Tomorrow morning we are going rockclimbing. It will be our first trip of the year. And my first trip since college started in September. Clint is bringing one of his ballsy BMX riding buddies. It will be interesting to see if a little competition will get him higher up the cliff. He has had a 40 foot top limit until now. I will be lucky to stay out of trouble myself. I haven't done any pull ups this year. Developing my mind has taken preference over my body. There may be enough of the climbing season left in September for me to get warmed up a little. I have to get up in 6 hours to climb, more later.
Time moves on. Our office manager had a birthday today at my web job. I am thinking she is about my age, maybe a little younger. It is terrible the way our minds stay the same, but our bodies fall to pieces. Lisa is looking more like her mother everyday. She thought it was funny when I complained that she was getting older and prettier everday while I was getting older, sicker and fatter everyday. There is some exaggeration there, but some truth as well. I only weigh 158 pounds, but because I am in school, working or studying 7 days a week, I have lost all my tone. Dave called me yesterday. We are going to go climbing this weekend with the family. Sue and Clint will rope up. Clint likes the muscle routes. Sue has been, in her time, an extremely gifted friction climber. Without her, I could never have gotten as good as I did. I suppose that is true of many things in my life. School has been fun lately. We turned in an assignment in DHTML today. I had no idea that it was simply CSS and JavaScript combined in a layer format. N. has showed us how to make absolute values and the z-index attribute work in both browsers. I was even able to position a layer with flash, although I have not yet been able to layer anything above the flash movie. It's lots of fun tweaking the code to get a nice display. Today we opened Dreamweaver for the first time. It looks interesting. The wysiwig functions appear intimidating. Thank goodness we learned notepad first.
That was one long week. I haven't written in four days. Writing here was a luxury I couldn't afford. When are they going to come up with a method for getting thought past the keyboard without typing...oh, I just remembered voice recognition software. But then my kids would laugh at me talking to the computer. No, I want something that can read my thoughts. Like my wife when I look at her in a certain way and she says she has a headache. My web job is quite predictable. I get there at 1 PM and work until quarter to 4. They know I have another job. My printing boss also knows I like to leave by 10 PM at the latest. They try to give me just enough work to last until 9 PM. Last week, they gave me jobs that potentially could have been finished by nineish, if everything went like clockwork. The problem was, they were either large quantities (as in 16,000 impressions) or four color or both. Plus every night everything was a "MUST".
I suppose that,s enough whining for one entry. The sun is up bright and clear this morning. I worked on a flash project for my web boss for many hours yesterday before and after working 8 hours at the print shop. I am pretty happy with it. I offered to do it for free, since I am really just a beginner at flash and don't expect to be paid for learning. However, the partially finished project looks like it will have some value. At the least, he said he would use it on the company site and if any clients wanted flash work done, he would have me do it. That's good enough for me.
It looks like the rollerblading will be fun today. I'm tempted to do that instead of drinking coffee. Despite my doctors orders, I started drinking coffee again. It's supposed to destabilize the pressure in the balance organ of my haywire ear. He has been wrong about everything else and he is wrong about this. Coffee just wakes me up.Since I went nine months without it, getting excellent grades, I am trying not to fall back into the silly habit of 5 cups a day. Today I need to work on my DHTML project for N. She is our only teacher this last quarter. I also have psychology to read for my 8 AM class. It's typical of that field that even the name is ridiculous. Psychology has 5 letters before the first vowel. Our teacher hopes to convince us that psyche is more than common sense.
I was obsessed with psychology in my teens, as were most of us " back to nature freaks". Among the many popular psyche theories in the early seventies were Transcendental Meditation, Jung, Buddhism, Primal Scream Therapy, Yoga and general meditation. I was certainly a mixed up teenager. It would be funny to be able to step into a time machine and talk to the old me. I doubt if I would like the long haired unemployed hippie living in the tipi, reading his psychology and Buddhism books. I would probably shake my head and walk away. Does that mean I don't want to be young again?
Four point oh. It almost killed me to get it but I got a 4.0 this quarter in college. For far too many nights in a row I was getting 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night. The weekend was lovely without any homework. We drove down to Dads house for the afternoon. For exercise, Sue, Lisa, Dad and I walked down town. I rollerbladed along beside them, occasionally zooming out ahead and returning. I skate as fast as a bicycle. I really love stretching out and covering some ground. Monday and Tuesday I discovered that I was right back in the homework soup again. N. has given us a project in DHTML (Combination of CSS and Javascript?). My Psyche teacher is giving us a chapter a week to read. All this wouldn't be too bad if I hadn't had big musts every night at the print shop. Tonight I got out of there at 8:30. I had a brief dinner and settled in at the kitchen table to read some psychobabble. Within 10 pages I found myself sitting upright, holding the book in my hand, sound asleep in the midst of a wonderful dream. I was conscious of being at a table, but I couldn't remember which table, or even whether I was at school, work or home. As I struggled to figure it out before I opened my eyes, I came to the realization that I was pushing myself too hard. Too hell with the homework.
Good news! I haven't had any trouble with my bad ear in 5 days which is a 4 month record. On examining my life for reasons I see I've had two changes in my life. Finals ended and I started having a cup of coffee once or twice a day. I have heard that stress can bring on the symptoms. But I have never seen it work so dramatically. This disease reminds me of the weather up at Mt. Rainer...you don't know what's going to happen until it does. I ended up having a nice couple days at my web job. Spring quarter ended Wednesday. I offered my time to both bosses <web&printing> and they both jumped at the chance. I am finding there is a dark side to working two jobs. You may be working 14 hour days but you're not getting a penny of overtime. Funny how that works...I'm getting a lot faster at certain things as a web designer. Nothing like working on lots of content to turn on some lights in the old brain. I work with a really funny crew of designers. At school I have become accustomed to the buttoned up, professional demeanor required in the college setting. Out in the work place I am finding they have a lot of fun. This isn't Kansas anymore. We are located in old printers row in downtown Tacoma. On my way to work I walk past all the old printshops that wouldn't hire me over the last 25 years. I used to be on a first name basis with some of the owners, coming in every two weeks to ask about openings. Now, when I walk by I don't feel any pain at all. They can have their high paying union jobs. I have a new skill and it's far more marketable than the outdated printing technology I learned in 1974.
Back on swing shift. Finals week put me back on swing. Not that I was sleeping in, far from it. I was staying up until 2 every morning for the last week. Getting up at 6 after a couple of those nights in a row is grim. I have been struggling with a recalcitrant table at my web job. Tonight, when I got home, I printed out the code. No wonder I am having trouble, the code is 10 pages long! When I wake up tomorrow I will color code the table tags to find my error. I have decided to buy a laptop. I am looking at the worst summer of my life without one. With a laptop, I can work in the car while Sue drives us around to pretty places like the coast and Leavenworth. I can visit my parents more frequently. I refuse to sit at this computer for an entire summer doing homework every weekend, all weekend long. I have tomorrow off from school. I still have to do my web and printing jobs but after I sleep in. That will be delicious. My ear has been relatively problem free for 3 days. That is a record for the last 2 months. I don't know if it is because finals are over and the stress is down or because I started drinking a cup of coffee now and then. This wacky disease keeps me guessing. I will sleep like a baby tonight.
Rain is falling gently on the deck outside the window where I have been doing the last 5 problems of my trigonometry final. This is the third and last test of the quarter which ends three days from now on Wednesday. I have gotten perfect scores on both tests plus the one extra credit assignment I managed to wade through. On the tests, an A was 100 points. I got 110 points on both. I am kind of expected, both by my classmates and myself, to go 3 for 3. This 35 question final is the hardest yet. He is asking things like, "What is the volume and the surface area of a hotdog with a diameter of 1 inch and a length of 7 inches?" We have to take into account the hemispheres on the ends of the dog. Then we had to find the radius of a circle with the same volume. Fortunately he didn't ask us how much mustard it required in cubic ml. Another one was find the volume of a sphericle shell with a 8 inch inner diameter and a 1 inch thickness. The test goes on and on. The last 5 problems are graphing using the theta and function formulas to come up with sin waves on a graph. This is stuff he lectured on in class but didn't give us time to work any actual problems in the book. I took copious notes and should be able to pull it off. I doubt if I can go 3 for 3. I'm only human. It would take someone who gets more rest than I do to get perfect scores on all three. The rain is so peaceful. It makes me want to lay down on the couch and take a nap. Trig calls.
Finlays are 90 percent over. I turned in all my stuff for web design. My Publisher 2000 projects are complete but not due until next Wednesday. This weekend all I have to sweat is the Trig test. He gave it to us in a take home form...4 hand written, zeroxed pages of problems. For example: figure the volume and surface area of a hotdog weiner given the diameter and radius of the end hemisphere. We are also doing a passle of sin graphs of various phase shifts. This is from the 3 chapters he buzz sawed through in the last week.
My methodical approach to learning has been taking a beating. I will have to locate the pages in the book that explain each problem and learn how to solve them on a individual basis. I was up until 1:30 last night trying to design a decent splash page for my final. This morning in class I completed a nice flash movie, it is on the
home page of this site. Considering I completed it in around 2 hours, from concept to completion I think I can be proud. Now that I have mastered the technique the possibilties are endless. By the time I got to work I was so hammered I couldn't even troubleshoot my own table code. I brought home a floppy to work on when I am fresher. I was trying to change 6 nested tables into 5 nested tables with ten rows in the last table. On some decent rest I am sure I can breeze through it.
Finals week. Need I say more? In addition to finals and my after school job in printing. I now have my 1 PM to 4 job in web design. I am getting better at my web job. I feel like I am actually getting some things done now...But, as I said, it's finals week. Most of my work is going into my new online site. I plan to have this personal site for writing and art and my other,
professional site for displaying my html and flash skills. I will combine the two in the future.
Sunday night. I've had a long weekend of homework. Except for working Saturday and taking 3 rollerblading breaks, I haven't left this computer since I got home at 9 PM Friday. Well, I slept of course. I skated down to the clubhouse by the lake after dinner. My mind was filled with all the homework I didn't and wouldn't get done. There isn't any possible way I can maintain these grades without my lab time,which is now spent working as an intern. So there I was, standing on the deck of our development's clubhouse looking out over the lake. There was a light breeze swaying the tall pine trees around the lake. Their tops, one hundred feet above me moved slowly against the clouds. But I noticed it wasn't just the trees moving. The whole sky, filled with backlit clouds was moving in unison above the lake. The clouds were back lit by the setting sun in pastel shades of blue, gold and pink. My mind, in the presence of such grandeur shifted gears to the big picture. I get wrapped up in the goals I set for myself and loose track of the importance of beauty and the time to appreciate it. Long after school is over, in fact, long after I am dead, buried and forgotten, those trees, or ones just like them will be waving their good nights against the backlit clouds of sunset.
Sue and I went for a skate/ride tonight. I skated, she pedaled. I got spanked in web design today. I was trying to build an exotic table. I struggled with it for 45 minutes before my boss came over.
"How are you doing?"
"I am really sucking today."
"What's the problem?"
"I can't make this graduated tint match the bgcolor in the table data cell."
"You don't have Paint Shop Pro on this old computer, come over to mine and I'll show you how to fix that. In the future, anytime you have a problem like this, or can't figure something out, save yourself the time and come ask me, that's what I am here for."
That was exactly what I needed to hear. At his computer, he showed me, in Paint Shop Pro how to fix the problem in under ten minutes. His fingers literally flew across the keyboard. I don't know if I will ever be that good. People like my boss and my friend A. are so extremely fast at computer logic they scare me. My classmates and my teacher all seem to think I am brilliant, I felt as smart as a turnip today. It was partly the late nights studying all week...until 1 or 2 AM everynight. My ear has been balistic all day also. No dizzyness, just this draining mind fog. A bit like working with a fever. I brought the files home to study when I am feeling better. The stuff he was doing was the most awesome web design I have seen. I am itching to get into Photoshop and figure out how he did it. We have been taught that Paint Shop Pro is for amateurs. In his hands, it sings like Pavarotti.
