10-29-00

Too much time on the computer lately. Sitting at the kitchen table, eating a baked potato and reading my Flash manual, I realized the potato was too big to finish in one sitting. I would have to put it in the fridge and finish it for breakfast. But then Sue might throw it out, so I'd need to put a save note on it. No wait, there's an easier way, I could just go: file, save as...huh? I actually thought I could "save as" a potato...for a second or two. The mind is a funny thing. We went for a walk around the Harbor this afternoon. We live near a touristy little former fishing town. There is still a real fishing fleet based here, though the yachts now far outnumber the fishing boats and condos have taken over most of the waterfront.

Near the public dock there is an old fishing wharf dating back to around 1915. The owner must be languishing in a nursing home somewhere. It hasn't been touched in the 17 years we've lived here. Brand new docks and condos surround the decrepit old eyesore. But there it stands on the huge lot, smack in the city center, defiantly thumbing it's crumbling nose at prosperity and speaking volumes about the true history of the town. Now that football is over, Clint has the time and energy to ride his BMX bicycle. We saw them doing tricks as we walked along the waterfront street lined with beamers and Jaguars. I plan to talk to a few web design firms this week. My site has been pushed as far as I care to push it without a complete redesign. I may still gussy up the intro a bit. I am learning how to put sound in my flash movie tonight. It will be interesting to see how it affects file size.

10-28-00

Hearing a roaring outside, I looked up alarmed from the laptop where I was working in web design. That sounds like rain, a lot of rain! When I opened the door water splashed onto my legs from the deluge pounding the front steps. It's surprisingly cozy in here at midnight, as long as our 18 year old roof holds out. Now the lights are flickering, good thing this laptop has a full charge. I've been painstakingly going through this web site, page by page, bringing it up to the quality level I'm now capable of. The trouble is, there are 45 pages and I'm only one guy.

I had a great night at work. I have been working so many hours this week I haven't seen the family since Monday. I was determined to get home by 9 PM before they all went to bed. On walking into the shop, I was dismayed to see my first job was a 4 color. I needed to leave by 8:30. It was 3:30 and I had to cut the stock before I could run it. The building was empty except for a few salesmen upstairs, but my foreman had left me a note. Three jobs were listed, the top one being the 4 color. Under it, he had written, "Do fast". Under the other two he had written, "Do good". Well, that was all the guidance I needed. I blew through that 4 color like it was chocolate fudge; I was focused, my mind was clear of distractions and I could print like I'd been born to it.

I got a sinking feeling as I pulled into the driveway: the house was dark. But fortunately, Sue was still awake. When I think about what is really valuable and long lasting in my life, it's the people that stand out. Compared to say, a car. Even my Gremlin only lasted 17 years. The '82 Toyota Dad sold me 8 years ago is so rusted out underneath it's an accident waiting to happen. Very few of my possessions go back more than 15 years. They wear out, or become so outdated they aren't worth hanging on to. I have some art that goes back to the turn of the century, but that's the exception. In my life, the things that have staying power are the people. Sue and I have been together since '76. And, of course, Mom and Dad in Olympia are still our best friends.

10-26-00

Words of wisdom from a seasoned online journal writer. Build it carefully at the beginning or pay the price later. I am working my way back through the older months on this journal, bringing them up to date with my new look. I am talking about tedious in the extreme. I am not in ideal condition for this. I've been working a lot of hours at the printshop. On my way home from work at midnight I stopped to buy some groceries. There were 20 people huddled in sleeping bags outside the front door of a closed Target. Several had lawn chairs. They were clearly planning on waiting for morning. As I was paying for my groceries, I asked the checkout lady what they were doing. She said Play Station was going on sale in the morning for $300. Although envy their ability to cough up that much cash for something so trivial, they really need to get a life. Clint's team won their last football game of the season tonight. They finished the year something like 2 for 14. He's glad it's over. He hasn't been able to enjoy his BMX hobby since football started back in June. He'll be able to catch the regular bus home every afternoon at 2 PM instead of getting home at 6.

10-24-00

Revisions and re-revisions. I didn't like the earlier composite header image at the top of this page. It wasn't long and narrow enough and the file size was too large. I spent a couple hours in Photoshop trying different things, eventually settling on the 10k image you see now. When I called in to work this morning, I was surprised to find there was none. It's just as well, since I needed the time to polish my site and revise my paper resume. Clint is getting a learner's permit in the next few days. I am afraid to find out how much that is going to raise my insurance rates. We have no extra money in the budget for it right now.

10-20-00

Revised at last! This 3 year old web page has been quite a trial. Halfway through web design college I did a temporary remodel that lasted 9 months. This is the latest version. I hope you like it. I plan to work my way back through the older months in the journal and update them to the new look as I have time. I also will be updating the flash intro. I plan to make more use of my paintings and less use of text in the first 50 frames of the animation.

As I stood in the shower this morning, I felt a wave of something strange wash over my consciousness. Was it just the wonderful hot water streaming down my body in the cold empty house? With chagrin, I realized it was a sense of well-being. I've been a bit under the weather lately. I assumed it was simply too much work and not enough play. But now that this web site and my company's web site are both up and running without major problems, I feel like I have finally climbed up to the top of the mountain where I can relax on the summit and enjoy the view for a while. The only serious thing standing between me and looking for work is the flash intro on my business site. I could skip it of course and start looking now....an interesting thought. Birdy, our pet cockateel is charming this morning. After my shower I brought him out of the garage for a drink of water from the faucet. He is cautious around the strange stream of water coming out of the shiny pipe. I rest my arm on the edge of the sink so he can decide whether or not he wants to drink. Today, he looked at me, looked at the thin stream of water pouring down, stretched up as tall as he could, then bowed. Looked at me, at the faucet, and bowed again. I think it's some sort of communication ritual parrots do. After several bows he reached over and took a quick sip. Several more careful bows and drinks later, he walked up to my shoulder where he sits now as I type. There are times when he has the manners of an English butler. Other times he is as wild, and annoying, as a crow outside the bedroom window.

10-15pm-00

White hands on a black dial. My watch sits on the desk by the laptop as I type, counting off the seconds with teutonic precision. It's not a cheap watch. I grew tired of $50 watches after 6 in a row died. But neither is it a Rolex. As I watch it, my mind races ahead with satisfaction over the next few hours. My web site remodel is moving right along. I am done with Flash for a while and back in straight html. It feels great to get back to something at which I am very good at. I love Flash, but I am always tackling things I have never done before, and, while always a great learning experience, the roadblocks take time. With html, I can go as fast as I can type. Jumping back and forth between Photoshop and Homesite, tweaking my CSS, cutting and pasting, I mold the collection of pages into a presentable, streamlined homepage I can be proud of. There are times when I think web design could be a decent job. If this all sounds a little sappy, blame it on the coffee and an empty house. They are all in bed.

10-15-00

Sue and I went for a walk yesterday on the Purdy spit without the kids. It wasn't quite a date, but seemed to be the break we needed. It's easy to get confused at home with all the pressures of my pending career change. But beneath the surface confusion is a deep and strong bond going back a quarter of a century. She is my girl, no doubt about it. There was a lot of debris on the beach: pop bottles, old broken docks washed ashore from who knows where, tennis shoes, sweaters and just about anything else that still floats. The saddest thing we saw was a cute seal, quite dead. Flies were buzzing around it's dog like face. It was easy to imagine it 30 feet off shore, watching us curiously as they so often do. But here it was, stiff as a board mixed in with the casual debris of humanity on the shores of Puget Sound. I wondered if it had became ill and swam to shore to die rather than drown.

I've been climbing the learning curve with flash and have pretty much finished my nav bar. Now I need to design the intro to my business page.

10-14-00

Just walked in from work at midnight. There was only 8 hours of work and it made a lot more sense to complete it in one shift. I usually try to get home to see the family on Friday night but they all had the day off from school and saw me this morning. The Mariners lost again tonight. I am a fair weather fan. Since I don't watch TV, I listen at work on the radio. When they are winning, it can be exciting. You never know what can happen or when. They got creamed so badly tonight, 7 to 2 by the Yankees that I regretted tuning in. It took me an hour and a half to recover my good spirits. The printing was going fairly well, but I kept thinking about how badly "we" had lost.

I tried to stop taking an antihistamine called Claritin, thinking I wouldn't miss one tiny pill a day. I've been off it for 2 weeks and my nose is running and my eyes are itching like crazy. This morning I took one of the antihistamines and feel almost normal again. That's some good medicine. By getting all my work out of the way in a shift, I now have a full weekend to focus on converting this web site over to Flash. I plan to have a Flash intro that changes to a part Flash, part html frameset. I am making great progress on the Flash nav bar. By progress, I mean I have it working well enough to see it is all wrong and needs to be redesigned. But, fortunately I know how to fix it. I wish I could say the same thing for Sue and I. We never see each other. When we do, we go through the motions with our eyes closed. I need to take her on a date. She's so obsessed with being a perfect mother that I've become an afterthought.

10-11-00

It looks like my instincts are still good. I have been getting deluged with doubt from the people I most care about, namely: my family. They can't figure out why I haven't hit the job market as a web designer. I have even begun to wonder myself. They don't understand the artistic mind. Just about the time everyone else has washed their hands in despair over us, we pull a winner out of the hat. I kept reminding myself that if I didn't believe in myself, no one else would, so I had better. I've been pushing and pushing on my Flash intro. It has been taking shape, but lacked cohesiveness. Tonight I got off early from work, getting home at 10:30 PM. I sat down at the computer, fearing another frustrating night of experimentation. For some reason, it all clicked. The next time I looked at the clock, it was 1:30 AM. I had gotten into that rare artistic zone where time has no meaning. Ever since I started school I have been afraid I wouldn't be able to transfer my painting talents from traditional media to the digital arena. I think my latest work lays that to rest.

10-9-00

Bushwhacking up the steep brush covered hillside, I felt the large spider web glue itself to my face and chest. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a large speckled brown shape frantically climbing away toward the safety of a tree branch.

"Aw God, this is gross!" I hollered.

"What's the matter Dad?" Clint shouted from down the hill.

"Oh nothing", I muttered, scraping the web off my face, "I don't think we took the right trail Clint, there's no cliff up here."

"I think I see something off to the far right Dad, isn't that some cliffs?", he shouted.

We climbed up the steep broken hill side for another 5 minutes before breaking into the open at the base of a 100 foot cliff. It had a lovely 1 inch hand crack splitting the left side and room for several steep face climbs if one had a power drill. But we didn't and, as we stood admiring the steep stone, a fine drizzle began falling. Looking South out across the several mile expanse of Lake Cushman, I saw the far shore disappear into the mist.

By the time we got back down to where Sue and Lisa stood waiting on the trail, the drizzle had turned to rain, and on reaching the car 10 minutes later the rain was coming down in buckets. Later we met my parents at a restaurant in Hoodsport for dinner. They had driven up to deliver some of Dad's homemade bread. It was fun seeing them. I hadn't really wanted to go climbing at all, especially with an iffy weather forecast and the 6 day week I'd just finished. But when Sue woke me up at 9:30 Sunday morning, saying everyone wanted to go to Lake Cushman, I found it hard to say no. I kind of needed a break from the constant pressure of this career change effort into web design. It was fun climbing a couple routes and romping through the woods. There's something about bushwhacking that brings out the explorer in me.

10-7-00

Saturday morning, 10:30 AM. I just got up. It's been a long week of printing and web development. We've been swamped on the Komori all week. For the last 2 days, I have run 35,000 sheets of 19x25-80 Lb book through the press in a 7 or 8 hour shift each day. To imagine how much paper 35,000 sheets is, picture a skid of paper 5 feet wide by slightly over 3 feet long and about 6 feet tall. It weighs around a ton. I grab as much of it as I can hold, about 2 inches, and load it carefully into the feeder end of the two color printing press until it is a neat stack about 30 inches high. I turn on the press and print the paper at an average speed of 7000 sheets per hour, unloading the printed sheets from the other end of the press and stacking them up on a skid as fast as I can move. I will do it again today. My hands ache as I type these words. We don't usually get orders this big.

I am hoping to see the family briefly around lunchtime before I head back into the printshop for my daily dose of punishment. I actually don't mind printing when I work this hard. We need the money desperately and I stay so busy feeding and unloading paper I don't have time to mope. I saw Sue for a few minutes when I got home at 10 PM last night. She asked me to guess what she got at work. Looking at her face, I could tell it was something good and guessed a bonus. Well, sort of she said. They had heard she was broke and passed the hat, coming up with $320. It's another not so subtle indicator that I need to get my web sites done and enter the job market. It would be quite easy to fall into a deep pit of despair over all this...I have an interesting little mantra I tell myself when the pressure builds up and our carefully laid plans appear to be falling to pieces. I think about how there will come a time in the future when I will wish I could be this age again: young, healthy and working hard at a paying job. Things could be a lot worse.

10-4-00

My Flash intro is coming along splendidly. Now I have three scenes, a preloader and mouseovers. I've come a long way from the easy stuff I was doing in school. I'd like to write a long entry here, but I am tired from working full time in printing plus staying up late developing Flash. When I got home, before I hit the computer, all I heard about from my family was, when are you going to quit your printing job and start making decent money in web design? We are tired of being poor, etceteras. I feel like I am getting pressure from all sides. I am busy at work, they need me to work more hours...my budget demands I work more hours. Sue's job is the school district where overtime is not possible. But our future hinges on my spending as much time working on my web sites as possible so I will have a presentable resume. It's a "Catch 22". I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't.

10-1-00

All my time this weekend, with the exception of a 7 hour shift at the printshop on Saturday, went into finishing the exercises in my Flash book. I would like to say I was able to apply those techniques to my new interface, but, alas, it's not true. I did learn a lot about actions as they apply to controlling animations in Flash. But not too much of it applies to my particular needs. They all think I am a bit crazy for studying so diligently. Sue asked me tonight if it wouldn't be better if I started working full time at the print shop. She and the kids can't seem to see the long term view. All they see is the empty refrigerator. They know I am quite capable of getting a Seattle job paying good money in printing. What they don't seem to realize is that I don't go to work simply to provide for my family. I also want some job satisfaction for myself. Printing doesn't do it anymore. I am very close to finishing my portfolio to the point where I can go out looking for work and feel confident in my abilities as an entry level Web Designer.

We went for a walk down pole line road before dark. We heard gunfire and got a little nervous since we would have to walk right by them unarmed. As we came around the corner and saw their truck, we were relieved to see it was over on the other side of the gully, about a block away. As soon as we came into view they stopped shooting, not resuming until we were well out of sight around the next corner. We have actually shot there ourselves. It's a little different out here in the country. There've been a lot of cougar sightings lately. I kept glancing around, hoping I wouldn't have to scare one off. At least we haven't seen a sasquatch. Some poor sap up in Granite Falls swears he had one in his yard last week. I don't understand how anyone can believe in those things. Where do they go to die? There should be thousands upon thousands of skeletons around the world that surely would have been found and put in museums by now. If we can stumble upon the dinosaurs, surely we could find a couple sasquatch remains.