9-29-00

When I got to my son's football game yesterday, a half hour into the game there was an ambulance parked by the opposing teams bench. I asked Sue how it was going. She had also just arrived and went down to ask the water boy. She came back looking troubled.
"The water boy says Clint is having a great game, he injured three guys already, one is going to the hospital."

We talked for a while about what a sick sport it was, but we kept watching. I've always hated football. I've read several books by famous quarterbacks who were basically crippled by the time they retired in their 30's. It's a popular couch potato sport primarily because of the violence. Fat lazy shmucks get to suck down chips and beer in perfect safety while fit young men try to do each other serious bodily harm. Lincoln, the "bad" guys scored several more touchdowns before one of the shmucks on our side hollered,
"Yeah, big deal. You scored another goal. Two of your guys are in the hospital!"

Several other shmucks on our side cheered with him. Later on in the game, when we scored a 30 yard touchdown even I stood up and cheered. Seconds later, Sue and I realized some kind of error had been made for it was taken away from us. We found out later that Clint was the player who made the error. He had been "holding" someone. Whatever that means. Karma comes to call. I will be really glad when this sport is over. Back when he was an unbeaten track star in the 800 meter, I could be proud of his accomplishments without worrying about who he injured to get there.

I've been making great progress in Flash. I am working my way through an excellent book called "Essential Flash 4 for Professionals". I started it in school but got interrupted by the curriculum. I plan to change this entire site over to Flash. It will be a great learning experience. I doubt whether this journal will be Flash, probably just the navigation bar. But the pages where I am showing thumbnails of my paintings will likely be all Flash. The 2 people who have interviewed me both seemed to want someone who specialized in something. I am considering specializing in Flash. At the very least it is a good painless design tool.

9-26-00

A good mind is a terrible thing to waste. That has been my incentive for the last 12 years as I searched for a means to express myself. When I got out of school, I was worried that I wouldn't have what it takes to create on the digital landscape. After all, as a web designer, I need to be able to create, not with paints, but with pixels. I am finding it to be very much like creating still lifes out in my studio with traditional pastel sticks. I hate everything at first, kick myself for being a lousy artist until my soul is bleeding. But if I keep pushing through all the layers of self doubt, I find myself smiling at the pretty pixels. I love Flash. It's an intoxicating animation program. Nothing to show yet, but I'm getting up earlier and painting with pixels.

9-24-00

Climbed at Lake Cushman Cliffs today with Sue and Clint. Lisa went to the Puyallup fair again with one of her girlfriends and family. They love the scary rides, but don't want to go rock climbing. Clint doesn't like the scary rides but likes rockclimbing, go figure. We spent the first hour exploring, wandering lost through the woods among various unidentifiable cliffs. We finally recognized a cliff from the miserable drawings in the guide book and I led a 60 foot route with 3 bolts. That works out to long runouts. Most of the danger was above the first bolt, where I could have hit the ground if I came off. I usually won't lead under protected bolt routes like that, life is too short. But I could see from the ground that there were plenty of rest spots, and the cruxes were well protected with close bolts. After the second bolt, I was free of the fear of a grounder and enjoyed myself on some pleasant crack assisted friction. The rock quality is very similar to Little Smoke Bluffs up in Squamish, Canada. Clint and Sue haven't been up high much and got very nervous from the exposure. The trail ended on an 80 foot high ledge and the route went up from there. When Sue refused to be lowered (to clip the bolts for Clint, gotta get another rope), we traded positions. She belayed me as I down climbed with her top rope, clipping the bolts for Clint to follow. At the ledge, I watched Clint tie in safely and took some bad photos as he fought his way up the boulder start. Neither one liked the route at all, although Sue finally relaxed during the long belay. Exposure take some getting used to. There is no way to prepare for it. You just have to put yourself out there and wait for your body to get used to what your mind is telling it. The body is screaming, "Danger!,Danger!" while the mind speaks calmly about the excellent anchors, the well tied knots, the back up anchors, the back up harness. Safety in spades is the rule. It's almost better for the leader. I'm only as exposed as my last piece of protection. For the follower (second person up the cliff), you are looking at 80 feet of rope dangling down the cliff. As a leader, I am usually within 10 feet of my last protection piece, often standing right by it while I am making my hard moves. We did our first all trad route today in a while. It was a long diagonal ascending crack in excellent rock. I love being able to control how much or how little protection I have. On a bolted route, I am stuck with what the first climber felt like drilling. If he was a lot better than me, there won't be enough bolts. When I place my own removable protection in the crack, I have complete control. Anyway, a great day of exploring and climbing in a new area, close to home.

9-23-00

My climbing buddy stood me up. It has turned out for the best. I needed to spend some time around the house organizing my bills and papers. Quality time with the family is not as fun as climbing but more important in the long run. Sue has been a real trooper today. While I worked on bills, helped Clint with Algebra and played with Flash, she took Lisa to her soccer game and ran several hours worth of errands in Tacoma. I have been whining about my problems creating digital art. Just about the time I am ready to give up, somebody, somewhere turns on the lights. I have an excellent interface going in Flash for this web site.

9-21-00

The sun shining down through the branches of the 80 foot tall fir trees that surround my house illuminates a 10 foot wide patch of dirt in my driveway where I sit with my morning cup of coffee and laptop. Life is good. It's late enough in the year that the coolness in the air keeps me comfortable. The trees are swaying with the breeze as the clouds from the last few days blow out across the Cascades, making way for a sunny weekend. D and I are going climbing. Sue is staying home again, tied up as usual with soccer games, trips to the Puyallup fair and other activities for the kids. I invited her along but she seems to prefer staying home. Clint is fighting off a cold and needs a restful weekend anyway. The wind is blowing so hard the fir needles and pine cones are falling down like rain. Bees buzz around without the usual invasive curiosity of the hot summer. I think they are beginning to slow down as colder weather approaches. Tomorrow morning I have a 9 AM appointment to get an endoscopy. At my bi-yearly physical, my doctor was alarmed by my fifteen year Rolaids habit. I keep them in my lunchbox as a matter of course. Lately I have only eaten a couple a week, but in the past I have had days where I needed a couple Rolaids twice a day. I seem to have the most trouble with heartburn when I'm at work. If a printing job turns sour on me, heartburn is usually not too far away.

According to my GP, regular heartburn over a long period of time can cause the lining of the esophagus to alter, it changes character and sort of becomes calloused, for lack of a proper medical term. This altered condition is usually present when people get cancer of the esophagus. But, he says that if they do find the "calloused throat" condition, there are lots of things I can do to lessen the chances of eventually getting cancer. He didn't say what, but I assume something like eating a certain diet, probably yams and carrots...yum yum. It's funny, when I'm happy, I never get heartburn. Maybe I just care too much. I love this weather. Can't wait to get up on the rocks. D and I are going to the Pinnacles. I haven't climbed on sandstone in a couple years. I haven't heard from him yet, hope he doesn't bail. Time for a workout and a shower, then off to work. My keyboard is filled with fir needles.

9-20-00

Had an interesting job interview yesterday. I had worn my best interview clothes: Dockers, nice new button down shirt and my new shoes. I was also sporting a fresh haircut in my favorite style for the hot summertime: as short as I can get it without being a butch. The first person I saw was a guy in shorts with long blond hair down towards the middle of his back. The person who interviewed me was a friendly guy with hair to his shoulders in comfortable looking worn blue jeans. None of them looked over 35. At one point during the interview he asked me rather delicately how I felt about working with a group of people who were...I don't remember the exact wording but something along the lines of creative types who didn't dress or act like bankers in suits.

I may well have misinterpreted his question, but regardless, I found myself describing my experiences as a hippie back in the early seventies, hitchhiking across the country and learning the fine art of communication. When your next meal, and indeed your life, depends on your ability to appeal to the drivers who stop to pick you up, you quickly learn to be a listener. Most of the people who picked me up back in those days were simply bored and wanted someone to relieve the boredom of the long cross country drives. I was usually commuting by thumb to San Francisco to see my highschool girlfriend who had left Olympia when her parents divorced. The Tipi got pretty cold during the winter and I welcomed a two week break in sunny California. Besides the backpack, I usually carried a guitar, a wooden flute and a harmonica. When they ran out of things to say, I would ask if they wanted to hear some music. I wasn't too great on the guitar, but I've been told by many people over the years that I rock on the blues harp. And my renditions of the old folk songs like Shenandoah and Greensleeves would leave them begging for more. We didn't have CD players back then, and a talented harmonica player was guaranteed a long ride, usually with a burger thrown in. I perfected the art of hitch-hiking to the point where I could often beat the Greyhound traveling between Olympia and San Francisco. Some of my other trips, like the time I hitched to Colorado were much more iffy. I can remember waits of as long as 24 hours at some of the freeway on ramps in Montana. Those cowboys weren't overly fond of long haired Bob Dylan wannabes in patched blue jeans. When I returned home from my month long Colorado trip, I'd lost 15 pounds. Mom had given me only $5, thinking I would return in a few days for lack of money. If you are intrigued by these true stories from the ancient past, see my "highlights" links at the top of this page.The one that goes to hippie stories has a couple telling photos. I'm not sure what all these old memories have to do with my job interview...I guess just wanted to write. It was a decent interview, as interviews go. They have a thriving web design firm and need some help. I would bring a lot of value to the firm, but I imagine it all depends on how much skill and experience the other applicants have. My business web site is complete except for the Flash intro. I am looking forward to spending some time with Flash, my favorite program.

9-18-00

Looking down the cliff at Sue on belay, I nervously pondered the consequences of a fall. I was about 60 feet above her on an almost vertical cliff we had never seen before today. My last safety bolt was 3 feet below my feet. The next bolt was 2 feet out of reach above my head. To get close enough to clip my climbing rope to it, I would have to leave the marginal hand and footholds I was clinging to and climb on a wish and a prayer (because there sure as hell weren't any hand or foot holds) up the vertical stone until I could clip my rope to the waiting bolt. My excuses for not going higher were long and convoluted:

• I was rusty, having only climbed 3 times this summer.
• The climbing I have done has been face, not this steep friction
• My 6 year old rope should have been retired 3 years ago
• My 10 year old harness should have been replaced long before the old rope.
• There was a 4 inch ledge below and off to the left very close to my falling zone that could hook and break an ankle even if the old gear did catch me.
• The 21 year old carabiniers belonged in a climbing museum
• ......What the hell am I doing up here?

The day had started wonderful. We had decided to explore a new climbing area in the Olympics on Lake Cushman, about an hour and ten minutes away from our house called Cushman cliffs. We had the guidebook and were pretty excited about finding quality climbing this close to home, especially located on the commute friendly side of the Narrows bridge. But now it was time to pay the piper. I either had the balls to trust my life to the safety net I had woven up the cliff, old gear and all, or I was just another old has been, better off playing golf. The route was supposed to be a much easier 5.8, well within my abilities. However, the bolts leading in the 5.8 direction were seriously overgrown with moss making for even more dangerous climbing conditions than the 5.10 variation I had chosen. I was too scared to try and reverse the moves down to the relative safety of the bolt below me, from where I could rappel to the ground. Telling myself to stay calm I took a deep breath, hollered at Sue to watch me closely, and climbed up the wall. When I got to the next bolt, I clipped it and hung on, not caring about cheating. If I hadn't been in college for the last year, this kind of route would be a breeze. I excel at friction climbing. But there is an apprenticeship period every spring that I had skipped this year. When I got to the crux of the route I took some baby falls, getting used to the idea of the rope catching me. Sue and Clint hollered up encouragement and I relaxed enough to climb up the last 3 bolts to the safety of the rappel station. Clint gamely climbed up it in his new shoes to the crux before we all bailed in search of easier climbing. Down on the road we found an excellent cliff right on the lake. It had two very pleasant 5.8s on high quality rock. I can't wait to go back.

9-15-00

Yesterday my son played his second football game. This time they weren't playing against an underfunded backwoods town. They played Foss, which is one of the largest schools in downtown Tacoma. My boss very kindly offered to let me take an hour off work to catch some of the game. Sue was there, looking fresh and lovely in the fall sunshine. I haven't seen any of them all week now that I am working 11 to 12 hours a day swing. Here is a letter I stuck on the fridge at 3 AM when I got home:

Nice job today Clint. Your team may have lost but you played a great game. Did you hear us cheering when you sacked the quarterback all by yourself? Then, when the bad guys intercepted the ball, you were right there to make an unassisted tackle, seconds after he caught the ball. I don’t know how you manage to be in the right place at the right time with such accuracy. When you made those unassisted tackles, I actually felt sorry for the guys you hit. You tackled them so hard and so completely, there was absolutely no doubt they were going down. Anyway, nice job! You made me proud. Dad

9-14-00

Brutal couple days at work. My first day back from vacation was a non demanding warm up. The next two days reality smacked me right in the face. Tuesday I came in to find I had 5 four color runs for Christian Musician Magazine, a national full color magazine featuring extremely high quality photographs from the best graphic artists on the planet. The advertisements are typically full page four color black builds featuring pictures of Peavy amps or Martin Guitars held by Nationally known musicians of the Christian faith. They have bright color on the subjects fading to black where the type is knocked out. The designers are used to working with high end printers using 4 color presses and think nothing of knocking 6 point type out of the black builds. The problems start when you take a part time, after school printer like myself who hasn't run that particular 2 color press for two weeks (I was on the Heidelberg GTOZ the week before my vacation) and expect him to print flawlessly. I gave it my best shot...but inevitably I missed a couple crucial steps. Yesterday I was apologizing to the owner J.

"How's it going Mark?"

"I'm having a really lousy day."

"Sounds about like how my day has been going since I got here"

"Well, you can blame a large part of that on me, I feel terrible about making that stupid mistake on your magazine yesterday. The problem was, other than that easy job yesterday, I haven't run the press in two weeks. I wish I could be an expert on every press here all the time. But, in reality, when I walk away from a machine for a while, I get rusty."

"Well, unfortunately I think we are all like that", J. said.

"What I need is a little computer chip I could pop in my brain: if I am running the Komori, I pop in the Komori chip and every control, every little idiosyncrasy pops into crystal clear view."

"Wouldn't that be cool," J. said, "In twenty years, we will probably be doing that. In the meantime, you can make it all up tonight by finishing these six magenta and cyan runs on Frank Russell for me. You know we all suffer from short term memory loss here, if you do good on this job, we won't even remember that you bricked a job last night."

"That's the great thing about solvent fumes in a print shop", I joked.

These guys are way too kind to me. Guilt kept me there 11 hours and by lunch time, I was kicking butt. I am going to miss printing. It's an active job that uses both the body and the mind in a fluid combination of physical grace and mental acuity.

9-11PM-00

Bad news. I just heard from an artist friend of mine who maintains the NPS web site. He uses Netscape 3 to test his html. My new web page with the high end layers code crashes completely on his Mac running Netscape 3. It's not like I didn't know this was a possibility. Just this weekend I finally got my new hard drive installed and partitioned with the help of a geek friend. My teacher told me months ago I needed to get an extra hard drive and install various versions of older browsers in isolated partitions for testing code. All I have currently is IE5, Netscape 4.7 and 6. I think I may have some older versions of IE on some old install disks in a closet. For the really old stuff, like versions 2 and 3, I will have to search the net.

My first day back at printing after my vacation went about as expected. I was running a bunch of spot varnish jobs. For the non-printers out there, spot varnish is how printers make pictures shine. If you ever see a printed piece of paper that has photographs that seem to be coated with a thick coat of glossy varnish, you are looking at spot varnish. First we print the regular black and color ink. Then we print the varnish over the top of the photographs to give them a classy shine. I was pretty rusty early on, but warmed up by the end of my shift. I showed my foreman the site I am developing for the company. He seemed to think it was a good start. We could do so much with that site if other people in the company besides me were willing to put some time into developing content. During my internships, the customers were all over us to hurry up. The laid back attitude toward the company web site at work is frustrating to me as the designer.

9-11-00

The climbing areas are getting closer all the time. Up till now, the closest one was up on Snoqualmie pass at Exit 38. Sunday we were in Olympia buying my son some rock shoes. I casually asked the salesman where the nearest climbing area was now. He brought me a guide book to a cliff on Lake Cushman. 10 years ago we were driving by the cliff on our way to a hike up Mt Elinore in the Olympics when we saw a couple people emerge from the woods with rock packs. So I had heard a few rumors but nothing prepared me for a guidebook with 14 pages of routes. This means we can be climbing on real rock in 45 minutes instead of one and a half hours.

Clint has been pretty worn out from starting his first year of high school this week. The benefits of popularity he enjoys as a freshman football player is offset by the extra physical effort he has to put out on the team. Only time well tell whether he would be better off as a simple student. The fees and supplies for high school are outrageous. Football cost around $100 dollars just to be on the team. Photography class was another $44 for supplies. Then he was required to buy a $70 Texas Instruments graphing calculator. Our budget is in tatters. My father lent me the money for the rock shoes. I am looking toward the future when I hope to be earning money using my new web design skills. My business site is coming along splendidly after spending my entire weeks vacation writing code. Most of the last 3 days have been spent developing the web site for the company where I work swing shift in printing. This web site well be the flagship of my online resume as a web designer. Sue has the standard stress related cold she gets every fall when she has to go back to work as an OTA (Occupational Therapy Assistant) with the school district. I am feeling pretty good after a weeks vacation from printing. No doubt printing well be a rude slap in the face today as always. Welcome back Mark, here's a 4 over 4 rush job, it's a must for tonight.

9-8-00

Football is dangerous. Sue and I watched my son's first football game yesterday. This is the first time he has ever played football. We had very little idea how risky high school football was. Three guys got injured and one got carried off the field. Even though he hasn't played the game before, he has become a very valuable player. All the other kids rotated in and out during the game. I asked him why he stayed in so much. He said it is because he is one of only two good tackles on the squad. I personally saw him make 3 unassisted tackles, one was the quarterback. Most of the time he seemed to spend pushing the other tackles around. But a few times, he darted through the lines like a fish swimming up river, appearing beside the quarterback with appalling precision. I was so worried about him getting injured that I tried to bribe him with a used car to stick with track. No luck. He loves the game. The sport makes rockclimbing look like a walk in the park. I wish now I was more of a couch potato so I would understand the tactics and rules. Sue and I couldn't make head nor tail of what was going on. We just watched the action and cheered the scoreboard when we won. You know you're getting old when your children have more fun than you do.

9-6-00

Nice Job on the sink Mark.- These are words I didn't think I would ever hear from Sue. Yesterday was a big day for fixing things. Real things for once, instead of mixed up bits of data in these humming plastic boxes that dominate our lives. I started with the cars alternator. For $18 my mechanic confirmed my belief that my alternator was bad. I felt kind of silly bringing my bicycle on the roof in case the engine died on the way to the parts store but, as an old boy scout, I'm always prepared. The car drove flawlessly during my search for the right alternator. I spent 2 hours switching it out for a new one in front of the parts store and couldn't resist a big smile when I started the car and the red light was gone. I wouldn't mind doing that for a living if the pay and working conditions weren't so miserable. Next I drove home and tackled the dripping sink. It looked like the kind of straight forward job I could muddle through until one of the old pipes cracked. I put a stark note on the sink "water off" and began a quest for an intelligent hardware store clerk who could explain the murky world of plumbing. Meanwhile, Sue and the kids came home to a house without water and no husband in site. My neighbor, the one with the huge pecs and the red corvette, came to her rescue, bringing over a hose and some buckets for flushing the toilet without water. Several hours later, I finally got it all working, except for the leak in the brand new faucet. Whenever I see those words "made in China", I know I'm taking a risk. But for what those poor people get paid, it's surprising how well most of that stuff works.

9-5-00

This hasn't been my ideal Labor Day weekend. Except for an afternoon trip down to see my folks in Olympia, we stayed home. Dad's computer had lost communication with his modem again. I don't know why it does that. It worked fine for me and flawlessly for him as well when I watched him connect. We speculated about whether it misses me since it's my old Pentium 133. He says it always works when I'm there. The rest of the weekend I spent here at the computer developing my new business website. I have decided to keep this personal web site going as a separate entity. It makes a lot more sense than trying to fit all this writing and art into the business web site I will be using in my search for a job as a Web Designer.

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday trouble shooting a JavaScript display problem. My pages were displaying the mouseOvers perfectly in IE 5 but not at all in Netscape. I had hand coded the Javascript into 5 pages before I remembered to check them in Netscape. Three or four perplexing hours later I figured out the solution. Because I am using CSS to control the positioning of two separate layers, the JavaScript for the mouseOvers on the z-index layer of zero had to be taken out of the head and put within the body div tags that held the content of that layer. Fortunately this had happened to me before in school or I would probably still be scratching my head.

On a more down to earth note, this morning, on the first real day of my vacation I get to drive my car down to my mechanics. Since it's the day after Labor Day, he's bound to be swamped. I am taking my laptop on the slight chance he can do it while I wait. The silly old Toyota is displaying a problem in the charging system. I diagnosed it myself as a bad alternator. The book I have says to measure the volts across the terminals of the battery with the car off. That is 11 volts on my little hand held voltmeter. When I turn the car on, the volts are supposed to jump up to 13 to 15. Nothing changes. I drove it down to a parts store yesterday where the clerk measured it with a better system under load and pronounced the alternator healthy. I'm done with amateurs. I wonder whether I should have spent the last year in mechanic college and forgot about web design. Honest and thorough mechanics are as rare as gold. I'll have to pedal home on my 10 speed. The 10 miles of roads back home are windy and narrow, not ideal bike riding country. I am still amazed that I pedaled across the state in the ninth grade. I either had balls of cast iron or a blissfull ignorance of the driving skills of the general public.

9-2-00

Cauliflower ear. Definition: A flattening of and soreness in the ear. Usually a result of too much time spent waiting for, and talking to, tech reps about your malfunctioning computer. Dell has decided to send a tech to my house for my ailing laptop. It has stopped dialing up. Or rather, it dials up, but cannot surf any sites. They think it has a bad modem. I suspect software problems but they are the experts. I have been grieving over my ear. Not the cauliflower problem from too much phone time but my hearing loss. I have almost completely recovered from my 6 month bout of Meniere's Disease. I no longer get dizzy and rarely get that strange mind fog that makes concentration difficult. However, as predicted by other people who have the disease, I now have a hearing loss in my left ear. This is such a huge improvement over the other symptoms I suffered back in the fall and winter that I shouldn't complain. Still, I miss the perfect hearing I used to have. I guess there is a slight chance it may still return. But it's been consistently bad for a couple months now. I can hear out of that ear, just not very well. And it does vary from day to day. Sometimes it is almost perfect, others days I live with a loud ringing in that ear. I suppose that if one had to pick a disease to have, this is one of the milder ones. It doesn't stop me from doing anything and is more of a mild irritant than anything.

I really enjoyed working a week of day shift this week. Working dayshift as a journeyman press operator is almost a satisfying lifestyle. I probably would never have tried to change careers if I had been able to get a day job in printing. Unfortunately, in this declining industry, day jobs are as rare as intelligent, thoughtful drivers on the Seattle freeway. All the day jobs are taken by hard working people my age who have every intention of retiring in those jobs. And with every new technological advance in printing, more printers are put out of work.

Instead of getting the simple stuff I usually get on swing shift, I got all the hard dayshift jobs this week: big solids, fancy four colors with built screens, stuff that I was decidedly rusty on. Looking back on the week, it is interesting to note how frustrated I was on Monday compared to how satisfied I was on Friday. Monday I couldn't figure out why a solid wouldn't print smoothly. By Tuesday, on the second job that had a large area of solid ink coverage on a different sheet of paper, I realized suddenly that it had to be weak packing between the plate and the blanket cylinders, despite the fact that my measuring gauges told me that my packing was correct. Some old pressman's instinct surfaced from the past like a barnacled submarine and I knew, without a doubt, that I needed to add packing. Working dayshift makes one smarter. I put in an extra three thousandths of packing and that old gtoz printed the smoothest solid I have seen in years. Since I had already set and calibrated everything else on the press, the packing was the last needed ingredient to print perfectly. After that day, my week got easier every day. By Friday I was cruising. Compared to swing shift where I work in an empty shop, working days with a full crew of friendly people was almost fun.

I have the next 9 days off. I plan to finish the last 10 hours of my internship and then focus on this web site. Weather permitting I may also do some climbing and landscape painting. Yesterday was our twenty-first wedding anniversary. I am a lucky man to have a woman like Sue. Speaking of lucky, this vacation feels great already. I haven't been able to work much at all in html since school got out two weeks ago. It's fun being able to put my college education to work full time on bringing this web site up to the professional level. There are big changes coming here.