12-31-05
Found some great snow up at Paradise two days ago. We took the old Toyota station wagon up there for it's front wheel drive. It's kind of scary driving that far in a car with 235,000 miles on the original engine. Still, it saves us spending $200 on studs for the truck and the front wheel drive is less likely to spin out on the icy miles up to Paradise at 5400 feet.
    They only have 75 inches of snow, which is about eight feet lower than normal...if there is a normal anymore. Because they hadn't had snow for a couple weeks, the 8 inches of fresh powder from the night before rested on a firm base and made for very nice skiing. The used skis I picked up at the Mountaineers sale last year for $30 work great. I couldn't believe the guy was selling them for that price complete with skins. I only wanted the skins, but he wouldn't sell them separate. I've had to do a bit of sewing repair work on the skins but they are good as new now.
    That purchase gave us 3 sets of skins and lets me, Sue and Lisa climb the hill together as quickly as our lungs will allow. The light was very flat and I had some tense moments up by Panorama Point trying to get to a viewpoint. I couldn't tell if it was level or a 40 foot drop off. Snow is funny that way, without sunlight, there are no shadows and all you can see is white.
   We made it up to the view where we could look out over the Nisqually glacier. Many of the crevasses are still showing the lovely blue light one expects to see in summer. By this time of year they are "normally" covered in with the winter snows. I took a few pictures but they turned out bad in the flat gray light. We pulled our skins off and cruised down the hill quickly, taking 20 minutes compared to the 2 hour ascent. I pitied the poor snowshoer's who put just as much effort into climbing up, but then have to walk back down. We blew by them like crotch rockets on the freeway.
    I can remember the days when we used to snowshoe. It's great exercise, and much better if you are carrying overnight gear...very stable. I have a pair out in the garage but the lacing has rotted off. I had them stored down at dad's house and the moisture got to them. Looks like LIsa and I may go to the climbing gym today. Both arms are still blown out, but maybe if I take it easy I won't do anymore damage.
   Clint and his buddy Craig are stuck in Washington D.C. at the airport all day where their flight home was canceled. They booked another flight tonight but won't be home until midnight or later. I'm wondering whether he'll think blowing $500 on air fares on a one week vacation was worth it. He worked hard for that money.
    That was his first plane ride ever. Well, that's not quite true. A month ago he went skydiving one time with a couple buddies. We're hoping he doesn't go again. One of his buddies severely broke his leg when he landed.
   I've been plugging away at my cartoon animation. It's slow and tedious work, but the results are fun to look at. It's so slow that I'm not at all sure my students could or would learn it. Not that I care that much. I'm doing it for me, and if it turns out to be something I can teach, well, that's fine, but it's not my main reason for studying animation. Most of the work has been in Illustrator. I spend hours drawing, then minutes animating.

12-28-05
My annual physical is today. I stretched it out to two years this time. He's been telling me my cholesterol is too high so I changed my diet and wanted some extra time to get used to the weird food. It's always kind of scary going in to the doctor at my age. This is when the body starts to slide down the slippery slope of decay. Some people go fast, others slow. When you are in your twenties and thirties it's rare to see your friends die. Now that I'm in my fifties, we see a couple apparently healthy acquaintances die each year.
   Many people bring it on themselves of course with unhealthy living, but some get struck by cancer or heart problems that seem to come out of the blue.
   I've pretty much given up on getting that camera. The list of things I want, or need is so long that I've decided to write them down, just for fun:

• Canon Digital Rebel XT $1000 - want
• Lens for Digital Rebel $500 - want
• Flash 8 $270 - need
• 12x13" Canon printer $450 - want
• hearing aid, 60% loss, left ear $1800 - need
• raincoat for daughter - $90
• replace rug in bedroom with wood floor for allergy relief $700 - need
• new linoleum in kitchen $500 - need
• replace rug in living room with wood $700 - want
• Creative Zen Micro WMA player $300 - want
• new radio for truck $350 - want
• studded tires for truck $200 - need
• new treadmill $600 - want
• new bifocals $180 - need
• pay off our credit cards $700 - need
• new work shoes $ 90 - need
• new bib overalls $65 - need
• outdoor yard garage light $60 - want

That works out to roughly $9400, which kind of puts it in the correct perspective. On the other hand, having a good marriage and a healthy, relatively normal family is priceless and something that many rich people can't get at any price. Of course, having all this stuff and being rich would be even better... I guess I'll just have top keep plugging away at the laptop, studying Flash Cartoon animation in hopes that someday I'll get good enough at it to get a better job.

12-22-05
Got my first animated cartoon running. Although it's only 7 seconds long, there is about 40 hours of Illustration work sitting (or walking) on the stage. I'll have to admit that I like it better than PHP. There is a much larger wow factor with animation than with PHP. Anyone with a decent brain can learn PHP, but it takes a decent brain, and an artistic eye to do animation.

12-21-05
Sanity finally prevailed and my family talked me out of buying the Canon SLR I really couldn't afford. It wasn't fair once I stopped to think about it. During the many long hours on weekends and weeknights when I was earning that freelance money, my wife would ask me, why are you working so hard, let's go for a walk. My reply would be something along the lines of: "Well, you are always complaining about how I don't earn enough money, well, I earned one hundred tonight."
     This implied that part of that money was hers, and that I wasn't just working for me, I was working as the de facto head of household. So then to turn around when I got paid and spend it all on a toy just for me, well, you can see the flaw in the logic. Instead, I bought the heater she has been wanting for several years. Of course, then I had to install it, and that took about 14 hours. I was replacing a 30 year old baseboard heater. When I opened up the wall, I saw that the studs were too close together because the forced air heater is an "in wall" unit. I opened up the wall to the left and found a wide spot, but the 220 Volt wiring was too short to get there.
    I sat there and scratched my head for a while with Sue hovering in the background, telling me to return it and get the old style (but less efficient) baseboard replacement. Finally I figured out that if I pulled a couple wire anchor points, and cut a notch in some studs, the wire might just make it. I got it over there to the wide spot, but found that I didn't have enough skin (outer wrapper sheath) on the wire, and would have to run the individual black, white and ground wire directly through the hole on the heater. Of course, I'd neglected to buy the "stress relief plug" and had to use the old one, but I did wrap the wires in a home made skin made from black tape before I pulled them through and hooked up the heater.
  What I should have done,and may still do is to buy some new 3 strand house wire and a couple junction boxes. That way I could have it wired up to code and we could sleep easier. Installing the heater took a lot of drilling and it occurred to me that, since I couldn't reward myself with the camera, I still deserved some kind of toy. When the little lady came home I asked her what she thought about me buying a cordless drill. I've always wanted one, and with the crampy hands I've got it would really come in handy for home projects. $110 didn't bother the family near as much as $1000 and I drove off to home depot like a kid in a candy store.
     Today I screwed together the sheet rock covering my excavation holes, then went out to the garage and built a long shelf above Clint's kayaks where we can store a couple hundred pounds of gear that has been cluttering up the garage floor. That was way overdue. When I was researching how to fix large holes in sheet rock, I discovered something called a "coarse pitch sheet rock screw". I've never seen them before, but I am now a huge fan. Combined with a cordless drill, those things make building stuff a snap. There is no pre-drilling. You simply press them against what you want to drill and pull the trigger. I made that shelf in half the time it would have taken without the drill and the fancy screws.

12-17-05
Finished grading my finals for the quarter this morning (Saturday) and I'm finally free. I would have been done a full day earlier but for being exhausted from working overtime on a freelance project. This client came to me via a friend of mine from college. He has been maintaining the site for several years but no longer had the spare time for the latest updates. I took it on and added about 20 pages (including the pop-up windows) to the "home theater" section. It totaled around 38 hours of time, and I spread these hours out over the last 3 weeks, working late into the night several nights a week, and at least half a day on the weekends, sometimes both days.
    Working those hours wouldn't have been so bad except I've also had a bunch of other distractions: cars going to the shop, helping kids with homework, grading finals and using the official college online grading system for the first time. Towards the end on Wednesday, the last day of college, I was beginning to rebel against the workload. Like a donkey that won't pull the cart anymore, I began spending increasing amounts of time avoiding work by surfing around the digital camera sites, looking at the latest toys.
   Because I have earned enough working freelance to pay for a new digital SLR, it is very tempting to spend long hours researching the best models, and dreaming about how much fun it would be to buy one and learn how to take gorgeous pictures. My old film Pentax SLR broke this summer, and while my 2 year old Canon G5 works just fine, it is so noisy that the stock photo agencies will not accept my photo submissions.
     Not that I plan on making a living shooting pictures...I don't have enough talent or drive to compete in that flooded market. Still, I feel that I've earned the right to buy that camera (Canon Digital Rebel XT, or the Nikon D50). My wife is a much more practical, down to earth soul than I, and she says we can't afford a new unnecessary toy. She is quick to point out that the house needs endless repairs, our retirement funds are laughable, and our Toyota has 235,000 miles on the odometer. Not to mention a couple credit cards that could be paid off with that money.
    I do have a long and cherished history of buying toys that were not necessary. I don't think I'm unusual in that regard. I don't get carried away, and our credit cards get paid off totally at least once a year. I'm not one of these idiots that have a ten thousand dollar credit card balance due to an out of control toy habit. I think we owe about six hundred total, and that is about our average. I would never buy a toy on credit these days, having learned my lesson. Still, when I earn the cash working weekends and evening, it does seem like I deserve to spend that on a toy.
    What it really comes down to is: do I want to hurt my wife? She feels that my toy purchases are a direct blow to the security of our household. When I bought my Canon G5, she burst into tears and made me feel like quite a cad. Now though (two years later), she has taken several hundred pictures with it and has forgotten about how angry the purchase made her at the time.
    I don't enjoy being in the doghouse, but I also don't like the feeling of being p_ssywhipped. What to do, what to do? Perhaps I'll just wait. I've found that patience is a virtue when it comes to electronics purchases. I can easily live without it, and the desire for a new toy fades with time. I want it more as a reward for working hard than having a true need for it.
       Putting the money in savings gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling too. The longer I wait, the better the technology in the camera gets. There is a slight chance of getting another large chunk of freelance money soon. I entered some paintings in an art competition with the City of Tacoma. If they buy one, I'll see another few hundred dollars to use as a bargaining chip with the little lady. I think we'll go see King Kong today. I've not been in a theater in several years.

12-10-05
Went to the Christmas party at the company that laid me off 4 years ago. Five of my old office mates are still there, which includes the three owners and two employees. They are a great bunch of people, and it's certainly not their fault that they had to lay me off. From a business standpoint, they actually kept me on about 2 months longer than they should have, . All the web shops were laying off and closing down back then, those were scary days to be a web designer.
      While they've weathered the storm well and seem to be in pretty good shape now, it was hard shaking the hands of people I used to work with, knowing that they haven't had to scrape for a living these last few years. They still have the same great job, working with in a friendly office with other professionals. They weren't cast out onto the street to wonder where their next paycheck would come from.
      Still, I thrive in adversity, and having to scrape for a living is nothing new to me. That wasn't the first time I've been kicked to the curb, and I'm sure it won't be the last. In the 25 years I worked in the printing business I got fired once, and laid off twice, which isn't bad for the printing business, known for it's cut-throat business model.
      One thing I will say about my former colleagues is that they deserve to have kept those jobs, their skills were more marketable than mine. What is sad is that in my absence, they have continued to improve, whereas my skills, at least in pure web design have stagnated, frozen in time if you will.
      Sure, I still do interface design in Photoshop and help my students assemble their web sites in notepad or Dreamweaver, but I am not learning new stuff, just rehashing the old stuff I learned four years ago. I do try to learn new things in my "spare" time, if any full time teacher ever has "spare" time.

• started a freelance web design business with 7 clients so far
• learn how to use javascript drop down menus
• Learned how to leverage my web skills into a full time teaching job
• taught myself how to write lesson plans (teacher training? What's that?)
• Was asked to teach Illustrator before I knew the program, learned it in a 3 day weekend
• Taught myself InDesign, used it to create a professional quality calendar of my art work. Used InDesign to create 12 page press-ready lesson plans utilizing page numbering and styles
• Mastered Digital photography with my Canon G5
• Read 2 php books cover to cover and developed a working order form calling to a MySQL database. Also implemented a php based contact form on my web site.
• Survived the downsizing of our department
• Developed lesson plans for five classes that did not exist until I created them: Drawing, Dreamweaver, Illustrator two, Flash two, Applied Design (Combining Illustrator and Photoshop)

This weekend looks like the usual mix of shopping and studying animation software. I may volunteer at the gym tomorrow. They've been emailing and calling. Supposedly I am over my hours for the month already but perhaps they can apply my hours to the future when they aren't so busy. A climbing gym was long overdue in Tacoma and now that it's here I want to help out however I can.

12-4-05
Climbed today with my son and his buddy at the climbing gym. While Clint has climbed outdoor for years, he had never been to a gym before, and his buddy had never climbed period. They both had a great time. They've been moody teenagers for so long it was weird watching them jump right in like a duck to water. I've known Clint liked climbing a little for a couple years now, but he hasn't brought a friend for longer than that. Perhaps that is the ticket to get him hooked on the sport.
   I spent another 9 hours working on my customer's site this weekend. The first 6 hours were legitimate. The last 3 involved searching for budget priced stock photos of Tahiti. I'm not at all sure I can or should bill him for that. He really shouldn't have to pay for the time I spend climbing the learning curve of the stock photo market. It's amazingly complex. I spent an hour at Corbis.com wading through endless pricing usages, none of which matched my customers situation.
   I spent another two hours wandering around the web to different stock photo agencies, each of which wanted me to log in with complete street address and phone number. I'd planned on taking today off the computer, but after my client called, I figured I might as well nail down his photos. Three hours later I have a headache and I've made absolutely zero progress.
   On the bright side: the money I've earned freelancing enabled me to put $300 in savings, something I've not done in months. This is finals week coming up. I love this time of the quarter. I'm done lecturing and all I have to do is wander around and help the students as they work on their finals. No more lectures until next quarter. No more spending an hour each night at home preparing for the next days lecture, no handouts to copy and staple, no lesson plan to write from scratch on the weekend...almost like a normal job.
   All the climbing I've been doing has blown out both arms. My left shoulder, which hurt a little in the summer now hurts a lot, any time I lift it at a certain angle. My right bicep has some kind of tendonitis going on. It doesn't like lifting anything remotely heavy. My left knee hurt so bad I had to walk the hills on my last bike ride. I'm not even going to mention my deaf left ear. I think I need a full body exchange.

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