Lightening the mood…

Yeah, life’s been crazy… what else is new?

In so many ways, it seems like we’ve been in Arizona forever, and in other’s it’s hard to believe it’s already been two months - heck, over two months…

In that time, I’ve started a new job, we’ve (mostly) unpacked the house, repainted the bedroom, torn down a wall, taken a jacuzzi outside, rebuilt the wall - and windows, and door - repaired drywall, plastered, primed and painted that room, shopped for a rug to cover the nasty stains on the linoleum (that isn’t getting replaced because our home repair budget doesn’t permit flooring just yet!), tried to stay on top of weeding the overgrown yard (who knew a desert scape could get overgrown?), tried to carve out the “usual” house keeping, grocery shopping, cooking, living, etc, all while getting used to a 45-hour work week (what the hell was I thinking when I took this job?), and oh so much more.

My writing - outside of work, that is - has fallen down the tubes to say the least!

My picture taking has followed it… And there are several pics sitting in my camera waiting to be downloaded and ’shopped.

But I had to share my weekend (and it’s only Wednesday! Wow, I’m finally getting to Sunday’s activities?)

You see, when we got this place, we knew right away that awful jacuzzi-in-the-family-room thing had to go. And go it did (look back for my home projects…) We also knew what we would put in its place…

A pool table.

And so - we investigated inexpensive tables. And The BF hated them. They didn’t “play” right.

And so - we investigate used tables.

And I hated them. Plus it seemed silly. By the time you bought the table, paid to have it moved, paid to have it refelted and rebumpered, plus bought new balls, cues, etc, you were almost to the price of a new table, but you had no warranty.

And so - we shopped. And we bought. In fact, we bought this table, custom done with burgundy felt. It’s a gorgeous piece in that room. (I need to take pics!)

But before we got that, I saved some money.

I found a furniture shop having a going out of business sale, they were selling their display rugs at dirt cheap prices. I found a beautiful area rug, 8×11, gorgeous, and typically priced at $550.

Wanna guess what I paid for that rug? Try $62. Yep. That’s it. Mind you, it doesn’t offset the price of that damn pool table, but I’ll save a buck (or a few hundred of them) when I can.

Oh yeah, I don’t even know how to play pool. The BF is teaching me.

Can I get some service here?

Finally, something to blog about other than my impending move, on-going job search and the training of the replacement…

A Casio watch, a rather outrageously expensive time piece that not only tells the time, but acts the part of altimeter, compass, barometer, and lots of other ometers that I don’t care to think about, as well as some other weird, and totally necessary functions, I’m sure The BF would just insist his watch has to have.

Well, the dang thing busted.

I don’t know what else to call it when the outrageously expensive thing that is supposed to do all those things no longer does them. It’s busted, right?

So, off it goes to Casio for repair. I call the repair dept, get the address and send it in. Weeks later it comes back, with a note. They need a “repair authorization number” before they can do anything to it.

Another call to Casio, assurances that they do not need the number since it’s no longer under warranty and off it goes again.

And it came back, again. Again with the note. It needs a repair authorization number.

I call again. Guess what? It’s President’s Day and apparently, Casio customer service does not work on President’s Day. So I give up on the phone people and switch to the Internet (where I should have started, I guess!)

This time, I find a cool little function called “Elite Service” where you can log on, put in all the info, get your handy-dandy “repair service authorization number” and even print out a handy-dandy label with which to mail your busted outrageously expensive thing back to Casio for, gasp!, repair.

Wow. What a concept. Now, why didn’t one of the multitudes of phone people I talked to over the course of this event ever tell me about this service?

Oh, and it costs nothing extra. Nope. It’s the same darn fee for fixing this no-longer-under-warranty outrageously expensive thing that isn’t doing all the things it’s supposed to do.

Grrrr.

My poor neglected little blog…

Between training my replacement, trying to wrap up everything here at the office, communicating with (and sharing forwarding info with) all the various industry people I deal with and letting them know my schedule for leaving, who will be replacing me, etc, and let’s not forget the rest of life like packing and cleaning a house, preparing for a move, dealing with The BF’s whacked out schedule these days, job searching, interviews, oh and let’s not forget a little thing called parenting, I’ve barely had time to be online, much less update my poor little neglected blog.

Never mind that the usual fodder for this place - poignant and touchingly worded stories from life, wondrously well-crafted rants and knee-slappingly funny anecdotes (I can dream, can’t I?) - OK, fantasy aside, my usual fodder is built on life. My life. The crap going on in my life. And occasional bits of things I find interesting. What was my point again? Oh, yeah.

It seems it’s become de rigeur for potential employers to do some Internet snooping on applicants, which means my usual grumps and grumbles about the goings on in my life might not bode so well for me getting a job.

I can see it now. Interview with Potential Employer goes well, but involves some humorous thing (or something I can certainly twist into humor) and I walk away from it planning to blog the whole, sordid event. But wait, PE has done their homework and found my little Web home, and now they’re reading all about our little meeting, right here, in black and white (or whatever color I happen to set the text for.)

Oh, that’s not a good thing.

Or is it?

Stories of meetings where the PE promised a “grueling” experience, which turned out to border on the snore inducing will have to wait. (Who, besides an eighth grader, considers eighth-grade grammar “grueling?”)

Shelved until the interviews are over are tales of misspelled advertisements, PEs who can’t seem to put two-and-two together - No, I’m not moving until the end of February. Yes, that means I am not available to start until then. No, I can’t just commute back and forth.

And we’ll not even discuss the rest of it. At least not until it’s all over. It simply wouldn’t do to be poking fun at the company that later decides to hire me, now would it?

A scrapbook by any other name is still a scrapbook…

Job searching was so much easier when all I had to do was list my experience and skills and then trust those and my personality to get me through an interview. These days it’s a whole different ball of wax. (hm, I wonder why that little charmer isn’t in my Dictionary of Idioms.)

These days, I have potential employers somehow digging me up on the Web. Considering how many steps I go through to keep my real name isolated from my personal Internet presence (ie – this blog, and the other places where I write and participate), that was an act of spectacular sleuthing, and I am sorely tempted to call the gent up and ask, “Just how, exactly, did you find me?”

I also have potential employers asking for samples of my writing, and my (gulp) portfolio. “Oh, sure,” is my blithe reply. “I can do that.”

Let’s be honest here, I haven’t updated my portfolio in forever, and I’ve never really updated it with job hunting in mind. It is merely a simple, clean and very basic showcase of some of my favorite pieces. Sure, I’ve shopped it out a couple of times, successfully even, as a freelancer, but I’ve never really prepped it to be a display of everything I am as a writer, editor, photographer, etc.

I suppose some folks go through the process of making their portfolio into a work of art, scrapbooking in the professional sense. Me? I haven’t had the time to that, and to be honest, even if I had the time, I’m not sure I would.

I prefer to spend my creativity elsewhere. That and I have this basic love of clean, simple lines, uncluttered spaces and letting an object (or article) speak for itself. Yeah, yeah, I also battle the theater major tendency to believe if a little is good, then a lot is even better (it “reads” better to the audience after all). So, I can be guilty of, well… overdoing it.

So, here I sit, flipping through the pages of my professional scrapbook, whoops, I mean, “portfolio”, and wondering, “What does this say about me?” “Does this show who I really am?” “If I didn’t know me at all, and I looked through this, would I like what I saw?” “How can I make this better, crisper, a more effective showcase?”

Oh, and, “Somebody please remind me to go get some good-quality black paper, a decent paper cutter and more page inserts, please.”

And finally I think, “Oh no! I’m scrapbooking!”

Taking a walk down memory lane… Blog style

Yeah…

So, here I sit, up to my elbows in alligators (someone kindly remind me to look up the meaning/origin of that charming saying) and I’m trying to keep my promise to myself. That one where I said I would keep my blog all fresh and sparkly clean, full of cool updated posts by Yours Truly.

And then life got in the way.

Between packing my house, working out the final details of custody stuff, planning a move, working on training the new hire coming in to take over some aspects of my job, training the existing employees who are taking over the other aspects of my job, the job hunt for a new job (in a new city, where I’ve never lived before), and all that goes along with those things, my blog has fallen into disrepair. Or is it dishabille? Or… Oh, never mind.

In the interest of keeping things fun, and because I dealt with a charming gent on the phone who, after receiving my resume, apparently did some world-class digging and found my little hole in the Web (yipe), I am posting links to some of my older posts.

Why? Well, some of them are those “most popular” things, though I’ve no clue why. Others are just ones I like for some reason or another. And no, I’m not telling which is which!

Want proof that bigger isn’t always better? Go here.

How about a nostalgic look at color and those crayons we all loved? Click here.

A funny story about a family on a camp out and some rather pesky wind? Try this.

And finally, that question women should never ask, “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?”