IPOD
RADIO
Guess I should update, for those whose lives come to a screeching halt when I don't
The photo above was taken with my new Sony A350, which I bought the day after I bounced my Canon S3IS down the side of the mountain where I shot the above photo. I initially thought the canon had miraculously survived the incident, but as I discovered when I attempted to photograph a couple of whitetail does I came across at the quabbin reservoir, it can no longer focus beyone 20 feet or so. Which is a colossal bummer actually, I shot a lot of pics with that canon and I like the camera despite the limitations of its small sensor.
I'm still getting the feel for how to use my new sony. Its buttons are in different places and the various functions are in different places in different menus compared to canon and my brain is stilltrying to use the canon button-press pattern. I'm going to have to pick up a set of macro extension tubes or a good macro lens to get going with the macro photography that I like. This new camera wants to be the one that finally works the way I've wanted a closeup camera to work. I was vexed after I had already bought it and found that it did not have a mirror lockup like the A100 has, and I assumed it too would have, but it has a damped mirror and Image stabilization, so I put it in some awkward situations such as would have made my old 35mm slr cameras shake a lot from the mirror slap and it did just fine.
A couple summers ago I was fishing on the Connecticut river in Holyoke and I started wondering if all I was ever going to do with my life was fish the same rivers over and over again. That's when I started up first seeing if I could get into being a latin teacher and then took up the truck driving.
A long time ago something my dad said to me that I took too much to heart and gave me an unhealthful narrow perspective on things, was that if you don't work your brain you're going to work your back. If you're a bright kid with ADD and can't really perform academically the way you're expected to this is idea will tend to give you a rather bleak outlook on life, and to tell the truth it is still very much my outlook, though I can see how wrong it is. It's a false dichotomy. For some people, like me, it is necessary to work both body and mind to be fully themselves. I like making things. I know I'm good at pottery and I expect I would be comparably good at blacksmithing or glass blowing. I don't know exactly how to get from here to there though. But as i said before there is the example of Josh Simpson who started out living on indian land in a tent next to his glass heating furnace, and is now a millionaire, so there's no denying that where there's a will there's a way. I guess for me finding the will and way is a problem, given how deeply negative I am. A lazy bastard as well I suppose.
A random aside, It has struck me as odd that I am not cool, when I can discern that various other people are cool. If I can recognize what cool is, why am I not cool, myself? What is the defining difference between a cool and an uncool person? I've noticed that cool people don't do things specifically to be cool, they do stupid things becasue they're funny. Also, they refuse to stand up to their necks in shit just because everyone else is doing so. I think the latter observable difference is very telling. Most people find security in standing up to their necks in the exact same shit that everone else is standing in. For the sake of feeling safe and secure and connected, they deny that the shit is in fact shit. Cool people on the other hand, are like "hey this shit is SHIT! and hell if I'm going to stand in it". They have a greater sense of personal security and independence. They don't need to be up to their necks in shit, to be psychologically supported or propped up, you might say. They have a greater degree of honesty and clarity of vision because they are not in their hearts deeply commited to the denial of shit being shit they way eveyone else is, who depends on that shit, for psycholgical support.
Shit is shit, I tell you, or I don't, because I'm not cool and I need your shit to make me feel safe.
I should go out and take some pictures. I might even fish a bit, though I've been reflecting on how working and fishing gets you nowhere. Work is work, and fishing is play or escape from work. I think for an artist that work and play should be as one. Which may certainly be an oversimplification, but whatever.
Another random thought I had, was that you can choose to do anything you want with your life, but that whatever you choose is going to be boring. I'm not sure just how true or how pessimistic that is, but it falls somewhere along that scale.
whatever.
qapla'
Another update of supreme quality
After yesterday's update I went out on a photgraphic expedition to capture some spring greens and get some shots of mountain runoff waterfalls that I return to now and then. At one point I took my Canon S3IS off the tripod because it was a little awkward(awkward is a rather awkwardly spelled word I think) and in doing so dropped it and it proceeded to bounce a ways down the basaltic rock formations of Mt Tom. The battery compartment flew open and the batteries flew out, I found three out of four of them. I thought the camera had had it but when I got home I put four new batteries in it and it worked, which blew my mind, although the rocker switch is kind of messed up. Fortunately the lens surface didn't take any of the impacts.
So I was in a bit of a sulk sitting there on mountainside, debating whether to finally get a DSLR or just go for medium format color this year. The latter course would haven entailed considerably less up front investment, but I keep seeing lots of images here on SG and elsewhere that can only be taken with DSLRs, so today I finally broke down and got myself a sony a350. It does take better pictures than my llittle canon.
Earlier today I was thinking "art is worth it", with reference to enduring various things in life, my job for example. Doesn't make it too much easier to deal with work. Now that I've got my body and mind back in order having to get up at 345 am again tomorrow to use them to deliver soda is a slap in the face. The thing about it is that you've got to maintain an awareness that things move and change. Night and day and rain and sun and summer and winter are all going to come and pass and come and pass again. Work will not suck one iota less this week than it ever did before, but it will pass, and come, and pass again. Hopefully I can keep enough of my brain juices flowing through it that I'll go out and get some good pictures, and hopefully eventually make some actual good decisions about what to do with my life. But when you're really in the pit of work it's reallly hard to keep a broad perspective. I actually admonish myself to maintain a narrow perspective and think I'm stuck where I am, by way of reverse psychology, or whatever the actual term would be.
Some things I don't know include whether I shall ultimately prove physically capable of holding onto this coke job for the few months I'm thinking to. I find myself in markedly better physical condition because of it, climbing mountains hardly makes me breathe hard nowadays. I'm not sure if my idea to go into home heating oil or propane would comprise a a great improvement over what I'm doing, but I'd like something that doesn't have me getting up quite so ass-early and driving an hour. I know from stories of what my boss expects of his workers, that when winter rolls around, and on some particular day it's a major blizzard with a foot of snow on the ground, he's going to expect me to get up a 3am and take two hours to get up to greenfield to deliver that soda. And that isn't at all cool. Driving a tank truck on bad roads could get pretty hairy too, but I might not be so bad if I'm not doing it all so terribly early, and if I get stuck by the roadside I won't be so terribly far away from home. Or commuting so far in blizzards. Trucking companies tend to be completely ruthless with their drivers with respect to expecting them to arrive for work and/or drive in any and all weather conditions, and I've seen a number of trucks rolled over or stuck and I don't want to put myself between a boss and a blizzard ever again. Like I said a tanker truck could also be really hairy in bad road conditions, but I can accept that people need heating fuel rather more urgently than they need soda. I don't know if the hours would be better or worse in terms of fitting a life around them, but you can't really tell about such things. Actually I can certainly see them being worse, in the autumn, working all day, maybe 6 days a week when the cold weather is coming. But on the other hand I don't think that uncoiling the hose from the back of an oil truck would be as physically brutal and draining as hauling the soda up and down stairs on a two wheeler, so I would have more of myself left for my own use at the end of a day.
Well whatever. It's also possible that if all the independent truckers get wiped out by the high cost of fuel there won't be too many jobs available with those guys looking for positions, but I still hope to escape coke come fall.
After yesterday's update I went out on a photgraphic expedition to capture some spring greens and get some shots of mountain runoff waterfalls that I return to now and then. At one point I took my Canon S3IS off the tripod because it was a little awkward(awkward is a rather awkwardly spelled word I think) and in doing so dropped it and it proceeded to bounce a ways down the basaltic rock formations of Mt Tom. The battery compartment flew open and the batteries flew out, I found three out of four of them. I thought the camera had had it but when I got home I put four new batteries in it and it worked, which blew my mind, although the rocker switch is kind of messed up. Fortunately the lens surface didn't take any of the impacts.
So I was in a bit of a sulk sitting there on mountainside, debating whether to finally get a DSLR or just go for medium format color this year. The latter course would haven entailed considerably less up front investment, but I keep seeing lots of images here on SG and elsewhere that can only be taken with DSLRs, so today I finally broke down and got myself a sony a350. It does take better pictures than my llittle canon.
Earlier today I was thinking "art is worth it", with reference to enduring various things in life, my job for example. Doesn't make it too much easier to deal with work. Now that I've got my body and mind back in order having to get up at 345 am again tomorrow to use them to deliver soda is a slap in the face. The thing about it is that you've got to maintain an awareness that things move and change. Night and day and rain and sun and summer and winter are all going to come and pass and come and pass again. Work will not suck one iota less this week than it ever did before, but it will pass, and come, and pass again. Hopefully I can keep enough of my brain juices flowing through it that I'll go out and get some good pictures, and hopefully eventually make some actual good decisions about what to do with my life. But when you're really in the pit of work it's reallly hard to keep a broad perspective. I actually admonish myself to maintain a narrow perspective and think I'm stuck where I am, by way of reverse psychology, or whatever the actual term would be.
Some things I don't know include whether I shall ultimately prove physically capable of holding onto this coke job for the few months I'm thinking to. I find myself in markedly better physical condition because of it, climbing mountains hardly makes me breathe hard nowadays. I'm not sure if my idea to go into home heating oil or propane would comprise a a great improvement over what I'm doing, but I'd like something that doesn't have me getting up quite so ass-early and driving an hour. I know from stories of what my boss expects of his workers, that when winter rolls around, and on some particular day it's a major blizzard with a foot of snow on the ground, he's going to expect me to get up a 3am and take two hours to get up to greenfield to deliver that soda. And that isn't at all cool. Driving a tank truck on bad roads could get pretty hairy too, but I might not be so bad if I'm not doing it all so terribly early, and if I get stuck by the roadside I won't be so terribly far away from home. Or commuting so far in blizzards. Trucking companies tend to be completely ruthless with their drivers with respect to expecting them to arrive for work and/or drive in any and all weather conditions, and I've seen a number of trucks rolled over or stuck and I don't want to put myself between a boss and a blizzard ever again. Like I said a tanker truck could also be really hairy in bad road conditions, but I can accept that people need heating fuel rather more urgently than they need soda. I don't know if the hours would be better or worse in terms of fitting a life around them, but you can't really tell about such things. Actually I can certainly see them being worse, in the autumn, working all day, maybe 6 days a week when the cold weather is coming. But on the other hand I don't think that uncoiling the hose from the back of an oil truck would be as physically brutal and draining as hauling the soda up and down stairs on a two wheeler, so I would have more of myself left for my own use at the end of a day.
Well whatever. It's also possible that if all the independent truckers get wiped out by the high cost of fuel there won't be too many jobs available with those guys looking for positions, but I still hope to escape coke come fall.
Das Wochlisches Update
I had to work yesterday, which sucked with in certain respects. My job is so physically demanding that I tend to need my three day weekends to have a decent weekend, because day 1 of my weekend is kind of spent recovering from my week, falling asleep a lot; day 2 is a full normal day with a recovered body and mind, and day three is a truncated day where I have to turn in early to try and get some sleep to get up at 345 am for day 1 of work week. So my weekend will effectively consist of days 1 and 3. Its suckitude was alleviated by my being on overtime all day, and going out with another driver, Ernie, who is basically a superhuman working machine, the brother of my brother's GF, and does a disproportionate amount of the work, so I ended up with far easier day than I would have if I were doing it all by myself.
Yesterday after work I headed over to Shelburne Falls to get some excellent pizza over at buckland pizza, and try to chill some, to get something of a saturday out of my saturday. I watched a glass blower make some christmas ornaments and that reminded of me of the artistic career i have thus far have not had the balls to really go for, unless you want to count my having taken on the Coke job so as to (hopefully) get the four day work week to allow me to attempt to make some art. At least do a little photography. Anyway, right near where you can watch the glass blowers in shelburne falls you can find for sale various works in glass by a local artist by the name of Josh Simpson, this guy who literally started out living in a tent in the woods next to his glass blowing furnace, and is now a millionaire, by the work of his own two hands. So in a certain sense I literally have no excuse for not having attepting to do what he has done. I tell myself it would be too hard to get rid of my mountain of excess posessions; I live a shitty life for the sake of keeping all this stuff. For health insurance. I may well have written of this before, forgive me if I repeat myself repeat myself.
Was thinking that maybe the difference between modernity and the pre-modern is that in that latter things happen because someone does something, whereas in the former case, things happen because someone has official documentation that something is going to happen. So if you want to be a blacksmith in 200 bc you take some Iron and coal and heat the iron up and whack it into useful shapes with a hammer. But by the time you get to the medieval period you're starting to run into guild systems where the artisans of a given type are networked in such a manner as to control the running of that particular craft. Nowadays you can have a forge in your backyard if you want, but if you want to sell anything you need a business license and you need to report your income and pay taxes on it or men in suits will send men in uniforms a-calling to stop you or throw you in prison or whatever. Another dimension of modernity is that medicine is very advanced but priced so as to extort the savings of the work of a lifetime out of you in exchange for the care to save your life. So in one sense if you want to do glass blowing or pottery, if you aren't super successful, enough to afford health inusrance premiums, especially if you grow ill, you're kind of gambling on surviving in a pre-modern mode of living where you don't have health care and you live until your body gives out; but on the plus side you can thusly give yourself the opportunity to do something that at least feels like it's worth doing. I think one way my dad really messed me up years ago was by creating a false dichotomy, saying that if you don't work your brain you're going to work your back. I think that's wrong; some people need to be working both body and mind, to be fully themselves.
One thing about crafts is that they are essentially a silent process, to work with a form is not about working with words that correspond to a form.
I've also noted that work is very much like alcohol. A little bit of it is good for it, but too much of it will wreck your body and kill you.
Lately i've been wrestling with obsessing over the the DSLR i want to get which has not yet been reviewed at dpreview.com, much to my vexation, and knowing that it will become obsolete very quickly and cost me a lot of money at a time when I don't know that I'll physically be able to continue with the job I'm in, and really not alter my state of mind much if at all. One thing that vexes me though is that my 35mm film slr cameras don't have mirror lockup, which is very necessary when you're into the sort of macro photography that I do. The dslrs have it, which makes it hard for the desire for one to entirely go away, among other reasons why. A couple weeks ago I dropped off a roll of 120 color film that i shot through my mamiya c33 a couple of years ago, and after a frustrating time waiting for it to get developed I'm really impressed by what medium format color film will do. I never gave it much thought before since i don't have a color darkroom. Anyway, now I get why people like holgas so much. The mamiya is an incomparably higher quality camera than a holga, but i get how the low-fi of the holga would combine with the clean appearance of a 120 color neg to produce a really cool image. So I'll have to get out and shoot some spring greens in 120 color.
tchuss
liz
I had to work yesterday, which sucked with in certain respects. My job is so physically demanding that I tend to need my three day weekends to have a decent weekend, because day 1 of my weekend is kind of spent recovering from my week, falling asleep a lot; day 2 is a full normal day with a recovered body and mind, and day three is a truncated day where I have to turn in early to try and get some sleep to get up at 345 am for day 1 of work week. So my weekend will effectively consist of days 1 and 3. Its suckitude was alleviated by my being on overtime all day, and going out with another driver, Ernie, who is basically a superhuman working machine, the brother of my brother's GF, and does a disproportionate amount of the work, so I ended up with far easier day than I would have if I were doing it all by myself.
Yesterday after work I headed over to Shelburne Falls to get some excellent pizza over at buckland pizza, and try to chill some, to get something of a saturday out of my saturday. I watched a glass blower make some christmas ornaments and that reminded of me of the artistic career i have thus far have not had the balls to really go for, unless you want to count my having taken on the Coke job so as to (hopefully) get the four day work week to allow me to attempt to make some art. At least do a little photography. Anyway, right near where you can watch the glass blowers in shelburne falls you can find for sale various works in glass by a local artist by the name of Josh Simpson, this guy who literally started out living in a tent in the woods next to his glass blowing furnace, and is now a millionaire, by the work of his own two hands. So in a certain sense I literally have no excuse for not having attepting to do what he has done. I tell myself it would be too hard to get rid of my mountain of excess posessions; I live a shitty life for the sake of keeping all this stuff. For health insurance. I may well have written of this before, forgive me if I repeat myself repeat myself.
Was thinking that maybe the difference between modernity and the pre-modern is that in that latter things happen because someone does something, whereas in the former case, things happen because someone has official documentation that something is going to happen. So if you want to be a blacksmith in 200 bc you take some Iron and coal and heat the iron up and whack it into useful shapes with a hammer. But by the time you get to the medieval period you're starting to run into guild systems where the artisans of a given type are networked in such a manner as to control the running of that particular craft. Nowadays you can have a forge in your backyard if you want, but if you want to sell anything you need a business license and you need to report your income and pay taxes on it or men in suits will send men in uniforms a-calling to stop you or throw you in prison or whatever. Another dimension of modernity is that medicine is very advanced but priced so as to extort the savings of the work of a lifetime out of you in exchange for the care to save your life. So in one sense if you want to do glass blowing or pottery, if you aren't super successful, enough to afford health inusrance premiums, especially if you grow ill, you're kind of gambling on surviving in a pre-modern mode of living where you don't have health care and you live until your body gives out; but on the plus side you can thusly give yourself the opportunity to do something that at least feels like it's worth doing. I think one way my dad really messed me up years ago was by creating a false dichotomy, saying that if you don't work your brain you're going to work your back. I think that's wrong; some people need to be working both body and mind, to be fully themselves.
One thing about crafts is that they are essentially a silent process, to work with a form is not about working with words that correspond to a form.
I've also noted that work is very much like alcohol. A little bit of it is good for it, but too much of it will wreck your body and kill you.
Lately i've been wrestling with obsessing over the the DSLR i want to get which has not yet been reviewed at dpreview.com, much to my vexation, and knowing that it will become obsolete very quickly and cost me a lot of money at a time when I don't know that I'll physically be able to continue with the job I'm in, and really not alter my state of mind much if at all. One thing that vexes me though is that my 35mm film slr cameras don't have mirror lockup, which is very necessary when you're into the sort of macro photography that I do. The dslrs have it, which makes it hard for the desire for one to entirely go away, among other reasons why. A couple weeks ago I dropped off a roll of 120 color film that i shot through my mamiya c33 a couple of years ago, and after a frustrating time waiting for it to get developed I'm really impressed by what medium format color film will do. I never gave it much thought before since i don't have a color darkroom. Anyway, now I get why people like holgas so much. The mamiya is an incomparably higher quality camera than a holga, but i get how the low-fi of the holga would combine with the clean appearance of a 120 color neg to produce a really cool image. So I'll have to get out and shoot some spring greens in 120 color.
tchuss
liz
Hey
Time for an update, mostly for chronological reasons.
I had a seriously craptastic day at work on friday. There's a little cord that you often need when your handheld computer needs to talk to the computer at the store you're delivering to. I needed it every day this week and I only remembered it one out of four days before I had left the DC. You'd think I'd remember it given how much I get bitten on the ass not having it. But I really do have ADD and I really am not a morning, as in wake up at 345 to arrive at work at 5am person, and I really totally don't remember it. But anyway on friday I remembered it a couple miles out from the DC and I turned at the first large parking lot I came across. Making that hard turn into a bumpy parking lot may have contributed to the two pallets of 2-liter bottles that I found I had tipped over when I arrived at my first stop. Picking all that shit up really cost me time. An then when I got to the stop where I needed that cord for the computers, the transmission from computer to computer didn't work (again!) and I got really fucked for time trying to get that sorted out. So by the time my first two stops were completed I was probably an hour and a half behind schedule, and at the end of the day I had to call my boss and tell him I wasn't going to be able to complete all of my stops. When they load your truck to the back of the trailer so that you can't close the door when your electric pallet jack is under one of the pallets, it is absolutely necessary that shit NOT happen, but shit always happens to me.
I had a much better time at the open mic that night, although I was so tired and mentally fried that I blanked on the chords to one of the songs I do all the time, but whatever.
One truth about life that buddhism recognizes is that you are where you most want to be. I chew on that one a lot. In a certain sense that is absolutely true, but on the other hand you can never be certain what's in a place until you get there, but however close to the mark it works out to be it's close enough to be relevant. Which is a telling point about your decision making habits when your life sucks.
Time for an update, mostly for chronological reasons.
I had a seriously craptastic day at work on friday. There's a little cord that you often need when your handheld computer needs to talk to the computer at the store you're delivering to. I needed it every day this week and I only remembered it one out of four days before I had left the DC. You'd think I'd remember it given how much I get bitten on the ass not having it. But I really do have ADD and I really am not a morning, as in wake up at 345 to arrive at work at 5am person, and I really totally don't remember it. But anyway on friday I remembered it a couple miles out from the DC and I turned at the first large parking lot I came across. Making that hard turn into a bumpy parking lot may have contributed to the two pallets of 2-liter bottles that I found I had tipped over when I arrived at my first stop. Picking all that shit up really cost me time. An then when I got to the stop where I needed that cord for the computers, the transmission from computer to computer didn't work (again!) and I got really fucked for time trying to get that sorted out. So by the time my first two stops were completed I was probably an hour and a half behind schedule, and at the end of the day I had to call my boss and tell him I wasn't going to be able to complete all of my stops. When they load your truck to the back of the trailer so that you can't close the door when your electric pallet jack is under one of the pallets, it is absolutely necessary that shit NOT happen, but shit always happens to me.
I had a much better time at the open mic that night, although I was so tired and mentally fried that I blanked on the chords to one of the songs I do all the time, but whatever.
One truth about life that buddhism recognizes is that you are where you most want to be. I chew on that one a lot. In a certain sense that is absolutely true, but on the other hand you can never be certain what's in a place until you get there, but however close to the mark it works out to be it's close enough to be relevant. Which is a telling point about your decision making habits when your life sucks.
Hello world.
Apparently none of you saw fit to comment on my last post. Humph.
Yesterday a radio commercial for a technical school that offers things like motorcycle mechanic got me thinking about going to school again for another career change. I think I'd like working on motorcycles a lot better than delivering soda or any other trucking job. So right now I'm again thinking, go for the hazmat and tanker endorsements so I can deliver home heating oil or propane, find a local day job doing that and go to school nights to learn the bike repair thing. But first I'd better find out things like how much it's going to cost, and whether they have job placement assistance, and what their placement rate is.
Fixing bikes would make acutal use of my intelligence, and not be so damn brutal on my body like delivering the soda, and not so much of a colossal waste of time like being over the road. I suppose i could find myself strapped for hours come winter but I could always fall back on some truck driving during the lean seasons for bike mechanics.
So I'm thinking to turn my truck towards the "out" door. After I've bought me a sony a350 and some macro extension tubes I shall save to pay off my student loans for trucking school and get that episode put behind me. Hopefully I won't get irreversibly physically destroyed in the amount of time it takes me to do that.
This morning I had a message on my deviant art page that one of my pics was being featured in a Taste of the Unknown, a special feature for artists who haven't been getting attention but deserve more. I hope people will acutally read the article and actually visit my page.
cheerio, pip pip
liz
Apparently none of you saw fit to comment on my last post. Humph.
Yesterday a radio commercial for a technical school that offers things like motorcycle mechanic got me thinking about going to school again for another career change. I think I'd like working on motorcycles a lot better than delivering soda or any other trucking job. So right now I'm again thinking, go for the hazmat and tanker endorsements so I can deliver home heating oil or propane, find a local day job doing that and go to school nights to learn the bike repair thing. But first I'd better find out things like how much it's going to cost, and whether they have job placement assistance, and what their placement rate is.
Fixing bikes would make acutal use of my intelligence, and not be so damn brutal on my body like delivering the soda, and not so much of a colossal waste of time like being over the road. I suppose i could find myself strapped for hours come winter but I could always fall back on some truck driving during the lean seasons for bike mechanics.
So I'm thinking to turn my truck towards the "out" door. After I've bought me a sony a350 and some macro extension tubes I shall save to pay off my student loans for trucking school and get that episode put behind me. Hopefully I won't get irreversibly physically destroyed in the amount of time it takes me to do that.
This morning I had a message on my deviant art page that one of my pics was being featured in a Taste of the Unknown, a special feature for artists who haven't been getting attention but deserve more. I hope people will acutally read the article and actually visit my page.
cheerio, pip pip
liz
Hey world
I'll do an update, because my last was seven days ago.
Max's eye is about 95-98% recovered from whatever it was.
Work is kind of pulverizing my hands. Tears up my fingernails and makes my fingertips sore. It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's Book the Sirens of Titan where he talks about the character Winston Niles Rumfoord, an aristocrat. Winston had hard hands, but hardened from the thousand happy labors of the active wealthy, as opposed to the claws developed by people who work super hard for a living. My hands feel kind of sore and fatter and stiffer from hauling those handtruck loads of soda around. Yesterday I had to yank a heavy load up a step with my arms instead of my whole body, as there was an object behind me not giving me room, and when I did it something in my neck went pop. I've had a knot or sore spot there for several days.
A while ago a friend of mine gave me a copy of Photoshop 6 and this weekend I finally bought a copy of photoshop 6 for dummies to learn how to use it. I was quite suprised to look at the copyright and see a date of 2001. Photoshop 7 and CS have both come out since 6, so I don't know . . . .I don't know what I don't know but I got 6 for free so I'll learn to use it. I hope it can do certain things that I want to do but don't know how to do yet. Like stitching together panoramics and HDR photography. I have Photoshop elements on a semidefunct computer that I did a couple of panoramics with, but I don't know where that disk is. Whatever.
Saturdays generally are something of an existential crisis for me, I think I should stay home and be real intense doing music or art or somthing, but I really feel like getting out and wandering around at my leisure instead of dashing about for work. Lately they have an added dimension of being recuperation time from the employment.
My dad used to say that if you don't work your brain you're going to work your back. Nowadays there's also retail where you work your nothing. My ADD was a big handicap when I was an undergrad and I really don't know if I could cut it in grad school. Once anything becomes your job it's about quantity. How rewarding would it be to be a college professor and correct ten thousand of the same freshman essays or exams about things not one in a hundred will ever think about again once the semester's over? Makes me think of Eternal Sunshine where the girl says "I'm going to get bored with you and feel trapped." I'm like that with jobs.
Last week I came close to trading my SIG 220 for a nice over/under shotgun that I came across. But I have these accessories, a plasitic holster and set of extra mag holders that my brother got for me and I didn't have the heart to trade off. The accessories mean more to me than the gun itself I guess. But then again it's a SIG 220, not junk, and don't have any other serious defense guns. I guess maybe I'll take it out this afternoon and pop a couple rounds off and try not to take life too serioulsy, something I have to work at.
Last night I was wandering the local mall a bit in something of a daze from work exhaustion and a large dinner that I'd indulged in. I let a pretty girl at a kiosk exfoliate my hands with dead sea salts and I felt pretty bad about not buying anything from her even as she was using her salesmanship techniques in the persistent manner in which she'd been taught. Not really sure whether doing stuff to my hands would be good for them or not, given the abuse they're taking nowadays.
Well, take care, world.
I'll do an update, because my last was seven days ago.
Max's eye is about 95-98% recovered from whatever it was.
Work is kind of pulverizing my hands. Tears up my fingernails and makes my fingertips sore. It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's Book the Sirens of Titan where he talks about the character Winston Niles Rumfoord, an aristocrat. Winston had hard hands, but hardened from the thousand happy labors of the active wealthy, as opposed to the claws developed by people who work super hard for a living. My hands feel kind of sore and fatter and stiffer from hauling those handtruck loads of soda around. Yesterday I had to yank a heavy load up a step with my arms instead of my whole body, as there was an object behind me not giving me room, and when I did it something in my neck went pop. I've had a knot or sore spot there for several days.
A while ago a friend of mine gave me a copy of Photoshop 6 and this weekend I finally bought a copy of photoshop 6 for dummies to learn how to use it. I was quite suprised to look at the copyright and see a date of 2001. Photoshop 7 and CS have both come out since 6, so I don't know . . . .I don't know what I don't know but I got 6 for free so I'll learn to use it. I hope it can do certain things that I want to do but don't know how to do yet. Like stitching together panoramics and HDR photography. I have Photoshop elements on a semidefunct computer that I did a couple of panoramics with, but I don't know where that disk is. Whatever.
Saturdays generally are something of an existential crisis for me, I think I should stay home and be real intense doing music or art or somthing, but I really feel like getting out and wandering around at my leisure instead of dashing about for work. Lately they have an added dimension of being recuperation time from the employment.
My dad used to say that if you don't work your brain you're going to work your back. Nowadays there's also retail where you work your nothing. My ADD was a big handicap when I was an undergrad and I really don't know if I could cut it in grad school. Once anything becomes your job it's about quantity. How rewarding would it be to be a college professor and correct ten thousand of the same freshman essays or exams about things not one in a hundred will ever think about again once the semester's over? Makes me think of Eternal Sunshine where the girl says "I'm going to get bored with you and feel trapped." I'm like that with jobs.
Last week I came close to trading my SIG 220 for a nice over/under shotgun that I came across. But I have these accessories, a plasitic holster and set of extra mag holders that my brother got for me and I didn't have the heart to trade off. The accessories mean more to me than the gun itself I guess. But then again it's a SIG 220, not junk, and don't have any other serious defense guns. I guess maybe I'll take it out this afternoon and pop a couple rounds off and try not to take life too serioulsy, something I have to work at.
Last night I was wandering the local mall a bit in something of a daze from work exhaustion and a large dinner that I'd indulged in. I let a pretty girl at a kiosk exfoliate my hands with dead sea salts and I felt pretty bad about not buying anything from her even as she was using her salesmanship techniques in the persistent manner in which she'd been taught. Not really sure whether doing stuff to my hands would be good for them or not, given the abuse they're taking nowadays.
Well, take care, world.
Well, I hate to supersede my fun blog about hangin' with Thora but time marches on.
Coke is getting to be brutally hard work. Wednesday I had to take two pallets of soda down a long flight of stairs and I'm still healing up from that. My boss says that when they redo the routes and schedules I won't have the three day weekends. The three days gives me more time out of the shadow of work. If I had two/dayoff/two/weekend it wouldn't be quite as intense a four day physical crush but the single day off wouldn't be much as I'd be haing to go to bed early for my 345 wake up alarm.
Yesterday in the super crappy weather a tanker truck carrying jet fuel went off the road on 91 in chicopee and the driver was burned over 70% of his body. But still lately I see guys driving around home heating oil and propane trucks and It strikes me that that job really might not be too bad. Yeah you're working in all weathers and a lot in the fall when I'd like to do some hunting, and you can get laid off in the summer. But that would agree with me actually. I'd like to a summer vacation and take a bike trip across the usa and have a job to go back to when that was over with.
It's totally improper to talk about your personal finances but I've a streak of not giving a fuck about social graces. I did my income taxes last week and found that in 07, when I worked 11 out of 12 months, I made 23,517 dollars. One does not need to put oneself 5500 in the hole for trucking school to be able to make 23k a year. Probably most pizza delivery people equal or beat that. I hate money and i think that if god exists, he's sent his only son in the form of money this time around and he totally fucking hates me. To add injury to insult the IRS decided to count the difference of what I saved when I settled a debt with a credit card company as income and the tax on that eats up most of my income tax return.
Last night at the open mic I forgot the words to one of the songs I like to play. I'm getting past my stage fright problem but I didn't know how tired I was until I blanked on the song. But there were other songs I could still do. I often think that one of the horrors of work is that it reduces you into something that can't do anyting else but work. That is being more negative than necessary though. It would have helped if I'd just headed down to barnes and noble and grabbed a nap in one of the overstuffed armchairs. Tonight I'm going to a party of someone who plays the open mic who's celebrating her divorce. One disadvantage of being less pathologically introverted than I once was is that I now somewhat know people who don't have cars and thus I find myself having offered someone a ride to the party, which creates a vexing restriction on my schedule if that person proves to want to go. Which now that I've typed it out does seem a totally stupid thing to whine about.
But the last thing I'll whine about is that my fretting hand fingertips are really sore from tossing the soda around. Something about the short fingernails. Whatever.
Max offers everyone a purr of contentment, and of lassitude.
jbl
Coke is getting to be brutally hard work. Wednesday I had to take two pallets of soda down a long flight of stairs and I'm still healing up from that. My boss says that when they redo the routes and schedules I won't have the three day weekends. The three days gives me more time out of the shadow of work. If I had two/dayoff/two/weekend it wouldn't be quite as intense a four day physical crush but the single day off wouldn't be much as I'd be haing to go to bed early for my 345 wake up alarm.
Yesterday in the super crappy weather a tanker truck carrying jet fuel went off the road on 91 in chicopee and the driver was burned over 70% of his body. But still lately I see guys driving around home heating oil and propane trucks and It strikes me that that job really might not be too bad. Yeah you're working in all weathers and a lot in the fall when I'd like to do some hunting, and you can get laid off in the summer. But that would agree with me actually. I'd like to a summer vacation and take a bike trip across the usa and have a job to go back to when that was over with.
It's totally improper to talk about your personal finances but I've a streak of not giving a fuck about social graces. I did my income taxes last week and found that in 07, when I worked 11 out of 12 months, I made 23,517 dollars. One does not need to put oneself 5500 in the hole for trucking school to be able to make 23k a year. Probably most pizza delivery people equal or beat that. I hate money and i think that if god exists, he's sent his only son in the form of money this time around and he totally fucking hates me. To add injury to insult the IRS decided to count the difference of what I saved when I settled a debt with a credit card company as income and the tax on that eats up most of my income tax return.
Last night at the open mic I forgot the words to one of the songs I like to play. I'm getting past my stage fright problem but I didn't know how tired I was until I blanked on the song. But there were other songs I could still do. I often think that one of the horrors of work is that it reduces you into something that can't do anyting else but work. That is being more negative than necessary though. It would have helped if I'd just headed down to barnes and noble and grabbed a nap in one of the overstuffed armchairs. Tonight I'm going to a party of someone who plays the open mic who's celebrating her divorce. One disadvantage of being less pathologically introverted than I once was is that I now somewhat know people who don't have cars and thus I find myself having offered someone a ride to the party, which creates a vexing restriction on my schedule if that person proves to want to go. Which now that I've typed it out does seem a totally stupid thing to whine about.
But the last thing I'll whine about is that my fretting hand fingertips are really sore from tossing the soda around. Something about the short fingernails. Whatever.
Max offers everyone a purr of contentment, and of lassitude.
jbl
Hey Folks
This sunday I had the rare pleasure of meeting the gorgeous vampiress, Miss Thora Zine!
'Twas the Blacksun Festival down at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut. Blacksun is a great gathering of goths for the purpose of listening to music and various other fabulous activities. When I got down there before meeting up with Thora I joined up with a Goth photo Safari.
We wandered around the Yale campus a bit.
Photographing goths atop monuments
And looking lovely on various building structures
Chaining each other up in graveyards
and hanging from trees
There was a blond girl getting more attention than the red haired girl but I thought the latter was markedly cuter. And her boob popped out a couple of times when whe was hanging from this tree and that in of itself was enough to qualify the day as a fine one indeed.
I also found Othniel Charles Marsh's tombstone in that graveyard. He was a famous dinousaur digger in the 19th century and very nearly as cool as a goth girl with a boob popping out a bit.
Later on when I met miss Thora Zine we discovered a shared appreciation for art
Anyway, Thora is an exquisite creature, much like the cats we both appreciate.
At one point we were wandering from one venue to another and I got a cell phone call from my mom who wanted to talk about what we'd be doing for my birthday, which is thursday. She asked where I was and I said I was down in New Haven hanging out with a friend from california. If she asks again I shall say it was with a friend from college or something. It could get complicated to explain in detail exactly what I was doing hanging out at a goth festival with a dominatrix from california who I know from a nudie website and with whom I mostly converse about cats. Not that I can't do that sort of thing, it's just culturally a bit outside my mom's sphere.
We hung out with some friends of hers from the band Attrition. The british pronunciation of the word "dork" is hilarious but the brits don't apparently use it.
Well anyway, I just sit and smile despite myself looking at all the pictures I took that day. Lucky I charged my batteries. Times like that come to an end much too soon. I'm still just a dork but I like that sometimes I manage to break out a bit and have a good time with interesting people, even when I'm not a fabulous mixer. A thousand thanks to ScotyRock for letting us crash at his place.
My cat max has an eye infection. He doesn't care for the treatment plan, but them's the breaks. I think maybe i should cover up the keyboard on my laptop with plastic because he likes to roll in dirt outside and a lot of it gets on my computer when he walks over it or sits on it or rests his chin on it while I'm typing which is precisely what he's doing right now as I type this.
Good night folks. Hafta turn in to be up at 345 to give max his eye ointment and then head off to work. Next week I'm going to be going out solo and I'm rather nervous about the spectacular ways in which I will doubtless screw up. Whatever. Onward and upward.
smooch smooch
Liz
This sunday I had the rare pleasure of meeting the gorgeous vampiress, Miss Thora Zine!
'Twas the Blacksun Festival down at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut. Blacksun is a great gathering of goths for the purpose of listening to music and various other fabulous activities. When I got down there before meeting up with Thora I joined up with a Goth photo Safari.
We wandered around the Yale campus a bit.
Photographing goths atop monuments
And looking lovely on various building structures
Chaining each other up in graveyards
and hanging from trees
There was a blond girl getting more attention than the red haired girl but I thought the latter was markedly cuter. And her boob popped out a couple of times when whe was hanging from this tree and that in of itself was enough to qualify the day as a fine one indeed.
I also found Othniel Charles Marsh's tombstone in that graveyard. He was a famous dinousaur digger in the 19th century and very nearly as cool as a goth girl with a boob popping out a bit.
Later on when I met miss Thora Zine we discovered a shared appreciation for art
Anyway, Thora is an exquisite creature, much like the cats we both appreciate.
At one point we were wandering from one venue to another and I got a cell phone call from my mom who wanted to talk about what we'd be doing for my birthday, which is thursday. She asked where I was and I said I was down in New Haven hanging out with a friend from california. If she asks again I shall say it was with a friend from college or something. It could get complicated to explain in detail exactly what I was doing hanging out at a goth festival with a dominatrix from california who I know from a nudie website and with whom I mostly converse about cats. Not that I can't do that sort of thing, it's just culturally a bit outside my mom's sphere.
We hung out with some friends of hers from the band Attrition. The british pronunciation of the word "dork" is hilarious but the brits don't apparently use it.
Well anyway, I just sit and smile despite myself looking at all the pictures I took that day. Lucky I charged my batteries. Times like that come to an end much too soon. I'm still just a dork but I like that sometimes I manage to break out a bit and have a good time with interesting people, even when I'm not a fabulous mixer. A thousand thanks to ScotyRock for letting us crash at his place.
My cat max has an eye infection. He doesn't care for the treatment plan, but them's the breaks. I think maybe i should cover up the keyboard on my laptop with plastic because he likes to roll in dirt outside and a lot of it gets on my computer when he walks over it or sits on it or rests his chin on it while I'm typing which is precisely what he's doing right now as I type this.
Good night folks. Hafta turn in to be up at 345 to give max his eye ointment and then head off to work. Next week I'm going to be going out solo and I'm rather nervous about the spectacular ways in which I will doubtless screw up. Whatever. Onward and upward.
smooch smooch
Liz
Well hello
About time for an update, maybe not too much to report. Like last time I'm still real concerned about keeping up with the workload when they turn me loose solo. My brother has not been able to keep up with his loads and has brought stuff back to the DC having been unable to finish.
Friday I bumped into an electric company truck who parked right behind me just after I got into my truck and I didn't see him. There was literally nothing behind me, I back up to go around the car parked in front of me, and Bam! WTF? I couldn't see him out the driver's side mirror, Fortuantely it was a very minor ding on his bumper and the driver didn't give a crap because it wasn't his vehicle. Lesson learned, always assume some idiot is going to pull up right behind you when you're not looking, and always leave yourself room in front of where you are to get clear of your parking space.
That cold I had really got around, lots of people didn't do open mic last week apparently. I still have some snot generation going in my chest and an ugly scabby spot where I got my cold sore from kleenex rubbing on my lip. Maybe you'd find it more rewarding to read someone else's blog, but you got this far.
Since I've nothing really meaningful to report, I'll wrap max in a scarf and take pictures of him.
After some initial perplexity about what to do about about this scarf thing, he comes to accept it and his tranquility remains imperturbable.
About time for an update, maybe not too much to report. Like last time I'm still real concerned about keeping up with the workload when they turn me loose solo. My brother has not been able to keep up with his loads and has brought stuff back to the DC having been unable to finish.
Friday I bumped into an electric company truck who parked right behind me just after I got into my truck and I didn't see him. There was literally nothing behind me, I back up to go around the car parked in front of me, and Bam! WTF? I couldn't see him out the driver's side mirror, Fortuantely it was a very minor ding on his bumper and the driver didn't give a crap because it wasn't his vehicle. Lesson learned, always assume some idiot is going to pull up right behind you when you're not looking, and always leave yourself room in front of where you are to get clear of your parking space.
That cold I had really got around, lots of people didn't do open mic last week apparently. I still have some snot generation going in my chest and an ugly scabby spot where I got my cold sore from kleenex rubbing on my lip. Maybe you'd find it more rewarding to read someone else's blog, but you got this far.
Since I've nothing really meaningful to report, I'll wrap max in a scarf and take pictures of him.
After some initial perplexity about what to do about about this scarf thing, he comes to accept it and his tranquility remains imperturbable.
cough cough sneeze sniffle cough
It just might have been sand
It might just have been sand
It might have just been sand
It might have been just sand
Virus got me. I don't think I was sick a day in the whole year I was out over the road, not during my last two months not working waiting on coke, then I get a virus that makes me call out day two of my new job at coke. I understand this isn't a great sort of first impression to make at your new job. Went to work yesteday morning but I didn't do open mike night. My guitar playing isn't quite strong enough to stand on its own without at least my usual umimpressive 1.5 octave vocal range.
Coke isn't too bad, except for hauling things upstairs on a hand truck. Doesn't entirely agree with my back but then I've been doing nothing for two months. The job isn't too hard with two guys doing a route, a train er and ee doing the work of a single man, but I'm a little worried about keeping up when they have me go solo. My brother works there. He just started being a solo driver after working there a long time doing merchandising
and then getting trained on driving the trucks.
It's a little disconcerting how small a space you can get into with a 35 foot trailer and a single axle day cab truck when you're used to the monsters I've been driving around this past year, that are a good 20 feet longer.
One thing that worries me is that sometimes apparently they'll put a day's work on a 45 foot trailer, my trainer called that a nightmare to manage, and he's won at least one truck rodeo that he mentioned. Truck drivers' needs are too often ignored by all kinds of people, who plow up heaps of snow or park vehicles or come up with other ways to obstruct drivers from doing their jobs. We have a problem in that we all have the same skill set and we can be replaced in a heartbeat if we don't like what's going on in a given position, so noone finds it necessary to make any accomodations for us.
Well, my antisocial evening turned into a social one after all when a friend of mine up in canada noticed I was online and we had a nice instant message conversation, or whatever the correct term is for doing that on google.
It just might have been sand
It might just have been sand
It might have just been sand
It might have been just sand
Virus got me. I don't think I was sick a day in the whole year I was out over the road, not during my last two months not working waiting on coke, then I get a virus that makes me call out day two of my new job at coke. I understand this isn't a great sort of first impression to make at your new job. Went to work yesteday morning but I didn't do open mike night. My guitar playing isn't quite strong enough to stand on its own without at least my usual umimpressive 1.5 octave vocal range.
Coke isn't too bad, except for hauling things upstairs on a hand truck. Doesn't entirely agree with my back but then I've been doing nothing for two months. The job isn't too hard with two guys doing a route, a train er and ee doing the work of a single man, but I'm a little worried about keeping up when they have me go solo. My brother works there. He just started being a solo driver after working there a long time doing merchandising
and then getting trained on driving the trucks.
It's a little disconcerting how small a space you can get into with a 35 foot trailer and a single axle day cab truck when you're used to the monsters I've been driving around this past year, that are a good 20 feet longer.
One thing that worries me is that sometimes apparently they'll put a day's work on a 45 foot trailer, my trainer called that a nightmare to manage, and he's won at least one truck rodeo that he mentioned. Truck drivers' needs are too often ignored by all kinds of people, who plow up heaps of snow or park vehicles or come up with other ways to obstruct drivers from doing their jobs. We have a problem in that we all have the same skill set and we can be replaced in a heartbeat if we don't like what's going on in a given position, so noone finds it necessary to make any accomodations for us.
Well, my antisocial evening turned into a social one after all when a friend of mine up in canada noticed I was online and we had a nice instant message conversation, or whatever the correct term is for doing that on google.
MAY 2008