On Jobs

A 9-year-old's description of her picture, entitled, "Mrs. Blocksma Is The Best Counselor Ever!"

"The butterfly is because you are pretty, the palm tree is because one time you told us about you going on vacation, and the monster is because you are strong and tough."

I have spent many days working 9, 10, 11 hours, eating my lunch while scoring an IQ test or checking emails, sitting through tense and uncomfortable meetings, explaining the difference between a school counselor and a school psychologist, etc. But when I consider my job, I am first of all thankful to simply have a job and a means to survive, and secondly thankful that the stressful stuff is sometimes balanced out by hugs and high fives, parties with funfetti cookies and pink party hats, and homemade pictures like the one that now hangs on the bulletin board above my desk.

Oh yeah, and summer vacation ain't bad either...

One Last Format Change

I think i can officially put down the metaphorical pen and step away from the metaphorical paper.  It took me a few tries and a number of CSS self help essays but I eventually got to switch out the original header, and now have gotten it to load new headers randomly everytime the site loads.  There's a number of them, but my favorite may be the mustaches - take a second to look, and I will hopefully periodically reload the site with different shots as the months roll along.

Sunny Tuesdays

It was 65 degrees in Fort Collins today.

But i was in Northeastern Utah. Where it was 2, with frozen snow around my ankles. Bunk.

(But i'll be home in time to enjoy the 63 day tomorrow. Hearin us yet Michiganders?)

Motion Sickness

I had an odd day for my overall frame of reference yesterday - it began in the afternoon, driving back towards Fort Fun from Greeley.  I was driving a rental for work (there is actually a long post comparing and contrasting my favorite rental cars to drive over the past few years.. the short story is that the Rav 4 is actually pretty fun, and I still can't stand Kia's) and i was about five cars deep, stopped at a red light.

Looking out at the mountains in front of me, contemplating my smallness, i noticed that i seemed to be slinking toward the 20 year old Audi hatchback in front of me.  My immediate instinct of pushing down on the brake harder kicks in, but i don't appear to be stopping.  At this point, both of my hands are at pressed hard against the wheel (10 & 2!) and my right leg is now straining with the pressure that i am putting on the pedal.  Still moving, now within 2' or so, i grab the transmission and put the car in Park.  Still floating....  and then, i stop.  And the car in front of me moves forward.  It is then i realize that in the two second span of the last paragraph that it was not i, but the Audi in front of me, who is a sloppy stick shift driver, and was rolling back towards me the entire time.  Guh.

I eventually get to the gym, after picking up our latest bounty from the new local food CoOp that we have joined (purple taters!) and try to get in a quick run before finally ending the day at home.  About a tenth of a mile in, the treadmill dies.  And when a treadmill loses power, it doesn't slowly rev itself down -  no, it just stops feeding you tread.  And you run into the control panel and nearly fall over.  The guy next to me had the same thing happen, and it raised both of heart rates to levels that were not comensurate to our meager distances.  Moving down the line of workout death machines, i began anew, only to have the same thing happen again a quarter mile in.  

At this point, smaller, more meager men would have (wisely) just packed it in, but i moved to an entirely different batch of mills, finished my run and drove home as non-eventfully as i could.  Once home, i very prurposefully spent the rest of the evening in one place, on the couch, with a glass of wine and read my new BackPacker that came in the mail.  I can only hope that today my inner ears do not give out and cause me to be even more off balance today than they were yesterday.  (mostly because i would not really be able to blog about it, since i have complained about my odd clumsiness already.)

-db-

New Year, New Look

For those of you who are still site-visitors, yes, you are looking at the same web address as usual.  Liz and i decided that with the new year, and with the addition of her voice to the blog, that a change was in order.  Turns out that i had to delete a number of things to upgrade to the new (and significantly easier to use) version of Blogger, but I will hopefully add most of them back to the blog over the next week.

If you use an RSS agregator, take a moment to actually visit the site and give us some feedback on what you see.  Like it?  Hate it?  Good colors, but slightly too girly of a border image? (It's grown on me, but i'm still not sold 100%....)  Please sound off, and here's to a great 2009!

Scrabble Commentary

This week, one of the New Yorker podcasts that showed up in my trusty iTunes was dedicated to the basic history and gameplay of my married-into family's favorite pasttime:  Scrabble.

Take a gander over here to listen to the 15 minute recording, and discover how the gal who wrote the article once scored a 300 point word.  (wowza.)  

Christmas parties are for novelty glasses

The Book That is Currently Changing My Life

Seven hundred and forty-two pages of vegetarian recipes written by a chef who is not a vegetarian. Somehow this makes her more credible in my eyes. As much of vegetarian cooking could be spent trying to replicate meat dishes with often second-rate substitutes, this is just a celebration of good quality vegetables in their own right. I've already become excited for next year's CSA...

More Reasons I Love my Wife:

The meatloaf is not ready for the oven until you place bacon upon it.
(and yes, that is a baked squash next to it, from our wonderful CSA
this Fall)

Just Another Day at the Office

Well, actually, not really. The nice part of my job are the chances I
get to visit some of our operating sites, like this guy in Southern
Wyoming. The wind was pretty strong all day, but the sunshine made it
mostly tolerable for a good day on the road.
I've also realized that I can post to the blog via my mobile, so I'm
going to attempt to do a better job of dropping notes of our regular
activities. I usually get yelled at for the lack of content, so I
figure I'll just bore you to death.