I’m glad to live where we can argue about the value of our taxes, and not the validity of them

I swear I’ve deleted you before

With all the layoffs that are happening… even from some companies that you wouldn’t expect to have taken large losses in the financial climate… I was wondering if maybe some companies are using this as an excuse to sweep out some corners.  For recent years, the big fear was that technology and outsourcing would take all of the American jobs, and it seemed the epitome of the evil corporate giant to “give your job to a machine.”  But a lot of companies have found ways to increase efficiency, decrease overhead etc.  what if they are using this as a way to trim the fat, and the blame goes to Fannie and Freddie.

I dunno.

Posted by mobile phone:
So, it appears that we are an Obama Nation.

So, here’s my week.  Work has been a mess.  It is one of the “seams” between semesters, which is one of the worst times for scheduling. I’m trying to coordinate changing schedules of 8 different people (besides me) who are starting at three different schools, all starting a different times, and I’m trying to cut back hours overall.  Plus I had one person on a long vacation and two more who haven’t yet returned from summer internships.  I also am trying to figure out my own school schedule, deciding what classes to take and how much it can interfere with work, and trying to do the dance of transfer credits and trying to decide if and when to transfer between two schools.

Speaking of schools, I heard this week that the 4 digit student loan I had been waiting for all summer, which still would only be half of what we have on the credit cards,  isn’t  coming.

Last sunday we killed bambi with our honda.  We were all fine, and happy that it would probably only be a few hundred dollars to set everything right as rain… until the actual costs of repair ended up being more than the car is worth.

My wife has been having some odd heart “palpitations,”  She went to the doctor and they said it is probably nothing but it still gets me worrying.

My wife found a part time night job.  That’s good, but so far since we have been married, I have made enough to (at least barely) get by.  I feel a little guilty that I can’t do that now, and I know its sexist, but I feel a little emasculated.

So we decided to visit my parents this weekend, gas is really expensive, but this might be the last chance we get for a while, and I really wanted a break (careful what you wish for) so we thought we would just do it.  Of course, our other (non homicidal) car broke.  Of course it is a holiday weekend, so of course no one is going to be open, and of course, I need to be back to work.

When it rains… it pours.

Posted by mobile phone:
Every once in a while I get a dose of reality and realize how much money we don’t have. it’s depressing. It can take all of the (little) bounce out of my step…it seems like putting one foot in front of the other is just too much. The most compelling urge is to just sit and stare off into space.

The sad thing is that I’m really not all that bad off. We definately aren’t in a good spot financially, but it could be so much worse. My list of “necessities” include high speed internet, two cell phones, two (money-trap) cars, and at least a moderate amount of ice cream. Regardless of how real or imagined the economic downturn is, it is undeniable that many companies are not doing well. The industry I work in has taken a beating along with the rest of them, but our company has weathered it pretty well.

It’s true that we might have gotten a better deal if we held off on buying a house, but I like the house we got, and we aren’t itching to move or anything. The one big mistake, and it’s the one that everyone tells you not to make… so let me (now) agree with them, is that we bought the house assuming that we would get a raise. Never do that. We could (barely) make the payments when we bought the house, but we figured it was OK to be tight because I should have been getting a raise soon. Well the raise didn’t come like expected, two kids cost more than we thought and with everything else getting so much more expensive we find ourselves in a problem. Actually I tend to ignore the situation most of the time. Occasionally my self inflicted oblivion is interrupted with small waves of panicked scrambling to find an alternative, or with the moments of the anti-motivation described above.

Yesterday I was struggling to walk a quarter of the speed I usually walk (yesterday was one of those reality days) I started thinking and actually somewhat replaced my ‘depression’ with gratitude. We have a lot of options, if nothing else, we can fall back to our good ‘ol high interest credit cards (I know, I know). I just can’t imagine living during the depression of the 30s. Maybe it is conceit, but I think I have a pretty wide set of employable skills. I get frustrated–as depressed as I have ever been–when my good job just doesn’t seem to be enough and we can’t find somewhere else to trim. I was afraid at the prospect of what I would do if, as jobworthy as I think I am, there was no job to be had. It became heartbreakingly comprehensible how people could do unthinkable things when they had no options for work or food or money.

In my head I have always associated “The Depression” much more with the emotion than the economy. Today that seems particularly apropos.

One of the cruelest ironies in my life is that when I am sick I can’t sleep.  The “universal cure” skillfully eludes me and I lie awake at night miserable, exhausted and angry.

I  have also noticed that the more I do, the more I can do.  Busy weekends seem longer, and if I force myself to use a little energy… I find that I have more energy.

I have renewed my determination to go to the gym regularly, and I have been blissfully avoiding TV in the overdoses I’ve been used to.  I’m hoping that will let me squeeze more than the minimum out of my life again.

… watch me get sick again.

Written on mobile phone

So I love music, but lately I have been disillusioned with the radio, so I usually listen to NPR in my car. I wouldn’t really say that I necessarily agree with their politics, but I like hearing the news, and I appreciate the minimalist commercials.

Today however I think they hit a particularly low spot. As I was pulling into the parking lot I heard one political analyst back her viewpoint with a skit from Saturday Night Live!

So it comes to that?

I had a job where I got to use the Macromedia MX suit and I absolutely loved it.  Flash has to be indisputably one of the coolest things to happen to the internet.  Thank you Youtube, Homestar, telecrapper2000, and a myriad of crappy flashy band websites etc.  Dreamweaver was a phenomenal HTML editor, the design end would write clean well formatted code (as opposed to other Frontpage end editors) and had a lot of cool integration features.  I only did a little maintenance with ColdFusion, but it was easy to learn, and kind of fun to work with. Hooray Macromedia.

To be fair, we also had, and I enjoyed using Adobe Photoshop (which was better than Fireworks) and Illustrator.  Both were great programs.

Then on a sad day, apparently at the end of 2005, Macromedia was ingested by it’s rival Adobe.

Once again…I’m not a complete hater.   Adobe did a fantastic job with Photoshop.  They made the PDF format a success and Premiere and other programs had an important part of the market.  But why kill Macromedia?

I liked all of the macromedia stuff better before adobe got their clay-caked hands all over it.  And why do they want me to update my Acrobat Reader every other day?  It’s pretty much the same as it was in 1999, can’t they get it right yet?

I just saw an ad for an adobe media player.

… there goes the neighborhood

So a lot of our language is lazy.  Contractions abbreviations, slang and don’t get me started on that silly chat acronym stuff. (LOL, BRB, ROFL, etcetera)

 I was thinking the other day,  why do we say “underneath”?  What’s a neath?  When is it ever better to add the “neath,” when “under” wouldn’t be ’nuff?

Again ”This one” makes sense, but why do we say “These ones”  …Ones?… That doesn’t make any sense… we should just say “these”

Come on all you overachievers, let it go.