planning.

So send up your prayers that the good people at Variety see what a catch they'd have in hiring me and, God willing, that I'll have something superblastastic to celebrate for Thanksgiving next week: the blessing of a new job.

And even if a new job hasn't arrived, I still have lots and lots of stuff to be thankful for, as do we all … it's just nice to able to pick the ones that really make you feel thankful.

Enigmatic Check In

I wanted to post something because it's been a week, and I don't want people thinking I've simply forgotten to write in the blog. But the last week has held something rather special, something in process right now, and I don't want to jinx it by even mentioning what it is. A few people know, but I don't want to share it publicly until resolution has been obtained.

Another purchase for the living room, one of the last, I'm thinking, before we dive into building the bookshelves. It's a floor lamp that was a perfect choice and a good solution for dividing the living room from the dining room. And, of course, on sale.

I haven't heard back from the people at Thibiant. I assume this means that they're still in the interviewing process, or that they've chosen someone and haven't bothered to let the other candidates for the position know that it's no longer a possibility. I've found that most places do give a call back or send an e-mail if you've actually entered the interview process and not been selected for the job. Depending on how the week pans out, I may give them a call on Friday and check in.

The weather's getting much cooler and fall-like, with a small front passing through last night and dropping enough rain to wet everything down. The rest of the week is forecast to be in the low 70s with the night in the upper 40s. Setting the clocks back brings long shadows in the afternoons and an early sunset: I love this kind of weather because I can use the oven to make dinner and all it does is make the house warm and cozy, not hot and sticky.

Stay tuned: I hope to post later on in the week.

Scissor Steps

Remember scissor steps in "Mother, May I"? It wasn't really jumping, but it was bigger than a regular step and certainly better than baby steps, but you had to make sure to execute them properly or you'd lose your balance and be out of the game. I ran across this picture of a Buddha made of scissors online and thought it a fitting image to head up the blog, because some form of scissor stepping makes up a lot of existence.

Here in the first minutes of November 2010, I wanted to put something up on the blog just because over a week has gone by. And I think it's been a week full of scissor steps; jerky, significant gains on various fronts interspersed with inactivity.

The interview at Thibiant went well. In fact, it turned into two interviews. The first was with the woman who I would be replacing if I get the job. Turns out it's a one-person operation, doing PowerPoint presentations, graphics and forms for the manufacturing areas of the business and architectural signage for the plant and operations.

She and I spent a little over an hour together, and she asked if I could wait around for a bit so the head of HR could talk with me. I did, and we had a very good interview, with her saying they had a couple other people to interview that week, and that she would be calling me back next week. Today is next week, so I'm eager to see if I made it to the final round of interviews, which will include one with the president of the company (he's very hands on and works a lot with the arts & graphics person).

The commute, while long, is on the easy side, hopping onto the 210 Freeway here in Pasadena, changing to the 118 in the North San Fernando Valley, and driving a couple miles on surface streets to the plant. If I actually land the job, we'll see how feasible commuting on Metrolink would be.

The place seems pretty amicable, and everyone I saw there seemed to be happy and enjoying themselves. They even had a couple of contests going for Halloween: Guess the number of candy corn pieces in the jar and guess the weight of a very large pumpkin that was hauled into the lobby by several guys who were obviously from the production area in back.

The rest of last week was spent trying not to focus on the prospect of an second interview, but that's hard to do. I spent the usual time looking over job postings, sending out applications (very few, because there wasn't a lot advertised that was up my alley) and feeling frustrated that more people aren't hiring full time.

I did locate the ottomans that will be replacing the coffee table in the living room, and they were very reasonable: upholstered truncated cubes with tops that reverse to serving trays. They're small, and inside they have a second ottoman, even smaller, that we can use by the bookcases.

I got these at the same supersite from which I purchased the patio fountain. They had given me a 10% discount code good for a week and the shipping was free, so these came at a really sweet price.

On Saturday we stopped in at Bed Bath and Beyond to pick up a faux fur throw for the couch (literally, for the couch: the cats have been clawing their spot on it, so the throw is to protect the fabric). It's a lynx print, and really much subtler than it appears in the picture. It's lined and thick enough to provide a good barrier.

Both of the cats are in love with the throw and seem to take it for some sort of mother surrogate. Patty was even licking and cleaning it Saturday evening.

While we were in the store, we also saw a rug that we thought would be great for the living room. It was well within the budget, especially with BB&B's 20% off coupon, so we picked that up, too. Just about the only thing lacking in the living room now are the bookcases, and I'm kind of hesitant to order the materials for those until I see what happens on the employment front.

Yesterday (Sunday), Steve and I cleaned out the CD collection which was sitting around in various racks in the bedroom. There's about 250 of them, and we actually dusted each one, alphabetized them and put them back in their racks, now stored in the office closet, along with the VCR tapes we took out of the living room.

There are also about 40 or so cassette tapes Steve kept, but the only thing we have to play them on is an old Walkman. Now, with the move of a bookcase from the bedroom into the office, we will have enough room to bring the recliner and its side table up to the bedroom and have a nice little sitting area.

All this activity, all this planning and organization, just to keep from going crazy while unemployed. It crossed my mind last week that, once I do land a new job, these projects will go from being a major concern to secondary priority. That, however, would be a very nice problem to have.

Mission Fruition?

The couch finally arrived today. It was worth the wait and aggravation and looks really good in the living room, but now everything else needs to be removed so the room doesn't look like a furniture warehouse. Already, I'm starting to think about what the area rug should look like and what we can use for a coffee table that's small enough to not take over the space.

More design progress: the fountain for the patio also arrived and is outside burbling away. It has been cloudy and wet pretty much all week, so we haven't been able to appreciate it as a water feature, since the whole patio has been a water feature.

And news on the job front: I got an interview with a cosmetics firm that has a world-famous spa in Beverly Hills (I'll drop no names) and also does manufacturing for other cosmetic lines. The downside is that the job is at the factory in Chatsworth, which is about 33 miles away from Pasadena in the San Fernando Valley.

The commute, however, might not be as bad as all that, since I would be going against the major flow of commuters (most are coming into town from out there), but it would almost certainly mean getting a new, more fuel-efficient car. There's also a Metrolink train that I could take from Union Station, so that and the Gold Line would get me there in about an hour and twenty minutes.

Landing the job is something else altogether.

The interview is on Monday at 2 p.m., so think good thoughts and put me in your prayers, if you have those. First, that it's an interesting and rewarding job; second, that they realize the value of the talent and skills I have to offer; and, third, that I actually land it if the first two work out well.

Again, no pictures, but those will come in time. I shall keep you posted on area rug options, employment status and couch and watger feature appreciation as the days go by.

Design for Unemployment

It's been over a week since I wrote anything for the blog, so now's the time.

When I look over my last week, it all seems creative overkill. I am going crazy not having a job, so the creative energy I would be spending on design is leaking out of me every waking moment. Designing things, redesigning things, conceptualizing, abstracting and generally driving myself mad.

Happy family news, though not exactly in the back yard: my Cousin Paul Riker (1st, once removed) and his wife Katie had a second child, a daughter, my cousin Maggie (1st, twice removed). Here's a really cute shot of older brother Max holding Maggie. I ripped it off from Paul's Facebook page, and I hope he doesn't mind, but they're such a good-looking family, I just had to share.

The big frustration last week was the "sofa problem."

A month ago, we bought a sofa from a place on South Lake called Pampas (South Lake touts itself as the Rodeo Drive of Pasadena, but I think that's stretching it just a bit). We ordered a special size (100" instead of 120") and the salesman said it would be ready in two to three weeks. Last Monday was just a shade over three weeks, so I called to check on the sofa. The woman at the home office said the manufacturer was closed for the day and she would call me Tuesday with its status.

Tuesday at noon she called, saying the fabric we'd chosen was damaged in shipping and it would take one to two months to reorder. She suggested we go to the showroom and pick a new fabric. I was a little irritated, but also grateful, as I'd been having second thoughts about our fabric choice (it got more garish the longer I looked at it).

On Thursday, after Steve got home, we went down and chose a new fabric. The saleswoman called while we were there to see if the fabric was in stock. She couldn't get the manufacturer. She suggested, just to be safe, that we pick a third choice in case the second was unavailable (see the numbered samples). This we did. She wasn't working the next day but would leave a note for the salesman (who had sold us the sofa) to check on the fabric and call us.

At noon on Friday I hadn't heard from him, so I called: he'd done nothing about it, but said he would call right away and get back to me. An hour later, the woman from the home office called: She couldn't contact the manufacturer, but would call me first thing on Monday with the order status.

I was pretty irritated by this point: If things are not right as rain on Monday, I may cancel the order and get the money back. Since buying this sofa, we've seen a couple others, both less expensive, which would work in the space. They just aren't as nice as the one we ordered, though. Rodeo-Drive-quality customer service, however, this is not.

And, speaking of rain, we've had a mild drizzle pretty much constantly for the last two days. I think we've finally broken the cycle of hot late-summer weather and moved officially into fall. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday also promise to be rainy, and when things clear out at the end of the week, temperatures will be in the low- to mid-70s, which is my very favorite temperature range.

I spent a day or two designing bookshelves for the living room. I was reminiscing about the old board-and-cinder-block shelving we used during my hippie days in college. I extrapolated on that concept, designing them with more upscale materials and keeping in the art deco/oritental/modern style mix we're working with. What I came up with was this design, using finished hardwood shelves and 4"x8" glass blocks:
We have books, DVDs, CDs and tchotchkes coming out of our ears, and even after we donate the unwanted stuff to Out of the Closet, there's still more than enough to fill them. Not only functional, they would also help open up the space in the living room. I've also designed them to appear built-in.

On the fountain front, I gave one last valiant attempt at sealing the base of the patio fountain, using the last of the aquarium epoxy, but to no avail. The fountain is officially a lot cause.

But take heart! I found a new fountain online; not quite as tall and now quite as Zen, but with nice aesthetics nonetheless. I went ahead and ordered it, and it should be here by the middle of the week. It's self contained, just plug-and-play, and it even has a light inside, so it will be a focal point in the evenings.

This, of course, leaves me with a perfectly good pump from the previous fountain, so I will probably be buying slate or rocks of some kind and coming up with another water feature for somewhere in- or outside the house. Stay tuned for that.

No new job possibilities. I keep combing through almost a dozen job sites and spend hours online filling out forms on companies' websites for positions that I'm totally qualified for, but no one replies.

I've been having insomnia worse than normal, and once stayed up the entire night processing images to update my general design page on the website. I've usually been getting to sleep between 1 and 2 a.m., which has been manageable, but I'm feeling lousy that it really doesn't matter when I get to sleep or when I wake up, because there's nowhere I have to be and no one who's counting on my to get a job done.

I'm up late tonight because I had to revise the slideshow programming on the general design page of my website, now that I have the new image files. I've included a couple extra brochures I found in my files, and also added galleries for stage design and my faux finishing work on interior design. The new slideshow is up and working, so I'm feeling good about that.

It's got me up late again tonight, though. And diving into a blog post didn't help matters, either. But, what the hell; I enjoy sharing inconsequential events in my existence with whoever has enough time to waste reading about them.