feather2pixels

Today my job was to operate a jet engine.  Then I went home and took a nap.
[flv:http://www.feather2pixels.com/blog/post_video/jet.flv 320 240]

The response to my call for kid-drawn monsters has been outstanding.  Why did it take me so long to come up with this idea?  The only thing better than free labor is free child labor.

So far, so good:

Since the beginning of the fall I’ve been bringing food to work.  I have never been able to do this before and I have no explanation as to why the O.C.D. is taking hold so late in life.  But five days a week this has been my lunch:

So it was that last week was a special treat.  I am not gonna gloat, but I’m coming off an unbelievable five days of eating with my friends. The undeniable highlight was Brothers restaurant, in the Korean BBQ district of San Francisco.  We got the meal for four, which yielded 38 plates, 3 pounds of meat and 1 hot-coal grill and the recommended Korean daily serving of approximately twenty thousand grams of sodium.

Look who’s here!

That’s right: it is noted bachelor and baseball blogger Ben Hill, asleep at 10 AM on my very own couch even though he’s still ahead on east coast time.  The sleeping part is expected.  What is not expected is receiving a Ben call on a Sunday night and, through a heroic act of sponetnaiety, drinking with Ben on a Monday night.  There truly are no downsides to divorce.

For reasons too boring to get in to, I ended up arranging a weekend field trip with a handful of my students. They drove from Vallejo, I biked from the Mission and we rendezvoused on a unusually wet and gray Saturday morning. The destination in question: Candlestick Park, ex-home of the San Francisco Giants, current home of a stray cat colony. As we poked around behind the scenes I was struck by how decrepit the place was. For example, the entire lot under section 25 is filled with junky old wooden tables. According to Wikipedia, “Candlestick is currently the only NFL stadium in which upper-deck supports obstruct sight lines from the first-deck seating.” And apparently, it’s currently the only NFL stadium with it’s own self-sustaining ecosystem.  The cats are tolerated because they eat the mice. I asked our tour guide Dave what eats the cats.

“The barn owls,” he answered un-sarcastically. “They’re like this big” (chopping at his neck).
Anyway, I’m making fun of Candlestick, but it was pretty cool. Plus, the tour gave me pause to appreciate my job, which is essentially to always amuse 19-22 year olds one way or the other. That is pretty good as far as jobs go. If I were a research technician, I might not be holding a fake press conference in the 49ers home locker room.

[flv:http://www.feather2pixels.com/blog/post_video/cooper.flv 320 240]

I really thought I would never get sick again.

But with the first rain in months came the strong sensation of autumn, a flooded ground floor, and a sick day in bed.  This was all after days of doing nothing but eating nachos and completing my “Working Personnel Action File” for work.  What is a Working Personnel Action File?  Well, it is a dossier in which I argue the case for my retention and in my case included sentences like the following:

“On a warm night after a basketball game, walking along Maritime Academy Drive, the sugar factory and the bridge blinking on the horizon, I realized that I felt incredibly fulfilled.  It was a remarkable moment for me.  While I had determined from the start to exceed the expectations of CMA, I had not anticipated that CMA would exceed mine.”

Wow, you don't just casually jot down gold like that. No wonder I have a 101 temperature.  Anyway, my WPAF took a week to finish and it's 109 pages long. In other news, I tricked a local coffee shop into letting me hang up my panels on their walls.  I didn't even have to show them my art, I just had to promise not to nail in to the wall.  Who knew is was that easy?  Also without nails, I finally hung the pieces up online, too.  Here's the scene in Cafe La Boheme:

How lucky are you when a friend finds a way to carry on a case of beer for you because it does not taste like rope and is therefore not available west of the Sierras? Now if I can only protect them.