I’m attempting to find some joy at work today. It may be hard to find. Stay tuned.
OK, I’m actually interested in something here at work, the Quick Reference Guide. And it’s a good excercise in organizing information, especially given the complexity of this game and how all the elements are intertwined- elements in a given grouping do not all perform the same operations or make the same connections that their neighbors do, while the central ‘core’ element, the housing, does not actually appear as the logical ‘center’ of the diagram, as the previous games had it arranged.
I was reading CNN today and they (surprisingly) have a large promo section devoted to the new album by Rush, the band I pledged total allegiance to at the age of 15. I was pleased to read that they have released their first album in five years, after a bunch of very tragic events and a lot of time off. I hope I can hear the single on the radio again so that I can decide whether or not to buy the album. Meanwhile, *gulp* I actually am digging the groove in the new Korn single.
Update: We’re going to the O’s game tonight at 7:05! Skybox seats! Food! Booze! Woo-hoo!
Update: We’re not going. Cue the sad music.
Oh, good god, I am tired beyond belief. What a productive, but exhausting, weekend.
Jen and I mixed about 500 lbs. of concrete, moved and laid about 600 bricks, and generally wore ourselves right out. The back patio is complete save the north side planter; we were able to get everything down and cured by Sunday afternoon at 5. The new brick looks and feels really good. It went in a lot cleaner and smoother than the old brick would have, plus it looks better to have the older, more weathered brick on the planters.
We also had a really great time being with each other, from walking the neighborhood for breakfast to getting a dozen crabs Sunday night (yum!) She taught me the St. Mary’s County method of opening crabs and I dropped an eight-foot 2×4 on her knee. So it equaled out perfectly.
At some point in the next few days I’ll hopefully have some pictures of the in-progress work to post online; I’m waiting for my camera to show up in the mail so that I can post more quickly. Until then, I took shots with the 35-millimeter and we’ll wait until they get developed.
It’s an odd feeling to have no fingerprints: after handling the brick for three days straight, two without gloves, the pads of my fingertips were worn down to bare, smooth skin. Now they are wrinkled over with scar tissue, and the tactile feeling is not unlike that of dried Elmer’s glue on your thumb, the cheap false skin we used to make in third grade. It does feel righteous and good to have worn, pitted, rough skin on my hands again.
OK, so the Scout pages are getting, by far, the most hits on my site, bar none. I think, if I get this illustration job, that I’m going to join the Graphic artists’ Guild and link on their site, as well as finally blow $3K to advertise in the Directory of Illustration. And I’m also, after taking delivery of the digital cam, going to add more frequently to the Scout pages.
Ordered $400 worth of bricks from Home depot (gulp) and the should be delivered sometime tomorrow. Hopefully I can get them to the backyard, where I plan to be mixing concrete and laying brick all weekend. I can’t wait. Woo hoo!
Still stumbling through a fog of down-ness. I’m not able to pick myself out of this gutter, and it’s really spiralling downward quickly. Attempts to get moving again are working in fits and starts, but it’s an up-and-down battle right now.
I quoted a price on a huge illustration job yesterday that came in out of the blue, and that made me feel good for a few days; I’m pretty sure I came in under the wire on my pricing, although my timeframe might have given him pause to think. I’m going to follow up with a call today to see what he says, and hopefully he’ll have some feedback for me either way.
I also used the Buy it Now feature on ebay to buy a Kodak DC-3400 digital camera yesterday, and I’m sending a check to the dude in California today to take delivery. Between the possibility of this freelance job, the months and months of pining after one, and the need to document the backyard progress, I decided that $150 was a good frickin’ deal on a 2-megapixel camera with an 8-MB card plus the card reader. Plus, I think that Jen’s need to get back into some photography could also be served by having an inexpensive digital camera. So that is a possible good thing.
I also installed Jen’s new laptop at her house the other day; I bought another Pismo from Nick with a bunch of goodies, so we have two 400mhz Pismos, one with 320MB/6 gig (Jen) and one with 576/12 gig/FireWire (Bill). Both have DVD-ROM drives and both are in fantastic shape. She has all our software, my 10-year collection of fonts, and the spare internal Zip drive to work on. Plus we now have four batteries and three power cords between us. I’m excited about the prospects for our future in freelance.
Attempting to remain excited about my future career prospects today. I woke up this morning tired, and wandered around my house in a fog. Coffee cleared the cobwebs and I focused on the tasks at hand, but I couldn’t shake a sense of boredom and stagnation. I’m not getting a damn thing from my current job, and that has me very depressed right now.
I am getting a lot of freelance stuff in the pipeline, though, and if I can maintain my current pace I’ll be in good shape at the end of this summer. Right now I’m trying not to overload myself with too much stuff, but there’s two big projects which are very exciting that i want to tackle for different reasons. Kind of makes me wish this was last summer and not this summer- I would be able to segue smoothly into lucrative, exciting freelance work at a time when I was not working at all.
It’s interesting to read the log from last year and see where I was at this time- on the 11th of May last year, I was laid off. on the 22nd of May, I was talking about getting my website redesigned and running again, as well as illustration work going again. it’s bizarre in a way to see the difference a year makes.
I’ve been away for about a month, in the face of server issues, career and work issues, and a general re-evaluation of what I want this space to be about.
My server (Greycube) had a catastrophic failure about a week before I was to transfer the domain off the machine, and so I lost www service AND email at a time when we were pitching work, so I’m sure we look like amateurs. I’m now happily parked on a quick, steady Solaris box in Laurel, with Appletalk over IP, which is absolutely wonderful. No more Fetch, WSFTP, or crappy Win NT FTP services, which were about as stable as a Central American government.
Freelance work has been good lately, thereby lightening the issues with getting paychecks on time; not only has it been financially rewarding but the work has been challenging as well.