I saw these ads during the football games last weekend, and wondered how in the world they were approved with the words “Paid for by the US Government” in bold letters at the bottom. And nobody says anything about them. The White House claims they are public service announcements, and they were paid for with DHS funds.
I’m entering the second month of work wind-down, and so far, it’s been very busy. I feel like I’m putting more of myself into a lot of different projects than I was before, and staying busy right now is a good thing.
People at work seem surprised that I haven’t completely checked out, including the COO, who I talked with briefly on Friday. I laughed and told him that as long as they’re still paying me, I’m working for them. It’s a measure of how strongly I feel about the mission and the organization; I have no beef with them, other than the fact that they didn’t plan well enough, but I want to see WRI succeed. I like to think I’ve also finally learned something from leaving some of my previous jobs, where I did a terrible job of staying in touch with people—some who I really liked, and some who I didn’t. I have a lot of regrets about that, actually. I was never able to maintain long-term friendships going back to the days when my family moved around a lot, and with a few exceptions, I don’t talk much to my friend group from high school. I’ve never been good at maintaining these kind of things, because I’m afraid those people won’t want to talk to me, but I’ve been working to get over myself and put myself out there some more.
In the meantime, I’m trying to average sending 1-2 resumes out per day, depending on what’s posted, but I’ve only heard one thanks-but-no-thanks reply. There are a number of job websites out there with pretty decent listings, but a lot of the social media stuff that’s suddenly entered my algorithm is about how people haven’t been able to get past the AI bots to have their cover letter seen by a human being. Having been on the other side of this, I know how hard it is to weed the wheat from the chaff, especially when you’re getting 200 applications each day, but I always did try to take the time to look at every submission myself. This new way of doing things seems capricious and arbitrary. I’m doing that thing I hate doing the most [see paragraph above] where I reach out to my network and kindly ask if anyone might know of anything. I’ve actually gotten a couple of good leads from friends, and I’m hopeful that the network will do what the bots will not. The LinkedIn post I put up about ‘moving on from WRI’ got a HUGE response from people, and I made sure to reply back to everyone that posted to boost it further. Here’s to hoping the right people see it.
I’m also looking at other ways to start generating income. There’s money to be made doing housepainting and light carpentry, which I have plenty of experience with, and our old friend Jen, a realtor, can funnel me work. I can load the OG-V with carpentry and painting gear and work for hire without a contractor’s license for what I’m told is pretty decent money, and she could share my name around with her peers. It got me through college, and it can work in the short term now.
I’m headed over to Brian’s this weekend to take stock of the EV project. Making a go of this would be the best possible option, although it would take me away from home for long periods of time. He’s been busy with personal stuff, but I’m hoping we can make a serious go of it in December.
At the house, I’m finishing up the Travelall floor and also looking at inexpensive ways to insulate for winter. I got to thinking a couple of weeks ago about the underside of the front porch floor, which had originally been sealed up with some sheets of plywood over the joists, which were filled with insulation. When Brian and I shot foam against the sill plate shared with the ice room, we never covered that area back up, and there’s a section of the office floor that hangs out over that open space. I got under there and covered it back up a few weeks ago, but I then thought about how our kitchen floor is always cold. In the basement we have insulation up against the underside of the floor but it’s not sealed with anything, which I’ve learned is basically useless. I did some research and found that some simple sheets of 2″ semi-permeable foam sealing the cavity between the joists would keep heat from soaking downwards into the unheated basement. So I’m going to do some experiments in the next week with that to see how well it works.
Meanwhile, my left wrist has been bothering me for the last couple of days—right after I had my checkup with my GP. I’m going to make another appointment to go back in and have him look it over, but what I fear is that this is the beginning of arthritis. About 30 years ago, I was mountain biking with Rob, and we were riding downhill toward our car at dusk on a dim single track. I cartwheeled over a chain spread across the trail, invisible in the fading light, and did a half-decent tuck and roll, avoiding a cracked skull—but I planted both wrists on the pavement as I tumbled. They hurt pretty bad for a week or so after that, but as a newly minted graduate with no health insurance, I couldn’t have them looked at. I’m pretty sure I fractured or tore some cartilage that day, and I’d bet it’s coming home to roost now that I’m older and the weather is colder.
Before our current health insurance runs out and our deductible has been met, we’re rushing to wring as much blood out of the stone as possible. I went in for a physical and had them do a full panel of bloodwork as well as cholesterol (it’s good news!) and a PSA (also good news!) and I still have to go in for an X-ray to check out my bone density. With the bloodwork I got a look at my numbers and plotted them in the graphs; it’s very interesting to see how my white and red blood cell counts have tanked since 2024, but my lymphocytes have actually been trending upwards. The other numbers are in line with my averages, so when I talk to my GP this week I’ll see what he thinks.
I think I tossed out all of my old iPods when the boards died, but I’m gonna have to dig through the bins in the basement to see if there’s anything left: there’s a new project promising a modern, easily swappable motherboard for old iPods with Bluetooth, WiFi, 2TB of space and a 40-hour battery for 3G, 4G and Mini models. I had a 3G model at one point, and did try to swap in a new board for it almost ten years ago. That’s a long time to be hanging on to old broken tech, even for me, but there’s a slim chance it’s still downstairs. I’ll have to go see. Update: I think I did get rid of them all. Rats. I could have sworn I kept the G3 iPod somewhere. I’ll keep looking.
The other option is to have the battery replaced in one of our old iPhones, which is usually about $70, but then there’s the frustrating issue of having it linked to my Apple account and trying to sync with my actual working phone, which messes both of them up.
[scratches beard]
…now that I’m thinking about it, I could just create a new Apple account for it with its own email address so that it’s separate. I’m going to try that. There is something to be said for the simplicity of the original iPods, and I would love to go back to that. I do enjoy my $1 Nano, but that’s limited by 16 GB of storage space. It’s good for holding a driving playlist, but it doesn’t have enough room for a full catalog to match my ever-shifting moods.
* * *
In the meantime, I’ve cleaned up and updated our server in the basement, and with my departure from WRI, I’ve been focused on cataloging and storing files not only for work, but my files as well. Cleaning up Dropbox, archiving work files, and backing up photos and videos has been top of mind for the last month. I dropped off the server I was using for WRI files at the office yesterday and set it up for the guys to use. Having a solid week to organize, move, and catalog photo and video files was long overdue and very handy. I’m leaving them with about 25 TB of files organized in a way that they should easily be able to find and access everything I collected in my tenure there. That project complete, I’m turning to my own stuff and making sure that I have everything I need before I leave. Another thing I took advantage of was an electronic recycling day to get rid of four decommissioned laptops that were bouncing around the basement. There’s more to be done down there, but it’s a good start.
Meanwhile, a friend reached out to see if I could help convert a bunch of Pagemaker 7 files to something she might be able to edit. Apparently, the way to do this is to use InDesign 6 to convert the files: anything above that cannot read the files. InDesign 6 came at a weird inflection point in my software history. I was staunchly a Quark guy until Quark’s laziness caught up with them and they got left behind when InDesign’s capabilities eclipsed theirs. What that means is that I don’t have any install disks for InDesign CS 6, only CS 5.5 and then CC2 in all of the dozens of backups I’ve made over the years. I think I might have a workaround to get a version of 5.5 running, and I think that will convert the files, but it’s going to take a little time to sort that out. There are other ways to convert PageMaker files to PDF, and then copy the text out, but I want to see if I can get the files into a clean in design format first.
Update: I found a copy of InDesign CS on RoadWarrior, a G4 PowerBook I’ve got napping in the basement for just such emergencies, which read, converted, and wrote new InDesign files for each one of the original PM7 files. This makes me feel VERY satisfied. Later today I’m going to consolidate all of the text files exported from InDesign and send them off to my friend.
I saw this Alfa Romeo while walking Hazel downtown and told the owner how much I appreciated it. The color is a newer (Hyundai? Kia?) one not offered by Alfa, but it absolutely works for this vehicle.
And this Oldsmobile was sitting in the parking lot at the Panera, all by itself, waiting for the sun to set.
I found out at the beginning of October that I was being laid off from World Resources Institute. For reasons far out of my control (but which anyone could see coming) our funding was constricted due to world politics and ongoing institutional challenges that weren’t addressed over years of rapid growth. My position, lofty as it sounds, became redundant, and my tenure made me expensive, so it was pretty clear I was on the chopping block. This seems to be a common issue with Gen X professionals in middle management—we’re too experienced and expensive to keep but haven’t ascended to the C-level to become bulletproof. They don’t offer a severance package, but they’re keeping us RIF’d folks on until December 1, and we keep our healthcare until December 31, so I’ve had some breathing room to get my affairs in order, polish the resume, and start blasting it out as much as possible.
After speedrunning through the first three stages of grief—I spent all of 30 seconds on denial, five minutes on anger, and two minutes on bargaining—I’ve been cycling between depression and acceptance, punctuated with moments of panic. I ran some numbers through Monarch, our handy money management app, and when I saw the first number it returned for our monthly outlay I nearly had a heart attack. I’ve been laid off twice before, and having always been paranoid about money, I keep an Oh-Shit fund at all times. Monarch’s estimate was much higher than I had bargained for, but when I started reviewing it I was able to chip away at a bunch of unnecessary line items to get to a number that was much easier to accept.
The big issue is going to be health insurance. COBRA, which has never been affordable or equitable, is the first option, and the number I got from our HR reps at work was more than our combined mortgage, car payment, and phone bill. The ACA Marketplace was my next stop, and while I didn’t dig too deep, the pricing there was more affordable per month—but with an astronomical deductible. So we’ve got to make some hard choices there. Next week I’m going to dive into that particular nest of snakes and do some comparison shopping.
I’ve signed up for several job search websites, some paid and some free, and have been using Claude to help me tailor cover letters to each position I’ve applied to. I’ve found it’s easy to ask AI to get the letter started, and then do a massive rewrite in my own voice to remove the robot from the text. As I expected, I haven’t heard much back yet, but I’ve got some friends at work who are putting the word out for me, with some success so far.
Another, more interesting lifeline could be teaming up with Brian to renew our work on Slowflake the EV project, with a goal of getting it running so that we can show it locally and drum up a project where someone else will pay us to convert their vehicle. There’s a lot to work out with this plan: I’d have to stay in Chestertown through the week and come home on weekends; I’d most likely be taking home renovation work on with Brian to cover our mortgage and bills; and I’d be away from the girls for a long period of time. But this one, I feel, has the most potential for growth. I’ve been thinking for a long while about my future as a creative with the ascendancy of AI, and it seems like a safer bet to stay employed is to make something with your hands that can’t be replicated with four prompts in a browser window. And if we owned a business we’d be in control of our own destiny instead of depending on others to make sure the train stays on the track. I’m still young, I’m healthy, and I can work with my hands—it’s something I look forward to. Maybe this is the time to take the chance and see where it goes.
The first step is to travel over to Brian’s, review our progress, and come up with a plan. If I’m out on the bricks in December, and we can plot out a solution to get Slowflake running—and make it happen, God willing—then we’d have a completed project to show and drum up some business. If we could get a paying project in the door for conversion, that would go a long way to making this a reality.
It does what the title says: thousands of Amazon Prime and Starbucks boxes were murdered to create this film.
The other day Jen asked me if I noticed anything wrong with our fridge; the milk seemed to be spoiling quickly, which was out of the ordinary. We put a thermometer inside and were shocked to find it above 50˚, which meant something was extremely wrong. Jen and I emptied it out, stuffing the 70-year-old IH fridge in the garage with food and filling the freezers in the basement with as much as we could.
Consulting the interwebs, I found a video by a mushmouthed repairman working on the exact model of Frigidaire we own, who demonstrated how to test the inverter module next to the compressor. I busted out my multimeter and followed his instructions, getting the same result he did. Rolling the dice, I ordered a replacement part on the Jungle Site for $100, and then used a shop-vac to clean about thirty pounds of dust and hair from the coils and fan under the fridge. Helpfully, Frigidaire hid all this stuff behind a panel so that it could collect without being seen; I’ve cleaned the front of the fridge multiple times but never realized there was an entire Sasquatch worth of dust and fuzz hiding under there.
The part arrived on our doorstep yesterday afternoon, so I put on my headlamp, spread out my toolkit, and got to work. Navigating the tight space under the fridge with my big hands, I was able to squeeze the old inverter out between the compressor and two delicate copper tubes, and squeeze the new one in place. When I had it connected, I said a prayer and plugged the fridge back in.
This morning we came downstairs to find it quietly humming along at 32˚, just in time to store a new milk delivery, which was a HUGE relief. I was not prepared for an expensive repair bill—or, even worse, a replacement—so this was a big win.
This week’s earworm is Dominoes by The Big Pink, who had a moment back in 2009 or so. I don’t know if they’re still around (too busy to do a Google search right now) but I dig the beat of this song—I miss good heavy drums in current music.
Well, shit. I just learned that the white and red cross in the Maryland flag was actually adopted by Confederate sympathizers in the state during the Civil War (I still, after 20 years, have to remind myself that I’m south of the Mason-Dixon Line) and legislation was passed banning its display on grounds of treason. 15 years after the war, during a 150-year celebration of the state’s founding, it was combined into a design with the heraldic banner of Lord Calvert, which had been adopted by the Union Army of Maryland. So I’ve been flying a flag with Confederate roots for years outside the house.