Well, as I expected, yesterday got a little darker. Then came the sunlight.
More specifically… I was laid off. And then went outside, blinking and bewildered at my sudden freedom, into the bright sunshine.
Fortunately, I’m surrounded by kindness and love. I have really great friends and a wonderful wife. And in truth, I’m in a very good and healthy head space about my situation. I’m actively looking for work, so if anybody is looking for a Project/Program Manager, I’d love to hear from you. What the heck… if you’re a friend, I’d love to hear from you anyway. As long as I have some time to hunt for a new employer, this might be a great opportunity to get together for that long-overdue cup of coffee and a chat.
In the mean time, don’t be surprised if my resume crosses your desk.
They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. Or something like that. Hopefully that’s true. Today feels pretty dark… update ahead…
Last night after practice with The 1 Uppers, the band decided to head up the Red Door for a quick beer before heading home. And of course, the bar was full of clowns. Apparently some kind of SeaFair activity has just wrapped up, and the SeaFair clowns had also decided a beer or two was in order.
I probably shouldn’t have stayed out so late drinking beer with clowns on a work night, but how often does one get such an opportunity?
PS : Upon suggestion from Gil Milbauer, I changed the title of this posting.
This is the day every year when I am thankful to be an American citizen. Not in a jingoistic way… I’m not blindly patriotic, and consider America to be a work in progress. However, I am thankful for our freedom and for the principles that the country was founded upon.
And yet, the 4th of July is also a little strange to me. I’ve never completely internalized the connection between fireworks and patriotism. I know the national anthem and can reference the rockets’ red glare stanza. It’s just a little ironic that we celebrate our love of America by blowing up small parts of it.
Say what you like about this country. I love it. I’m proud and thankful to be a citizen. And I think Lady Liberty is kinda cute, although my masculine ego is slightly threatened by taller women.
I have a horrible head cold. Apparently my sinuses were optimized for maximum head-cold misery, which means I get to spend a few days feeling like my skull is a basketball. Feh. I thought somebody was going to cure the common cold and spare humanity from all this inconvenience. And weren’t we supposed to have jetpacks by now? And robots to cheerfully do all the crappy stuff like housework? Man, the future isn’t what it used to be.
For the record, yes I do realize the common cold is an ever-changing myriad of mutating strains and can’t be cured by a single targeted pharmaceutical knockout punch. So while the lab coats toil to assemble some kind of cold-killer medicine, can we at least have jetpacks and robots?
Montana is incredibly beautiful. Any local who says otherwise is probably trying to hide their favorite fishing spot. I just returned from spending five amazing days with family and friends, attending a wedding and generally having fun. Over the course of those five days I took over six hundred pictures (!) and had some great adventures. At the wedding reception in Big Fork (right on Flathead Lake), we were doing the usual toasting / visiting / dancing / drinking. Behind the bar was a bottle of dangerous-looking liquid containing a coiled cobra biting the tail of a fairly large scorpion. It turns out this unusual liquor hails from Laos and is supposed give a person “increased vitality and health”. The bartender told us they’d had this bottle for a few years and nobody had ever wanted to drink any of the magic high-proof elixir inside… but that was before we arrived! Note that this picture shows a bottle that is only half full… sure enough, by midnight a bunch of us had taken shots of this terrible stuff.
I had two shots of it and am pretty sure I will soon be mutating and/or developing super powers.
Last night during our softball game I had the two best hits of my season so far. I managed to get a fairly serious connection with the ball and reached base on two strong singles. I’m getting my timing down, which is definitely a big part of the challenge… short bat + big softball = tough to get a decent hit.
It’s a great team this year and everyone is having a lot of fun. I’m darned glad to be a part of the crew.
Well, I did indeed sell that guitar this week. I also sold two flight cases last weekend, and I’m starting to think it’s a good idea to clean out some of the excess stuff in my music room. This seems like a great opportunity to lighten my earthly load of equipment and apply the proceeds to other endeavors (like the kitchen remodel).
Always good to have less stuff…
It’s so completely aberrant and unexpected that I’m going to blog about it : my garage is actually clean and mostly empty. That is pretty unusual. This weekend Teri and I spent the better part of two days hauling junk to the dump and Goodwill, and all the remaining stuff got put out in the shed. Then we disassembled the big chrome shelves that used to occupy the long wall of the garage. All this cleaning was in preparation for this weekend’s big party, but still … ! We’re actually considering leaving those shelves out after the party is over. A clean garage is a strange thing. I always thought the state of the garage was sort of a paeon to law of chaos; as I recall from my university physics class the universe tends toward entropy. If so goes the universe, why then not the garage?
At any rate, we’ve successfully enforced temporary order and cleanliness in that confined space. It’s all at once beautiful and unnatural. Can this order be maintained? Stay tuned for an update. The smart money is on entropy.
