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This is apparently what happens when I take 22 credit hours plus a work-study. Sorry for the sound of silence.
I do however manage to tweet from time to time, as it seems to be a little more free form and quicker than sitting down and writing out a blog post. @bluevulpine
Let me tell you a little bit about how the summer’s going so far.
This year, I took a position at a summer camp as their business manager. While I have been looking at business management/education as a potential field of interest in my return to college, I’ve so far not taken much in the line of actual business management. Even so, I was offered the position - with little idea of what exactly I’d be doing aside from a basic explanation over the phone during the interview.
We’ve just finished our fourth week of scouts in camp. I now have a far better handle on what I’m doing - the first week, I was in the office nearly every night until 2am trying to make sure I had things right. Not quite so late, now… Generally 10pm or so. Still, it’s generally a 12-14 hour day in the office. I have Wednesday night and most of Saturday off, but my mental state is depleted enough by these points that I can’t concentrate on anything in fine detail.
As such, I haven’t gotten any more writing done. At this point I expect I won’t have anything new until August.
Sorry for the delay, but thanks for sticking around.
Finals are done for the semester, and I’ve finally found time to put some polish on the next installment: Awakening, Part 10. I’m hoping that between now and the beginning of June I can knock out the next part, but as usual… Well, you know by now.
For my Desktop Publishing final project, among other requirements, I needed to create a ‘menu or program.’ I wound up making a wedding program for a nice couple I know. The tentative date for the wedding is sometime in 2048. I’ll get photos of the printed version, as the PDF in this case just doesn’t show off how nice the end result turned out. (Although, I admit, I made a rookie mistake on it.)
Spring has sprung here at the lake; the ice went off about a week ago and nearly carried off our dock, deck, and my propane grill. So, I went wading in 34ºF water (with rubber waders, thankfully, but it was still cold) and tied ropes to everything before it could escape too far into the lake to save. No worries—the next day, the wind shifted, and pushed the dock back to the shoreline retaining wall… and right on through it.
In the meantime, we had so much moisture stored in the snowpack that everything’s running over. There was (and in some places still is) flooding all over the state. Mother’s house in the city a few hours away decided this would be an excellent year to leak water into the basement. It’s on a hill, so it’s not from a river or anything. No broken pipes either, and no backing up from the sewer; no, Nature just decided to open a natural spring up underneath the concrete floor of the basement and it’s leeching in as fast as she can suck it out. She’s removed something on par of 500-600 gallons of water in the last week, 8 gallons at a time, using a shopvac. I wish Mr. Mike Holmes did stateside work.
The barge still isn’t on the lake, sadly; with the water content of the ground as it is, we can’t get a trailer to where it’s parked so we can load it. We’ve now had a couple of sunny days over the weekend, and I’m hopeful (but only just) that we might make some progress on Monday toward that goal.
I imagine a library atop a remote mountain that collects the essential information needed to re-learn practical knowledge essential to civilization. This depot, open to anyone who journeys there, is the cultural equivalent of the Svalbard seed bank, a vault on the Arctic Circle that holds frozen seeds of crop plants from around the world. The utilitarian documents in this vault would be the seeds of culture, able to sprout again if needed. It would be the Library of Utility, and it would serve as civilization’s backup.
We’re coming up on the end of the spring semester and things are kicking my behind. It’s a challenge, and that’s okay; this whole thing so far has helped provide a little more focus on my priorities. I have a feeling fall is going to be different (in a good way).
Between tutoring a young gentleman in the Intro to Computers class and juggling other assignments and projects, I’ve had some time to do editing on the next chapter of Awakening. Sadly, however, it’s not -quite- done. If I manage to knock out this week’s projects early, I should be able to give it a spitshine and get it up by Friday.
In the meantime, here’s some examples of the things I’ve worked on this spring. Read the rest of this entry »