Homebody

One of the many things that I am grateful for now is that I did not get the flight attendant job I went out for in 2005, four years ago now. With everything that has happened since and all the things I know now about how the airline industry has changed and the likelihood that I would have been laid off my life is better for not having gotten that job.

I did not see it then, but the airline industry that I loved growing up was dead and gone by 2005. It may have died even before the 2001 hijackings without anyone noticing and the paranoia of the west since then only accelerated the changes. Now the airlines are greyhound buses in the sky. Miserable cramped unpleasant places with next to no standards. I miss the days of dressing up in a suit to fly. I miss when young children would be called up to the cockpit to see the controls, and not necessarily just airline brats either. In short I miss travel being as pleasant and interesting as getting to your destination. It cost more, but I would rather pay for that. This is why I no longer travel.

I don't want to be a piece of meat packed into as small a space as they can make the average person tolerate. And I'm glad that I'm not part of that. Flying is now and is for the foreseeable future something I will only do if absolutely necessary, not something I do by choice.

This does cut me off from certain options, but that's what life is about. There are infinite possibilities and you cannot choose them all.

March for New Beginnings

This is possibly the last week I will be on unemployment. A very exciting possibility, but also an event the brings on a certain amount of apprehension as any change is apt to do. Not terrible fears, just mild ones relating to what my work schedule will be like, the amount of vacation time, and the like. I hope that things will work out well, but I did not inquire too closely as to the exact particulars beyond the rate of pay and exactly what I will have to do as I am quite hungry to have a job. No matter what happens I intend to stick with this position for at least one year from my actual date of hire. I am also quite hopeful that the addition to my resume may help me in eventually landing a job with the Denver Public Library. It seems to me that between my volunteer work and the interaction with the public and loss prevention aspects of my job that I would be a good fit for one of their hybrid security guard/circulation clerk positions. And once I have a city job I shall never, never give it up.

I doubt I will write much publicly about my job both for the reason that I don't wish for my employers to read my thoughts about work and also for reasons of propriety. I am willing to say on this blog that I will be working in loss prevention with a major supermarket chain. If I am to continue blogging about work as was my habit in the past I shall have to figure out how to make the system work here on Blogspot as I simply do not trust the current owners of livejournal with private information as well as disliking particular policies.

Speak up if you want to read my thoughts about work, sex, or any of the other topics that I relegate to my 'secret' journal. Or speak up if I added you and you cannot seem to get it to work.

A Dream About Dreams

Last night when in a dream I was watching a BBC report about an formerly obscure Jewish sect in Jerusalem that was preparing for bad times as their claim to fame had run out. In this dream they had worldwide attention focused on them when a Pope made some prediction based on a dream he had about a prophet being born to their congregation. They received all sorts of donations and all the children were checked, but now the time was running out on the prediction and it looked like it was not going to come true. People were drifting away and there were no more donations from abroad, though they had a fantastic new building from everything they previously received. And even though it was a Christian prophesy about a Jewish prophet it seemed the members of the congregation were demoralized about it not coming true.

Very interesting sort of dream.

Circuit City Verges on Reasonable Prices

You know Circuit City's prices are not that bad... but on clearance they're often still higher than those you can find online. That's right the super duper clearance prices just barely match the same discounts you can find almost any day of the week online. At a guess this has been the problem for Circuit City all along. They're up against Amazon and every other online purveyor that can offer 30-50% discounts off list price all the time at the expense of not giving a buyer instant gratification.

Here is an example. The movies at Circuit City are now 40% off their origional retail price. Today when wandering around with my father today looking for bargains I noted that the original price for The French Connection was $14.95. Amazon offers the exact same movie for $8.99, only three cents more than the $8.97 'sale' price offered by Circuit City. Additionally with Amazon there is not any sales tax and you can actually return something if it does not work unlike with a clearance sale.

Another example is a one terabyte hard drive. Costco has a Western Digital "My Book" for $139.00 and the super duper 'bargain' at Circuit City for a similar external hard drive? $205 after discounts. Bah.

It is like this for virtually everything in their store. My advice to everyone is that if you go to the clearance know what you are looking for and check online prices before you go. They might start getting into good prices in another week, but right now the people who buy stuff at Circuit City are just suckers.

Of Yogurt, Chicken, and Jobs

I plan on making yogurt tomorrow. It really does not save any money over buying it at the store, well about a dollar and three bits since the gas coming out of the stove is a fixed cost included in rent. But every dollar counts and I have nothing but time to spend cooking, cleaning, and so on. You would think this apartment would be more clean considering that fact, but motivation is sometimes hard.

In good news I'm not only getting enough money back from the feds to pay off my credit card, but enough to live on for two or three months without tapping my last savings account. But if I still do not have a job come April I will need to clean myself out. Then I should have enough to last through the end of the year. I do have job leads and I've even had an interview now. I am quite hopeful things will turn around for me personally in the next month.

I had a much more coherent post to make, but I forgot what it was going to be about. Too many distractions in modern life. Well... that's the news right now. Tomorrow or the next day I think I'll be off to Costco to get some nice bulk food. Perhaps a big package of chicken thighs.

Oh and someone with too much alcohol took pity on me and gave me a bottle of blended Scotch whiskey he did not like. This made me quite happy as I don't really have the money to afford my evening tipple at this point and I really ought to husband my liquor cabinet.

Space as Vietnam

The other day I figured out what the problem is with manned space programs. The problem is that no president want to be seen to kill the program because he'd be the first president since Eisenhower not to have a manned space program. It is the same problem as with Vietnam for Nixon. Even though he promised an end to the war he did not want to be the first American president to not fight a war to at least a draw. It is all about saving face.

Even though manned space shots are a waste of money that return next to zero in useful science we're going to keep doing them because of pride. The same reason that the Russians kept doing them even though they were minutes away from being bankrupt in the 1990s.

And so we'll keep wasting those billions for pride. It isn't that large relatively, but since I think we Americans are going to have to make serious and painful cuts somewhere else soon due to the debts run up by both the private and public sector it is galling. But then again it does have the value of letting at least a few people pretend that we're still a superpower.

Magnet Project Ideas

I have a bunch of neodymium magnets. You know the type, the dangerously strong magnets found inside hard drives if you're willing to tear them apart and look for the metal housing plates used by the swing arm thingy. Gomez Lemieux (local fan) gave them to me years ago and I've been using them still attached to the little plate each is mounted on. That's not a bad way to use them as the plate gives a bit of leverage and/or air gap to enable a user to remove the things from a ferrous surface.

For whatever reason it had never occurred to me to remove the magnet from the plate... until today. Now I have a loose rare earth magnet to which I could attach something else using epoxy. For example a 1976 Eisenhower dollar. But what else should I attach to such a magnet? I've got a bunch of them and as long as I'm getting the epoxy out should I do more than one such craft project? I doubt there are many (any?) other inexpensive coins of the size of the ol' Eisenhower dollar

In other project news my coffee tables are set up in the living room and look fabulous.