October, 1999


highlights

poetry- Voices from the Past- fashion slave- Limited Edition Prints- Painting On Location
Art Versus TV- Macabre dance- night skating- dysfunction- artistic brake job?


The Actors Mark Sue Clint Lisa
Job Printer OTA Yardwork None
Relationship Husband & Wife Son Daughter
Age 46  &46    15 12
Favorite sport climbing X-C skiing BMX jumping soccer
Grade Point 3.94 NA 3.833 3.833

10-31-99

Saturday was a bit rough, I started to feel dizzy as I drove in to work. Fortunately the seasick pill worked like a charm and I was able to work. I had this dream that my low salt diet would make me not need the pill anymore. Reality is a tough pill to swallow. Satuday night I spent 4 hours in Powerpoint working on this weeks presentation. Today did our bills until noon when I started framing for the show that starts next week. My dad and mom showed up to share Halloween dinner with us all before driving my paintings back down to Olympia where he will deliver them to the gallery Wednesday. Bless their hearts. I couldn't ask for better parents. They patiently waited around until nine PM when I finally finished cutting all the matts and packing up the 6 paintings. Even though I haven't cut matts in a few months I was able to remember the craft. I am always afraid of making a misscut. The math is a bit complex and a misscut means an extra thirty minutes of rework. With my 80 year old parents waiting sleepily to drive one hour home, I really couldn't afford an error.

All is well. I would like to write more but need to do homework.
10-29-99

It is Friday night. I got home early enough tonight to see the family. Fortunately, tomorrow I only have a half day of work. That will come in very handy as it gives me more time to frame the 6 paintings for the show next week at State of the Arts Gallery. Our two multimedia teachers are piling on the work pretty heavy now. They just gave us a 5 to 100 slide Powerpoint assignment that is due first of December. I am leading a group of 6 other students. The subject is Animation about which I know nothing. One of our classes is in creative team process. Apparently we are supposed to discuss team problems we have during these group projects in the team class. She says employers need employees who are skilled at teamwork. I like to work alone. I can trust myself to do everything right. So this will be a learning experience for me.

Wednesday our html instructor gave us another table assignment. When I got back from lunch they were talking about the table. I sat down at my terminal and said, "Well, I don't know about you guys but I am going to do this right now."

My instructor looked at me kind of funny like I was crazy.

"What, you don't think I can do it?"

"No way," she said, "J. just walked out of here because he got so frustrated with that table, and he's a second year student."

"I am going to do this table right now and be done by three oclock" I said.

"Wow," N. said, "What did you have for lunch, a couple power bars?"

"What, you don't think I can do it?"

"How much do you want to bet me I can't finish this by 3?"

Right about then N., our instructor got a thoughtfull expression on her face and I could see the gears working in her mind. I made a lame comment about sticking my foot in my mouth. We left it at that. I love to work under pressure. I don't know if it is the high stress rock climbing I do or just the nature of my life in the high pressure printing business where customers drive from hours away to sign off on my printing before I run their $10,000 dollar job. My boss tells me the customer will press check his job at 5 Pm and I had better by god be ready or they will be standing there watching me work until I am.

But, needless to say I was ready by 2:45. When I called her over she was kind of quiet as she said it looked fine. So no glory there, although I felt pretty proud that I could write all that code without once getting confused. It seems to fit my logical mind perfectly. I could post it here but it might be a little unethical. Time to hit the sack.
10-27-99

I have good and bad news today. First, the good news: School was lots of fun today. We were still working on the table you see below thoughout most of the day. I had one other class that took me away to study Photoshop and Powerpoint for a couple hours. The entire rest of my day was spent on the table. Since I mastered it yesterday, and our teacher can't move on until everyone else has mastered it, I and a couple other more experienced programmers taught the beginners. There are too many newbies for the one teacher. Intense html can be quite overwhelming, especially when one doesn't do ones homework. Perhaps I am being too hard on them. Our homework book made a lot of sense to me but that could be because it was more like a refresher course for me. I wasn't starting from scratch.

Today I spent about an hour with both W. and L. They caught on very fast once I showed them how to start simple on the complex table assignment by closing each tag as it is started. In other words, if you start a table tag, close it before you write the TR and TD tags. It takes longer but for a beginner it seems to help. I still do it on complex stuff like those stacked and nested tables that made up the assignment. It is the only way to keep track of the hierarchy.

Now the bad news. I had a dizzy attack at work. I just barely took the seasick pill in time. Like an idiot I ignored all the early dizzy signs. I have become accustomed to being very slightly dizzy all the time. So it gets tricky knowing when a big one is coming. I got so focused on my body I put the wrong ink in the right heads. That cost me a half hour. And it was a rush job that everyone was counting on me to finish. But it all turned out well in the end. I survived another day.

10-25-99
I had a tough time with this assignment today. I finished it at home but it still has me so paranoid I have posted it here as a back up. It is an interesting exercise in html programming if you like that kind of stuff. Now I need to do some framing out in the garage.
Nancy's Quiz
GREEN

Ohmy!
whatwill
shegive
usnext?

10-24-99
Both the kids were out with friends today. Sue and I took advantage of the sunny fall weather to hike out to a picnic spot in the woods by ourselves. We found a secluded level spot and took a nap. It was so relaxing to just hang out with my lovely wife, no kids around, in fact, no one at all. The sun was warm on our skin and we remembered why we got married. It always surprises me how we seem to be such a perfect match. Marriage should work this well. The reasons why it often doesn't for most people are so complex as to be beyond me. For the rest of the day I have been paying bills, talking my daughter into reading a book instead of watching TV and helping Clint de-rust a free weight bar someone gave him. Now Lisa is sitting on my knee and reading. Clint turned on Bart Simpson behind me and I watched her curiously to see if the book was attractive enough to win over the TV. Looks like it has. Score a point for intellectualism. We did a study for class on TV. I found a site called, kill your tv, that described TV as
"A silent destroyer of intellectualism". Another fact: By the time the average child has graduated from school, they will have spent more time watching the tube than sitting in class.

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10-23-99
I finished my six day week today at 3:30 PM. I would have worked longer but thankfully they had not given me a full day. I got too thinking this week about how I have been "working" from 8 AM until 9:30 PM for a month now. I wonder if it is only coincidence that I happened to acquire an ear disorder during the same time frame. I wandered through a health food store today picking up all the salt free goodies. I may have to learn how to cook. Everything that is salt free is also fat free. They must be aiming at overweight, high blood pressure types. I am under weight and trying to put on some of the 16 pounds of weight I lost since I started this "diet".

I am used to writing html at school in Notepad. Using my HotDog 5.5 html editor at home is a big change. For one thing, all my <TAGS> are color coded. This makes the editing so much easier. Plus I have a built in Thesaurus and Spell Check. I know my teacher is forcing us to use Notepad for good reasons. I guess I am just spoiled. It has been fun wallowing in <TABLE>S this week. I am frustrated with my fellow students. I am the only one except G. who has finished their TABLE homework. Until the rest of them catch up on ROWSPAN and COLSPAN our html class in dead in the water.

Everyone at work is back from their sickout. Apparently they had a big vent meeting and got some things ironed out. One of the reasons I am recareering is just this sort of chaos management style. It is extremely common in the printing biz. That's not to say I don't like my bosses. They are nice people and highly intelligent. But, as is usual in printing, they never ran presses. And the presses are the backbone of a print shop. I think you shouldn't be allowed to run a print shop unless you have first been a journeyman pressman. The most successful shop in this area is run by a former journeyman. The backbone of his shop is his fleet of well maintained, all Heidelberg presses. He only wants the best machines so his unfortunately underpaid employees have one less thing to worry about.

New equipment is the other reason I am switching careers. It is so expensive it has to run around the clock to be profitable and that is one lifestyle I am no longer willing to live.

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10-21-99
I have gone a almost a week without getting a full Meneires attack thanks to the seasick pills. Big chaos at work right now. The old owner J. who "retired" but still works in the bindery 6 days a week has been harassing employees again. The two best pressmen, G. and M. walked out early Wednesday and haven't been back. That leaves me, working only 5 hours a day and a Saturday. Well, there are also three other pressmen but they don't run the hard jobs that keep the shop afloat. Everyone is playing it down as a "sick out". I could tell management is a little worried. I don't have time for a long session here at the terminal. Instead I will post a couple emails I wrote home from school.
Hi Lisa,

How are you doing? Are you sending lots of mail to Brittany?

Email can be lots of fun, especially when your friends are far away.

My friend in Olympia sent me some snail mail information about my ear thing that might help me a lot. One of print outs mentioned that I needed to get plenty of exercise so I walked both before school and at lunch for a half hour each time. It feels real good to walk fast. Then I was able to sit calmly at this computer terminal instead of fidgeting like I normally do.

I have been getting a lot of answers right in class lately, sometimes way before the other students. You know, like the teacher asks a question and looks around and only one person raises their hand? Well, that was me a couple times. The lady who sits next to me said, "Ok, Mark, you can stop being so smart any time now." She is a friendly lady my age who used to do computer illustration.. I have real nice people on both sides of me at my computer table.

That was sure a good drawing you did yesterday. Maybe you could find a cat cartoon since you like cats? See you later,

Dad


Good day at school and work on monday. I kicked but at work finishing a four color job that G. had started. I was doing remarkably fast makereadies for me,under 20 minute washups and makereadies under :35 on both four color passes.

Came home exhausted at 10:15. Worked on Powerpoint presentation until 11:30. Couldn't sleep due to this cold/flu bug. took some cough medicine and drifted off at 1:30.

Ear bad all day today. I am finishing last pill of a 5 day course of Prednisone. Got the dizzys around 10:30 at school. Waited bit too long to take nausea pill. Sat at computer feeling the spins attacking my body as I waited tensely for the drug to take effect. I was wondering whether I would have to make an unsteady dash for the bathroom. Staggered out to the car and called an old friend in printing who I heard might have the same disease. Sure enough, as soon as I mentioned it he started describing what I had been going through. He was uncannily accurate in nailing all my symptoms. It turns out our doctors are partners in the same ENT office.

The pill finally started working as I talked to him on my cell phone in the car. I took that dose a bit late. I am ok now, thinking about going to work. I had better make it an early night and get some rest. D. said it is definitely related to stress although there is good stress also.

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10-17-99
I have spent so many hours in Powerpoint today my eyes are blurry. The program has some really annoying bugs that slow down my learning curve. I must have spent almost 2 hours figuring out how to get a screen capture (print screen) .clp into a useable file format that could be cropped and presented in my Powerpoint show. I am slowly working my way back to feeling halfway decent as we get used to this low salt diet. The seasick pills are a real lifesaver. I even worked out tonight on the Aerodyne and the weights. This page isn't going to be to interesting from an artist or rockclimbing viewpoint for a while. School, homework, my job,and family consume every minute now. Throw a bizarre new disease like Menieres into the mix and life gets pretty hairy. But at least now I have a medicine that works. Lisa went on a sleep over birthday party last night. I picked her up at noon. She said they stayed up until 6 AM. That's a good example of why we don't let her go on those very often.

Since we have never moved, she has had the same friends her whole life. Sue knows all the parents from back when she did home daycare for their first nine years and was able to volunteer at the school on slow days. Sue is great that way, taking an interest in all aspects of their lives. I, on the other hand, get so consumed with bringing home the bacon that I loose track of how important the kids' friends and hobbies are to them. Sue drove Clint into an indoor BMX bicycle track today in Tacoma where he and a friend rode the half pipes for 6 hours. He wasn't too pumped up so I presume he got spanked by the regulars. But it was his first visit to a serious indoor BMX place.

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10-16-99
Thank god that week is over. The drugs the doctor gave me are working reasonably well. I have been able to fight off the vertigo attacks by using the seasickness suppository pills. I had a full day of pressure in my ear on Thursday but prevented an attack by taking the seasickness pills every 6 hours. Sue has been asking everyone she knows about Menieres disease. It turns out to not be as uncommon as I thought. At Lisa's soccer game today she was talking to one of the other moms. This woman turned out to have had "the ear thing" for the last 6 years. It started out real bad for her also with almost identical symptoms and treatment. Now she only gets 4 attacks a year and feels those are probably because she doesn't watch her salt carefully. Her only lingering after effect is a slight hearing loss in the affected ear. She recommended not leaping into any ear surgery unless I was incapacitated. If this medicine becomes as trustworthy as it seems this first week I may be able to live with the disease. Thursday night I woke up at 1 AM feeling dizzy. I lay there getting worse and worse in the dark, trying not to waken Sue and the kids with my troubles. When I was sure I was going down the tubes, I staggered out to my lunch box and inserted an anti-nausea pill. The attack leveled off and within an hour the vertigo was gone entirely, avoiding 3 hours with the bucket on the floor. Now that is some good medicine! It is called Trimethobanzamide 200 Mg. I had a woozy couple days at work after that. Instead of eating the wrong things I have been eating nothing but fruits and vegetables, went from 166 pounds down to 147 and, predictably, that makes me super tired at work if I try to go past 9 PM..

School has been lots of fun this week. We do so much more than just learn html. One of our instructors has a wide background in film production. She is teaching us how to take quality photographs using both film and the new $1100 dollar Sony Mavica digital camera. We are studying lighting in a large on-campus photography studio. She is teaching us how to light a set, how to use main and fill lighting, and all about apertures, shutter speeds and filters for indoors and outdoors lighting situations. Her teaching method is a little vague but I can tell she really knows her stuff. Now we have assignments to take a couple rolls of film demonstrating our competency. I was out in the parking lot at school shooting foolish pictures of rows of cars to demonstrate depth of field as it relates to aperture and focal length. Kind of fun. I haven't done much photography since I took up painting. It would be wonderful to go out and really get creative but, with my schedule I have to do the least possible But now it well be part of my job to walk into a clients office, shoot his product and hang his site.

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10-13-99
I had another attack of vertigo/dizzyness last night at work. My ear had been ringing since the attack Friday. I had enough warning so I could wash up the press this time. I also managed to turn off all the lights and shut the building down. I called Sue's parents since Sue wasn't home yet from karate. They all showed up in the van to help me and my car, which I was too dizzy to drive get home. I slept solid from 9 PM to 7 AM when Sue talked me into not going to school or work.

Sue and her parents are such caring people. I am incredibly lucky to have married into such a warm family. When the chips are down, they are there for me. I can remember when I first met Sue back in '76, her mother was about 44 and very attractive. Now Sue is carrying that beauty into her middle age. I saw my ear, nose and throat doctor today. He said he can cure this disease and not to worry. It is just a matter of trying the least invasive methods first, like a low salt diet and diuretic pills. Then, if necessary there are second level things like drilling a hole in my skull and thinning the bone by the inner ear canal so the equilibrium chamber has room to expand without causing the vertigo. He also gave me some different drugs to possibly prevent the attacks from completing once I feel them coming. He said the MRI was normal as were the blood tests. I said I was almost wishing for an easily operable benign brain tumor instead of this bizarre ear thing. He said he would far rather have Menieres disease than an ear tumor if he had to choose. He seems like a very solid young doctor, very compassionate in his belief that he could cure me.

I have been going through some "why me?" self pity sessions. There is no easy answer to that question. I am feeling shaky today, possibly the aftereffects of the attack. I may simply be hungry since I am leery of food of any kind now. This will be great for my diet. I walked weakly up our old hill in town today for exercise. Felt good coming down though. I hope school isn't too hard to catch up on. About half the class has been sick at least one day so far in 3 weeks of school. It is very calming to be home, waiting to see my two great kids come walking down the driveway from school. The weather is lovely. Birdy is preening on my arm as I type this. Perhaps all will be well in the end.

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10-10-99
I apologize for not writing for five days. I have had homework up the wazzoo. I had the 5 minute Meyer-Briggs speech/presentation to give yesterday plus a 10 page Power point presentation due this next Wednesday plus a digital drawing of outer space complete with at least 3 planets, diminishing perspective and a clearly defined light source. And that is only half of what is due during the next week. The people who sit on either side of me have both quit their jobs to go to school. I envy their integrity and savvy financial planning. Their notebooks are models of organization, optimized for ease of use. I can just see them at home in the evenings carefully putting labels on the dividers for each of the nine classes we are taking.

My bad ear was ringing all week. Friday between school and work I went in for the MRI my ear, nose and throat doctor scheduled after the last attack of dizziness. The MRI was pretty scary. While I was out in the waiting room, a beefy guy my age walked out of the office and told the receptionist he had flunked his MRI and needed to reschedule for a later date when he could bring some tranquilizers. He didn't look like the kind of person who would scare easily. In the undressing booth were a whole slew of warnings about did I have any bullets or shrapnel or piercings in my body. Apparently metal in the soft tissue heats up in the MRI chamber and cooks the flesh around it? Filling in teeth are ok for some odd reason. She had me lay down on a narrow stretcher mounted on a track that went into a body sized tube 12 feet long. She handed me a rubber bulb attached to a long plastic aquarium hose to squeeze if I freaked out and needed to be motored out of the "oven". She said she would not be able to hear my calls (screams) because she would be behind a lead glass in another room. The bulb would trigger an alarm and she would motor me out. Next she gave me hearing protectors for the banging noise the MRI machine makes as it whirls around the tube scanning the brain a half a millimeter at a time.

"This will take about a half hour, but please, do not move at all the entire time or we will have to do it over again." The technician said as she closed a head positioning device over my face. She inched me in about a foot and asked if I was ok. I said I was and she sent me into the "oven" the whole way. Soon I was taking shallow breaths and pretending I was made of stone as the machine whirled and banged all around me. The sound seemed to penetrate right into my soul and I felt myself go weightless. I began to lose touch with reality and felt flashes of claustrophobic panic. Right about when I would have freaked out completely, right over the edge, I felt a great peace come over my mind and I focused all my energy on the power of the medical community to use this awesome technology to find out what is causing these bizarre dizzy/vertigo attacks this summer. After that it was no big deal. I motored out in about twenty minutes to the news that I had done well and the pictures were sharp. Later at work I felt an attack of dizzyness coming on around 7:30. I ignored it and kept working. Right before I got so sick I couldn't work anymore, I was kneeling at the feeder end of the press, trying to load it with paper. I was staring at the top of the level stack of paper and it was slowly spinning in a circle.

Within an hour I was on my knees with the bucket, a miserable excuse for a human. I called M. who kindly came in and washed up the press so I could leave when the attack passed. He could have come and found me huddled miserably in a corner of the loading dock with my bucket. Instead he brought his puppy who found me and licked my face. Animals are so wonderful. They don't care who you are or what kind of shape you're in, they just want human contact. The puppy came back several times during the twenty minutes it took M. to washup the press so I could leave. The cute little fellow seemed genuinely concerned about my well being.

Around 11PM I woke up on the floor shivering and tried to drive home. Center street, usually a forgotten four minutes in my commute, became a heaving ocean. Man I'm going fast, I thought, and looked down at the odometer. I could have sworn I was going 50 MPH the way the car was swaying. Hmmm, only 20 MPH...I wonder what I will say to the cops if they see me tonight. The freeway was quite impossible and I pulled off at a Safeway to sleep/freeze in the back seat until 1 AM when the dizzyness had finally passed. How convenient this was the weekend when our other car was in the shop so Sue couldn't rescue me. I could have called her dad for a ride but my pride got in the way of common sense.

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10-5-99

Portrait of an Argument,

Our assignment from S. for Friday is to present a 5 minute explanation of the S/N character types as defined in the Meyers Briggs psychology theories. S stands for sensing or observing concrete things like smell, touch, hear and see. N stands for iNtuition and iNtrospection.

My wife is an iNFj. I am an iSTj. We both have the i for intuition meaning we tend to think a lot about "things". We also both have the j for judging and tend to be judgemental. Or, to state it differently, we like to file people in boxes as soon as we can figure out who they are. Depending on their character, we will file them in the nice box, the mean box or the "deserves more study" box.

Where we differ is in my sensing (seeing) versus her intuiting. As an example she recently had an intuition that her checkbook was getting close to the bottom. Before I go any further here I should say that she is my best friend, my love and an excellent mother to our children. As well as being very compassionate about everything concerning our family. However, numbers have never been her strong point. I, on the other hand, because of my sensing (observing) nature enjoy math and do most of the bill paying. I had been avoiding her checkbook for a couple months. As soon as I got a couple pages into her balancing I found forty dollars worth of errors heading in the wrong direction on a one hundred dollar account. I could see I was going to have my hands full for an hour that I couldn't spare on my only day off to catch up on homework from school. Soon she was scratching my back (there's that intuition again) to encourage me to finish balancing her account.

Where the trouble started was when she iNtuitively began to understand that I was Judging her for her intuitive style of balancing her checkbook. She judged me for judging her and we spiraled down from there. I could go on and on about the gory details but it would be pointless. My son, who was calmly observing somehow got dragged into the whole affair. But at least I have some company in the doghouse.

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10-2-99
I was supposed to learn basic html tags this week. I have my tags down pretty well so instead I have been changing the tags here to all upper case and adding HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes to my images. My html editing program, Hotdog 5.5 has a find and replace option which comes in pretty handy for that. It's nice to hang out with the family. They are all full of energy. Clint and Lisa are having a friendly karate match in the hallway. I think they are going to crack the sheetrock if I don't take them somewhere outside. They both want to go golfing. Looks like we might go to a driving range today.
10-1-99
I have survived two weeks of school and work as of today. I thought I was going to have to spend the next two Sundays replacing my clutch. I was not looking forward to spending my only day off of the week working on the car. It seemed like a good idea until I realized how tired I was going to be and how much homework I was going to have. Sue called my dad today while I was at work to arrange picking up his Camry for a couple weeks. He offered to just give us the $450 to pay a professional to do the clutch. I really did want to learn how to do the clutch but it just isn't practical with my schedule. I suppose if my dad wants to throw money at one of his sons I shouldn't argue. We have this goof ball assignment to research the Meyers Briggs personality test on the internet. I have to present my findings to class next Friday. I suppose they are teaching us how to work successfully as a team with creative types whose personalities can be flakey to say the least. To me, with all my years in the printing business and working with other artists, it seems like common sense. But, maybe they see the big picture better than I do. I am paying them to teach me so I probably shouldn't second guess them.
In looking back over this paragraph I see a lot of wishy washy adjectives like "maybe, probably, suppose and realized". A good English teacher would spank me for writing like this.

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