Beautiful haiku

Check it out: My Dad is an artist! He has a blog dedicated to his haiku. This is from there:

how lucky the leaf
that falls into the river
journey just begun

Say what?

So, Ether, things didn't pan out for me at 50 Below. After sending out my resume with a really good cover letter, calling Sam Carlson and leaving messages three times, and calling their HR department once, I got following e-mail:

Our website indicates positions that we have at 50 below and descriptions to go with them. We do this so others are able to see what different positions entail here. Unfortunately they are not all open. So I am sorry to inform you that the Web Design Supervisor position is not open at this time. There is a note on the website indicating that not all positions listed are currently open.

Wha happen? If you look at the list of jobs, it sure seems to me like the links would be the jobs that are open. At least, that's how I woulda done it.

But hey, asking's free, I really appreciate the steer (ummmmmm... steer!), and please keep me in the back of your mind if you run across any other opportunities, OK? Muchas gracias, amigo!

A polite pre-baby note to family and friends

We love you all. You're awesome and we'd not be where we are in the world (where is that, anyway? Anyone got a map?) without you. However, please plan on giving us at least a week alone with the Beestling before you head north. I'm sure that by that time, we'll have done some bonding and will be ready to play Pass The Kid. But until then, we'd like to hang. And chill. Alone. And if we freak out, we'll call for help.

Also, we're instituting a new guest rule at the Flying W Ranch: Please limit your stay to five days or less. More is just too stressful on everyone (you and us) to have any sort of utility in the economic sense of the word.

However, if you're down on your luck and need a place to crash, our home is your home, at least until you get a haircut and get a real job.

Slacker, pt. 5 — Slackass

Since I've become gainfully unemployed — I quite recomend this route to anyone who's fed up with spinning the giant wheel that doesn't exist in any meaningfully good way (Of course, I suppose you could be more succinct in your writing than am I, but whatever.) — I think I've actually become busier than I was when working full time. Sure, at work, I was "at work" eight or nine hours a day, but I could schedule all the things I needed to do and give myself the time to get them done. Now, almost everything that's not "at work" falls on my shoulders.

This is disturbing because I had carefully choreographed my unemployment into discrete phases. There was a "Relax, Recover and Forget" stage, a "Look for Work Online" stage, and a "Look for a Local Job" stage. Of course all that was blown to hell almost immediately.

So I've been taking my RRaF stage whenever I can find it. And anyone who knows me knows there are two things I do to shut out the rest of the world: read and play video games. Lately, video games have taken precedence. I've battled my way out of a triple-max security prison of the future in "Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay," I've kicked serious zombie butt in "Hunter: The Reckoning," and right now I'm working on my lightsaber technique in "Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy." Next up are "Fable," something I've long anticipated and am going to test drive from Mr. Movies next week, and "Halo 2" which I *will* own as soon as I can find a copy (and maybe after the price has dropped from the initial ofering and ensuing feeding frenzy).

I love the sense of story, of getting better at things as I go along in the story, the scenery, the music, and the fact that each game world is controllable to some degree. There isn't any completely open-ended game yet (except maybe the Sims). And heck, before you call me up and start raving about me getting a job and what the hell am I doing with my time with a baby on the way, check this out: The video game industry (that's right folks, it's big business these days) shuffles around a couple billion dollars a year. And there aren't a whole lot of great writers out there, being involved yet (although whoever did the script for Jedi Knight gets huge kudos; I've never played a video game with a sparkling dry sense of humor before.) so I'm working on making a niche by doing my hands-on research.

OK? OK. So to help me make this niche happen, any one who has A) contacts in the video game industry or B) a Sony PS2 for give-away, please step forward.

Slacker, pt. 4 — The dishwasher

My boss at The Daily Press once told me she didn't think women's lib really got going until household dishwashers becamme commonplace. OK, so I'm not a member of the fairer sex, and I think I'm pretty open minded, but the dishwasher thing is *so* right. The Wife, the Apple Lady, and MIL went to Duluth and came home with a bunch of baby stuff and a DISHWASHER. A really nice one, too.

So of course, ever the gadget and gizmo guy, I spent an hour reading all the instructions and warnings and cautions that came with the thing, then setting it up and making a test run, then doing a real run with actual dishes. Which actually got clean.

Since then, I've been surfing the net for dishwasher detergent reccomendations (I'm using Cascade lemon gel at the moment; anyone have any other suggestions?), rinse agent reviews, and of course, actually using the machine to wash dishes.

Yee haw! Thanks a million, MIL!

Slacker, pt. 3 — Hungry chickens

A big part of the Great Thundering Horde here at Flying W Ranch are chickens. Hungry feathered flocking peckers, to be exact. Now we like to try to give all members of the Horde all the basics of a comfortable life: good food, clean water, warm, weather-proof shelter, wide-screen, high-definition television — it's the same list we all learned in biology class. But we also try to go a step further. We try to eat low on the pesticide ladder and higher on the sustainable scale. Sometimes, though, that's easier said than done.

The flocking peckers eat about 75 pounds of food each week, give or take a little. Organic layer mash runs about $16 a 50 (that's farm-speak for $16 for a 50-pound sack of feed) at the local feed mill. I went there the other day to talk about the possibility of getting bulk feed instead.

"Oh, well, the smallest bin we've got is about $1,900, but the feed's still going to be plenty expensive since there's not a lot of organic grain going on up here, so we'd have to find it, then pay to have the truck cleaned out so it's not contaminated by conventional grain, then have it shipped up here." The guys at the feed mill are really nice, but sometimes their news isn't the best.

So I went to plan B. I called Mark Thell in Carlton, MN, and ordered a half-ton of feed. Then I had a little road trip. Of course, that link doesn't really do the trip justice. It says I drove about 172 miles. Except that, feeling adventuresome, I took the scenic path. From Washburn (30 miles from my house, where I borrowed my friend's truck) to Cornucopia to US 2 to Duluth. Then up the Hill to Sears to pick up a dishwasher. Then back down the Hill (the same way, out of my way, thank you humungous construction project) to Hwy 35 and south to Cloquet, then out of Cloquet to Mark's farm.

Mark's a cool guy — into alternative energy and organic farming, but from a practical perspective. "I haven't gotten certified," he said, "because then if my neighbor wanted me to bale his field or something, I'd have to come back here and hose down and decontaminate everything that I used over there, even though he doesn't use any chemicals on his stuff either." Hey, it makes sense to me.

Anyway, after shooting the breeze with Mark for a little while and loading the truck, it was back to Ashland two hours and something away doing no more than 55 mph with the truck carrying it's rated capacity. I got home, unloaded the half-ton of feed, and the dishwasher, then took the truck back to my friend in Washburn (Thanks a million!), then picked the Wife up from work in Ashland (tired, hungry, and grumpy. Yeah, and pregnant and hungover ;-)), then finally got home again.

That's what I call a long day in the saddle.

Slacker, pt. 2 — House

So in all the work on the kid's room that MIL's been doing, we found some black mold in one of the outer corners of the room. We decided that it's better to be safe than sorry, so we ripped out the sheetrock and found disaster!

A note on the history and construction of our house

We live in a 70-something-year-old brick school house. The folks that we bought it from did a whole lot of work to turn the place into a prety nice home. Then, they moved and rented the house out for years before selling it to us. One of the things they did to the building was lower the ceilings and add two bedrooms in dormers upstairs. The kid's room is in the south dormer.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming

The disaster was that one of the roof trusses (a 2x6 beam) was rotted through so there was only about an inch-and-a-half of semi-solid wood holding it together. And there were carpenter ants. And we could see daylight in gaps between the sides of the dormer and the chimney that's right next to the dormer's side.

My buddy Jacob came over to help with the carpentry since my joinery skills are pretty much non-existent. We cut out a big piece of the truss, replaced it with new wood, sistered it, removed another 2x4 that was starting to rot, replaced it, filled the gaps with some "Great Stuff" expanding foam (that's some great stuff, lemme tell you what!), took out an (the?) ants' nest in a chewed-up nailing header and replaced that, too. Then we killed some chickens (more about that soon).

MIL taught me how to measure and cut sheetrock to fit the gaping holes in the wall, and then she taped and mudded seams. She's up there right now sanding things down, getting ready to paint. I'm writing this while our new dishwasher (courtesy of MIL — thanks again!) works on some dishes. Tonight, we're painting and laying the floor. Tomorrow night, or maybe Saturday morning, we're moving stuff into the room.

Slacker, pt. 1 — MIL

As I'm sure you all know, my mother in law is here. And she's doing great stuff for us and the house. She's spending huge long hours in the kid's room working on demo, sheetrock, mud, and paint. She scrubbed all the walls with bleach water (and filled the entire top of the house with chlorine fumes last night - EVACUATION!). She's taken us shopping for all sorts of tools and supplies at three different hardware stores and two lumberyards. She's been the engine driving this project.

And all this has kept me driving the three-and-a-half of us around town and making decisions and lugging heavy stuff in the house, then out; up the stairs, then back down again. Which is good, because then we can progress forward. But is bad because it keeps me from all my important engagements with the rest of the world.

You know how those engagements pile up when you're out of work...

Ima Slacker

And other faces you may recognize

So yeah, I've slacked off on my blog; what else is new? But I have good reasons. They go like this: MIL, house, chicken feed, dishwasher, job hunt, and plain ol' slackiness. For your reading convienence, each reason cum excuse cum way-the-world-is will be featured in a seperate post. Ta-da!