2-28-05
Another 3 day weekend spent at the computer. Sigh...This time it wasn't because I was studying my new programming language but because of lesson plans. I've taught this class before and created some very good lesson plans for each week. I thought I had it covered until I realized Friday that the quarter for which I created lesson plans was summer quarter which only has 9 weeks. This is an eleven week quarter.
       I had to devote my weekend to creating one of the two missing lessons for tomorrow's class. I am also teaching a class to the faculty and needed the last lesson for that class, also tomorrow. That was 16 pages of lessons in the ongoing book I'm writing on web design, one page at a time. They take about an hour or two a page by the time I've added in the screen shots, the pointing arrows, checked for numbering or spelling errors and reread it once or twice for logic errors.
      But I got it all done, and done well. I took a few long breaks over the 3 days I spent on the two and a half lessons. Sue and I went out for a couple bike rides, I helped Clint put a clutch master cylinder on his pickup, and I veg'd out until noon one morning with a good book: "Just Friends" - Robyn Sisman. That woman can really write!
     I've never read her before and picked it up at the library based on a great cover design. She writes about a lonely mid thirties career woman in New York who is looking for Mister Right while her biological clock sends her increasingly loud panic alarms. There have been many books on this subject, but Robyn develops her characters so completely that I could truly believe they were real, and become involved in the story.
     The male lead is a frustrated writer who teaches creative writing at a small college. He had a best seller early on but then developed writers block which makes his life somewhat similar to mine. His writers block was related to a tendency to "pick up" the young women he meets in his writers workshops. He realizes over the course of the book that the older woman his own age, who he has been 'just friends' with for years is the one.
       On my bike ride down the dirt powerline road I stopped where a narrow one lane bridge crosses a small stream and stood staring at the water for a while. I was the only one around for miles. The stones under the water had that yellow look they get around here from some kind of algae as the water burbled merrily along toward the 6 foot pipe under the road.
        I thought about all the salmon I'd seen spawning here 4 months ago but couldn't see any sign of them. Their bodies have been absorbed into the ecosystem completely, probably helping to add nutrients to the stream for their eggs under the gravel. It's funny to think about all the little baby salmon eggs down there, waiting for warmer weather to begin their long trip down to the sea.
       It looked like it would be possible to wade up the stream for miles if one were willing to climb over all the fallen logs and duel with the possessive dogs in the houses along the way. That stream has been pouring water down to the Sound for tens of thousands of years, and the thought of just how unimportant my little life is in the grander scheme of things is humbling.

2-22-05
With the exception of a one hour bicycle ride with Sue, I spent the entire day yesterday writing php code. For the uninitiated, php code is a programming language used on the internet to create e-commerce sites, among other things. The fanciest thing I've done so far is create a simple calculator, a drop list that changes pages and an email form that presents an "email has been sent" page after the user clicks the submit button.
    I know it doesn't sound nearly as exciting as creating beautiful things in Illustrator, or out in my garage at the easel. Most especially, it doesn't even hold a candle to going climbing down at Smith Rocks, which is my usual activity on Presidents Day weekend. Still, none of those things will ever pay the bills, but mastering php will most definitely pay the bills. There is a high demand for programmers right now, and even if the demand changes over time, once I've learned one language, the others come easier as they all use similar logic.
     Because I already have a deep understanding of Flash Actionscript, a more visual programming language, I'm finding php to be an easy learn. My first html teacher told me 5 years ago that I'd need to learn a programming language someday, and she was right. Thankfully, it's just as interesting as html was and I have an aptitude for the logic, now if I could just learn to type faster. How was I supposed to know that I'd need to learn to use the backslash and dollar sign keys?.
    I went down to talk to a new client yesterday who is interested in putting her business online. Her first question was how much would it cost, but after talking with her for a while the question became "what do I want to achieve with my web site?" She hadn't given it much thought, but after I showed her the web sites of some of her competitors, and reminded her that she pays a very large chunk of cash each month to the phone company for her yellow pages advertisement, she began to understand how a web site is simply another way to reach out and communicate with her customers.

2-13-05
Spent Friday and part of Saturday looking for ways to increase my income and get us out of this negative cash flow situation. While I have no immediate plans to leave teaching, I do have Fridays off and could easily become a part time "Guy Friday" employee in one of the big web shops downtown. This might be ideal for them as most of the shops are being cautious about hiring new help.
      Even if they were looking for someone with my skills (interface design, XHTML, CSS, Flash), they probably would only need me on a freelance basis. I say this because both of the big shops that took the time to speak with me said they were looking for someone who has high end programming skills. And while my comprehensive knowledge of interface design and slicing would be helpful, they would prefer someone with deeper knowledge in the arenas of XHTML, CSS, search engine optimization and a server side programming language.
    I had an illuminating conversation with my friends down at Artifex, the shop that laid me off 3 years ago:

      One of the other shops I went to was desperate for a PHP programmer, and while they didn't have any current needs for my skills, they did ask me to put the word out around the college that they are currently looking. One of my former students lives and breaths in PHP and I let him know that there was a shop looking for help.
       Saturday afternoon Sue and I walked the Purdy spit in a cool and bracing wind. The sky was darkening as evening approached and lighting up the wispy clouds 40 miles off with a very pale shade of pink. It was so lovely it made me think of my neglected box of pastels gathering dust at home. The wind was strong enough to lean into as we hiked up to the bridge and back on the familiar sand and gravel beach. We've been walking that sand spit since we moved out here 22 years ago and it holds a lot of great memories for us.

2-6-05
Through the glass of my bedroom window where I sit writing today, the twelve inch thick fir trees stand mute, listlessly moving in the occasional light wind that accompanies the heavy rain. I hear it pounding into the roof, and dripping off the eaves onto the sodden grass. I'm snug and dry in our modest little house, thanks to the new roof we had put on a few years ago.
       Clint's out in the kitchen filling out a form sent to him by the Tacoma Fire Department that will allow him to do a "ride along" in one of their ambulances. He's attending Tacoma Community College, taking basic math, english and public speaking classes prior to starting in on any specific course of study. At first he leaned toward radiology, but only because of the high starting wages. He doesn't really have a passion, other than bmx and kayaking, hence the "ride along".
     Sue got paid Friday, so we have enough food again finally...lentils were getting old. I went shopping mid-week for food and spend the last of my money, three dollars, on a bag of lentils, a box of rice and a can of tomatoes. Yesterday I tried to put together a budget in Microsoft Money. I've been using it for years to balance my checkbook and send payments online, but I've never been poor enough to actually need to set up a precise budget.
    We have $1500 in monthly expenses. This includes our mortgage, car payment, house & car insurance, water, electric, small payments on both VISA cards, phones, dial up service, prescriptions, gas and the orthodontist (Lisa). This does not include food, car repairs, household items or clothes.
   Sue and I examined our checkbooks, trying to figure out what we spent on food and household items (shampoo, paper towels, etc) and estimated we are spending around $1100 at the grocery store each month. If you subtract all that from our monthly take home income, there is still another $400 a month, unaccounted for that we spend in cash. It is probably split between food, gas and miscellaneous items:bike parts, ink and paper for the printer, oil filters, etc.

We sat there staring at each other and wondering where all the money was going. That's almost $400 a week we are spending on food and "stuff" for our family of four. We are not blowing money anywhere on unnecessary items like toys or fancy clothes. It appears that the only place we can "cut the fat" is in our food budget. I'm thinking that we need to stop buying meat such as chicken and fish and return to the vegetarian diet of my early twenties. It's better for my cholesterol and by spending less all month long, we'd have enough money left over to cover the crunch time on the first of the month when all our biggest bills come due at once.
   This is all assuming I can't find a part time job on Fridays to supplement what I earn as a part time teacher. I spent Friday, my day off, updating my web site and resume to reflect the new skills I've acquired over the last few years of teaching and freelancing. The changes are a little rough around the edges, but I think I may have it done by next Friday in time to pound the pavement for a few hours and see if anyone needs freelance help on Fridays.
   After getting flummoxed in Microsoft Money yesterday morning I switched off for the day and went on a long bike ride with Sue. We headed off down pole line road but turned north on an old logging road. We'd heard from 50ish woman walking her dog on poleline that the logging roads and trails went "forever" and she turned out to be right.
    The narrow, 8 foot wide dirt track went on and on, winding around swamps, over small hills, through clear cuts, occasionally turning into shallow lakes that we splashed through carefully, unsuccessfully trying to keep our feet dry. Because there were no road signs at the many intersections, I resorted to an old mountaineers trick, piling up small cairns of rocks into arrows pointing back the way we'd come.
   We tried to keep the sun at our left rear, meaning we were riding north along the spine of the peninsula through a forest we hadn't known existed, despite having it practically in our back yard for 23 years. We saw no other people or houses, just miles of narrow logging roads surrounded by one hundred foot second or third growth fir trees. Surprisingly there weren't any abandoned cars, or litter of any kind, just empty woods and these old logging tracks. Something was keeping the brush back, and from the looks of the track down the middle of most of them, it was walkers and mountain bikers, with maybe a few motorcycles or three wheelers.
    After about ninety minutes of steady pedaling we saw a house and exited onto a wide gravel road. There were regular houses now, usually of the trailer trash variety but the gravel road stretched on interminably. I was having doubts about my ability to navigate home through all the intersections successfully as I'd not put cairns at every single turning.
   We saw a guy walking a dog and told him we were lost. We pointed back the way we'd come and told him we'd come from the Key Center area. He looked surprised and said we couldn't get to Key Center that direction. When I tried to explain that we had just done that very thing via all the forest trails he looked confused. I asked him where we could find a paved road, figuring we stood a good chance of recognizing a real road and he pointed downhill.
    Sue was getting anxious about her ability to pedal all that distance back through the forest. We thought we'd be better off on an established road so we coasted downhill past the numerous horse pastures and tract homes, finally emerging at a road she recognized. Several years ago we trained both kids to drive on these roads, and before that during her "soccer mom" period Sue would frequently drive the kids around the peninsula to visit their various friends. She felt pretty confident she knew where she was and we headed off.
     Fortunately she was right (I hate it when that happens) and we were soon pedaling back up the old familiar poleline (powerline) road toward our house. Next time we go out I will bring along some navigating tools: pencil, paper, compass, altimeter...maybe even a map, although I doubt it would have the logging trails.

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