September 2004

The goal of any interview is to get an offer on the spot, and this afternoon I came as close as I ever have. Instead, I came away confident that I’ll be working there in a week. I met with the president of the small direct mail company and everything went smoothly; all my questions were answered, I successfully defended why I was good at my job yet wanted to leave, and both of us were joking by the end. The only question now is whether they like the portfolio CD I left behind enough to give me a shot at the more artistic of the two positions. Either way, this will be an opportunity to flex my creative muscles in a small art department where I can be more hands-on and the medium isn’t only insurance forms.

I bent down on the floor of the bathroom today like I was giving it up to Allah. Head now shaved, I’m ready for my back-to-back interviews. The first is only a phone interview, but since next one is only an hour later I have to have everything ready when I get back from my run. I’m not even sure there’s an entirely clean shirt in my closet, but with two interviews I’ve doubled my chances for the day and I’m not sweating anything right now. Speaking of which, time to get down to the jogging path.

I’m almost positive that my gmail account is the reason I’m getting responses to my job applications. It doesn’t say “I’m a student” like my drexel.edu account does nor does it make the risky association to my blog. That said, come and get ‘em. I’ve got a bunch of gmail invitations at my disposal even after having given two away already. They’re not as lucrative as they once were so I’ve got no use for them whatsoever.

My e-mail address doesn’t play as large a role as my newspaper-style The Cover Letter, but every bit helps.

(I’m excited because I have another interview up for Thursday. The guy who called said out of 400 responses mine was the best and everyone got a big kick out of it. In the top five he’s ever seen, even.)

Our place in Conshohocken is cool and we like living here, but the one thing I can’t figure out is why the toilets are occasionally left with the seat up and filled with urine.

I’ve used every reason under the sun except ghosts to rationalize how it could be happening week after week. Maybe the cats somehow learned to use the toilet. (Ridiculous, I know.) Perhaps the plumbing is screwy and flushing one toilet backs up another. (Even if that ignored what I knew about plumbing, it doesn’t explain the seat.) Maybe I’ve been doing it in my sleep. (Easier to blame myself than point the finger at someone else.)

I like my housemate Travis. He’s neat, quiet, seems nice enough. But he’s the odd man out in this scenario. This problem never existed when Dia and I lived alone, and I think I know Tim well enough to confidently say he doesn’t have hygiene issues. So we live with what we assumed to be our minor complaint against Travis.

It can get annoying at times. I’m pretty confident our cats wouldn’t drink tainted water, but who’s to say they don’t play around in it? It’s also not sanitary and I find myself flushing toilets two, three additional times a day. I use the bathroom enough on my own without feeling the need to check in on the toilet when I don’t even have to go.

We considered the case closed until recently, when Sean pointed out a similarly non-flushed toilet at Tom’s house last Monday night. As a result we’ve reopened the investigation with Tim once again among the suspects.

To be continued….

I played poker Friday with Ross, Brian, their coworkers and one of those coworkers’ friends, and amazingly I broke even. With 18 people present and quite a few re-buying in for another $25 the pot was up to $500 for the night. Fearful of being short-stacked when we combined tables in a few more hands, I went all in with a shitty Jack-Seven (what can I say, I thought I had my opponent’s tell figured out — he was playing a game of footsie with himself that he had done a bunch of times before). As a result I ended up standing around with nothing to do for a while until Adam suggested we start up a losers game. I had a $5 bill in my pocket, so we started up a second table of dealer’s choice for dimes. In the ensuing hands of Texas Hold’em and Seven Card Stud I really lucked out and played well, and I was able to win back from the other losers most of the money I had spent by entering the first game. It was one of the most exciting and enjoyable nights centered around drinking and pizza I’ve spent in a long time, and the first game of poker where I felt like I wasn’t throwing money away.

I made the 20-minute trip home from Chalfont by 3:30 a.m. and immediately encountered srangeness. I pulled up in front of the house to a spot that would have been a tight squeeze and decided instead to back up three spaces to the at the end of the block. As I shifted into reverse, I noticed someone running down the street. I found it a little odd considering the hour but brushed it off as paranoia from recently starting book of short horror stories. When I was parking, I then noticed a minivan with its dome light on parked on the cross street. Odd again. When I made it to our porch I saw that one of two couches and the cushions from both were missing. It wouldn’t have been totally impossible for Travis to move his couches on a Friday night, finding himself unable to fit only the largest piece, but it wasn’t likely by a long shot either. I woke Dia up just a little to ask if she knew anything about the missing furniture; unfortunately, I asked the wrong questions and was able to convince myself that exhaustion was making me paranoid. After taking a quick walk to the corner where I saw the van (it was still there, light on) and hanging out just inside the front door for a few minutes, I went to bed.

My internal clock deemed it to be yet another short night and at 7:30 a.m. I was up to check on the remaining piece of furniture — and it was gone. Which means that not only were my instincts right but that someone had the balls to come back after I had interrupted their theiving. I also missed my chance to use the baseball bat hanging in the basement; it would have been totally sweet to hide out in the bushes and catch the bastards on my porch just to scare the hell out of them. I certainly didn’t care if they took the couches, and as it turns out Travis didn’t either, but just to have had the upper hand and seen the look on their faces would have been a great end to the night (unless I got shot). Of course, it could have gone the other way too: I could have ended up foregoing an extra hour of sleep to crouch in the alley — in the rain — to catch nothing but pneumonia. As it was, I was the loser and am still kicking myself for it.

It’s certainly a long drive to Maine and a longer drive back. The up trip was split in half by a night at Alex’s house and the mood was one of expectation; home was just the opposite with the best part behind us, everyone sore, and the passengers road weary. Even so, it was a trip I’d do again in a heartbeat.

Sean and I left late Thursday afternoon and plodded our way through turnpike traffic to Dia in Princeton. From there we bopped up to Boston for Alex, our fourth and final passenger. We bedded down there and left early the next morning for The Forks; it’s a good thing, too, since we stopped three times (once successfully) for beer, once for an out-of-the-way bathroom pit stop, once for a meal, once for supplies at WalMart, and twice for gas. By the time we arrived at Moxie Rafting Adventures it was 2 p.m., ahead of everyone else arriving that day. We set up our tents right away for the next two days of rafting, camping, barbecueing, and drinking.

The pictures are pretty representative of what went on. Of course, there was the rafting. The bus rides to the heads of Pennobscot and Dead Rivers passed quickly, and the water treated us well. My raft consisted of Tim, Casey, Dia, Sean, Alex, and our guide Matt and none of us went for any unscheduled swims. (Alex came damn close, but Tim somehow grabbed his ankle while at the same time staying on his side of the boat to keep it from overturning.) A few people fell out of the other two boats, but other than a lot of splashing they were safe runs.

At night we ate, drank, and amused ourselves by sitting around the campfire, visiting the waterfalls, and paddling canoes around the lake, the view of which as breathtaking.

On Labor Day we packed up and headed out, stopping for one last breakfast before breaking into groups based on our driving-speed comfort zones. For the most part Jay, Tim, and I stuck together. Tim had shredded one of his rental truck’s tires and wanted to swing by Manchester on the way home to trade it in for a new one, so I split with them in New Hampshire and dropped Alex off in Boston. We met back up in Worcester at some Perkins-esque diner and made the rest of the trip as a group until New Jersey. [Apparently, here is where I missed a chance to see some motorcyclist fly over his handle bars. All I know is everyone pulled up in a very excited state, Ali screaming at Tim about nearly causing an accident.] The rest of the drive home was without incident and we passed the time by weaving in and out of traffic while chatting via walkie talkies.

I finally sorted through my rafting pictures. I’ll get to the highlights before long.

Our cats went on an expedition two nights ago in search of the mouse that has made our kitchen its home. My faith in them has waxed and waned over the past month as two run from certain things but not others while the third is fearless yet incredibly stupid.

Just as we gave up on their abilities and set a trap (from which the mouse stole peanut butter without getting snared), they proved their worth. We awoke yesterday morning to find a three-inch carcass in the middle of the kitchen floor and its innards vomited up a short time later.

As for a culprit there is no hard evidence, only theories. While Cannoli was seen poking around the kitchen late at night and Ravioli is the most agressive when it comes to chasing bugs and laser pointers, my bet is on Csoki — the only cat not hungry the morning of our discovery. I guess ingesting diseased rodents would take away my appetite, too. Even if she was vicious/hungry enough to rip it into an almost unrecognizable state, all three probably played a part in toying with the little bastard before its death. I almost feel bad for it until I think about how if our cats had a little more practice then I might have had to deal with a half-dead mouse in my bed instead of blood-splatter in the kitchen.

Until another mouse comes along and we see which cat actually does the deed, I have to be proud of all three. Not to mention a little frightened. If they enjoyed their late-night snack, how soon before they try the same with our fingers while we sleep?

I’m currently running a 70 percent response rate with my job applications. Almost every job to which I applied sent me back a rejection letter in the mail, an e-mail rejection, or an invitation to interview. I only went on two interviews so far, but it feels good to know that my cover letters and resumes are getting through to someone. As far as those interviews went, I dropped the ball on the most recent one by not sending a sample of my html handiwork, and I flat-out rejected the Chambersburg newspaper gig with the following apology:

Robin,

I was excited about the job, and to some degree still am, but I was
not able to convince my girlfriend or cats to make the move. After
weighing all the options it came down to job description, pay, and
location; while the first was absolutely ideal, it didn’t justify
sacrifices in the other two categories.

I hope you don’t think I wasn’t sincere about my interest because I
most certainly was, both before and after the long trip out there and
back.

Thank you once again for your interest in me, but I have to remove
myself from the application process. I’m sorry if I took up too much
of your time.

Sincerely,
Bob Rudderow

It’s a tad cheesy, but it’s only a rejection letter. I also put the blame on Dia and the furballs when my heart wasn’t in it either.

The jobs in which I’m interested are starting to thin out a bit, and though it could be a long winter if I don’t find a job soon I’m not worried or depressed yet

Now that I’ve got my X-Box Live account up and running (username: nately’s wh0r3), I’m getting Halo 2 fever again. I’m also feeling extremely sentimental about the Marathon trilogy. I get truly depressed when I think about how much fun I had playing eight-player games on my old PowerMac and running the length of Myers Hall in my socks to gloat or whine about my performance. Years later we still played in The Triangle office on an occasional Friday. I poked around a little bit and found that the Aleph One project is up on SourceForge.net with a revision date as recent as April, 2004. I’m skeptical that it’ll be as easy to set up as its supporters claim, or that it’ll run well enough to make it worth the effort, but it supposedly supports multiple platforms and Internet connectivity and that’s enough to peak my interest. Hopefully running around the P’for ships at the whims of Leela and Durandal — even in single player mode — will quash this sense of longing that I’ve developed while reading about the buzz surrounding Halo 2. Bungie Software’s latest release will no doubt be spectacular, but playing over the Internet is nothing compared to playing right next to my opponent (with my own monitor and a keyboard).

I’ve heard enough already from people about how I haven’t blogged in a while. Even as I was writing this, one unnamed individual was pestering me with sarcastic comments. I already feel horrible about letting more than two weeks pass without a post. What can I say? My life was in terrible disarray.

I hate schedules, so when I started my new three day work week I was in heaven. It gave me plenty of time to fix something I love, which is getting organized. I had the final remnants from the move tucked neatly away as much for my sanity’s sake as a surprise for Dia when she returned. Then rafting happened. Not only did I fall out of my job application groove and lose track of other projects while I prepared for the extended Labor Day weekend, I let our clean, orderly house fall to pieces upon our return. We had so much extra beer and food that we planned to let it sit in the living room until tailgating (which we did Sunday). The rest of our camping supplies, which had been stacked neatly in the basement only weeks before, weren’t going to fit easily in their former spots without major reorganization. The mess had me feeling so lethargic that I hadn’t blogged, exercised, shaved, or applied to jobs

With tailgating over, we were finally done with the coolers, the beer and bag of meat, and other assorted leftovers. Half of the mess was in my car now, giving me room to finally make headway on the living room disaster. Determined not to let the day go by without feeling somewhat productive, I put as much away as I had energy for after sending out resumes and “testing” my new X-Box Live account. There’s still lots of tidying to do in the house but it’s largely the everyday clutter and coffee table junk, and my car is immaculate.

With the house starting to shape up, I’m ready to tackle the digital realm. I have two weeks of posting to catch up on: rafting, job updates, bowling, football pools, tailgating, and other assorted odds ‘n’ ends. Fortunately, I took pictures of some of it so I’m not starting with an entirely blank slate.

Since it is daunting to catch up on so much, I’m not going to worry about chronological order or sweat the details too much. I’m out of practice and just want to get it down and out of the way.