Skill Point Allocated

I'm particularly proud of myself this weekend. I've never been much of a handyman and the DIY gene that others seem to possess has been largely dormant in me. But, I've made a vow to myself that I should begin working on these kinds of skills. So this weekend, I found myself installing our washer and dryer while switching out the three prong plug for the four prong one with the ground connection built into it. I also fixed a piece of furniture that got broken in the move from Chicago. I realize that these tasks are certainly not the Mount Everest of home improvement skills but, hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?

The move itself went really smoothly. Normally when we move during the summer months, the temperature is usually in the 90s with a heat index in the hundreds. Not that weekend. It was low to mid 70s all day Friday and Saturday and only crept into the 80s on Sunday. Monday, our actual move day, it rained, but the rain held off while the movers loaded the truck so it was really just cool and breezy. Also, because of the weather, we were able to move all of the boxes and little odds and ends ourselves and only needed the movers for the furniture which cut our cost in half.

So Neo (The One)

I wrapped up my official first year of teaching this past weekend. It was a year. Let's just move on. To be a little more verbose about it, my first year was pretty typical I think. It was a lot of fumbling around, trying to gain some understanding of just what the heck works and what doesn't while trying to keep the avalanche of paperwork at bay. I had some successes, some failures, a lot of minor headaches, one major headache, and some fun also.

So far, being off for the summer has only allowed me the time to try to recover from my severe allergic reactions to whatever is in the air out here. If I just got the sniffles and sneezed once in a while, I wouldn't mind, but I get full on cold/flu symptoms that knock me on back every time. In my last post, I was sick. I'm sick now too. Last year, I wasn't really sure what was going on because I was under a lot of stress and that depletes your immune system. But I'm really thinking this is some allergy and not a bug or mental issue. I mean, I've experienced the same symptoms so many times in the past ten months it's approaching ludicrous.

On a better note, I think we found our house. I went out looking with our agent again yesterday and had "that feeling". Almost everything about the place is exactly what we've been waiting for. It's a three bedroom ranch with a mostly finished, walkout basement and a great view over some rolling grassland. It also happens to be very close to Nick's new daycare facility, which will be a huge plus if we end up buying. We're going to do everything we can during the contract process to try to make this happen. I'm not necessarily looking forward to moving again in a month, but if it happens, this should be the last one for a while.

Oh and it's my birthday. Happy birthday to me!

Writer's Slack

It is sometimes difficult to get the wheels turning or the gears grinding in my cognitive machinery to write on a regular basis once again. There can be so many reasons for the apparent writer's block, none of which have anything to do with lack of subject material. First, after being gone so long, where would I start? So much has changed that filling in the monumental gap would take time that I quite frankly do not have. Second, if time is of the essence, should I record the major milestones from the minutiae of our existence, simply denoting events that occurred, or should I dig into some mental gewgaw, some philosophical plaything to purge some of that intellectual energy? In time I should get to both if I once again make a habit of sitting down to weave together these pointless threads of introspection that will someday be the only extant map of my existence. Onward.

The minutiae did indeed include some remarkable events during the last two months. We moved out of bucktooth central, our apartment building of six months, and into a house in a suburban Omaha neighborhood. Not so mysteriously, our physical and mental health improved drastically. Also, we celebrated Nicholas' first birthday on the 14th of February. He had a great time visiting with his Grandma and Grandpa B. and Nana (his great-grandma Moore). We did take some pictures, but I will have to find some other time to share them. Finally, Amy and I also celebrated ten years of marriage. It is a significant milestone, a testament to our devotion to one another. Also, we rolled over another number into a higher decimal place on the ball-and-chain odometer, like watching your car hit 50k miles, which is always a good time. On a side note, I find it wholly self-satisfying to not only have our wedding anniversary in such close proximity to a Hallmark (R) holiday but also the birth or our son which allows us the freedom to celebrate more personally meaningful events and avoid the trappings of an otherwise overblown day.

As for the other thoughts I have that I'd like to share, I will save that for later in the week. I am currently on Spring Break and will hopefully have the time to sit and wonder as I wander, metaphorically of course.

These Are The People

The trip back to Chicago went well. I even had an entire row on the plane to myself on the way out. It was good to get a chance to go out to dinner with some of my friends, too. There was a lot to do at the house to prepare. Between Curtis and myself, we shoveled the driveway which was full of snow, especially the end where to snowplows shove all the extra snow from the street. I think there was at least three feet piled up there. I also had to shovel out the garbage cans which were buried very deep next to the alley.

Once everything was loaded, I had about half an hour to wait until my ride to the airport arrived. It was really weird standing around waiting in the empty house. A little sad, a little exciting, there were lots of things to think about while I waited in silence. Every time I heard a creak, I would look around and expect to see Sid creeping around the corner or sitting on the stairs in between the banisters.

My reverie was enjoyable but then I remembered one of the reasons we wanted to leave that neighborhood in the first place when I heard a snow shovel outside. I lightly pulled open one of the slats in the blinds covering the side door window. One of the nearby alley neighbors was shoveling snow back into our driveway from the alley. I don't know why. Nothing was preventing him from getting in and out of his garage. It really was not a whole lot of snow. He glared at me and I closed the blinds. People there were nice enough but it really wasn't a neighborhood, just a collection of houses with people living inside of them. We lived there four years and only at the very end when a young couple moved in next to us to the east did we really meet anybody. They were very nice and we will miss them, but otherwise, there really isn't a whole lot I will miss about that neighborhood.

The Darkness

There have been a few moments these past months when things have been really dark: losing lots of money on our potential house sale, not being able to find a place to buy in time for our move, neighbors that don't seem to care that our building is on fire, Nicholas being sick twice in a row just when we have more work to do than ever to get things done for both work and house, Nicholas refusing to give us a full night's sleep, my school announcing massive budget cuts, no raises in the near future, and the potential to cut low-enrollment programs (i.e. mine) in the coming months. It just seemed to be getting worse by the day.

But there have been good things happening too. For instance, during the first week at least, I'm not finding my job an unending well of stress like I did last semester. Don't get me wrong, it's still stressful. But I can see how things fit together now. I can see the big picture for most of my classes because I've been through them once, so I know what I want to change and how to change it to communicate the concepts more clearly. I no longer feel the need to work 70+ hours a week to keep up. If something goes wrong, I'm trying to let myself write it off as experience instead of berating my lackluster abilities, which is something I've done for a very long time and a hard habit to break.

As for the school's budget cuts, I've been assured by my dean that my program will not be cut. The justification was something that I'd thought about, too, but needed to hear from someone more in the know to believe or trust. Basically, my program is new. They've just dumped thousands of dollars into it and it has the potential to grow rapidly if we can figure out how to best capitalize on the demand. Therefore, music tech stays despite only having about 12 majors to speak of right now.

Finding a place to live has been a giant bummer so far. We've basically resigned ourselves to renting. With the astounding amount of money lost on our house in Illinois, we cannot afford the healthy down payment we need to get the loan we want. We'd pretty much tap our liquid resources to muster 8-10%, which in the current climate, is still not enough for some banks to grant you the loan. So, the rentals we've seen so far have been pretty terrible until yesterday. We found a very nice house that a couple would like to sell but is willing to rent for $1100/month, about the same amount we'd pay in mortgage for anything we could currently afford to buy. It has three bedrooms, a family room with fireplace, a relatively new kitchen, a two car attached garage, and a mostly finished basement. It's very clean and well-kept, something we can't say of most of the other places we've seen. The only catch is that the owners would rather sell. So, we're hoping to get a lease drafted and signed before any potential buyers swoop in and snatch it away from us, not to mention our stuff is moving out here next week and we'd like to put it where we are going to live rather than a storage facility.

Again, I won't lie, things have been looking rather bleak around here. I look at our situation and in some ways it's the same as when we first started out, me working 60 hours a week for the $17K yearly salary that would just barely pay for meager shelter, food, and clothing, while Amy finished her graduate degree. It's certainly just as difficult, we just have higher bills to match the higher salaries. But if we can get out from under the house in Illinois and rent the house that we found yesterday, things will start to look up, some pressure will be relieved. If one thing should fall in our favor right now, we need this to be it. I hope it works out.

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

I'm frustrated because I'm sick again. I have no idea why, but that cold is coming back. I started taking those foul-tasting Cold-Eeze when I noticed that I had a sore throat this time, though. I hate them, but they do decrease the length of a cold. The real issue with my second round of sickness, however, is that we still do not have insurance coverage and won't until September first. I'm not really concerned for Amy or myself as we can weather a cold without issue, but if Nicholas gets sick, he'll undoubtedly take a harder fall.

We still feel pretty unsettled here at the moment. The abrupt nature of this move coupled with the speed with which we have had to employ in order to accomplish it have taken an emotional toll on us. We'll recover, I know, but for now we don't feel at home. We're going to start looking for a house in a week or two, so I'm hoping that once we sell the house in Chicago and move in out here, our dispositions will begin to improve.

Iowegian

I've now been living in Iowa for two weeks. And I have somehow not gained 200 pounds by eating corn. ;) It's been a long couple of weeks, though. I moved most of what little I brought up to my apartment on Friday, August 1st while Amy had an interview for a job. She and Nick left early Saturday morning and I've been on my own ever since. That weekend was the hardest because I had nothing pressing to do, but once work began that next Monday, the pace picked up significantly and it hasn't slowed yet.

Unfortunately, I either was simply so upset that it made me sick or I contracted a bug from the water not long after I arrived which made that first week one of the roughest I've ever experienced at a new job. I spent much of my first Saturday in the bathroom and by Sunday I could barely sit down. If I managed to do that, I would double over in pain and lie moaning on the floor once I was done. My throat then started feeling a little scratchy. By Tuesday, my second day of work, my initial digestive problems were subsiding, but a full-blown cold had reared its head. Being wary of the water, I made friends with the local Walgreens employees after I started showing up there every morning to buy water and orange juice.

As for work, I've been busier than I've ever been in the last five years. There's a lot to know, a new confusing building system to navigate, and of course, the fear of getting up in front of a room full of people on a daily basis to conquer. I'm pretty familiar with most of the material that's being taught in all my classes. There are a few dark and dusty corners of information that I haven't used in a while that I will need to brush up on, but otherwise I know what I need to know. However, I still wonder if the day will come when the dean comes to my classroom and calls me out as a complete fraud.

I've been working long hours for about twelve days straight now and I am tired. I have one more day of meetings and instructional sessions to attend tomorrow and then Monday we're off to the races. I can't help but think of what my adviser in graduate school, Virgil, told me one semester, "All of my work is heaped at the beginning of the semester, while yours is heaped at the end. Our workloads are about even at midterm." I hope his experience will mirror my own.

Farewell, Chicago

So it's official. I've given my two-weeks notice to PIL today and have accepted a job as full-time music technology faculty at Iowa Western Community College outside of Omaha, Nebraska. I haven't posted much recently because, frankly, not much else has been on my mind and I couldn't talk about anything publicly until today. So much needs to be done on our end that there isn't time for anything besides thinking about moving and actually moving as I start August 4th. Amy will stay behind with Nick for a while to finish our business here and they will hopefully join me by the beginning of September.

I am sad to leave my coworkers behind. They have been a fun group and I will miss them. They've challenged me in ways I never expected and I feel I've become a better person because of it.

I've never been good at goodbyes. We've been seven years in the Chicago area now and we have hat a lot of fun here. But despite my penchant for personal comfort and stability, it is time for some new adventures. Onward.

Anticipation Unbearable

Amy and I have less than a month left before we pack up our lives and move across town into a new house. Well, it's a used house, but it's new to us. With all that's going on, all I seem to be able to think about is getting back to writing music. Maybe my fantasizing is just stress-related. It always seems as though I'm itching to write new music only when I am so busy that I don't even have time to think about it. Prior to February 2004, I was mostly writing music and creating sound effects for other people so that my portfolio would impress someone and I would get a job writing music and creating sound effects. So I finally got a job (and it is indeed most rad) and ever since I've been heaving a metaphorical sigh of relief by not wanting to compose music or deal with sound outside of work. Five months of rest and I'm ready to create music just for me again. In all honesty, I did record two songs for my own pleasure since January, but one was just a throwaway joke track about the movie Robot Jox. The other was a jazz flavored electronic track that I recorded with my Zube Tube and tenor saxophone.

Anyway, I've been listening to Tree Wave, Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, and Printed Circuit, among others for the last few weeks and they're inspiring me to dust off my coding and tracking skills to get some killer old school chip sounds happening. But, I'll just have to wait until after our move in August to get some time for that kind of stuff. Until then, I'll continue to stay inspired by those very cool artists mentioned above.

I am definitely excited about the new house for musical purposes, though. First, my parents have been threatening to haul all of my stuff that's currently stored at their abode to Chicago as soon as we got a house. Now that that threat will be carried out, I'll have my Commodore 64 and Atari VCS back. It'll be like a reunion of old friends. I haven't been able to play on the authentic machines ever since I left home 6 years ago and I'm looking forward to putting both machines through their musical paces. Emulators are cool and all, but there's nothing like using the real thing. Secondly, I don't have to keep quiet on my saxophone like I have to in the apartment. It's always nice to be able to just play without worrying about complaints from the neighbors.

Currently listening to: mmfan316, Modern Control, incredible chip music from Japan.