the journals

Last night one of our neighbors allowed his car alarm to go off – from one in the morning until who knows when (hours later). I’ve been having a terrible time sleeping, anyway, so I think I clocked in at about two or three hours tops, after going upstairs where it was infinitely quieter. I had this funny nightmare about being late to work because I was sleeping upstairs, too… I dreamed I overslept until 8:40 (after I’m supposed to be at work) and then, to top things off, couldn’t manage to drive to work because I was dizzy and kept crashing into telephone booths.

I have weird dreams sometimes.

Tonight I made a cheese-and-eggplant sandwich (Seth’s working tonight), on this funny rye stuff that isn’t sure if it’s a cracker or bread… sorta like pita bread, only crunchy. At any rate, it was pretty good. I’ve never cooked eggplant before, and I didn’t have any clue what I was doing, but I think it turned out okay. Not very filling, though!

I had some more significant things to say, but I’m really, really sleepy, and I apparently don’t have as much energy to write as I thought I did. So I think I’d better close, scoot off to get ready for bed, and save the deeper things for another day.

Tonight we went to see Finding Neverland (opens to more screens on the 24^th; it’s still a limited release right now) – the movie about J.M. Barrie, writer of Peter Pan. I thought it was a rather sad movie, on many different levels, from the opening sequence to the end credits, but it was sad in an undepressing way, which is good. I don’t think I like depressing movies.

Anyway – I liked it. :-)

I had written a whole long entry about the above screenshot from a game called The Sims 2, but then a series of events intervened and my entire entry was lost amongst the discovery that my keyboard apparently requires nonrechargable batteries to run. Suffice to say that I think that the game is trés cool.

It’s very relieving to finally have a job. It’ll be more relieving once I actually start! I’m somewhat amazed at how “job-alert” I’d gotten – we were driving home this evening from the WNM, and I caught myself mentally going through the businesses we passed and considering just going into one of them to apply. Then it’s like… duh, got a job already!

Seth has an interview tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to figure out our taxes lately – which is a bit of a task! Federal is pretty straightforward, except that it took me forever to find the tax tables on the IRS website. I don’t think Kentucky has tables – it’s just a straight percentage plus a certain dollar amount (for instance: $280 plus 6%). Much simpler that way. Anyway, I was trying to figure out about how much we’ll pay this year and about how much we’ll pay next year, so we can get a sensible budget worked out.

Found out that Delaware has the 48th-lowest tax-per-income rate, which is why Kentucky’s 17th-lowest rate is seeming so terribly high to me – it is! It’s so nice, though, that they don’t tax food, and I think gasoline is cheaper here.

Speaking of food, we bought a gazillion (okay, more like ten) packs of Ramen (sp?) noodles today. Seth apparently likes them… I don’t believe I’ve ever had them, but for 14¢ a package, I’m more than happy to eat them even if I don’t terribly enjoy them! I also picked up a box of all rotten (er – au gratin) potatoes, ‘cause I like them, but I haven’t managed to make any from scratch yet!

I’m very sleepy, and therefore probably making questionable amounts of sense.

Well. Now I’m being positively overrun with interviews, which is, I suppose, a very good thing.

Already had one today, which went very well. Then there’s one this afternoon, one tomorrow morning, and one tomorrow afternoon.

I have a job interview (again) Tuesday at 2:30… retail sales, again, but a bit brighter prospects, perhaps. From looking on the ‘net, I had to have actually passed this personality test to have even gotten called. No idea how much it pays, but at least it’s not a straight commission job.

Every year since 2001 (at least), I’ve toyed with the idea of doing NaNoWriMo. And every year, I’ve been knee-deep in schoolwork, and only too aware that second-third midterms generally come smack in the beginning of November, and that writing 1,667 words of fiction every day would be somewhat hindersome to my schoolwork. So every year, I’ve decided to be a nonparticipant. But now I’ve gone off and graduated, so the wheels are churning again. It’d be a bit easier to figure out if I already had a job – I don’t know how much “time” I’ll actually have in a day after working and houseworking and such – but the idea is interesting, at least.

On another note, Seth and I have started having a sort of “ice cream night” at our house on Sunday evenings after church. Tonight was only the second time, but we talked about it a bit afterwards and would like to continue. It’s kind of more brainy-philosophical than it is social; much food-for-thought going on. Although I also put a bit more effort into the real food tonight – in addition to an array of ice cream, we had fresh-baked Swedish chocolate bread (a very hard bread, but yummy) and Japanese fruit pie. I like entertaining, I think, although I’m always a bit nervous.

Well… managed to fail another personality test today. JC Penny’s.

We spent the bulk of the afternoon and early evening going around in malls and asking for and submitting applications (and résumés) for every retail store that looked remotely interesting. Toys ‘R’ Us looks somewhat promising, but we’ll see.

Also got a bit of freelancing done this morning, so I am making a very little bit of money, but please do pray for us and that I would find a job!

My little time investment this morning paid out! Literally – $5, cha-ching! I’m officially a freelance writer!

Which fact does not mean that the job-hunt will in any way be discontinued or slacked. Like I said before, it’d be difficult to pay the bills freelancing. But money is money, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been so happy about five bucks before!

Woo-woo!!!

So… yesterday we went downtown to the office of the Courier-Journal, a Gannett paper (like the News Journal in Delaware), where I applied for a job. I’m trying not to be too optimistic – but it would be really lovely. First, because I’d be working at a paper, which I’ve always wanted to do; second, because it pays very well; third, because it has good opportunities for broadening my horizions; and fourth, because it’s not too far away. It is right in the middle of downtown (think skyscrapers), but I think it’s a fairly easy location. And downtown Louisville is so pretty! The architecture is really quite something.

I also applied for a freelancing job as a ghostwriter, and sent in the first article this morning. If they like it, I get paid and hired. If they don’t, then I guess I wasted an hour. But – good potential there. There’s no minimum output, the pay is very clear-cut, and I could work as much or as little as I liked. If I worked to death, it could pay the bills… at any rate, even once I find a salaried job, it would be a good way to pick up a few extra bucks. Writing isn’t much of a chore for me. So I’m really really hoping to get it. It’d take a lot of the stress off – while it would take an unbelievable amount of discipline to do it enough to substitute for a salaried job, it’s possible, and that would make me feel better. Too, it’d be something solid to put on my résumé that might help me land a job doing something similar. Anyway, now’s a bit stressful, as I expect to hear back from them today or tomorrow.

Last night, I made pancakes! Usually Seth makes pancakes or crêpes if we have them. But I totally cheated, and bought Great Value Buttermilk Pancake mix at Walmart. (For about $1.50 – talk about eating inexpensively – it makes 60 pancakes!) Anyway, all you do is add water, whisk it for a bit, then cook! No eggs or oil to make messiness. I also got the bright idea (I think my mother had it first) of using a measuring cup to dish the batter out onto the pan. It worked excellently!

Unfortunately, I’m either very ungood at baking pancakes, or else I’m just not used to my electric range. I started with four on the skillet, and the things just weren’t cooking, despite my having tried the drop-a-drop-of-water-and-see-if-it-vanishes trick. So, I concluded, they weren’t turned up high enough. So I turned them up. Still no bubbles. I turned ‘em up some more… all the way, in fact. Then they started bubbling like crazy, and I thought, yay, right temperature at last!

Em, no. By the time I finished the third batch, the kitchen was filled with smoke, the alarm was going off, and I was thoroughly embarrassed. Happily, despite all the smoke, the pancakes actually weren’t very burnt, and were edible. And I think I learned something about cooking pancakes and burner temperatures.

Like Seth, I too have been twiddling my creative thumbs – with a fractal generator called Apophysis. Which is ridiculously easy, but has some cool effects. In a nutshell, what you do is take generated fractals and alter them – moving the coordinates, for instance, which changes the shape of the fractal, and doing aesthetic stuff to them like changing the colors. It’s kind of art, and kind of not so difficult as art should be.

Be warned that many of the files are in the vicinity of one megabyte, which takes a bit to download.

Seth has been writing music lately, which is making for pleasant sounds around the house. He has to record and stuff, though, so there are all these long gaps of silence when the piano is plugged into his laptop or headphones. But here are the wonderful results:

• Julie's Song No. 1
• Julie's Song No. 2 -- he says this one is "meant to be silly," but I think it's fun and interesting.
• Julie's Song No. 3
• Julie's Song No. 4 -- this one took forever because of all the mixing going on with different instruments. Interesting result, though.

Anyway, I much like! And now he's working on his Hebrew homework.

Got some thank-you notes written today, and plan to get through at least another one or two packs before the day is over. I try to space them out a bit so that they don't all start sounding the same. I guess I have this secret fear that all my relatives are going to call each other up and compare phrases! Anyway, I really hate the inherent tension in writing thank-yous: I really am thankful, and so there's so much more that I want to say than can possibly fit on one card! And if I take the time to write a lot -- as I do on some -- then it ends up taking me a half an hour to write each one! Seth's a genius with them, presumably because he had to write so many as a seminary Ambassador, but it's really neat how swiftly he turns them out, and how nice they sound. Mine are all awkward. I'm glad for the opportunity, though... it gives me a chance to say significant things to people who've been significant in my life.

Having finished all my unread books, and pursued every job lead available until tomorrow (newspaper), I've been occupying my time... with writing! I wish I had a better grasp of writing short stories; my head seems to only operate in a novel-length way. I'm toying with the idea of trying in earnest to write a draft of something and send it off; it'd serve to sharpen my skills and also introduces the possibility of income. Apparently the market right now is extremely receptive to new writers of children's fantasy (books like Harry Potter, in other words)... it's a tempting thought, at least for the moment. Anyway, I've always had this problem with not being able to stretch the plot out -- I tend to jam a novel-length plot into a single chapter -- and it has been very pleasantly surprising to discover that that doesn't seem like such a problem anymore. I've done a good bit of revising that story I linked to in my previous entry (and by "revising" I mean completely erasing and replacing 75% of it), and it's clear just by looking at the paragraph breaks which are the new sections and which are the old. It's difficult to judge one's own work, but the past two days have been encouraging, at least.

Okay... enough about my writing uncareer. Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was finally released this week, which is sadly not as exciting as the release of Thunderbird 0.8, which had some very important upgrades with this version. I don't use Firefox exclusively (I still use IE6 for most things, in fact, for a variety of reasons), but it does help prevent one from catching computer viruses, and the new version incorporates an RSS reader, which is a really nice addition. I do use Thunderbird, after switching to it from Outlook Express a year or so ago. Thunderbird rocks, and is pretty effective in blocking email viruses. While I'm on the subject of lovely free software, Weather Watcher was a nice recent discovery. It sits in your system tray and tells you what the temperature is outside. You can click it for a week-long forecast, or just hover over the icon for a variety of detailed information (like humidity, wind direction and speed, etc.). It's extremely customizable and ad-free, which is quite rare in similar weather programs.

Well, we’re finally back online, much to my delight. In the interim, however, I’ve read entirely too many books. There’s only so much time one can devote to housework and job-searching, and in the dark hours of the evening when one’s husband is at work – there are pages and pages awaiting!

It’s been so long since I’ve really read outside of school assignments, and it’s been rather pleasant to pick up the habit again. I don’t think I’ve qualified these last few years as a “bookworm,” and while I’m not sure I want to devote that much time to reading, it is mentally challenging, in a way. I had a recently-acquired (and thus unread) copy of an “Encyclopedia of Mythology” or something to that effect, and I’ve been reading it along with one or two fiction books. It’s interesting. It makes me want to write.

I actually spent quite a bit of time last night combing through the files on my computer to find my latest abandoned story (which, while on the internet, strangely has no regular file on my hard drive). I think it’s too juvenile (especially the names – shudder!) to pick up again, but it does make me want to write now. I’m kind of curious what would happen if I did; I’m so much older now than I was when I wrote it, and hopefully I have a better sense of the melodramatic in order to avoid it. But I’m also so much more out of practice now than I was… at any rate, I think I’d like to try.

I think I’d better go – dinner calls.

Edit: On reflection, I think the second part of that story might be somewhat salvagable. It’s overdone, especially in places, but I think some of the threads might pick up again.