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jaegerfesting
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Jobses, toyses

Started: 2003-11-11 20:56:50

Submitted: 2003-11-11 21:47:05

Visibility: World-readable

pocketses... What has its gots in its pocketses?

Under ordinary circumstances, I would be inclined to ration my toys over some period of time. In purely practical terms, this implies I only have a certain amount of money to spend at a given time, so if I spend most of it on one toy, I need some time to replenish my personal expenditure allocation before attempting to acquire anything else. But when one of these toys happens to come in the form of a belated birthday present from Gem's parents, less than a week after I acquired an expensive mp3 player, I end up with two expensive toys in a short amount of time.

Gem's gadget-obsessed father decided to give me a Garmin eTrex Vista. FedEx attempted to drop it by my apartment yesterday morning, but like most of the world, I was at work during normal business hours. (I circumvented this problem last week when I ordered my iPod by having it shipped to iTi, which I'm now declaring to be the Official Way to ship packages to me. Unless they happen to be shipped via USPS, in which case our local postman has access to the interior of our apartment building and can drop it off in front of our door.) I contemplated my options and decided the best course of action was to drive to south Arvada to our official FedEx repository. (Why I didn't get to drive to either of the much-closer Boulder offices I can't say.) I had a nice drive in post-rush hour traffic down through Broomfield, Westminster, and Arvada. It was thrilling.

To test my little toy, I decided to to take a short walk around the city of Louisville. Main Street beckoned me, so I ended up at the local public library (39°58.876' N, 105°07.854' W, 5310 ft), took a short jaunt in to check the status of a book (Louisville's one copy is on hold, even though it's been checked in for three months; Boulder has a couple copies, so I'll probably wander by there eventually), and headed back to my apartment (39°59.267' N, 105°07.805' W, 5323 ft). Most entertaining.

Willy made the following observation:

Whoa! Now we can always know exactly where we are at every moment...and still have no clue what is going on.

Willy also pointed me to the following site, which he notes that I'm one of two people he knows who might be insane enough to think this up on our own. the Degree Confluence Project.

I guess this means I'm going to have to upgrade my bat belt now.

In other news, our job situation seems to be looking ever so slightly up. Last Monday, I was informed that my current place of employment would be presenting me with a Real Live Job Offer at the end of the month (ie, November), barring any unforeseen circumstances. I'm greatly excited at the prospect of having a Real Job, although at the same time I'm ever-so-slightly dubious about the merits of working for real at said current place of employment.

Running concurrently with whatever job-like goals I might have, Gem graduates with a Masters in Library Science in December (ie, next month) and wants something worthwhile to do then. Among other places, she applied for a reference position at the Peterson Memorial Library. Despite the fact that she's fairly underqualified for the position, they're checking up on her references, so apparently the haven't thrown her resume the same place all of mine seem to end up.

(My secret hope is that Gem will get a job somewhere far from here and I'll have no choice but to write a book while I'm trying to figure out what to do.)