Where I've Been

The other night Katie and I were talking -- as we often do -- and the conversation turned to where we "are going" in life.

It got me thinking, first, about where I am, much less going. I push carts for a big retailer with a wage barely above minimum wage. I do the same thing day in and day out. Why am I here? How did I get to place that seems to be going nowhere? What have I been doing? The answers came to me more quickly than I expected. And, I think, converge: I wanted to marry Katie.

She had a shot at what I thought would be a fantastic opportunity for her a thousand miles away and I let her know I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity for her even if it was a thousand miles away. She got the job and I followed her down because, well, I was going to marry her. (And she had no clue about the latter.)

My job did not follow me, nor did new ones appear quickly. My bills, however, did follow and did appear quickly. The only interview I had was pretty sketchy and I am glad that I didn't end up with the job. Pushing carts was the only job that came my way.

That pretty much answers the why and how. Next I started thinking , "So I am where I am so I could marry Katie... so I could prepare for the rest of our lives together." Wait, so I've spent the last year and a half getting ready for the rest of my life? That is true, but only to the extent that every day we are getting ready for the rest of our lives. "Is that it?" I wondered.

No. It is not. I am pushing carts but I enjoy my life (I am married! To a wonderful lady!). Moreover, I have enjoyed it, even when it was getting ready to get married, even before Katie knew this was my plan. I've enjoyed road-tripping, I've enjoyed spending a lot of time with my parents in Minnesota before I came down here, and more time when they were able to visit, I enjoyed seeing Katie regularly, I enjoyed going to church, I enjoyed meeting and getting to know new people (if only a couple of them well), I have enjoyed working on my car (at least part of the time), I've enjoyed learning new things at work, I have enjoyed learning how hard I can work, I've enjoyed having a regular routine that lasts longer than a semester.

And this isn't a complete list! My low level low wage life has been good! Most of the days haven't been exciting, but the events have been. (If my life was a movie I think it would be pretty good, more on that later.)

In other words, I have enjoyed living now, not just getting ready to live later, even though it has "just" been pushing carts "getting ready" for The Next Big Thing. If The Next Big Thing never comes (although I think it will) I'll be ok, in fact, I am sure I will continue to enjoy life as much as I have.

Work Responses to Photos

(In response to this post)

Ironman Coworker: "Thanks, I'm not invincible!" I need to tell her invincibility is a good thing.

President or Whatever*: "I'm going to start calling you Master Chief." I'm ok with that.

*I don't remember his actual title because the company where I work is owned by another company. It is unclear whether we are technically a division or a fully own subsidiary (separate company). Moreover, our parent company is owned by two other companies.

It's complicated.

Work Photo

Outside of everyone's cubicle at work is their name with a picture of them underneath in front of a wall with the company logo behind. I didn't have a photo, so I decided to make one.

You'd be surprised how good this looks printed out glossy at Walgreens...

Ironically, the only person to walk by and recognize the picture was the head of the company (or division, or whatever exactly the place I work at officially is.)

Another employee wanted a picture too (her real one wasn't good enough I guess), so I indulged.

Just That Cool

So my brother, M, & myself are driving down to Knoxville, TN as I write. My brother and I wanted something that wasn't on the local radio or XM -- both of which were available to us.

Coming prepared I pulled out an FM transmitter, my laptop, power inverter, and cell phone. Together, we are streaming The Current (89.3 FM - Minnesota Public Radio) while driving on I-75 south through Kentucky mountains.

Yeah, we are just that cool.

The Things You Find

I've been spending a lot of time packing (at least when this was written) and moving recently out of The Shelter back to my parents' house. Because I plan to move agian by January I am putting in more effort than normal so I don't essentially move twice. This is my most organized move every. It really gets better every time.

I think I've found all the instrutments I own, it is kinda of amazing. Apparently I just can't get rid of something musical after I get it. I apparently own all the following (and "tested" half of them while moving :-)

1. Accoustic Guitar
   
2. Electric Guitar & Amp
   
3. Recorder (for real, since 5th grade, and I still know the fingerings!)
   
4. A juice harp (aka "Jew's Harp", despite not being connected with Judisiasm.)
   
5. A tenor saxophone dating back to approximately 1929.
   
6. An shortened electric keyword (e.g., it is like a regular electric piano but missing an octave on either end.)
7. Harmonica in the key of C
   

I think that is it. I was pretty pumped about finding my juice harp again, and taking out the sax for a bit. I can actually play all of them but the keyboard (well, I can play most chords in the key of G and play simple melodies, but not really play.) But I figure not playing keyboard is compensated by playing Tuba. Unforatently, I don't have one of those on hand :-( They are pretty awesome!

I love playing all of these, even the onese I suck at (most).

Writ November 1st, 2008

What Jonathan Can Work On

So for the first time in a couple of years I logged into LinkedIn on the recommendation of my manager who has offered to endorse me on LI more than once. That's kinda cool.

I found an endorsement from someone else I had requested some time ago. The end of it:

"...As for something that Jonathan can work on? Well, that would be easy, I think he drank too much Mountain Dew! :)"

Schitz / I Talk Too Much Sometimes (But Not Usually)

I have way too many ideas these days. I have so many posts written in my head, but I never seem to find the time and energy together to write them. I have at least half a dozen programming projects that are half done in my head. I think two of them have something resembling actual code.

I also am trying to be clever with the new name. I'm not sure its all that clever. But what the heh, I try. (If you don't know what it means look it up.*)

I do have one nice work story that I can share. I used to work for Slumberland Furniture in their IT department. I was technically an intern, but for all practical purposes got shuffled through nearly every position there, usually for no more than a couple of months. But I did everything.

I learned a lot of things there, and I am quite thankful the experience. One thing that I didn't have to learn was how to load paper into printers. I got that part down, uhm, let me think, elementary school. (I did learn how to load paper into printers older than me, however.)

At my soon to be alma mater students are not allowed to load paper into the printers. It really is about the stupidest policy in the world. The only redeeming part about the policy is that if you call the help desk they get someone up there pretty quickly. (I know because I had to call if there wasn't paper available for me to illegally load.)

So a couple days ago (meaning sometime since I starting working at my current job) I went to print out a massive document, I needed to load paper in the printer before hand. Basic, run of the mill HP LaserJet. I asked a collegue if I could load the paper myself. I could. I was pleased.

As I was loading the paper I went on eloquently wax and wane about how stupid my soon to be former school's policy was and how I could load paper perfectly well thank-you-very-much.

Can anyone guess where this is going? Yeah.

I completely bungled it. I managed to drop the entire tray. Right in front of the person I was boasting about my oh-so-clever paper loading skills. And then I had to restack the paper, get the drawer back while this collegue was watching and I was turning red as a pepper.

I finally got it done and made it back to my cubicle as fast as possible. The only time in my life I've been thankful for a three and a half walled grey cell. (Seriously, at least real jail cells have a full wall with bars. And they are white. Oh, and often have cable. Oh, and they get fed for free.)

When I was finally done with my job (it took a long time, it wasn't one of the big do-it-all machines, just a "regular" (home office type) printer. It was a big job. So I was told I should have printed it to the big-made-for-large-documents printer.

That was -- easily -- the worst day on the job. Needless to say my level of hubris dropped a couple of levels after that (I did redeem myself to some degree later, but I can't blog about it.)

Worst part, I really, really, deserved it. Really really.

*It's Greek: +3 cool points for my blog...

I Am the Awesome

On Thursday I had to get to the airport so I could visit Knoxville. The airport is 30 minutes away, I had to be there by 5:25 am.

I left at 5:00.

I was there at 5:20.

I am the Awesome.

Am I A Bad Person For This?

CNN just ran an article announcing that Congress finally announced their resuce bill. From the article:

Lawmakers' goal is to shore up a deal before financial markets around the world open on Sunday evening.

By which they mean the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Naturally, the first thing I do is to look up the time in Japan, they are 14 hours ahead of CST (3:00pm here 5:00am there). Next I look up the hours for the TSE: trading starts at 9:00am.

Finally I have to smile, in kind of an evil way, at the thought of over 400 congress-persons running around (literally) trying to find the votes to get this to go through.

Guys, you have 3 hours and 39 minutes to find the votes, pass the bill, and get it signed.

Enjoy.

Ooops...

At least it's the first time, not again. I think I just annoyed (or at least really confused) a VP. It's a long story. Still, note to self: do not approach [VP] again unless it is with good news...

The Worst Time to Blog

Is when you are bored. Very. Bored.

The writing tends to lack any sense of spontaneity and often fails to attract any interest -- especially from the writer. Back in the day this was never a problem, or at least rarely. At least for me. There was always news. And I mean real news, you know, the stuff that is interesting.

Today the news is dominated by piddling topics such as presidential elections and a financial crisis or something on Wall Street. Wall Street is in New York and that is too far away for me to actually care about.

And the politics, the politics are quickly becoming incredibly boring. Seriously, when the best I can do is make fun of attack emails it is bad. When I was a youngster there was always a president, high ranking official, or congressperson having an affair, being charged with murder, starting the most absurd policy changes ever. Today the news centers around whether John McCain or Barack Obama is running a dirtier campaign, whether Palin is an angel or a demon, and what people think of either campaign. I don't care what other people think of the campaigns, I care about what I think.

In a completely separate event readers of my blog just went up by 50%; yup, I have one more reader.

If rather alarming events (and non-events) keep on happening at such an astounding rate I make have to take the unprecedented step of blogging on a regular basis and trying to make it interesting.

The Things You Can't Blog About

I've always disliked the number of things I can't blog about because they usually are the most amusing. I can't blog about most things at work, except for the boring stuff, and even then I have to make sure I'm not disclosing any proprietary information.

I can't blog about half the stuff that happens at my house to protect the guilty (including myself at times).

I can blog about politics (and obviously do) but unless I make it particularly amusing neither of my two readers (seriously, both, that's it) care much. (Although over half my traffic comes from search engines almost all of them leave the page immediately).

Ditto about most geeky stuff.

Guess it will just be a boring blog unless I decide to start making up life stories. Actually, that could be fun...

Breaks and Random Facts

Recently I've started getting some pretty severe pain in my lower right arm, a single tendon. I know because I can feel it. Almost no doubt from using my center mouse wheel too much. I use it navigating through records in MS Access, scrolling on webpages, etc.

So I did some research on computer ergonomics and found out that I am doing almost everything the wrong way. One of the best practices is to take 30 second "micro breaks" every ten minutes. There is no way I am ever going to hit every ten, but maybe I can do 20 or 30. So I go to take my first break, but start by navigating to http://time.gov because I know they have a clock with seconds there. And course, as I am "breaking" from typing everything I want to do is check out who is on IM, write blog posts, etc. Take me a far amount of discipline to sit in front of my computer doing nothing for 30 seconds.

While at time.gov I was reminded of an extremely random and amusing fact. Greenich/Zulu time is now called Coordinated Universal Time. Part of an international effort to get all the countries in the world (or all that have the capability) to be using the same time. The acronym for this is UTC, which obviously does not match Coordinatd Universal Time. Apparently this was a comprismise. The Powers That Be couldn't find an acronym that matched both French and English reprentations of their new name. So they went with one that didn't match anything.

Politics really can be funny.